littlelady03

Hopelessly Romantic

New to all of this, but there’s some pretty neat stuff, so here I am. Age 21 for those concerned.

328 posts

Compound Fracture Is A Book About History And Legacy

Compound Fracture is a Book About History and Legacy

Finally finished Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White. There is A LOT that this book has got going for it, but what sticks out the most to me is just how heavy it is with history.

It's something that you see a lot in Black fiction, this emphasis on ancestry and family heritage. Black Panther (2018), to name the example that everyone knows, or if we are at queer horror novels, Virginia Black's Consecrated Ground. Both a very much about family, about the land the family has ties to, and about the new generation's responsibilities to carry on this legacy. I haven't really seen it in white fiction before, at least not US American white fiction.

I especially have not seen it in queer fiction before.

Queer fiction deals a lot with alienation from the family. Characters either get kicked out, leave on their own free will, or have this strong feeling of alienation hanging over their heads. There is no connection to the past. Even the ones who are on good terms with their families, like the movie Runs In The Family (2023), which is genuinely one of the best father-son relationships I have ever seen ANYWHERE, are very much stuck in the present. You can be on good terms with a parent, or sibling, or grandparent, even your extended family, but the previous generations remain silent. The ones who manage to find queer role models within their family do so within someone who is still alive.

And, well, that's all of us, isn't it, doing whatever research into queer history we can however we can (word of mouth on the Internet, mostly), looking for people who might have been like us, but it's still so uncertain, and also, given the nature of the Internet, the names we find are from some random corner of the world that is pretty much never ours. It's Silas in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth latching on to James Barry, because who else is there?

Compound Fracture is all about legacy, and that legacy goes back four generations. It is no wonder that Miles' main Special Interest is history, it's the major theme of the book: How systems of power and oppression get passed down from one generation to the other, how everyone is basically a child caught in the sins of their parents, doomed to repeat it, over and over again. How the ones in power have the possibility to rewrite history, and use it to erase people they don't like, or simply don't care about, and how it takes conscious work and effort to preserve their memory.

And in the middle of it all, a revolutionary, a true role model, not from some random other place, but from Miles' own family. A figure he can look up to, a figure he can admire, a figure whose life and deeds still influence his everyday reality a hundred years later.

A figure he has pretty solid proof to have been a gay trans man.

Silas in The Spirit Bares Its Teeth already had this connection over time with Barry, but that was still quite distant, in that it was completely parasocial. Silas may have seen himself in many ways as Barry's spiritual successor, and he may have even been right, but there was no direct connection between them. If James Barry's consciousness still exists in that world, as a ghost or whatever, then he is pretty guaranteed not to know of Silas' existence. Like, why would he. But with Miles and Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White goes this one step further. There IS a direct link between him and Saint Abernathy. Saint Abernathy DOES exist in this book in the form of a ghost, and he DOES care about Miles, and he DOES make it abundantly clear that he is proud of him. Looking further, at the symbolism, it becomes clear that Miles is Saint's heir, and that he is worthy of that role.

I'm pretty sure that every queer person has dreamt of a similar situation regarding members of their own family before. Just knowing that there was someone would be amazing. But to have the founder of your family share your exact identity? To have a sign that they would be proud of you??

Yeah.

As I said, Compound Fracture is a very good book with many strong themes and consequently many reasons why it will appeal to a reader. But this weight of history and legacy are definitely going to be one of the major reasons. I think that we are all secretly STARVED for this kind of queer story.