Culture games: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons — Iain M Banks

 In the last post I argued that Consider Phlebas is mainly concerned with the question of identity, perhaps appropriately for the first major novel that developed into a significant series. In some quarters, ask about the "Culture novels" and you'll be directed to the safer entry-points, the established bases: The Player of Games and Use of Weapons.

Of course both of these books still betray Banks's concern with questions of identity and unreliable narrators  — who plays the bigger, more dangerous game; who is Zakalwe, really; who wields the weapon, and who is the weapon? — and one could well say that these questions are often at the center of Banks's considerable narrative craft. But I think as Banks's understanding of the Culture as protagonist and utopia developed, the other conflict, the clash between the logic of intervention and personal autonomy, also became more pressing.

In PoG the Empire of Azad, perhaps like the Idirans, is authoritarian, regressive, oppressive, elaborately sexist (since Banks gives it three biological sexes to manage). If there is a weakness in the presentation of the empire, it is almost cartoonishly corrupt, an easy stereotype. The nuance is that the empire has also created, and is structured by, Azad, which is elaborate, beautiful, endlessly complex, almost like literature. Naturally, Gurgeh comes to win at Azad, and because the game embodies the empire, he defeats the imperial system itself, initiating its collapse. But Gurgeh only wins because he eventually, in his revulsion at the empire's brutality, plays in the vernacular of the Culture, through soft power, subversion, the finely measured application of force. 

So, at this point, Gurgeh is effectively de-protagonized. Rather than the subject of his own narrative, he is another playing-piece in the long game of the Culture. The Minds, the drones, are the actual players and, we learn, manipulated Gurgeh into play in the first place. Gurgeh is their knife-missile, their perfectly deployed and selected instrument. Hence, for Gurgeh, his victory in the game of Azad is deeply ambivalent, and at the end of the story we find him not triumphant but in tears, perhaps because he understands that his own game has also collapsed, that the real player of games will always be the Culture itself.

The question comes to a fine point in Use of Weapons. Instrumental reasoning is a fine thing if only the objective counts, but the doctrine of utility reduces all individuals to the status of objects, tools, weapons, or game-pieces in the pursuit of the Culture's broader aims. UoW is a complicated read because of its dual strands of flashback and forward narrative, as if narrative technique were also one of the weapons the author wields for maximum effect. The flashbacks, though episodic, are always clearer and more engaging than the present narrative, in which the narrative stakes seem less clear and compelling, as the politics of the Cluster are less meaningful than the odyssey of the younger Zakalwe.

The coincidence of these streams is what shows us that Zakalwe, like Gurgeh, is merely a weapon, talented and useful, but only fully realized when deployed by the Culture. In fact, the text suggests that whenever Zakalwe attempts to break free of the Culture, to act on his own terms, his attempt is a failure. The tragedy of UoW is that at no point can Zakalwe redeem himself from his brutal history or escape his identity. He is the weapon rather than the wielder, and the poet knows that weapons find their full reality only in the moment of destruction.

Consider Phlebas — Iain M. Banks

 I can still recall buying Consider Phlebas on a rainy winter’s afternoon in Christchurch in the very early 90s and reading it entirely in the space of a couple of days. No slight thing, given its comparative length at 467 pages. I was a student at the time, which makes dedicated, compulsive reading feasible. Consider Phlebas was then the first of what became Banks’s sequence of Culture novels, but to my mind it remains one of the most compelling and challenging novels in the sequence, a masterpiece in the sense of being the first and necessary proof of the author’s skill. Over the years, I’ve seen other reviewers relegate Consider Phlebas to the status of an earlier, less accomplished work — the first but not the best, as fantasy literature.com has it — but this seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand its impact and importance.

If you’re inclined to read CP as part of a series, it does offer some challenges, the first of which would be a roughly two-part structure, in which the first part is relatively disjointed, almost picaresque, a sequence of accidents and violent incidents as the protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchel weaves his way towards the location of his main mission. Each of these incidents, from a disastrous raid on a remote temple to a crashing megaship to a gruesome encounter with an apocalyptic cult and its grotesque, cannibalistic leader works exceedingly well as a set-piece. In terms of narrative they are superb and compelling, a combination of action, suspense, and vivid detail. But beyond setting the scene for the novel’s broader conflict between the imperialist, religiously conservative Idirans and the liberal, pan-humanistic but no less expansionist Culture, what do these incidents achieve?

To my reading, the arbitrary violence and random danger are quite the point. War, of course, is chaotic and often absurd. But more than this, Banks’s galaxy of cultures and species, despite its high technology and tiers of civilization, is no utopia. Rather, we observe through the context of Horza’s encounters the persistent strands of hedonism and fanaticism, and the fear of disorder that motivates both the Culture and the Idirans. Horza is fond of accusing the Culture of trying to suppress the “messiness” that is organic life, but the first half of CP illustrates just how violent and precarious that messiness can be.

This would still be simply scene-setting if it were not for its connection to the second significant challenge of CP. Horza, our primary point-of-view character and protagonist is aligned against the Culture and sides with the religious zealotry of the Idirans for his own reasons. From the beginning Horza, a Changer, one of a species of biological weapons designed to infiltrate and impersonate other humanoid species, has been engaged in a struggle for identity. This might seem natural for the doppelgänger, always marginal, always forced to mediate between multiple identities merely to survive. As Banks makes clear, this is the challenge for all intelligent life. Who are we? asks Fal ‘Ngeestra, Culture Referer, whose intuition matches the intelligence of the Minds: Information being passed on... Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence — consciousness — an order quicker, another new plane. The Idirans, at the apex of their ferocious evolutionary ascent, are driven to assert a fixed identity lodged in their genetics. Even the refugee Mind, quest object, fears the corruption of its information/identity as it shelters in its hiding place.

Understand this about CP, that the framing Culture-Idiran War is really a struggle for identity that consumes and shapes Horza’s path, and you begin to see how compelling and emotionally demanding the ending really is. 

Consider Phlebas...

Who are we? Who do we identify with: the Culture, the Idirans, Horza the Changer, his doomed crew? 

Oh you who look to windward...

Enquire of the Internet what "Look to windward" means and you're likely to find multiple, circular references to CP and the Culture series. But if you treat it as the fragment of poetry it is, to look to windward from a sailing ship suggest looking into the wind, either along the course you have passed, as the wind blows you, or to look out for any object bearing towards you with the wind behind it. The metaphor, then, is an admonishment to consider where you have come from, and the threat that is not before you but follows in your wake. 

Eventually, Horza fails, defeated by the irreconcilable tensions between the fanaticism of the Idirans he has committed to and the technical superiority and perhaps moral superiority of the Culture. Indeed, it is the Culture, and it's "clever" anticipation of all eventualities that prevails. But in his last moments he grasps for and retains that fragmentary expression of identity, a name, a coherent, tragic self. For Fal and the Culture Minds—those who look to windward and prevail—there is a certain validation in this rescue, just as the outcome of the Culture-Idiran War is inevitable. But buried in this moment is another realization, as we learn that the rescued Mind later assumed the name of Bora Harza Gobuchel, the reason for which is a "long story"— indeed, the long story we have in hand.

Deep in the Command System on a Planet of the Dead, a desolate war monument to the mass destruction of an intelligent species with its own weapons, Horza and the hidden Mind both come to recognize the fragility and contingency of consciousness. For Horza, it is a single, all-too-late point of identification with the Culture: "Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life."

Last century, when I first read CP, I was inclined to assign Banks’s other motto, the sardonic quote from the Koran, as a reference to the Idirans. But now, I can see another irony at play: the moral calculus of the Culture may indeed be that contained carnage is preferable to idolatry, to religious fixation on absolute ideas. What makes CP so compelling is the nuance of this theme set against the brilliance of the explosive action narrative Banks deploys to deliver it. Eventually we will choose to side with the Culture, and later novels, more contained, mannered even, will focus more and more on the implications of the Culture’s own use of weapons as it expands and consolidates its version of interventionist utilitarianism. But the emotional sub-current is equally relevant: what are the costs, who are we, really, to decide? Consider Phlebas...

Who was once handsome and tall as you.

The Book of the New Sun – Gene Wolfe

Where to begin with even preliminary notes on Gene Wolfe's dizzying, monumental sequence The Book of the New Sun? The death of Gene Wolfe earlier this year prompted me to return to the sequence starting with The Shadow of the Torturer to give the whole series its second (and in some volumes third) reading, but the whole remains a staggering and sometimes frustrating work, frequently brilliant and occasionally baffling.

At one point in The Sword of the Lictor, the narrator-torturer Severian climbs down a mountain cliff that is composed not only of natural materials but human-made elements, strata of artificial structures, metals, made objects: "the buildings and mechanisms of humanity," layered in geological sediment. As Tolkien created a sense of the mythic past of Middle-Earth by building ages of imaginary history, Wolfe creates a sense of an ancient world illuminated by a dying sun by generating these accumulated layers of future history. But this history is also so vast that it is mostly unknowable, at once so compressed and remote that there is little to be gleaned from it. This scene is something of a touchstone for my reading of the whole work.

You might say that Severian's eidetic memory, able to record a mass of episodic detail but rarely able to draw back far enough to show the implications of what he witnesses, enacts this kind of layering. Severian is often described as an unreliable narrator, despite the precision of his recall. In fact, the text itself is like this, layering allusions, metaphors, stories, histories, and forms of meaning. One of Wolfe's most effective conceits is to conceal high technologies behind antiquarian terminology by way of "translation", such that energy weapons are described as lances, grounded spacecraft as citadels, and often the apparent significance of an item conceals and transcends its material nature, as the Claw of the Conciliator, the healing relic of the messiah, is eventually whittled down from jewel to claw, and eventually shown to be a thorn from a wild rosebush.

This mirroring (mirrors can also transcend space and time in the New Sun) can be both dazzling and perplexing. For instance, after two or three readings I'm still at a loss as to describe precisely how the far future messiah boot-straps himself into temporal existence, or precisely how and where and for what function he comes by the Claw. It's suggested by the end of the sequence that Severian is destined to travel in the corridors of time, and thereby somehow guide his own apotheosis, but where Severian intrudes in his own story, or his precise relationship with menacing, distant figures such as the abyssal giants, is not apparent after this reading any more, I expect, than the next.

The dying earth genre, from The Night Land to Viriconium, is by implication an elegy, located at the point of entropy where the fictional world is ossified and decayed. The Book of the New Sun certainly partakes of this moment and its dizzying perspectives. But perhaps Wolfe's most profound piece of misdirection is that his work ends not on the edge of dissolution but of renewal. This theme, the movement from executioner to broader moral consciousness to redemption, is one Dickens deployed and I've used myself, most clearly in the figure of Gabriel Carver. There is always a tendency, from Tolkien to Wolfe, to chase after deliberate allegories, in this case between Catholicism and the cult of the Increate and the New Sun, but for me it is Severian's meandering journey, sometimes impressive, sometimes perplexing, in the labyrinths of the far future that hold the greatest satisfaction and interest.

A new review and the executioner's call for Google+

First the good news, as they say.

I'm grateful to Peppermint Ph.D. for a glowing review of A Hangman for Ghosts. What's intriguing to a writer about this review is the list of "Historical 'stuff' I've Been Googling." It's a pleasure to see the nuggets of historical detail one scatters, large and small, being picked up by a reader.

Now, my normal response to a review such as this, among other things, would be to click the G+ button, which adds a "like" to your stream on the Google+ social network. Google+, however, as many of us will know, is condemned, and the executioner is little moved by the small and active communities among writers and others that found a home there.

I should assure readers that Blogger, and Displaced Pieces, are going nowhere, but the option to share and +1 posts on Google+, as well as any Google+ comments coming back to the blog, will be deleted as of February 4.

If you are a follower of my work through Google+, please keep coming back to Displaced Pieces, and the excellent network of blogs around historical and mystery fiction.

The System – and two more reviews

One of the questions that emerge in the course of A Hangman for Ghosts, and a question that also preoccupied Dickens, most notably in Bleak House, is whether social systems represent and embody human intentions, or inevitably come to supersede them.

The legal system and its demands gives rise to the system of transportation. Transportation necessitates the penal system, and yet piece by piece the penal colony generates its own systems: magistrates, constables, free-convicts, settlement, commerce, trade, and land transfer, until the colony becomes its own state. Human beings in the story are subject to the system, and yet from the top and the bottom they also seek to subvert it, and bend it to their ends, both moral and immoral.

This is one of Carver's greatest tests: even as hangman, does he rely on the system to evade his past and give his life structure, however cruel? And later, as he takes up the magistrate's cause, is he twisting the system to his own ends even as he advances in it? Is he able to maintain his integrity, even as he discovers how the system can be both abused and perpetrate abuses?

Perhaps this question, along with the others, was part of the interest for these two generous reviews for A Hangman for Ghosts.

Yvonne, from A Darn Good Read:
https://adarngoodread.blogspot.com/2018/07/book-review-hangman-for-ghosts-by-andrei-baltakmens.html

Stephanie, from 100 Pages A Day:
https://stephaniesbookreviews.weebly.com/blog-tours/a-hangman-for-ghosts#comments

A Hangman for Ghosts - early reviews

The blog has been a little quiet of late, although I'm shocked to see how long ago the last post was. To stir things up, here are two early reviews for A Hangman for Ghosts.

Without editorializing too much on these independent reviews, phrases that include "vivid", "compelling" and "page turner", or comparisons with the 19-century masters, are exactly what the author looks for.

Foreword Reviews

A Hangman for Ghosts
Andrei Baltakmens

Top Five Books (Jul 1, 2018) Softcover $15.99 (288pp) 978-1-938938-28-3

MYSTERY

Set in the roiling, corrupt world of an 1829 prison colony, Andrei Baltakmens’s A Hangman for Ghosts is a historical mystery that brings regency-era Australia to life.

Gabriel Carver, the hangman of Sydney, is dark, lonely figure. Soaked in rum and regret, Carver becomes an unlikely detective when a woman from his past is accused of murder. As Carver follows the clues through Sydney’s underbelly, he encounters a cast of bleakly Dickensian characters, from whistling streetwalkers to baby-faced policemen. As he works to solve the murder, the mystery of Carver’s own origins unravels as well. With rich historical details that evoke Australia’s early colonial days, this is a wonderful, traditional novel.

A Hangman For Ghosts is Baltakmens’s second novel. With a PhD in English literature with a focus on Dickens, he’s well versed in his subject, but the Sydney that Carver stalks through is neither dry nor academic. Baltakmens depicts a filthy, unpredictable, densely populated society where transported convicts mix with sailors and “fallen women.” Descriptions have a dreamlike quality, as though seen through antique glass: a woman is “too bright, fatally bright, for her skirts were on fire, a river of flame in the dark.”

The novel does lean a bit on the Dickensian tradition, and some chapters feel repetitive, as though serialized; however, the mystery’s thread keeps spinning at a satisfying pace. Folding in vivid details, bright characters, and compelling dialogue, the story is a page-turner, a savory treat to be devoured.

This delightfully grim historical mystery is true to Dickens’s style, and holds on to its secrets with tight, clammy fists. CLAIRE FOSTER (July/August 2018)

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

A link to the review is coming soon. Already online, is an equally positive review from Kirkus reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrei-baltakmens/hangman-for-ghosts/

My favourite line in this review:

Baltakmens (The Raven’s Seal, 2012), echoing the voices of 19th-century masters like Conrad and Melville, combines adventure and mystery in a high-stakes tale of class, morality, and justice.

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline

My water-damaged, crumpled copy of Ernest Cline's geek friendly science-fiction adventure Ready Player One certainly now looks like a vacation read, and as an entertaining ride that ultimately offers few challenges to the reader, a vacation read is probably the best summary of its qualities. In this case, appearance and reality coincide.

Which is not to say that the premise, an extended dive through a global virtual-reality game that has come to stand in for the Internet in search of a departed billionaire's fortune is not both intriguing and well-executed. The execution of the plot is pitch-perfect, and the near-future dystopia, in which the energy crisis and global warming have driven human beings into the refuge of a virtual world, is intriguing. But the game ultimately proves more compelling than the characters' fictional reality, and so as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls short.

The quest for the Easter Egg buried in the vast, shared virtual-reality world of OASIS, which grants access to the entire game as well as its creator's legacy, is as much a tour of Geek culture as the story itself. No movie title or song goes by without its due, reverent, acknowledgement. The products of Eighties geek culture, from arcade games to D&D to Monty Python to John Hughes' movies, all get their moment on screen, but there's no lightness of touch or satire in Cline's relentless referencing. This means that, firstly, the culture is predominantly the dominant culture of US media and games, but that Cline also conveniently leaps over cyberpunk, over Willam Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) over Philip K. Dick, over the all the science fiction and culture of the 80s and beyond that has taken the same ideas about reality and virtual reality, the real and the fake, but questioned them with much more rigor and effect.

The effect of this is that as speculative fiction, Ready Player One falls enticingly short. The real world of the novel, including stacks of mobile homes that make for compelling cover art on my water-damaged edition, with its collapsing energy economy, galloping inequality, and corporate slavery, is intriguing, but Cline never attacks these themes head on, and the ramifications of the tension between material realities and virtual realities are handled more predictably than analytically. Although Wade's online best friend does turn out to be black, female, and gay, rather than a white gamer bro, this is no surprise, and Wade's love interest remains "the girl", minor blemishes aside. Wade and his friends fight and hack a murderous corporate entity to win the prize, but the fact is the prize is.... control over an even more ubiquitous corporate entity.

The end of the novel makes a gesture towards rejecting the virtual reality that Wade has always used as an escape from a collapsing world, but this is only possible because Wade and his friends have mastered the Geekosphere and escaped from virtual reality to the even more tenuous reality of the ultra-rich. They may choose to save the world at this stage, but never ask what world, exactly, is worth rescuing. Other works in the same vein, such as Charles Yu's sardonic "Hero Absorbs Major Damage" (of which I hope to say much more) bring a sharper critical eye to bear in less space.

Which is not to diminish the fun of this airplane read, but only to observe that Ready Player One would be stronger, and more memorable, if its contemporary cyber-nostalgia was tempered with more of the spirit of cyberpunk.

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón

There could hardly be a better snippet of dust-jacket praise than this to capture this reader's attention:

"Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show." - The New York Times Book Review

 And, to some extent, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, reflects all of these influences. There is an element of the family saga and national history (Marquez), a literary thriller (Eco), and meta-textual play (Borges). There's no reason why these elements cannot cohere in a novel that is both tremendously popular and intellectually challenging, but The Shadow of the Wind does not quite live up the the challenge of this lineage. This is because, whereas Borges, Eco, and Marquez were all writers of the higher order, none of them were sentimental, or prone to melodrama, as Zafon is.

Which is not to say that The Shadow of the Wind is not entertaining, compelling even, but it lacks the clarity and generic playfulness of these other writers. Its strongest element is that of the meta-text, as the narrative of the protagonist and the author of the books he adores merge and coincide, through nested and interpolated stories. The initial Borgesian fantasy, the cemetery of forgotten books, is intriguing but never really examined. The mystery is not hard to anticipate, although many of the details are truly harrowing. But, in the spirit of a book about books and their value, both material and spiritual, The Shadow of the Wind seeks to affirm its own sort of literature, the literature of feeling, of imagination, of trauma described and therefore transcended.

This is why the plucky, sensitive protagonist ultimately marries the beautiful girl and has a son of his own, healing the wounds of the past and refusing to relive its injustices, though at some personal cost. Although one notable character pursues the idea that literature in itself is worthless, this view is reversed by the end of the novel. This is both a celebration of the text and the root of its sentimentalism. Eco and Borges, in particular, were profoundly conscious of the limits of literature, of what words and fictional worlds could and could not do, and played with these restrictions in their fictions. Zafon resolves these tensions, but although the journey is satisfying, all the narrative invention it entails leads to the happy ending, the popular narrative, we foresaw after all.

Unfinished, not unread

I firmly believe that writers should be readers, that reading is an act of faith in writing and essential to the craft.

And while I dislike leaving a book unfinished, it sometimes happens that, due to work, writing, or other contingencies, a book has to be set aside. Sometimes, this is because a book is dull, unreadable, or impossible, but mostly not.

At the moment, I'm coming close to the end of a revision of A Hangman for Ghosts, and so I have less time than usual for reading. But, as a record of my efforts, here are three partial reviews of three books started and left behind, through no clear fault of their own.

The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton

I owe a significant debt of allegiance to this, an historical novel, also a literary mystery, by a New Zealand author. It is a considerable work, with a deep and complex narrative, rich structure, and sensitive voice. It probably deserves greater attention that I could spare at the time.

Catton's model for the Victorian multi-plot novel, however, is not Dickens but George Eliot. Middlemarch springs to mind, for the breadth interaction and the close attention to the minutia of human interaction. The danger here, for Catton, is that much like Eliot she often describes the secret key, the inner nature of her characters, in subtle terms, but – unlike Eliot – she cannot quite reflect the inner character in their outer actions.

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

A literary fantasy by a significant author. Certainly there is something haunting and evocative about his post-Roman Britain, a land where fantastical beasts and terrors are real, and where the culture is as contained and occasionally fearful as the upper-classes of England before the Second World War, or in 1930s Shanghai. But there is, I think, a limit to the effectiveness of Ishiguro's rigorously affectless prose. His characters may have fenced off their memories and feelings, but in a world of magic and looming strangeness, should their feelings also be fenced off so effectively from us?

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Completing the move to more commercial fantasy, The Name of the Wind is engaging, highly readable, a perfect traveling companion (which is how I started reading it). The fictional world suggests depth and interest, and the work is well-written, occasionally poetic, which serves it well. Unlike Ishiguro, however, Rothfuss does not quite grasp the mindset of the pre-technological, mythic era he describes, and occasionally lapses into odd anachronisms, or drops modern phrases ("Okay" is particularly jarring) into his dialogue. If Rothfuss has embraced the need to make his imagined world coherent and believable, it seems to have been imposed from the outside rather than growing from an inward imaginary.

But, as the book moves on, it begins to solidify some of the cliches that it appears at first to eschew, and attention wanes. The hero at first becomes a Harry Potter-esque magical prodigy, complete with a visible physical tell, is then violently orphaned, then finds his way to the University (of magic – which operates more like a modern American college than a medieval school), and then teaches a lesson to the stuffy and insular faculty, and so on. This may indeed be an "adult Harry Potter", but others, such as A Wizard of Earthsea or The Magicians sequence, have made more original work of this.

Since this book is still unfinished, the summary is partial and unfair. My biggest hope is that eventually Rothfuss will begin to unwind the tropes he summons.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

The main character—it would be too much to say he is the protagonist—of Umberto Eco's novel The Prague Cemetery is flatly despicable. This is not to suggest that Simone Simonini is an anti-hero; he is simply a hateful man, a murderer, misanthrope, misogynist, opportunist, glutton and forger, whose cynical masterwork, the racist slander of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is one of the bricks in the foundation of the greatest mass murder of the 20th Century.

The Prague Cemetery has particular relevance today, as crimes of hatred and the politics of bigotry are on the rise, for the theme of the novel, amidst all the riot of detail and incident, is not only hatred but the generation and circulation of the fictions that support and validate it.

Having said that, it is not easy to analyse the roots of Simonini's hatred, except that he is brought up at the table of a bigoted, autocratic grandfather in isolation from other children. This is enough to explain why he is repulsed by women and yet obsessed with food, and lacks any sympathy for other human beings. Simonini inherits his grandfather's antisemitism, but racial hatred is only one aspect of his contempt for humanity, which manifests itself in his willingness to betray and murder, preferably—though not always—by remote means. Eco illustrates not so much the banality of evil as how bland and matter-of-fact such evil is; how the absence of empathy is also an absence of self-reflection. Perhaps in response to this, Eco introduces an element of psychological depth in Simonini's attempt to puzzle out his apparent split-personality. One of his disguises, as the clerical Abbe Dalla Piccola takes on a narrative life of his own, but this suggests not so much psychological complexity as the way a hollow man like Simonini assumes and discards false identities at will.

With characteristic verve, Eco drives Simonini, the only fictional character, through a gallery of late 19th Century historical figures: soldiers, terrorists, spies, agitators, propagandists, extremists, anarchists, fraudsters and opportunists. It's something of a treat for the reader to check any of the monstrous and extraordinary events Eco describes in Wikipedia to find that they are all historically accurate. The plot therefore is somewhat episodic, and the whirl of conspiracies, plots, counter-plots, frauds and intrigues can be exhausting to follow. In all of this Simonini goes relatively unscathed, whereas a significant few of his associates end up dead in a sewers beneath his apartments. It is in the conflict between radicals and reactionaries, in the clash of regimes, that Simonini plies his trade: false intelligence, fabricated conspiracies. Eco is at his most deft in illustrating how these falsehoods are truly nothing new, but plagiarized, copied, re-circulated. The old lies need no innovation, only selective editing, because they merely reflect to the reader and validate what their prejudices and politics demand.

Antisemitism is Simonini's masterpiece, but without asserting equivalence we could also draw parallels with the anti-muslim hysteria of Donald Trump or homophobia. Forgeries and fictions, in The Prague Cemetery, stand very close together. Where hateful forgeries are joined with state power or ideologies that validate themselves through violence, they turn monstrous. We need no more illustrations of that. What we need are more complex, self-aware fictions like Umberto Eco's, which can help us begin to unravel this pernicious combination. That's the real puzzle at the heart of this thriller. If The Prague Cemetery lacks anything, it lacks a figure like William of Baskerville, a skeptical humanist who can help us unpick the ramifications of the story and express our confusion. Instead, we're left alone as readers to do this, which is how the work might educate and entertain but bring us no closer to its loathsome principal character.

On Viriconium

M. John Harrison's Viriconium sequence rightly stands as a landmark in literary fantasy, although to the new reader it might be difficult to tell why. This is not to say the Viriconium is not a brilliant, significant work; it is, but it is also a puzzle, a challenge, which subverts the narrative unities of the genre, of fiction, even.

The puzzle begins with the collection itself: it is a sequence only in the loosest sense, being comprised of three novels and a number of short stories, published and composed over many years, and presented not entirely in chronological order. The stories are haunting, sometimes elliptical. The novels form a rough narrative arc, but the whole effect is not that of a traditional fantasy trilogy, and more one of recursion and retelling, a revisiting and revising of the history and place that is Viriconium.

To identify the setting, then: Viriconium is a city, sometimes the centre of an empire, perhaps the world's last, located on the far edge of human time, in the Evening Cultures that follow from the environmentally devastating period of the Afternoon Cultures. This suggests a science-fantasy, perhaps even of the dying earth variety, but the world is too indistinct to support that notion entirely. In fact, Virconium is more like an  urban fantasy, an impossible city, an abstract compilation of London, Rome, Paris, Berlin, York, Venice, with its European street names and imprecise architecture. And although Harrison deploys many archaic technologies and weapons (toxic power-knives, combat airships) the era and level of technology is fluid, anachronistic, indefinite.

This same fluidity characterizes the narrative as it expands. The first novel, The Pastel City, is probably closest in form to the science fantasy, and roughly follows the conventions of a quest fantasy: there is a hero (teagus-Cromis), a conflict (The War of the Two Queens), a quest against the enemy in the north. But by the second novel, which ostensibly addresses the aftermath of the first, the quest is less heroic, the threat more metaphysical, the protagonist confused and cynical. And although the final novel replays some of the tropes of the first (the metaphysical plague, the faltering rescue), it has become a matter between artists, entertainers and policemen, rather than swordsmen, and the events of the first novels are touched on only as the most distant memories of allusions.

Well, as Harrison warns us, in a phrase that might be taken as a talisman: "All queens are not Mammy Vooley.... All heroes are not Ignace Retz." His characters constantly reprise and return to archetypal roles (queen, swordsman, magus, dwarf), as though playing with the masks of the hero, and yet never entirely fulfill them, or indeed lose their own identity in the effort, as Cellur, the immortal, alien maker of mechanical birds, forgets even his own identity across the vast stretch of time the novels allude to.

Indeed, memory is the basis on which Harrison constructs and deconstructs his city, likening it to a set of letters read and reread until the original meaning becomes unclear. In his important, elusive online essay "What Might it be Like to Live in Viriconium" Harrison argues against one of the standards of modern commercial fantasy: worldbuilding.

The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes—their appearance of being a whole world–is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over “Tolkien’s World.”

Viriconium cannot be mapped; it resists literalism. Hence, Viriconium steadily unbuilds, revises, breaks open its invented world. This is less a deconstruction, a taking the world apart, than a continuous revisioning, a seeing anew.

But one might ask, to see what anew? Defamiliarisation is a process, not a statement, so what does the work as such say in the end? One could assert that to make the world anew in each work is to renew our perceptions of it: a kind of recovery such as Tolkien describes. Harrison proposes that such strategies can serve to reveal the inevitable structures of power and language that define realities, political, social, and otherwise. Certainly, Viriconium is strongly concerned with world-views, the clash of alien and familiar umwelts, but it is not until the last novel, In Viriconium, that Harrison reveals his interest in the function of art, visual, literary, or otherwise. In this novel, the sword is replaced by the palette knife, as artists take over the roles of poet-warriors and queens. Just as Harrison's essay rehearses the tension between literary and commercial fantasy, this Viriconium has become sickly, moribund, trapped between the popular, meaningless commercial art of the High City and the ineffectual avant-garde pretensions of the Low City. Consequently, the gods of this city are equally ineffectual, literal dummies and figures of fun and revulsion.

The city is only saved when these gods are challenged and wounded, when an attempt is made to reconcile "high" and "low" art, to return to art-making as a first principle. Elsewhere, Harrison has indicated the metaphor is an activity, an exchange, like meaning, which cannot be reduced to a static formula. Viriconium is not so much a city as that process in action, boundless, metamorphic, iterative.

Of course, this sort of work cannot always satisfy: that's the point. Viriconium doesn't deliver a world, but glimpses of a shifting world view that you assemble as best you can. Sometimes, we fail, and we're left with the pieces, as the characters so often fail. This is not always the best thing for readers: we're provided with suggestions rather than resolution. In its place, we have Harrison's extraordinary, evocative, powerful language. Viriconium is a thrill to read, even if we're not sure what's going on, or what a "cynical room" consists of. Sometimes, characters seem to lack a critical agency; Harrison's female characters, most of all, are either figureheads or images of stoic acceptance.

This does not stop us from journeying towards Viriconium, or constructing it again in imagination and tracing its rise and fall. This ever-expanding, never resolved journey is the subject, suitably, of the last story in the collection. "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconmium" is a journey that can never be completed, or is likely to be punctuated with disasters, but in the middle of the story, a child's vision of a cafe interior reflected in the windows that look out on a garden, superimposing the two spaces, becomes a metaphor for the work that fantasy can accomplish, a moving and poignant vision of a world transformed. If you look for a plot in this story, or even continuity between scenes, you will be disappointed. But if, as in the last scene of the story, you want to keep digging in the storm, you will be rewarded.

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 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.

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?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

The principle difficulty with mystery fiction is the business of telling two stories at once. There is the leading narrative, which must be lucid as any story, composed of incidents and characters that are intelligible and reasonable to the reader, and then there is the covert narrative, built out of clues, hints and sheer misdirection that keeps pace with the primary narrative but must ultimately be unravelled and accounted for as clearly and logically as its counterpart.

Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time cleverly plays with the conventions of mystery by shifting this difficulty from the mystery (the murder of the eponymous dog) to the character of the detective. What is most engaging and moving about the novel is that it forces the reader to read its narrative as though it were a case and points to the distinction between the bare facts and meaning on which detection itself depends.

To explain: Haddon's protagonist and nominal detective, Christopher, is autistic. The condition is never named, but Christopher cannot tolerate lying, cannot read faces or parse the complex emotions that expressions communicate, and cannot tolerate figurative language, although he is an extraordinarily precise observer of facts and details, with a mathematically acute mind. Christopher's revulsion at lies is perhaps aligned with his desperate need to maintain distinction, order and unambiguity in the face the overwhelming stream of reality. His memory for facts and details makes him, in the Holmesian mode, a perfect observer, potentially a perfect detective. All this we understand by inference and reading.

But although Christopher discovers the truth about the mystery, and thereby the suppressed truth about his own family, the solution is trivial compared to the complexity of adult emotions, needs and betrayals to which Christopher is almost completely blind. As a detective, Christopher can uncover the means, but the motives are forever obscure for him. As the last pages in the book outline Christopher's mathematical proof, ending with the triumphant QED, we realise that some proofs and some mysteries will remain outside of Christopher's perceptions.

The reader's task, then, in this work, is not to puzzle out the solution but to experience Christopher's puzzlement, and to understand that though plots are resolved by logic, stories are only brought to life by imagination and sympathy.

The Night Land - William Hope Hodgson

The Night Land (1912), William Hope Hodgson's science fantasy of a decaying Earth darkened by the death of the Sun in a vastly remote future, should be regarded as unreadable. The pseudo-archaic language lumbers along, the plot is simple and largely descriptive, there is virtually no dialog, the characters are thin, there is an unpleasant thread of misogyny in the character relationships, and the whole mass is excessively long and repetitive.

But The Night Land is, after a fashion, a masterpiece.

The Night Land is less a narrative than a prose-poem, a setting, a mood, an evocation of entropy and dread in a world so old that human progress is over, the Sun is dead and only the end of all things, inevitable but hugely delayed, remains. Humanity has retreated to one last Redoubt, and can only wait for extinction. The world is desolate, ruled by threatening monsters, but their nature is utterly alien. Whatever the hero of the text can gain, it will be ultimately eclipsed by the destruction and failure of everything else. Hence, in a real sense, progress, narrative advancement, is futile. The book is really about a setting, a world of alien things and impending destruction, which can be barely named, let alone described.

Hence, the archaic language is an evocation of distance, of the alienating effect of so much time. The vague names of creatures – Watchers, Silent Ones – suggest their menace and unknowability. The routine story is really the only action that is possible when all human beings can do is rescue the remaining fragments and wall them up against the gathering darkness. Hodgson's fantasy edges closer to the logic and stasis of a dream. The Night Land is about creating an impression, a sense of dread, of the night closing in and a flicker of human resistance.

This, and the scope and boldness of the author's vision of a dying universe, is what makes The Night Land unique.

A comment about the Potterverse and fantasy

A critical note about the Harry Potter series. An unused fragment of my creative writing dissertation, which is not wholly fair, or reasoned, but represents my disquiet with this otherwise admirable series:

In the world of Harry Potter, magic has become procedural, teachable and formulaic (though we rarely, if ever, glimpse the history of those formulae). Hence, magic becomes a mechanical task, a technology, and is represented as heavily bureaucratised. The only character who defies the bureaucracy, who acts as if magic has personal, transformative power, is the antagonist Voldemort, the leader of a cabal of racists in a fascist coup. Rowling’s work is so committed to the coherency of her world and magic that she discounts or smothers magic’s transgressiveness, its dangerous potential.

A new review of The Raven's Seal

An excellent review of The Raven's Seal from novelist and reviewer Judith Starkston can be found on her blog. Starkston identifies some of the thematic and figurative elements of The Raven's Seal and describes them deftly (if I may say so).

A speculative review of Sorcery! - The Shamutanti Hills

I've been reading -- if that's the right word, because you could also say 'playing' -- Inkle Studio's impressive e-book version of Steve Jackson's classic gamebook The Shamutanti Hills, the first volume of the Sorcery! series. The Shamutanti Hills is a game, a map, and a story: an interactive fiction in which the reader exerts choice over the path he or she takes to the end of the book.

Now, all fictions are interactive in that they involve engagement, the creation of a world between the reader and the text, and the play of speculation and imagination: guesses, expectations, and reversals. But interactive fiction enhances the possibility of interplay by giving the reader choice over the path of the narrative at key points. The most popular of these, and the ones that have interested me for some time, are those based on games and quests. The idea of a path is not incidental: the gamebook often resembles a map or chart, or even a labyrinth, where the ideal play is to find the optimal path through.

The Shamutanti Hills does a fine job at this. What I most admire about it is the sense that the hills constitute a real, if fantastic, terrain: a landscape of mines, villages, hills, woods and ruins, inhabited by goblins, giants, witches, elves and wizards, villagers and monsters, that one can pass through and explore, rather than a simple series of challenges. One feels that the stories of the hills intersect and carry on their own life, and this is enhanced by the game aspect of surviving and mastering the various challenges that the hills represent. The Shamutanti Hills rewards play because each play-through reveals something new about them.

Although the fantasy quest provides a way of structuring the forking narrative of the gamebook, I speculate that the form could also be applied to the mystery. Imagine a mystery in which the reader takes up the role of investigator, choosing clues, hunting leads, suspects, uncovering the plot (or not), building the case on the basis of decisions made in reading.