When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain by Nghi Vo
Publisher – Tor.com
Published – Out Now
Price – £2.04 kindle eBook £10.99 paperback
The cleric Chih finds themself and their companions at the mercy of a band of fierce tigers who ache with hunger. To stay alive until the mammoths can save them, Chih must unwind the intricate, layered story of the tiger and her scholar lover—a woman of courage, intelligence, and beauty—and discover how truth can survive becoming history.
In stories we love to talk of unreliable narrators but actually all narrators and stories will carry bias (see I was paying attention in History classes!) look closely at a story and it sits upon a culture that comprises its own biases and beliefs. The events that ultimately created the folklore get lost in retellings and the addition of the lens the storyteller themselves uses. This is what really struck me reading the excellent When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain by Nghi Vo where a legend gets the addition of footnotes by the Tigers who should really know best
Chih is a cleric and tasked with recording stories be it from tavern owners, mammoth drivers or anyone else they meet. A trip though across the dangerous mountains gets interrupted by the sight of a man about to be eaten by tigers. The tigers are thrown off by a combination of mammoth and ingenuity, but the Tigers come back. Chih and the others are told they will soon be eaten but a story gets told by Chih that keeps then entertained about Scholar Dieu who makes their way to a haunted mansion but first has to deal with the tiger Ho Thi Thao. A tale of love, guests and betrayals gets told but the Tigers are very keen that history gets fixed before their next meal is taken.
So much to enjoy in this story. Vo creates from the off a world of its own reality from recording birds, mammoths as taxis and of course talking shape-changing tigers. We enter a world of myth that is where anything can happen and so a cleric on a mountaintop telling stories to the tigers planning to eat feels entirely natural and you realise in this world anything can happen.
When we get to the tale and Dieu and Ho Thi Thao we get a fascinating two-handed tale with Chih telling the ‘official version’ and then the Tigers adding in their version of events. This makes several things happen firstly we get a lovely sapphic romance revealed between the two characters and Vo’s language gives this tale of two women discovering their feelings for each other some powerful emotional depth and some lovely additional cultural interpretations of gestures and words being re-examined which is so important to storytelling. The impact is we see a much more interesting story get developed and a reminder that our understanding of other cultures shapes the story we read or hear. Of course, we also get monsters ghosts and reversals of fortune which also make the tale really tick.
This is another knock out novella from an author who I am definitely going to keep an eye out for future work and is highly recommended to those who enjoy folklore and stories about stories. Thoughtful, exciting and heartwarming I really really enjoyed this one.
