Book #44

The Iron Ring
by Lloyd Alexander

I picked this one up at Powell's some time in the last year; I was looking in the young adults section, curious if Alexander, who wrote the Prydain Chronicles that I loved so much as a young adult (before that, actually) had written anything else I was curious about. This one caught my eye, and so it has been sitting on the shelf and calling to me ever since. Now I've read it, and I'm glad. It was good.

The concept comes from Hindu mythology, and that was probably the most interesting part for me; it was interesting to read about the concepts of dharma and karma and caste and such in this modern retelling. It was also cool to read about all of the monsters I remember from D&D, like nagas and rakshasas and the Garuda Bird. But the best thing about the book is that it's just a good story: Lloyd Alexander was a good writer, and this is a fun and exciting adventure, with a lot of really interesting (to me) philosophical bits.

The basic storyline is about a young king of a small country, who gets sucked into a bad bet by another king. Tamar bets his life on a roll of the dice, and he loses; so Jaya insists that Tamar come to his distant kingdom to offer his service as payment of the wager. An iron ring appears on Tamar's finger to represent his debt. But then Jaya disappears, along with his retinue, and nobody else remembers seeing them -- although the iron ring is still on Tamar's finger. So he has to make a choice: was it a dream, or not? Does he owe his life, or not? Should he keep his promise, as he is honor bound as a kshatriya to do? Or should he forget the ridiculous wager, which might never have happened anyway and was almost certainly a trap if it did happen, and stay to govern his kingdom?

Tamar decides to go, and on the way, he meets and befriends many, including several magical animals -- the Monkey King (Heil der Affenkonig Cole Grisham!), the Garuda bird, a philosophical bear, a kind-hearted elephant, and a beautiful and intelligent peasant girl named Mirri. He helps a tiger out of a trap, earns the friendship of the Naga king, and falls in love with Mirri, though he won't marry her because he doesn't know if his life is his own to give away to her. He also meets another king who has been overthrown by an evil cousin; Tamar decides to help Ashwara regain his throne from Nahusha, and the rest of the book is the story of the war. It's a little less interesting with that, mainly because it gets a little too military when it should have stuck to the whole-wandering-the-world-and-learning-philosophy theme, which worked much better with the characters. But there is a great section in there when Tamar is captured and turned into an Untouchable, a washer of corpses, and he learns some nice truths about caste and honor and such there. That part was one of my favorites -- though really, how could anything top a bear who lives in a beautiful ashram in the middle of a magical forest and debates philosophical truths? I so want to live there.

Good book, especially for someone young and interested in philosophy and/or mythology. I wish I had read it when I was a kid, but I'm glad I read it now.