Tanith Lee is something of a guilty pleasure for me. I started with her – well I guess “sinful” is a pretty good description – vampire novel “Dark Dance”, and every now and then I just have to find another one of her books for more trashy fun. A couple, like Storm Lord and Days of Grass have been somewhat forgettable. Most are intricate, dark, entertaining stories. White as Snow is epic.
Part of a series created by Terri Windling, where different authors would write their own take on classic fairy tales, this book was inspired by versions of the Snow White story that are even older than the one written down by the Brothers Grimm. Most people know that the fairy tales we hear nowadays are sanitized versions of the Grimms Fairy Tales. What I didn’t know before reading the introduction (don’t skip that, it’s definitely worth a read) is that the Grimms themselves cleaned up the versions they heard. In the original stories, the fathers were a lot less kind-hearted, evil didn’t always meet a bad end, and rather than a step-mother, it was usually the mother responsible for torturing her children.
Like Catherynne Valente’s Six Gun Snow White, this isn’t just a simple “I Wonder What If?” story, where the main characters are thrown into present day, or had their genders reversed, or cast as animals, or anything like that. Here, Snow White’s mother is a captured princess who gives birth to a conquering warlord’s child. The traumatized princess, now queen (the warlord married her out of guilt), does everything she can to forget that her daughter was ever conceived, much less born. Eventually she takes a lover from a group of worshipful, secret pagans (natives of the city, who don’t like the warlord any more than she does), and actually seems to be happy for a little while. Then she does something her lover can’t forgive, and her forgotten daughter suddenly becomes important to everybody. Hands up if you can guess what happens next.
The story is set in a quasi-historical time when Christianity was gradually replacing pagan beliefs, and sometimes stealing from the original mythologies to try to attract more people to the church. So the book combines Snow White and the Seven Dwarves with the myth of Demeter and Persephone, but also shows how the old stories were adapted by the church, turning everyone into Mary, or Jesus, or the Seven Deadly Sins. (Remember the dwarves? Ah, I see what you did there.)
This is the second of Tanith Lee’s re-interpreted fairytale books I’ve read, and she keeps startling me with how much I enjoy what she does with them. I keep thinking I know where things are going, based on the source material, and then everything will make a left turn and go into something completely unfamiliar for a while, until it makes a passing wink at the original story again. And of course since it’s a Tanith Lee book there’s a lot of darkness and sex and truly, truly, awful things happening to people (mostly the women) and everyone making horrible decisions. But then it would turn romantic, in ways I completely didn’t expect.