Deconstructing Fire by Kristin Cashore, Part 1

NOTE: This post will contain spoilers for Cashore's Graceling trilogy, and may not make much sense to people who have not read Fire and, to a lesser extent, Graceling.

CONTENT NOTES: Um, mind control? Sociopathic behaviour. Patricide. Ableist language. Swearing. If I've missed warning for something, please let me know in comments.


Fire opens with a prologue about a man named Larch and his disturbing child, Immiker, which succeeds in being incredibly creepy and makes very little sense to people who have read Graceling until the final paragraph, wherein Immiker changes his name to Leck.

READER: Oh. Oh. OH. Everything makes sense now. Omigod, Leck could have died like sixteen times already in this prologue and saved everyone so much trouble and grief. But then Graceling would have no plot and Bitterblue wouldn't exist. :(

A brief example of HOW FUCKING DISTURBING this gets:

 Larch tried to lift his head, and cried out, almost blacked out. "It's no use. The pain is too great."

"The pain is not so great that you can't get up," Immiker said, and when Larch tried again he found that the boy was right. It was excruciating, and he vomited once or twice, but it was not so bad that he couldn't prop himself on his knees and his uninjured arm, and crawl across the icy surface behind his son [p. 9].*

I won't focus on the prologue except to note that Larch, upon discovering Immiker's abilities, thinks that his son was able to control him so easily due to Larch's enormous, blind love for his child. This idea doesn't sit well with me for two reasons. First, the text seems to imply criticism of Larch's parenting, but that criticism is completely useless. What was Larch supposed to do, love him less? Or, more to the point, actually discipline the kid for his misbehaviour? Immiker, the world's tiniest sociopath**, has total control over his father's mind from at least the age of three. Probably earlier. The narrative shows that every time Larch perceives Immiker doing something wrong, Immiker immediately 'corrects' his father's thinking. Larch never had a chance of actually raising his son.

Second, Immiker appears to control nearly everyone in his vicinity, regardless of how much any individual loves him. In Graceling, Katsa is as vulnerable to his Grace as anyone else, in spite of her efforts to prepare herself. Po, whose Grace also involves the minds and thoughts of others, is the one with immunity. In this prologue, the only character to resist Immiker's control is his wetnurse, who quits her job at some point after Immiker learns to speak before being weaned and creeps her the fuck out. Since she is not in the king's employ and thus presumably can't be a Graceling herself, a plausible explanation might be that she actually leaves before Immiker discovers or develops his abilities of mind control.

Immiker himself admits that Larch is particularly easy to control, which he attributes to Larch being "stupid" [p. 15]. Certain other people must, then, be more resistant to Immiker's Grace, but the text does not (at least at this point) give us any examples of this.

I don't believe, though, that Larch's love for Immiker has anything to do with Immiker's ability to control his father. Larch may think so, but the man spent the last seven years in a fog of mind control and is dying of a stab wound. I don't have to take his word for it.

Here is where I confess that my opinion on this matter is influenced by having read the rest of the book already. For now, I'll just say that I think that Immiker's ability to deploy his Grace depends more on the skills and abilities of the mind that he is trying to control - for example, Po being immune due to having a Grace in the same general family as Immiker's - than on the feelings that person has towards Immiker.

So, what effect does Larch's love have? It feeds Immiker's contempt for his father, whom he views as a fool. More importantly, though, it makes Larch happy. The reader might be tearing her hair out while Larch misses opportunity after opportunity to get both himself and his unnatural child safely killed off (damn his superior game keeper survival skills anyway), but Larch himself finds comfort and joy in his son's presence, and even in Immiker's control of his mind. And the reason for that is that IMMIKER TELLS HIM TO. I'm not saying it's a good thing, for example, that Immiker made Larch stop grieving for his dead wife; I'm saying that I think it's interesting that Immiker doesn't stop at controlling his father's thoughts - he also makes sure of Larch's happiness, in his own messed up way.

Larch's dying thought, after being stabbed by his loving son, is that Immiker was wrong in saying that he controlled Larch so completely due to his father's stupidity. Larch believes that it was his love for his son, which he remembers feeling even before Immiker's birth, which allowed the child to so easily control him.

From the text:

Larch's love had kept him from recognizing Immiker's Grace, because even before the boy's birth, when Immiker had been no more than a promise inside Mikra's body, Larch had already been enchanted [p. 15].

I find this to be a little contrived. Larch's 'enchantment' with his unborn son prevents him from realising that Immiker is 'enchanting' his mind? Um, no. Immiker's actual ability to actually make Larch believe everything he says does that. But that's okay. People dying of blood loss and organ failure inflicted by their sociopathic sons do not have to be precise in their thinking.

Here's the thing. Immiker killed Larch because he finally figured out Immiker's Grace. In dying, Larch is able, for the first time, to look back on his life since Immiker's birth and understand what his child has been doing to him. And his reaction is not to feel horror, or rage, or guilt that he has unleashed this monster on the world. Rather, the feelings Cashore conveys are peace and acceptance. Larch has no regrets about loving his son. And given what we know about Immiker, that may be the most disturbing thing of all.


*All quotes taken from the 2011 paperback edition.

**I'm using the term 'sociopath' on purpose. I am not a psychologist, but neither is Immiker a real person. For information from an actual expert, I recommend Dr. Martha Stout's book The Sociopath Next Door.


NOTE: Ahahaha, apparently this is what it looks like when I don't "focus on the prologue". Well, tune in next time for Chapter 1 and the introduction of our fascinating protagonist!