Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews
Page 42
A white dancer-choreographer, at work in Amsterdam, is accosted by three hooded women whom he assumes are fans; the first he realizes otherwise is when he notices they have slipped a hypodermic into the back of his hand. When he wakes he finds himself in a room that is featureless save for the starkest accoutrements of bondage around the walls. For what he later discovers is a period of eighteen days he is subjected by the three masked women to escalating levels of inventive sexual and sadistic humiliation and torment: one day his naked, blindfolded body is used as the table/tableau for an invited banquet of unseen guests; another, his foreskin is crudely pierced with a screwdriver so that he may be chained by it to the wall. He attempts to personalize his captors, despite their anti-personalizing hoods, which they never shed; he believes that he succeeds in this, though perhaps all he observes are incomplete jigsaws whose not quite interlocking pieces comprise tones of voice, glimpsed birthmarks and vaginas, body languages and body morphologies.
Released abruptly back into the land of the living he realizes that he cannot explain himself and his absence. The dancer with whom he has lived assumes he has been indulging in a wild fling; his description of the truth is met with blank incredulity, and so he opts for a more plausible lie that is similarly disbelieved. Unceremoniously dumped, he embarks on a years-long campaign of seduction among the women of Amsterdam whose purpose is not consummation but identification: only when women are naked might he have a chance of recognizing them. After hundreds of conquests, however, he realizes that the viewed female bodies whose characteristics were once so firmly imprinted upon his mind have now become, perhaps, overlayered by all the others he has scrutinized.
After a long period of dislocation during which he is unable to establish any relationship with a woman beyond adding her body to the extending (but dismissed) identity parade in his mind, he discovers new love with a black woman, Juliette (Thomson deliberately keeps most of the characters in this novel as cyphers, but Juliette is a joyous exception); she is certainly innocent because none of his captors was black.
Finally, meeting a woman in a bar, he is convinced that he has discovered one of the three rapists. Following her to the lavatory, he rips the clothes from her and tries unsuccessfully and finally apologetically to find the identificatory marks; he ends up in jail, where still he cannot bring himself to confess to his new (and analogous) captors what happened to him. Only in the last couple of pages can he start making the revelation that is the book you, the reader, hold in your hands.
Rationalized fantasy, to use a technical term, is not often a fertile field. For every time that an author has knowingly created a work of major impact to fantasy that consciously omits the elements commonly regarded as essential to fantasy, there are a thousand extremely tedious failures. The task for the writer is an extremely complex and convoluted one: (a) to understand the heart, the core, and the entire sensibility of fantasy; (b) to deconstruct all of this, so that one is left with a barebones; (c) to erect upon that barebones a structure that bears all the appurtenances of fantasy yet is not in itself a tale that must necessarily be fantasticated – one knows it could have happened at the same time as one knows it never did, that this is a fictional/fantasticated construct.
It's a neat trick that very few have been able to pull off. John Fowles did it with The Magus (1965) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), in both of which reality eternally shifts. Theodore Roszak did it with Flicker (1991). Valerie Martin did it with Mary Reilly (1990). Donna Tarrt did it with The Secret History (1992) – Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind is a masterpiece of this form. There are other examples – while reading this novel I found myself constantly thinking of Kafka – but essentially we're talking about a select crew. In the case of The Book of Revelation we discover ourselves in the presence of someone who has been captivated into the land of Faerie – he is away for a longer or shorter time (and who can decide?) than has elapsed during his absence. At the same moment he is desperately telling himself that the thing he has gone through is reducible to the mundane – as if men are constantly being seized by predatory and preternatural women. He is entering a conspiracy to eliminate the possibility of the fantastic, even though he himself is the one who has endured the fantastic – the Tom or Tam who has survived Faerie and its cruelties.
This is a novel which can be taken in terms of its surface as a psychological thriller of sorts, but it's very much more than that. It both subverts and substantiates what fantasy is all about. It survives in the mind long after the reading is done.
—Infinity Plus
The Assassins of Tamurin
by S.D. Tower
HarperCollins Eos, 454 pages, hardback, 2003
Young Lale was discovered as a baby floating down the river by the natives of a remote village in Fantasyland. She is reared by them but not loved – indeed, she is made the scapegoat for all their ills. After one serious error she is socially ostracized by them, and so she flees to make her way in the world. Soon she is picked up by the Despotana (female Despot) of a neighbouring country, Tamurin. Taken there, she is schooled and eventually graduates to become, as she thinks, a religious acolyte. However, the Despotana's supposed convent is in fact a training academy for spies ...
And so on.
This is an amiable enough tale and it's rather nicely written in a very simple, almost simplistic style; in most contexts the plainness of the prose might be tedious, even irksome, but here it works well. Lale is a likable heroine, and her best buddy Dilara is an extremely appealing figure.
However, despite the appeal of the telling, the tale eventually does indeed become tedious, because there seems to be nothing new here. There's a certain amount of magic, but nothing we've not seen before; overall, there's surprisingly little fantasy at all in this novel except for the fact that it's set in a Fantasyland ... which is much like any other Fantasyland, although at least not a straightforward clone of Middle-Earth.
"S.D. Tower" is apparently, to judge by the cover flap and the book's Acknowledgements, the joint pseudonym of "an artist and the internationally published author (under another name) of espionage thrillers". This may give a clue as to why The Assassins of Tamurin is so unambitious in terms of its content. There is, of course, absolutely no reason in theory why artists and the authors of spy thrillers shouldn't write groundbreaking fantasies – just think of Mervyn Peake as a fantasy-writing artist! – but this particular book has the air of one whose authors are proudly re-inventing the wheel. It hardly needs to be said that a good many authors of generic fantasy do exactly this, repeatedly, and neither have the excuse of unfamiliarity with the field nor write so nicely; but that's a consideration of little relevance to the reader.
On the evidence of The Assassins of Tamurin, S.D. Tower may be an author to watch for the future, but with only moderate expectations.
Special mention should be made of the cover illustration, which is by Mark Harrison. Although it's in fact quite simple, it's very striking, probably due to the strength of its composition, and genuinely evocative. It made this reviewer's disappointment in the text perhaps more acute than otherwise might have been the case.
—Infinity Plus
Big Planet
by Jack Vance
Gollancz, 218 pages, paperback, 2000; reissue of a book originally published in this form in 1978
There have been countless sf novels over the years set on huge planetary surfaces or their equivalents, the prime examples probably being Larry Niven's Ringworld (1970) and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville (1975). It was perhaps as a result of the success of these two novels that in 1978 there was published in book form Jack Vance's 1952 Startling Stories serial that is widely regarded as having been the granddaddy of them all. Although it was good that the book was back in print, and a restored version at that – earlier, 1950s book editions having been cut – the reissue may have been a bad publishing move, since, despite its title, Vance's novel has very little in common with those other works.
This isn't just a fusspot and fundamentally irrelevant terminological matter. Rather, it relates to the way in which one can read Big Planet – and it also explains the reference to Cabell a few lines ago. The art of world-building in either fantasy or sf includes the conscious attempt to convince the reader that the world built somehow "really" exists, even if its landscapes are purely mental ones and endure only until the book is closed. Like Cabell, Vance in this book (and of course others) declined the chance at world-building, preferring instead to construct scenarios which the reader is forced to accept purely on their own terms.
This is an extremely difficult writing trick to pull off – well, anybody can do it, but the difficulty lies in keeping the reader's interest sustained. After all, as a single example, a basic requisite for engrossing fiction is generally taken to be the creation of plausible characters to whom the reader can relate emotionally (and, depending on the character, identify with). But, if the setting of the novel is merely a painted backdrop upon which the artist's brushstrokes are perfectly visible, it is constantly borne in upon the reader that the characters, too, are mere artifices. Who cares about the fates of people who, we're constantly being reminded, aren't real?
Well, there are other ways to keep a reader reading, among them the sustained inventiveness of the writer's imagination and the grace and stylishness of the writing. A few good jokes – verbal, situational or conceptual – don't hurt either.
I'm not certain Vance actually does pull off the trick in Big Planet, primarily because the plot is unfulfilled.
What is that plot? Sometime in the past, Earth colonized an enormous but low-density planet; despite the planet's size, the surface gravity here is not much different from that on Earth. The planet is desperately poor in metals, which must almost exclusively be imported. The policy of the Earth government is not to enforce its laws outside the confines of the Solar System. Thus the colonists on Big Planet were all the kooks and oddballs who couldn't fit in at home, tempted here by the prospect of effectively unlimited space in which to indulge whatever practices they wished.
Now the tyrant Charley Lysidder, Bajarnum of Beaujolais, is attempting the takeover of, if not the whole of Big Planet – which would probably be impossible – at least a sizeable percentage of its surface. He is doing so with considerable ruthlessness. Earth has sent various missions to try to halt this, but all have vanished. The latest, headed by Claude Glystra, is nearing the giant world when sabotage forces a crash-landing. In order to survive, Glystra's plucky little band – aided by hormone-rich local girl Nancy – must somehow trek forty thousand miles across the surface of the planet to the safety of Earth Enclave (in essence, the Terran Embassy). No planes, trains or automobiles to help them on this journey: because of the paucity of metals, Big Planet's technology is rudimentary. Also, of course, the Bajarnum is aware of their existence and will do his best to stop them.
Off they go on their forty-thousand-mile trip. They have various adventures and encounter various fantasticated societies. But the ever-diminishing group – almost all get killed off en route – don't in fact get further than a tiny fraction of the distance before Vance runs out of steam and the curtains come down on the play: the evening's entertainment is over.
Yes, the guy gets the gal despite all vicissitudes and misperceptions; but that's not exactly a surprise and, anyway, these have never been real characters. The Bajarnum and his tyranny are somewhat arbitrarily terminated; again, hardly a shock twist. The zillion other social problems that plague Big Planet are left unaltered: the massacres, child-rapes, tortures and the like are permitted to continue in the not-so-merry fashion of the past. In sum, there's a strong sense of coitus interruptus as one finishes page 218; to put it another way, it's as if one had paid for the Magical Mystery Tour and all that happened was that the bus went round the block and dumped you back on your own doorstep.
Yes, there's some inventiveness here. A few of the fantasticated societies are fastidiously intriguing, although none has the wit and quasi-plausibility of those depicted by, say, Eric Frank Russell in his tales in The Great Explosion (1962) and elsewhere. Yes, there are one or two good jokes, but they don't stick in the mind (at least, not in this reviewer's mind, because I've been sitting here desperately trying to remember one). And, yes, the writing is stylish by comparison with much else of what was on offer in 1950s pulp sf magazines; but a little too frequently what must have seemed stylish half a century ago reads today instead as simply affected.
Picking up this very attractive new edition, I tried to remember anything at all about my first reading of Big Planet, some twenty or more years ago, and all my memory could come up with was a vague sense of dissatisfaction on having finished the book. To be honest, this was why I decided to read the novel again, to discover what it was that my youthful self had so obviously missed out on. Yet, on finishing Big Planet in 2002, my feeling was exactly the same: Well, that was okay, I guess, quite fun in places, but, er, so what?
All of that said, Big Planet is one of those books that anyone seriously interested in the evolution of fantasy/sf should ... well, not so much read as, at some stage, have read. It is significant to the history of the genre even if no longer, as a novel, especially significant in itself.
—Infinity Plus
Bloodlines
by Marian Veevers
Gollancz, 272 pages, hardback, 1996
This haunting novel has three intertwined strands set in three different times.
(1) In the 11th century Lady Macbeth, who has inherited witchery (of the Goddess rather than the broomstick kind), infatuated with her brutal and largely uncaring husband, plots in both mundane and occult ways to bring him glory. Among Macbeth's servants is the vile rapist Seyton, who is told by the three weird sisters that he will never be a king himself but will father kings. Macbeth later awards him the title Steward (which will become Stewart and then Stuart). One of Lady Macbeth's powers is that she knows the secret of seeing the weird of the Stewarts; i.e., she can see the future of Seyton's line, and all its tragedies.
(2) In the early 17th century a peasant girl called Jennet is being interrogated and is condemned to death for witchcraft and for killing her newborn baby, one of her interrogators being the man who raped and thereby impregnated her. She has inherited the knowledge of the Stewart weird: the real reason she must hang is that the newly crowned James VI & I, paranoid about witchcraft, has learnt of this.
(3) In 1996 actress Abigail West must play the part of Lady Macbeth in a production designed to relaunch the career of her faithless husband; among the cast is a certain Alan Stewart, who still bears a vengeance because of what West's line of witchery has, as he perceives it, done to his family.
To give much more of a synopsis would be to give the game away. Veevers's prose falters in the first fifteen or twenty pages, but thereafter settles into an elegant, understated smoothness; she captures the distinctive voices of all three threatened women with very great skill. This is a book that is hard to put down as it accelerates towards a resolution of the three connected lives. Veevers, whose first novel this is, is an author to watch.
—Samhain
Golem
by Greg Vilk
Ricochet, 172 pages, paperback, 2005
The author of this short novel has been a visual effects technical director for companies like DreamWorks, and unfortunately it shows. Golem is less a novel, more a treatment for a screenplay, complete with lots of explosions, cardboard subsidiary characters introduced seemingly for the sole purpose of meeting a gruesome end, unexplained (if not inexplicable) plot progressions whose illogicality a moviemaker might reckon would escape the notice of the thrilled audience but which leap out only too starkly from the printed page, the sense, as with so many modern action movies, that you're seeing bits and pieces jigsawed together from earlier action movies ... Combine all this and more with a prose style that not so much graces the page as lurches and staggers across it, and you'll understand why it took your reviewer an inordinately long while to plough his way through the novel's mere 170 large-print pages: much of the time was spent repeatedly thumbing back through previous sections in a desperate effort to find out what the heck was supposed to be going on.
It's World War II, and the Nazis have kidnapped archaeolinguist Professor Benedict and taken both him and the secret he has discovered, that of raising the Golem, to a secret base in Greenland in hopes of learning how to make lots of lethal, indestructible clay soldiers. Sent after them are a bunch of US special-ops malcontents who could well, with their exaggerated but forgettable characteristics, be the Dirty Dozen except that I never came up with the same answer twice whenever I tried to count them.
With these lovable toughs goes token female May, who's both linguist daughter of the abducted boffin and Equity-registered hot babe; from the moment she and good-guy leader Leash clap eyes on each other it's pretty obvious that he's going to be getting (a) over the fact that he's been previously Unhappy In Love and (b) into a tangle of limbs with Ms. Benedict about two sentences after the end of the book. Similarly, as soon as the troop's watery-eyed, morphine-addicted sawbones appears on the scene, it's a dead cert he's going to betray our heroes to the nasties, and our author does not disappoint.