The Sword in the Stone - T. H. White

Tolkien, I recall, had reservations about Lewis's blending of inconsistent sources and traditions in the Narnia stories: Roman fauns and Greek centaurs against Nordic wolves and a White Witch, for instance. But I wonder what he made of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, an extraordinary melange of elements: sentimental medievalism blended with precise historical detail and conscious anachronism, children's story and searching political allegory, legend and fantasy, and comedy with a looming thread of adult tragedy.

Among those concerned with writing modern fantasy, much is made of world-building, which means the coherence and integration of the world, and the application of a realist logic to unreal categories. But as M. John Harrison has observed, fantasies are extended metaphors, idealogical and not physical landscapes, and they serve to generate interpretations, not factual consistency. In this respect, The Sword in the Stone is a novel of education, but its lessons are about encountering and integrating, without necessarily reconciling, a multitude of viewpoints.

Merlin, living backwards in time, has already seen the tragic future and the even more baffling modernity which occasionally intervenes in the text, but he can only prepare Wart for what he will discover and ultimately do as the Once and Future King. He can guide but not resolve. Wart's lessons, through Merlin's magical transformations, are often about the burden of power, and his encounters, such as with the mordant pike or the mad, militaristic hawks, highlight the dangers of tyranny and the moral price of authority. If the fantasy England of the narrative is but a nostalgic rendering, this serves to highlight that it is also lost in the past as the whole golden age of Arthurian legend is lost, that these soft edges are just a comforting illusion, but one we can't give up quite yet. This is what Merlin sees and Wart cannot, and the discrepency lends the comedy unusual poignancy and insight.

The last mystery

When the mystery is resolved, what remains? Maybe the the fact that we are all mysteries to ourselves, and that character is the one clue we can never follow to its conclusion.

(A cryptic post to celebrate the conclusion of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts.)

First and last

I started writing the last chapter of A Hangman for Ghosts. But given that the last chapter of a murder mystery is necessarily that first one that the author devised, and that the rest of the writing process is selectively concealing and revealing the nature of this chapter, does this mean that I really started writing this chapter first, and it has simply taken the longest to finish?

The Morse Code

I've been watching the classic British mystery series Inspector Morse through Hulu. A review of the visual medium is a little out of character for this blog, but never mind. It's fascinating to mark how prevalent the genre of detection is in popular TV and speculate as to what that means for our wider culture, and Morse exemplifies a particular turn in mystery drama and fiction of the eighties which, I've found, influences my own thinking about the genre.

Like P. D. James, whose best work appeared at this time, the writers of Morse returned to the policeman as detective, as opposed to the collection of interesting eccentrics, amateurs and private detectives that flourished after the Golden Age of detection. 

Morse was irascible, morose, a clever puzzle solver, but frequently baffled by human motivation, prone to bad habits in life and relationships. He was often wrong, or relied falsely on intuition, which showed that the rational solver of clockwork mystery puzzles was more often than not a pleasing fiction rather than realistic portrait. By the same token, the conclusion to many of his cases was often ambivalent, showing that murder, morality, guilt and the law did not intersect as often as the consoling certainties of earlier detective fiction would indicate.

After Morse, the preeminent home counties detective became Inspector Barnaby, of Midsomer Murders, which reverted to the chirpier, more predictable structure of the cosy country-house murder. (Morse and Inspector Barnaby would neither have held on to their inspectors rank in real life with the number of murders per case that occurred in drama). And Morse was also followed by the forensic detective, the CSI crime-solver, substituting the myth of the infallible lab technician for the flawed investigator of human frailty.

But Inspector Morse retains its interest because of its richer, darker plots and flawed, fallible protagonist.

Mystery and stupidity

This is an odd topic for a longish post, but as the end of the first draft of A Hangman for Ghosts draws near, as an ambiguous detective hunts down the conclusion of an intricate and ambivalent case, I've had cause to consider the nature of stupidity, as a theme of the novel and in society.

By stupidity, I don't mean simple, individual foolishness, but consistent, willed idiocy in grave matters of public life, from the spectacular boorishness of a New Zealand talk-radio host attacking a respected writer for disloyalty to – of all things – the government; to the exceptional callousness of the Australian Prime Minister, who refuses to prevent the further brutalisation of children held in detention and instead moves to change the subject; to rewriting the charter of a respected university to diminish truth and enquiry, to – most dangerous of all – admitting the reality of global climate change while not recognising the human cause.

In many of these cases, from the cruelty of Mr Abbott to putting humanity and the planet at risk, there is an element of harm, as cruelty and stupidity go hand in hand, even as there is also a violent disrespect for persons and their good sense in the other instances. Of course, folly, bigotry, self-interest, and deceit are nothing new – unsurprising, in fact – but what is worrying is that this stupidity has become naked and shameless, that there is no attempt to reason or persuade, only a bald assertion that should be as embarrassing to the speaker as it is irritating to the audience. Was there not a time when political leaders, rightly or wrongly, would at least attempt to persuade us of their case, on whatever grounds?

How is this related to mystery? Because I think that in a good mystery there is a satisfaction in the discovery that truth can be found, that the detective, whether a private individual or an official, can use reason and observation and imagination to track down the real facts of the matter. In this way, the mystery narrative schools us or engages us in a certain kind of thinking. By the same token, the dark forces the detective might confront, malice and crime, are aligned with stupidity as well as the fog of circumstance. Hence, in A Hangman for Ghosts, in the harsh environment of the Australian penal colony or on the doorstep of the empire, my reluctant investigator, an outsider even in exile, must confront official stupidity as well as the complexity of the crime, because this kind of stupidity is about preserving the order of the system rather than justice.

Which brings me back, from another direction, to my first point. Just as propaganda in a totalitarian society is not about reality but bullying and demeaning the subject, official stupidity is not about the facts or even reasons, but about muddying the waters, creating confusion in the hopes that confusion seeds doubt, not to sway the majority by argument but to target the wavering few by obfuscation. As such, stupidity is the great red herring, the concealer, the distraction from who is guilty.

Eleanor Catton was subjected to a stupid personal attack because she demurred, mildly, to act as a cheerleader for a New Zealand government she thought at odds with her values. The response to her in some media shows that on the contrary, her writer's role as critic, conscience, and doubter is even more vital.

The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman

The Magician's Land, the last volume of a series we can now say forms The Magicians trilogy, does several admirable things. It brings the series to a satisfying close, not always possible in a loose serial narrative, and addresses the primary question left dangling at the end of the first book: what is magic for? And it does so with a brisk, well-written narrative that avoids the bloat and long-windedness that the genre has become prone to.

The Magician's Land has some faults too. These are minor faults, to be sure, but they make the reading experience an uneven one. The first is an over-large cast of focal characters, and a structure that flips between characters at will, which forces Quentin, the protagonist of the trilogy, towards the background at odd moments, even though the story of his growing maturity and quest for restitution is the focus of the novel. Plum, a young magician snatched by misadventure from the magical college of Brakebills, holds significant portions of the narrative, but there's no real reason for her to do so, except to act as a foil for Quentin. There's also a tendency for characters to speak with the mock-ironic tone of college students even in moments of genuine tenderness or emotion, which is rather at odds with the growing maturity of the central characters, he signature development of this final volume. Nevertheless, Grossman has a magician's gift for combining action, contemporary references, and moments of true fantasy and wonder, and his invented world of Fillory has gathered true weight and strangeness (and a touch of sadness) as the series continues.

These, however, are small matters. Although Grossman is at pains to point out that the grand fantasy quest (even the quest for self-knowledge) is more often than not incomplete or ambivalent, his characters both destroy and remake a world. And in this we finally touch on the answer to the challenge of the first novel. Magic is not neat, predictable, merely technical, or even necessarily useful. But it is creative, and in creation and dislocation the magician, like the novelist, brings new possibilities into the mundane world.

A note on The Maltese Falcon

An astonishing proportion of any given page is given over to descriptions of Sam Spade himself: his grins, his grimaces, the set of his shoulders, the variable colour of his eyes. Yet the emotions that inform these are generally opaque, as though the detective himself were the cypher and only his gestures and expressions the clue. This may be the point, since the mystery is not that magnificent diversion, the falcon, or even the murder of Spade's partner, but the question, from the moment the trouble begins: what will Spade do?