When we left Menolly at the end of Dragonsong, she was overjoyed to discover that she was going to live at the Harperhall. After a lifetime of abuse because of her musical talent, she was finally going to be recognised and accepted for her skills.
Dragonsinger: Harper Of Pern begins with Menolly arriving at the Hall upon the back of Monarth, the bronze dragon ridden by T’gellan, who befriended her during Dragonsong. This is just a short time after the conclusion of that book: it’s the same night, in fact.
What follows is a recount of Menolly’s first week at the Harperhall. It’s a story in the grand tradition of school stories, as set down in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which was published 120 years prior to this book.
Menolly struggles with her new environment and the rules of it, makes new friends and enemies, discovers that her talents will take her places but not with everyone and, finally, realises that she has the inner strength to fulfill the potential that her old mentor, Petiron, saw in her years ago when she was a child at Half Circle Sea Hold.
This is a very minor book in the series. It contains no events that really impact on the rest of the series, save that Menolly helps Masterharper Robinton hatch his fire lizard egg (a fire lizard who, according to Dragonquest, has hatched a few days prior to this… but this is a very minor fluff in the grand scheme of Pern continuity, frankly) and meets Piemur, a young apprentice who befriends Menolly because of her novelty value and then comes to appreciate her very genuine personality. She also comes to understand what a pure joy music is to her and begins to heal from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents in Dragonsong, largely through the challenges set her by her teachers and peers, such as Sebell, a journeyman harper who will play a major role in future novels.
She also meets Camo, a drudge in the kitchen with learning disabilities. It would be easy to dump on McCaffrey for her portrayal of disabilities in a set of novels that depends upon the actions of healthy, virile young men and women for its conflict and heroics, but that would be taking the easy way out. Most novels of the 1970s wouldn’t even look at the plight of the disabled, especially not in a way that showed those characters managing to live a life where they are performing work that is not demeaning or actively harmful. McCaffrey instead sets out to give us a portrayal of a world where people who suffer beyond the regular plight of being old or injured are treated with a degree of fairness and empathy. Camo isn’t easy to look after, it seems, but he isn’t treated badly or abused, and he has certain people at the Hall that he trusts implicitly, not the least among them the two characters who are revealed in a later book to be his parents: Masterharper Robinton and Silvina, headwoman of the Harperhall.
Having said that, Dragonsinger is one of my literary safe spaces and comfort reads. Like most of the Pern books there’s a focus on the comforts of ordinary life and the importance of being true to what you hold to be important.
But what it does is show just how ordinary life can be on an exotic alien world, several thousand years into the future.
The Harperhall is any boarding school writ large. McCaffrey had experience of this from when she was a girl, having spent some time at Stuart Hall, an exclusive girls school in Virginia.
This sort of background knowledge enhances scenes like the ones in which she comes into conflict with the few other girls at the Harperhall, who are “only” paying students, cultivating themselves as though they are at some kind of finishing school rather than preparing for a life completely immersed in music.
But it’s still a fabulous environment, filled with chores like litter patrol and kitchen duties intermingled with feeding Menolly’s fire lizards, and cheering on a dragonrider who lands outside the Hall to confer with the ground crew that everything is all right after a Threadfall.
It’s nearly perfect.
This is the first of the Pern novels that deals entirely with the domestic side of life. I have thrown that word around quite freely so far in the series and you are going to hear it a lot more before we finish.
The Pern novels are a near-perfect mix of the “epic” and the domestic.”
The epic comes from the struggles against Thread, the parasitic spore that bombards Pern every 250 years for about 50 years. The fight to keep Pern free of Thread, and the power struggles that the cast go through in order to do so form a drama equal to anything offered by the giants of the genre. But the domestic side of life is given equal importance in this series.
In this book it’s about Menolly settling into her new life and adjusting to it from the trauma she endured in the previous novel. Her struggles are fairly petty compared to the brushes with the epic strands of the story she has been tangentially involved with – F’nor and Canth’s flight to the Red Star, Jaxom’s Impression of Ruth – but they are no less engrossing for that. Dealing with bitchy fellow students and grumpy teachers seems just as important as knife fights with recalcitrant time-travellers.
Which is part of the joy of stories: the stakes may vary but the result is what a skilled author gets us to care about.
In any case, the Harperhall became one of my literary havens for many years: when I first read Dragonsinger, I was just beginning my journey into the performing arts (theatre was my jam) so it became a sort of Platonic ideal of schools for me. The idea of jamming with Menolly and Sebell, then crafting musical instruments to sell at Gathers (Pernese fairs), and improvising an opera performance over lunch was everything I’ve ever dreamt of in life. My own experience of this was quite minimal at this point – largely due to an absence of the whole “studying” thing that would have enabled it – but I instantly fell in love with the idea of a school populated by people who were really good at their craft and just spent their days practicing it.
The later books in the series would imply and then openly state that there was a lot more going on here than was apparent to the eye in regard to what the harpers really meant to Pern but, for me, this book is full of joy; tiny moments of joy set amongst thousands of years of regular and unimaginable peril.
Coming Up Next: The White Dragon.
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