The doorstopper fantasy

 The Lord of the Rings is no doubt a long read and well worth the time, but compared to the “doorstopper” multi-volume fantasies that followed it, it’s positively compact. Indeed, LOTR was drafted as a single long novel, and then published in three volumes, a choice with a strong tradition in the case of the triple-decker novels of earlier Victorian publishing. But, at some point in the 70s and 80s the trilogy became the pattern, and then commercial fantasy developed the even more substantial series format, which gave us behemoths like The Wheel of Time and Game of Thrones. These doorstopper fantasies, of significant mass and length, well exceed LOTR in word-counts and represent several intriguing challenges and questions.

I’m minded of this because my shelter-in-place COVID-19 reading has included Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, both a trilogy and one of the better exemplars of the doorstopper series. William’s certainly wrote at length, introducing multiple character threads and alternately cultivating and subtly defying genre conventions, but at least MS&T came to a satisfying ending. I still remember overhearing Robert Jordan being pressed as to when The Wheel of Time would end by a Christchurch bookstore owner during a visit. As I recall, he gave a firm “we’ll see” in answer, and sadly died before his series was finished. George R. R. Martin, on the other hand, has attracted the scorn and concern of fans for not yet completing Game of Thrones, and yet I think the more interesting question is how will he finish his own sequence when the script writers of the TV series have already preempted his choices.

The trilogy format certainly offers some advantages. The three book sequence frames and encourages a beginning, middle, and end structure, offering the clarity of exposition, development, and conclusion, rising tension, and similar desiderata. And a wide range of authors have made good use of the scope of multiple story threads to develop tension and suspense. And perhaps the more complex the fantasy, and more complex the fictional world, the more need for development and explanation.

But issues of completion aside, the doorstopper has encouraged and even enabled some weaknesses, perhaps the worst of which was bloated storylines with more long-winded development for development’s sake and seemingly interminable politicking and journeying. Even Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn drags in the middle volume, shifting and transferring characters back and forth across Osten Ard like an over-cautious chess player advancing and retreating pieces in the mid-game before the end-game becomes apparent. But worse than pacing, I think, was the proliferation of shallow minor characters and ancillary story-lines. The main reason I dropped GoT and the sprawling, interminable Malazan Book of the Fallen was the ever expanding cast of characters, which made a focal point, much less a protagonist, impossible to settle on. 

And yet the fantasy trilogy trilogy, with its open horizons, its richness of texture, its sustained evocation of a world, remains compelling. Perhaps there are ways to adapt and develop the three part structure; to make the long journey an adventure, to provide authentic scope for characters to emerge, and to make the imaginary world dense and strange again. 

The politics of stupidity, reprise

1. Choose a stupid leader, someone who will bark stupid lies with enough conviction that they seem authentic (they aren't).

2. Enact stupid and destructive policy. Ignore serious, important, long term solutions for stupid immediate appearances. If the policies are also cruel, so much the better. To the stupid, this looks like toughness.

3. Bark stupid lies about your failures, the opposition, anything really. The point is not to be right; the point is to make so much stupid noise that no adequate response can cut through.

4. It's now harder and harder to maintain a lucid argument, or to identify stupidity and name it directly.
If you can get ostensibly smart people, like judges or the Hoover Institute, to cover for your stupidity, that's even better.

6. Stupidly blunder back to 1 and 2, because the only solution to the current, stupid mess will look like more stupidity.

What happened in the end

Pandemic reading has led me to two quite different authors and two quite different formation of one of the crucial challenges of writing in the long form: the stakes and satisfaction of an ending. 

We take it for granted, of course, that novels end. If they simple finished, terminated arbitrarily, we would recognize immediately that we possess a fragment, not a whole. And even fragments, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, suggest their own missing structure. If we were to come across half of a broken boat, we will still see in the broken beams and keel the shape of the whole.

Here, then, is a study in contrasts.

M. John Harrison's Empty Space is the last volume in the loosely federated Kefahuchi Tract series, but it rigorously resists any disclosure that could be taken as a resolution to the complex of unsettling questions of character and causality that the sequence raises. There's a remark about a control room instrument: "Everything was processed to look 'real', arriving preassembled as a narrative from selected points of view," which taken in reverse suggests Harrison's method. From separate, selected points of view, narrative is disassembled, the structural illusion of reality is unravelled to reveal the contradictions, incoherencies, and dissonance of a future poised on the shockwave between the unfathomable physics of chaos and quantum indeterminacy and the unbearable nostalgia of submerged human identities.

But, also on my e-reading device is the first volume of the Penguin series of Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels—French detective fiction from the 30s, almost as far from contemporary science fiction as you could get. And, of course, what happens at the end of any Maigret is that the crime is solved, the guilty are discovered, the selected points of view, clues, plot points, are assembled into the narrative of the crime and its solution.

And yet—I'm not sure anymore whether Empty Space can be called an "open" ending and Pietr the Latvian, for instance, a "closed" one. Because however the inspector exposes the material logic of the crime, the human problem, Maigret's point of entry into the solution, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, remains. And isn't that the point of Harrison's radical uncertainties and unresolved threads, and inchoate nostalgia, that the human problem persists, a struggle to assert a sense of reality and identity against the shimmering chaos of an unknowable universe?

Whether SF or police procedural, perhaps the distinction lies in what is settled and unsettled, the points that are decided and undecided. In this sense, Harrison's project is to disrupt the confident teleology of technological progress, where Maigret's detective can close the case but leave open, and subtly unstated, the implications of character and the ironies of morality, guilt and deviation. In any case, what happened in the end counts, but we are left with something beyond the ending that haunts our reading still.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick

One of the most compelling scenes in Philip K. Dick's Ubik is a struggle simply to walk upstairs, to find a place of rest: a fight against inertia, fatigue, the pure malice of entropy. Reading this scene during the pandemic, after seeing harrowing accounts of the fever and weakness that COVID-19 inflicts, the scene gains a terrible resonance.

At other times, Ubik might seems  prescient for its distillation of routine capitalism into endless payment for trivial services, such as the coin-operated doors and coffee-makers, presaging the economy of micro-transactions and in-app payments. But this, like the plot that sets emergent “psi” powers against their natural, effect limiting counterparts or “anti-psi” operations is simply part of the scaffolding, the incidental background for a more profound and deliberate consideration of how worlds are made and unmade, and what happens when our physical, moral, and even temporal realities begin to unravel. 

It’s striking that the forces of entropy are yoked to malice and cruelty in Ubik, just at a time now when reactionary politics in the US are also heedlessly erasing or countermanding progressive reforms in an attempt to wind the clock back to an era of “greatness” that never applied. In contrast, the cure-all “Ubik” seems to come from a humanizing impulse to heal and restore, an almost spiritual impulse to resist the death urge: “watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life.”

And yet, as in most of Dick’s work, for every action there is a reaction, for every reality a counter-reality, and the tension between life and half-life is never wholly decided. Perhaps this is why Ubik is both fascinating and unsettling — we’ll never quite know where our world stands; the only valid choice is what we’ll fight for, what we need to resist.

8:46

The Last Battle

Beginnings are tentative, difficult, subtle. Few parts of your work face as much revision, as much rewriting, than beginnings. 

Endings, on the other side, roar in and seem to compose themselves, inevitable, like the cresting of a wave.

This is how endings should be. Lay the ground, set the pieces in motion, the end game will play out itself. 

As I've grown older, as a reader I've found it harder and harder just to finish a book I like, not through dislike of the task, but because the pleasure of reading, discovery, is something I want to sustain. 

As a writer, the agony of ending a piece is the constant stream of distractions that break the whole into fragments of work, and the awareness that the measured end-game also requires its own patience, its own pacing. But of course, the ending is never the end of the writing task, only the point where you go back to review and revise again.

When Bilbo gets to the end of The Hobbit, he has his share of the treasure. All he has to do is get it back across the Mirkwood, the Misty Mountains, and the wilds of Eriador again. 

What have other found at the end?

Childish Audacity - The Secret Agent

I've mentioned elsewhere Conrad's masterwork of urban terror, political agitation, anarchism and authority, The Secret Agent. His portrait of the the shabby. monstrous Professor, the essential suicide bomber, is both relevant and terrifyingly familiar to us today. But The Secret Agent is also a domestic tragedy played out as a bitter farce, with deep insights that continue to cut against contemporary conditions.

One phrase, among many, struck me as notable: "Barefaced audacity amounting to childishness of a particular sort". Anyone who has had to witness the absurd contortions about the Ukraine scandal, the unforgivable betrayal of the Kurds, or the pointless provocation of Iran, will recognize this phrase as eerily applicable. On one level it means that malice and folly are never far apart – "Oft evil will shall evil mar" as Tolkien would have it – and there is, in our current discourse, a dangerous tendency to ascribe deeper motives or at least clarity of purpose to what is in fact mere lying, blundering, and cruelty when the liars have the power to frighten and appall us.

But beyond that, every character in The Secret Agent is locked into a form of childishness. For like Stevie, the man-child and first victim of the misguided terror-attack, every character is trapped in their own perceptions, their own circle of thoughts and fears and illusions, and none of them, not even the policeman, has the clear insight to regard another human being with accuracy. This is, of course, the basis of the novel's dramatic irony — we are all secret agents, operating only to ourselves, opaque to others.