I picked up Susan Palwick's "The Necessary Beggar" a couple of weeks ago and had it read within a few days. It's a fantasy, but the lack of dragons or dudes with pointy weapons or pointy hats on the front, and the "Winner of the American Libary Association's Alex Award" thing on the back suggested that it might be a cut above the standard sword and sorcery fare that litters the shelves of our libraries and bookstores. I have no idea what the "Alex Award" is, but sometimes that whole "working with books and people who read them" thing can give librarians a good notion or two about what makes a good book.

So anyway, it was a notch above the usual sword and sorcery fare. It's the story of Zamatryna-Halani, a young girl from a vaguely middle eastern fantasy world. Her uncle the carpet seller has murdered a beggar, and the punishment for murder on her world is exile to another dimension. Families are very important in her culture, and the family views the uncle's fate as their own, and so they join him, passing through a blue door into an unknown destiny. Their destiny in this case turns out to be Reno, Nevada, a few years in the future. The door opens into a camp for political refugees from foreign countries. They are taken into the camp, with military and bureaucrats assuming that their papers got lost. They are accepted in the camp, but are not allowed to leave, because they can not explain where they came from, and the immigration department will not allow them out until they can prove they are actual refugees.

Eventually, with the help of an unfortuate fire, and the aid of a fundamentalist Christian couple, they do get out, and their story becomes similar to that of many motivated immigrant families. The plot then revolves around why the mystery of carpet selling uncle killed the beggar, and how the loose ends surronding that death come to play themselves out in our world.

"The Necesary Beggar" has a very kind view of its characters. Everyone is noble in their own fashion. The immigration officials are seen as caring, but stuck in a bureaucratic bind. The fundamentalist couple that takes the family in are actively seeking to convert them and the family's unwillingness to convert creates conflicts, but the couple is basically kind hearted. Even the murderous uncle, it turns out, is a nice man.

I did really enjoy this book, but after I finished it I immediately thought about another book involving carpets: "The Carpet Makers" by Andreas Eschbach. I had started this book a year ago, but was so offput by the characters that I put it down and figured I would never pick it up again. "The Carpet Makers" also had the trappings to suggest that it would be more than standard fare: it was translated from the German, it had an introduction by Orson Scott Card, and it had a blurb from "The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy" about how amazing the author is.

Like "The Necessary Beggar", "The Carpet Makers" starts off with a carpet selling murderer. In the case of "The Carpet Makers", the murderer is not punished for killing his son, but is seen as fufilling his moral obligation within society. Ostvan the carpet maker is an elderly fellow with two wives, a bunch of daughters, and one son. He has spent his life weaving a single carpet made from the hair of his wives and daughters. It is part of a tradition that has been passed down for 80,000 years. Each carpet maker at the end of his life sells his carpet to the emporer, and then his son lives off that money while he weaves his carpet. A carpet maker may have only one son, and he must kill any newborn males beyond that one son. In this case, on the eve of his youngest wife's latest birth, his only living son tells him that he does not want to be a carpet maker. When the baby is born a male, the elderly carpet maker goes up stairs with a sword and slays his teenage boy in his sleep. The woman who his son was in love with is forced to marry the elderly carpet maker.

And that is pretty much the tone of the book. People are shits to each other, and act in spiteful, horrible ways.

The carpets in "The Necessary Beggar" are used to as tools of meditation. In their weavings, the people of Zamatryna's homeland discover their underlying spirtual nature. In "The Carpet Makers", the carpets are efforts in futility, symbols of wasted lives and effort. For the most part, I'd rather view the world the way the author of "The Necessary Beggar" does; everyone has good inside them; people are fundamentally caring individuals. It is the way I try to approach my work.

So after getting disgusted and putting down "The Carpet Makers", I did not plan on picking it up again - ever. Then I read "The Necessary Beggar", and I thought finishing it would make a good journal entry. But you know, I actually turned to like "The Carpet Makers". It does everything you probably aren't supposed to in a book. There is no protagonist in it - every time you start to like someone, they are shown to be a fool and the author has something nasty happen to them. The plot mainly skips around from the view point of one mean person to another. There is sort of an antagonist, but the author doesn't follow the rules there either. The only thing to keep a person interested is the mystery of the carpets. This a science fiction story, and there are some 8,000 worlds whose main focus is making hair carpets for the emporer's palace. The ending explains how this came to be, and it turns out that it is keeping with the overall view of the author of people as petty, nasty, and vicious. But at the end I found myself satisfied. I would say that I liked "The Necesary Beggar", but I also ended up liking "The Carpet Makers" as well.