It’s been nearly a month since I read The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England and I’ve had this post in my head for most of that time, but I finally have leisure to write it down. I may have forgotten or misremembered some stuff.
The book is definitely engaging with a lot of the recent discourse around policing, in some obvious and some less obvious ways. I never fully bought into the protagonist’s temporary characterization of himself as a ‘heroic cop’, and didn’t feel that the book bought into it either - it felt from the start like a story with a deeply flawed protagonist who was going to need to grow beyond his past attitudes and assumptions. I did assume that he’d bought the ‘universe’ he was in rather than hiding in it, so that was a surprise.
The characterization of Ryan and its subversion - the initial presentation of him as an ideal hero, followed by the revelations that he’s both a pretty crappy friend and doesn’t care about the people of the medieval-universe - is the most direct way the book deals with cops, since he’s the one cop character who appears in it, but I don’t think it’s the most important way the book engages with the topic. The most important way doesn’t openly mention cops at all.
Near the climax, John realizes that the way organized crime operates is by making people feel weak, powerless; by saying, ‘you have only the power I give you, and the second I take that away, you are nothing’. The crime boss kept John around as an example for that reason. And then, crucially, with Sefawynn’s story it explicitly connects that to Woden and says: he is behaving in the same way. He is sending the message of, ‘you aren’t obedient enough, unquestioning enough, to deserve my protection,’ and leading people like Sefawynn into deception because deception is the only way they can square their support for him with his actions. And at the climax, Sefawynn rejects both that and Woden. In short, the story turns around and says to the reader: look at the way the organized crime boss is acting. What other authorities, ones with social power and status and legitimacy, are in fact behaving in the same way? Which ones are ruling by force and fear, saying that that they’re the only thing that can protect you and give you security, and justifying their actions by saying any of their victims just weren’t good enough, just weren’t obedient enough, compliant enough?
In additionto this, there’s a thread running through the story of what I’ll call the redemptive power of vulnerability and weakness. John comes into the ‘parallel universe’ with virtually no knowledge and no power, and as a result is reliant on the people he meets. This leads to him getting to know them, to value them, to understand them and become friends with them and see them as equals. Ryan, in contrast, comes into the ‘parallel universe’ with all his knowledge and resources intact and is able to recruit the locals - in fact this means he’s still reliant on them, but it doesn’t feel that way to him: to him they’re not equals much less friends, they’re subordinates or tools. As a result, John values and cares about them and Ryan doesn’t. When you’re trained and conditioned and empowered to regard everyone you work around as enemies, tools, or bystanders, you’re not going to end up treating them as equals. You can only treat them as equals if you’re willing and able to be vulnerable to them. It’s why a lot of things in society - not only policing - won’t work right without a shift away from saving/fixing/protecting people to accompanying them, to letting them say “I need X and I want to do Y about it” and people - social workers, teachers, health professionals, child welfare workers - saying “What can I do to help?” rather than saying “I need you to do X, Y, and Z, and I will give you A, B, and C.” There are limits - medical professionals know more about medicine than laypeople do, and if someone says they need herbs to cure their cancer they can be (literally) dead wrong - but working with people rather than to or for them means you’re treating both themselves and yourself more as people rather than positions. Policing’s a heavier version of a similar thing, because avoid vulnerability at all costs is so deeply embedded in its culture. And that’s the reverse of what should be. Anyone whom society gives a gun to needs to be more, not less, willing to be vulnerable, precisely because the power they’ve been given makes others vulnerable to them.
A final thing that stands out in the books that ties in with similar social themes - very openly! - is the way characters from ‘our’ timeline are encouraged to think about those from ‘parallel universes’. There are a host of ways that could have been used to describe the fact that people from ‘our’ timeline can enter the medieval timelines and not vice versa. The choice of describing it as ‘people from these other timeles are less real’ is very much deliberate! It’s a choice that lets them say ‘these people’s lives don’t matter’ - or at least, don’t matter as much as ours. And that’s the narrative that Ryan buys into, and John rejects. (By the way, the satirical send-up of superficial corporate social responsibility in the Handbook excerpts is A+. Buy a bracelet! Feel virtuous! Don’t think about the fact that yes, this is absolutely imperialism!)
