The blog of Cirsova: The Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense has produced a new review of Rags and Muffin:
This one was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit. All I knew going in was crime-fighting catgirl with an Asian dragon dog. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Certainly not an incredibly rich fantasy setting heavily inspired by Indian mythology.
As an aside, the “pseudo Indian” (as he calls it) setting almost didn’t happen. When I first started this project, the setting was a more generic dystopian city vaguely resembling Blade Runner. But while I pondered what kind of city it was, I mused that it might be a religious capital; I then asked myself, “Which religion?” and the answer instantly came, “All of them.” After that, an early test reader said the book had an “Indian vibe,” which further encouraged me to build the world in that direction.
Also, the novel’s conception of religion is partly drawn from the syncretistic and drug-fueled stew that was Vedantism and perennialism in the 1960s. The portrayal of people getting doses of hallucinogenic drugs as a shortcut to mystical experience is ultimately inspired, albeit indirectly, by Timothy Leary, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate through third-rate philosophers like Huston Smith, John Hick, and Marcus Borg. Of course, Leary, Huxley, and their disciples were all enamored of Hinduism, however deficient their understanding of it, so a pseudo-Hindu setting seemed appropriate for a story about a world where drugs and religion are inextricably linked.
But what ultimately convinced me to go all out with the Indian elements was my happy discovery that the religious practice I invented as a central feature of my fictional world—the worship of young girls as living goddesses—exists in real life. Although I obviously employed a lot of artistic license in my fantastical portrayal of it, kumari puja is a real thing: It is particularly prominent in Nepalese Buddhism, but there are versions of it in India as well. In the world of Rags and Muffin, of course, it is essential to every religion, which is why early chapters give the reader brief glimpses of both Christian and Tibetan Buddhist kumaris.
Cirsova also says,
I used to be something of a Hindu Mythology wonk in my younger years, so this was a pleasant surprise. Davidson incorporates the cultural textures without overly romanticizing them, showing both the beautiful aspects which Lord Curzon fell in love with as well as the ugly and downright evil.
If I depicted anything as evil, it was on account of plot necessity rather than personal opinion. My attitude toward India and its neighbors is about as neutral as it is possible to be: I am enamored of Indian culture and people, but my view of their history, religion, and mythology is almost purely academic. The Bhagavad-gita is a book I like to return to from time to time, but mostly because it has fine passages; I am not especially moved by its sweeping theology nor repulsed by its amoral and fatalistic stance on ethics.
Even kumari puja, which often exercises Western philanthropists and busybodies who believe Nepal’s worshiped girls are being abused, is a practice on which I have no strong opinion. On the one hand, I find it a rather charming form of idolatry. On the other hand, I think its critics are likely correct that it leaves its pampered girls unprepared to cope with the real world once their stint as goddesses is over. But on the gripping hand, Reuters and the BBC hate the practice, as revealed by their frequent exposes on the subject, and anything those organizations hate must have something good about it.
On another note, it was originally my intent to be entirely agnostic about the religious beliefs and practices portrayed in the book, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions as to whether any of the mystical experiences are real or just drug-induced hallucinations. However, as the story developed, I reached a point where I was forced to reveal that the gods truly exist, which I partly regret.
Cirsova has one prominent criticism, which is quite fair:
There’s a lot of excellent worldbuilding in Rags & Muffin, but as a book, it’s a little all over the place in setting things up. A number of seemingly unrelated events, as well as side excursions of the main characters, tie in to the world and add a backdrop to the story but go nowhere on their own in this volume.
He’s correct that the book spends some time hanging Chekov’s Guns to be fired in later volumes, but part of the problem he detects is that I blended two different types of stories without complete success: This is first of all an action story, which requires a tight structure. But it’s also a milieu story, which is allowed to wander around.
That’s why there’s a sub-story, starting in chapter seven, in which an elaborate, city-wide, syncretistic religious ritual ends incongruously with a terrorist blowing up a bus: That sequence exists purely to show you what kind of world I’m drawing you into. Plotwise, it is barely justified because it introduces both Rags’s medical problem and the characters of Miss Marie and her henchmen, but its true purpose is to display the city, which is really the main character of the book.
Buy Rags and Muffin here.
