February 7, 2025

In 2003, William Gibson published a novel called Pattern Recognition, a term he borrowed from the vocabulary of machine learning. Looking at several articles about it, I quickly realized that I would not be saying much about pattern recognition in its original context, where for some reason it elicits impenetrable prose even beyond that of most cybernetic theorizing. Definitions of pattern recognition often seem merely tautological: it is the detection of patterns in a field of data. The real point seems to be that computers are now able to detect patterns with more sophistication than previously due to vastly increased processing power, and that this has led to real advances in areas such as facial and vocal recognition and some kinds of medical diagnosis.

Nor is Gibson himself concerned with the original context: after all, this is a man who, in his novel Neuromancer (1984), invented the concept of virtual reality when he didn’t even use a computer. As reviewers noticed, Pattern Recognition is influenced by another novel, The Crying of Lot 49, whose author, Thomas Pynchon, a former engineer, very much does understand and make use of information theory. But Gibson’s interest is in what the Marxists call “late capitalism,” specifically in advertising, where pattern recognition is the key to “branding.” Advertisers crave brand recognition, and the plot premise is that this depends on a product’s logo, the symbol that embeds itself in consumer brains, whose familiarity impels them to buy the product. At least it does if it impresses the consumers as cool. The protagonist of Pattern Recognition is a “coolhunter.” She immerses herself in the data field of popular culture and has a gift for telling which logos are effective and therefore which products are going to become trendy in the near future, thereby providing her corporate employers with information that will give them a competitive advantage. Gibson was writing before social media, but I imagine that influencers today have taken the next step, from trying to predict the next trend to actually attempting to create it through “influence.” But the theme is the ability to detect patterns in the seeming chaos of mass culture. The moral of the story is that this is not some arcane technique only interesting to intellectuals—it is a means of navigating our fragmented contemporary reality and in fact profiting from it. Pattern recognition is a gift, a tool, sometimes a weapon.

But that is not just a feature of the contemporary world. It has always been true, as I want to show by looking at two other novels, Hild (2013) and Menewood (2023) by Nicola Griffith. In her early career, in the 1990’s, Griffith was a celebrated science fiction writer, but in the second half of her career she has turned in the other direction. Hild and Menewood tell a continuous story about a real historical woman who would later, two decades after the events of the novels, become St. Hilda, one of the great women of medieval history. She was the founder and Abbess of the monastery at Whitby, where she hosted the important Synod of Whitby in 664 CE. She became a promoter of learning comparable to Alfred the Great two centuries later. It was she who encouraged the herdsman Caedmon to become a poet, so because of her we have the first poem in English literature, “Caedmon’s Hymn.” She had such a reputation for wisdom that kings sought her advice. Remarkably, Griffith deals with none of this. Instead, her novel—it is really one novel in two parts—is a Bildungsroman tracing Hild’s development from the age of 11 to her early 20’s, and its theme is Hild’s gift for pattern recognition, which she possessed from such an early age and to such a degree that she became known as a seeress, able to tell how events would fall. Griffith is free to invent in this period because there are so few facts. Indeed, most of what we know of Hild, including the story of Caedmon, is derived from a few pages of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Griffith uses her freedom to create the portrait of a woman who would be extraordinary in any age. Yet Hild’s gift, although it sets her apart, is not some special genius, but rather a more-than-usually developed version of a universal human potentiality.

Pattern recognition is in fact the gift of the human race—the real fire given to us by Prometheus (whose myth I have begun exploring in the Expanding Eyes podcast). The name “Prometheus” means “forethinker,” one who thinks ahead—in other words, who thinks as a chess player does, looking down at a board of 64 squares and seeing a webwork of patterns, of possible moves. I am the world’s worst chess player, but I think the game fascinates because it demands a mode of thought resembling the concept of the multiverse, and also what Borges’ famous story called “a garden of forking paths.” Each decision, each move, will call forth a response from one’s opponent, to which you will respond in turn. If you make a different move, the game will go down a different path. True chess players are those who can hold the various possible moves and counter-moves in their head for at least 15 moves down the line, or so I have heard. This implies more than gamesmanship—it is potentially a way of living life, in love and war. Chess is of course a mock war game, but its moves and countermoves are also those of the strategies of love. At the end of Shakespeare’s Tempest, the young lovers Ferdinand and Miranda are “discovered” playing chess together, a tableau that is clearly symbolic and has no relevance to the plot. Part II of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a conversation between a man and a troubled woman, is called “A Game at Chess.” The theme of the war of the sexes runs throughout the poem.

To think like a chess player is to think in terms of relationships. Everything is connected to everything else, so that making one move, one change, changes everything down the line. But life is more complicated than chess. Before you can calculate possible moves and their ramifications, you have to know the pieces and how the rules limit what moves are possible for them. A bishop can only move diagonally, a knight in a right-angled shape, and so on. But life is a lot more complicated than chess. There are many more pieces, and each can move in complex ways. In other words, to think like a chess player about life, you have to know a lot about many aspects of life. To understand relationships and possible interactions between things, you have to know about the things. The demand is not for the narrow knowledge of the specialist, but the opposite—a wide-ranging acquaintance with as many aspects of life as possible. To think, you have to know something. The more you know, the more possible connections you can see. When you teach, you see this in young people. Often they can only think inside a narrow range because their experience has been so narrow. Formal education is by no means the only way of acquiring the broad range of experience necessary to understand and cope with life, but a broadening of horizons is the primary goal of liberal education. It is often said that liberal knowledge is knowledge that is not “good for” anything, but that is quite misleading. That only means that it is not specifically-targeted job-skill knowledge. Having a head full of all sorts of things is good, because you never know what is going to be useful.

In the first Sherlock Holmes story, in which Holmes and Dr. Watson meet, Holmes says that he tries not to know things. Informed by Watson that the earth revolves around the sun, he says that he will do his best to forget the fact because he cannot afford to have his head cluttered with extraneous knowledge. This bugged me when I was reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories at the age of 13, and it still bugs me. First of all, it is not really true. Holmes’s head is full of a great collection of knowledge. He is quite proud to recommend to Watson his monograph on the many varieties of cigar ash. In other words, he knows perfectly well that a wealth of knowledge is necessary in order to think like a detective—and a detective, at least in mystery stories, thinks very much like a chess player. His game pieces are his suspects, and the more he knows about their habits, the better he can predict their moves. If the ash of a rare and expensive cigar is found on the murder site, it says something. Holmes is able to give the impression that he has paranormal powers in exactly the same way Hild does—by looking more closely at the details to which most of us remain oblivious. He knows that Watson had taken a stroll in a certain part of town because the mud on Watson’s trousers is native to the banks of a particular river. Holmes does not want to be like a winner on Jeopardy, who gives the impression of having memorized the encyclopedia. He has tailored his self-education, narrowed it to include only what is likely to be useful in solving crimes. But that is problematic. You never know what is going to be useful information, in forensics or in life. If there had been a story called “Murder in the Planetarium,” knowledge of the heliocentric cosmos might have been crucial in discovering that the murderer was the mad astronomer who murdered his abusive father, the head of the Flat-Earth Society.

All too many people, unfortunately, do not think relationally, like a detective or a chess player. Not only are they unused to thinking of interconnections, but they have limited knowledge to think with. These are the “low-information voters” who have just handed the country over to disaster. Many such people are proud of their ignorance, which is willful and not born of deprivation. They reject information: they don’t need information. Information is inconvenient, and gets in the way of believing what they want to believe. They belong to the Know Nothing Party—which is actually more than a joke. The Know Nothings were a populist, xenophobic, anti-Catholic party in the 1850’s, driven by conspiracy theories—in other words, they would fit right in to the present political scene. Unscrupulous political operatives love low-information voters because they can be easily manipulated—any old culture-wars rag will serve to madden the bull, so long as it is red and therefore “socialist.” Every teacher has encountered Know-Nothing students. They are the “If I need to know it, I’ll look it up on my phone” types who regard having to memorize information as a backward and regressive form of education. They are the ones who summon the genie of AI from its bottle, because there’s no sense going to the trouble of learning something when the genie could do it for you. What good does it do to know things? That just turns you into one of those contemplative scholarly types who will be bagging groceries after they graduate.

In fact, of course, it is the students who actually learn something that become successful after they graduate. This has led to the division of the Democratic Party, the great political tragedy of our time. The dwindling number of blue collar jobs, for which you do not have to know much, faced the middle class with a choice. Those who coped with the change by going to college became the “educated professionals” of the upper half of the Democratic Party, and have been relatively successful. But the other half, those that Trump called the “poorly educated,” have been seething with resentment for a long time. At the moment, they have seized power, and are on a mad rampage trying to destroy everything they can of the normal mechanisms of a complex society. This is revenge. Is this vengeful rage justified? To an extent. While few Trump voters are actually in poverty, deregulated capitalism has destroyed the quality of middle-class life, leading to overwork, loss of job security, the devastation of the 2008 financial meltdown, families living paycheck to paycheck—all this would be appalling to someone from the 1960’s. We may not have Depression-level poverty, but our quality of life has shockingly degenerated. It is no wonder that there is an increase in anti-social aggression, from disruptions on airplanes to mass shooters. These are reaction of an anxious, exhausted society, which tips over into the psychosis of scapegoating, demonizing immigrants and LBGTQ+ people as a way of lashing out. There has been genuine victimage, and therefore justified anger.

But is that the whole picture? I have also heard the MAGA rampage referred to as “the revenge of the mediocre.” The argument is that there are a lot of people who are my Know-Nothing students grown up. They didn’t work hard, didn’t care, feel the world owes them a living, feel that women owe them sex, obedience, and laundry, and are outraged when their anti-social behavior is criticized, much less curtailed. In other words, these are the dregs. We know that many if not most of the January 6 rioters were, well, losers. Trump set them loose and two of them were immediately in trouble again in a couple of days, without the excuse of being “patriots.” They love Trump because he is just like them. He knows nothing, despises those who do, and wins, wins, wins. This is what makes assessing the present moment so difficult. There are genuine victims, people whose lives have been made barely livable in order to give tax cuts to billionaires. But there are also a scary number of just plain shitty people. And the shitty people ye shall have always with you. The “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton once called them, really have always been with us. They are basically a collectivized mob, and are personified in a single figure as the Cyclops of the Odyssey. Like all mobs, the Cyclops is stupid and yet arrogant. He boasts that he is more powerful than Zeus and the gods, but a god, Poseidon, is his father. He is easily duped, and the price of his gullibility is the symbolic punishment of being blinded. I am not the only one to make this identification. In Ulysses, James Joyce made his modern Cyclops figure a ranting xenophobic nationalist named the Citizen, who accuses Leopold Bloom of being a “foreign” Jew and throws a biscuit tin at him.

Shakespeare recognized the mixed nature of the human race in his last play, The Tempest, in which a microcosm of society is shipwrecked on an island. Prospero the magician puts proper order back into that society, but he tailors his rehab tactics to fit the case. Some, like the wise Gonzalo and the noble young Ferdinand, are innocent, and thus rewarded. Of the guilty, the redeemable ones are put through an ordeal of recognizing their guilt over deposing Prospero 12 years previously, so that they repent and change. The two members of the lower class, Stepheno and Trinculo, are January 6 rioters to the hilt, mounting a crazy, inept attempt at insurrection, half-drunk. They are sobered by being dumped in a “horse pond.” But the two upper-class schemers, Antonio and Sebastian, are intelligently malicious. All Prospero can do is put them on a short leash like vicious dogs. It is an amazingly accurate model of the type of social factions in our society right now.

Knowing something, so that you can understand the relationships and interactions between things, begins in a literate society with learning to read. Reading is in fact one of the most fundamental acts of pattern recognition. It comprises the two steps necessary for patten recognition: knowing things in order to know the relationships and interactions between things. The things in this case are the words, the signifiers, and the first requirement of learning a language is to learn the signifiers and what they refer to, the signified. But the second requirement is to learn how to assemble the signifiers into various structural patterns that indicate relationships. This is syntax, the mysterious heart of language. Words are assembled into “clauses,” in which subjects are related to objects by means of verbs. Subordinate clauses and other units called “phrases,” including prepositional, infinitive, gerund, and participial phrases, may be attached to a main clauses in such a way that a subordinate clause, for instance, is related in a certain way to the main clause—as an adjective, an adverb, a noun completing the main clause, and so on. Pattern recognition is linked to the visual, and we may learn syntax by diagramming sentences so that their relational structures can be read like blueprints. A common student writing problem on the remedial level is that some students always write short, choppy sentences. But you cannot think on any higher level in such sentences because their syntax is too simple. Good writers do not write longer sentences in order to show off, but in order to express relationships among facts and ideas.

But writing is only a secondary form of language, intended to capture and codify oral language. Historically, only a few civilizations developed writing, but the capacity for oral language, for speech, seems to be innate. According to Noam Chomsky, we arrive in the world neurologically equipped to learn the complexities of oral language easily and without much teaching—as all children do by the age of 3-5. I suspect that we also come into the world hard-wired for pattern recognition in the outer world, not just in language. We speak of “reading the world” as if it were a text. That is Hild’s gift. She can read the patterns and relationships in nature, in the material economy of a society, in social relationships, in political structures and power conflicts. Even more importantly, she sees the pattern of patterns: how natural, economic, social, and political patterns are all part of a universal pattern, all interdependent, each affecting all the others. Hild tries to explain this in a sudden excited outburst to her lover Brona in the following extraordinary passage, which is what inspired this newsletter:

“I was baptized in Christ. But who is Christ? Who is Woden, or Eorthe? They are all parts of the pattern. The pattern is in everything. We are all part of it. We make the pattern; the pattern makes us. The pattern is the way a bird’s feather grows one way but not another. The fold of a beetle’s wing. The—” She looked around, plucked a daisy. “Look. It’s the whorl at the heart of the flowers, the pattern of its pollen. It’s the same pattern on a snail’s shell. Wait. Wait. Don’t move.” She went to her pack, where her belt lay, and the pouch fastened to it. Brought back the snakestone. “See? The same pattern.” | Brona traced it with her fingertip. “It’s like the whorl in a pinecone.” | “Yes! But that pattern is just part of the greater pattern. The pattern that’s the living weave of weather, of wave and wood, of wishes and wyrd, hope and happiness. It’s the breath of the world. It’s the tiny seeds on a strayberry, the way the skin of a horse wrinkles in the same pattern as elm bark, and elm bark is like the gold cells we put garnets in on a shoulder clasp, and the little honeycombs bees build from their wax. We all hear it, we feel it, we breathe it. It sings in us. Let the priest have his church and the priestess her pool, my domain is here.” She laid her palm on Brona’s breastbone. “And here.” She touched between her eyebrows. “And here.” She cupped her hand between Brona’s legs.

This speech is unique in the novels, and therefore a crucial, revelatory moment, an epiphany of the meaning and purpose of a 1000-page narrative. Hild is not in the habit of trying to explain what goes on in her head all the time, which is more complex than the thought process of a chess player or detective. But the patterns Hild reads in the world are not something Griffith has made up. They are actual. I know this because once, long ago, I happened to read about the “Fibonacci sequence,” which can be defined simply as the pattern created when each number in a sequence is the sum of the two numbers preceding it. Plotted spatially, this creates the “Fibonacci spiral,” which is closely related to the “golden ratio.” And that spiral really does appear to be a key to the pattern of the universe, from the smallest natural phenomena to the largest. It appears in the structure of DNA, in the pattern of sunflower seeds and the arrangement of leaves on a tree, in the spiral patterns of nautilus and other shells, in the spiral shapes of hurricanes and at least some galaxies, known befittingly as Grand Design Spiral Galaxies. If you type “Fibonacci sequence” into a search engine, you will get many beautiful photos of Fibonacci spirals appearing everywhere in nature. It is luck that I happen to have stumbled across this information, and I remember exactly where. Long before there was an Internet, I read about it in a Donald Duck comic book when I was an omnivorous reader at the age of 10 or 12. It amazed me, and therefore stuck in my unpredictable memory, where it lay dormant for 60 years before suddenly proving useful. Which, again, is why knowing all sorts of things is good.

But there is a further thematic element, mythological rather than scientific. In the above passage, Hild has a “snakestone.” This is the actual name for fossils of an extinct cephalopod called an "ammonite," which, like the nautilus to which it is related, has a shell in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral. This is a foreshadowing of Hild’s later life, beyond the limit of the novel, when she will found the Abbey of Whitby in Yorkshire, on the northwest shore of England. There were many ammonite fossils at Whitby, and, after Hild was canonized, the ammonite or snakestone became her saint’s emblem, visible in artistic representations of her. But, in a typical appropriation and Christianizing of originally non-Christian myths and symbols, a story grew up that the ammonites were snakes that Hilda turned to stone. Since snakes were a pagan symbol, this represented a defeat of paganism by the missionary forces of Christianity, exactly parallel to the legend about St. Patrick riddding Ireland of snakes. Another example of how you never know when lore is going to pop up: this legend is alluded to glancingly by Sir Walter Scott in his narrative poem Marmion (1808):

When Whitby's nuns exalting told,
Of thousand snakes, each one
Was changed into a coil of stone,
When Holy Hilda pray'd

In other words, the symbol was made to represent the opposite of what it really did. What it really represents is life as a universal pattern, a beautiful and powerful order that all religions symbolize in their own way. The symbol has been meaningful to Griffith for a long time: Ammonite (1992) is the title of her first novel, in which it is the name for an order of women, much as in a monastery, who have to survive on a planet after a virus has killed all the men. There is one more connection in the pattern. In 2020, the movie Ammonite, directed by Francis Lee, concerned the scientific career and fictional lesbian love affair of Mary Anning, a pioneering woman paleontologist and fossil collector in the early 19^th century, approximately 1810-47, who made many important discoveries, especially at Lyme Regis, Dorset in southern England, in complete isolation except for a collaborator, Charlotte Murchinson, being excluded from the male scientific world for the usual sexist reasons. The movie stars Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan as Anning and Murchison respectively, focusing on the affair between two women that was a mingling of love and intellect. I have not seen the movie, but I suspect the ammonite of its title means something similar to what it does in Griffith’s work.

The ammonite symbolizes life’s pattern in a religious perspective, in which it is a vision of order, one that has affinities with Einstein’s religion, which he defined as a non-theistic sense of an order in the universe, for him revealed mathematically, that has a numinous and sacred quality to it. Hild’s gift for pattern recognition, however, goes beyond detached contemplation. Just as science can be applied as technology, Hild’s pattern recognition has myriad practical applications. In fact, it becomes the instrument of survival not only for Hild herself but for the entire community of people that Hild finds herself leader of while still in her late teens, after an actual battle, the battle of Hatfield in 632 CE, has wiped out their king and his army. Hild’s perception of patterns enables her to understand how things work, starting with what we would call ecology, nature considered as a system to which the lives of all living things belong. Her people need food, and Hild sees hawks at a distance suddenly diving downward. By this she knows that they have found prey, which means the community might find food in that area too. What Hild can do is what hunters and trackers do. She can read signs, the tracks of animals, the change of smell in the air that signifies a coming storm.

Within the community, much of her leadership consists of what in a modern business would be called project management. She knows materials, and how each can be used—how to make the dyes, for instance, that the community uses not only for their own clothing but to trade for a profit. She keeps track of inventories, especially given the need to stockpile for winter. She pitches in for the manual labor, but mostly she gives orders, keeping hundreds of details in her head, constantly trying to learn new techniques from people who have valuable skills. Because we experience the whole story from Hild’s point of view, we can understand how overwhelming the pattern of the community is in its complexity, with always a need to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. There are times when the burden is almost too much for her. I have met people like this, and they awe me. I think Joe Biden was one of them, which is how he was able to accomplish an astonishing number of things on many fronts almost simultaneously, ignoring the Cyclops blindness of the general public, which has no clue what it takes to lead—and, make no mistake, the blind, collective Cyclops in this case was not just MAGA idiots but included the media and the Democratic Party, who thought and still think Biden was senile because he could not do political theatre. The science fiction writer with whom Griffith has an affinity in this matter is Robert Heinlein. Critics complain that Heinlein’s main characters are often variations on the same personality, but that is because Heinlein is endlessly fascinated with a type of character that the critics sometimes call the Competent Individual, the resourceful person who is up to any challenge. It is a very old time: its first exemplar is Odysseus, who is named in his epic’s opening lines as polytropos, “of many turnings.”

Making sure the economy works effectively involves understanding how the social network of material processes—getting and preparing food, making clothing, building shelters, providing medical and obstetric care, milling grains into flour, brewing drinks, caring for and teaching children, and so on—depends on a webwork of social relations and interactions, which are in turn dependent on individual personalities or groups and their needs. Hild makes it a point to memorize people’s names and genealogy, which is vitally important to these people, remembering 6 months after meeting someone that his wife was pregnant and should have delivered by this time—so she inquires after the health of mother and child. The best president in my college’s history, Neal Malicky, was legendary in his ability to remember the names of over 160 faculty, and personal details about them as well. I admire this kind of memory—the gift of pattern recognition often goes along with a phenomenal memory—though with chagrin, as I think how hard it is for me to learn a mere 70 or so students’ names every semester. Hild also has to conduct her relationships with various peoples in 4 different languages.

This leads to a warning. I used to say that one’s limitation is the other side of one’s gift, and that is definitely true of Nicola Griffith, who is I think a major literary figure. But her limitation—it is not a flaw—is that she is challenging to read. Griffith is clearly herself a Competent Individual, who has absorbed a mountain of genealogical, historical, and linguistic research, as well as the lore of dozens of different trades. By the latter, I mean that she can describe, for instance, how hard it is to make sausage without machinery, to get ground meat into a set of animal intestines without cutting or rupturing them. This is only trivial and unimportant to readers who buy their sausage at a store, who can afford to be uninterested in how it gets there. But sausage-making is the least of it. There were times in the first 100 pages of Hild when I myself felt like anything but a Competent Individual. I simply could not keep track of the genealogical relationships on which succession to various kingships depended, nor could I entirely follow the chess-player thinking of Hild and her canny mother about the shifting political situation. Their survival depends on their ability to recognize the pattern in events as they happen, thinking many moves ahead so that they can be prepared to cope with events they cannot control, and prepared to influence the events they can. I say the difficulty is not a flaw because dealing with the complexity of life, especially in a crisis, is exactly the whole point of the book. To make it simple would be to make it simply one more historical adventure tale. Instead, Griffith has written a story whose theme is the necessity of pattern recognition for survival.

All this, and we have not yet spoken of military life, which in Hild’s time was exactly what it was in the time of the Iliad or of Beowulf. She is not a bitter feminist about it, but many times Hild is puzzled and at times disheartened by how men are utterly captivated by the “glory” of being a warrior in a warrior band sworn to absolute allegiance to some king or other leader, the only exceptions being those who become priests or bards. The fate of the entire community depends on their warrior males continuing to win battles, yet someday those men will lose, they will all die in horrible, violent ways, and their entire community will be wiped out. Eventually, the victors in their turn will be wiped out. Moreover, winning “glory” was even more important than victory, and glory was achieved in individual combat, so that reputations could be achieved by battle prowess. It is as if all men were programmed with a kind of deathwish.

Make no mistake, Hild can go up against any man. Still in her teens, she is taller than anyone, and has learned how to fight with a staff, which in her hands is as lethal as any sword. But the climax of Menewood is a second battle, also historical, the battle of Heavenfield, c. 635, whose outcome historians genuinely do not understand. It is Griffith’s invention that Hild won the battle, precisely by not waging war in the lemmings-over-the-cliff way that men typically did. Instead, she devises a pattern, a complicated plan, that essentially involves guerilla warfare—never engaging the enemy head on but picking him off in isolated ambushes, confusing him with false banners to suggest non-existent allies, feinting and seeming to do one thing while really planning to do another, and so on. It is chessplaying strategy on the battlefield, and depends upon strategy instead of charging headlong. No “glory” in such trickery and sidelong tactics, but Hild prefers winning over glory, which is another name for male self-proving. And strategy depends upon pattern recognition. There is no historical evidence that Hild was at the battle of Heavenfield at all. But some unknown factor caused the downfall of a brutal, psychopathic villain whose name was Cadwallon, who had greatly superior numbers and was considered invincible. Griffith is just slyly suggesting that the unknown factor might have been a 19-year-old girl, a girl the same age as Joan of Arc, who, in George Bernard Shaw’s wonderful play about her, had many of the qualities of Hild, especially the ability to assess a situation intuitively with such startling success that it is taken as supernatural revelation.

We may feel that we are not extraordinary like Hild, do not possess a special gift. While it is true that some people are capable of pattern recognition to a rare degree, it is anything but a special talent. It is practically the definition of being human. To state the obvious, it is one name out of many for the imagination. Hild, like Odysseus, is a survivor, surviving by her wits. We are moving into a uniquely dark and dangerous period of American history, and the beast that Yeats foresaw in his poem “The Second Coming” is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. It will be a time for survival skills. Henry James’s famous advice was, “Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.” It was advice given in 1884, in his essay “The Art of Fiction,” to anyone who aspired to become an a writer, advice that Nicola Griffith has certainly taken. But her novel is about survival, and survival is itself an art.

References

Griffith, Nicola. Hild. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013.

Griffith, Nicola. Menewood. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2023.