The best thing about this text it is the story of its discovery, which was included in both of those key Arabic manuscripts. The text was supposed to come from an actual emerald tablet that was found in the hand of a corpse lying on the floor of a tomb, in front of a statue of Hermes Trismegistus. In one manuscript this was the tomb of Hermes himself.
Which is the most Dungeons & Dragons story I know from the whole medieval age.
But honestly it was ok. I've read many books that were far worse; in fact, in terms of fantasy novels I have read in the 2020s it might make the top ten.
Everyone I've mentioned this project to has said something like, "Isn't that smut?" But it really isn't. There's no sex at all until page 300, and when we finally get to it, it is pretty decorous by the standards of contemporary romance. The writing is ok, with some good passages, and there are even some nice bits of fantasy.
How to describe it?
One of the reviews quoted on the back of my recent copy says, "Sara Maas transcends the genre." But that is exactly wrong. This book wallows in its genre. Absolutely every piece of it is something you have encountered before, either in the ancient archetypes of heroism and romance, or in recent fantasy. Everything unfolds just as you know it should.
Out heroine becomes a bow hunter to feed her starving family. She is so tough and resourceful and perky that she might as well be named Katniss Everdeen. She semi-accidentally kills a faerie, and discovers that because of an ancient treaty between humans and faeries she must either die or go into faerie and replace the person she killed. So she goes into faerie. Her captor is a High Lord (of course) of vast powers and great wealth, with a fabulous mansion and a flower garden even nicer than Mr. Darcy's. When he goes into combat he transforms into a monster I could only imagine as looking exactly like the Beast from the Disney movie. When he gets aroused, he growls, and his claws show. He is amazing in every way, but of course he is under a curse. In fact the whole of Faerie is under a curse, and there is an Evil Queen mucking everything up. For dumb reasons – the weakest part of the plot, imo – the sexy High Lord cannot oppose the Evil Queen, so Katniss, I mean Feyre, has to do it for him, with the help of an ambiguous nobleman from the Night Court who is the best character.
I can't make up my mind about this persistent feminine fantasy. I suppose for most women it is harmless enough, no worse than men imagining themselves as James Bond. But, really, if you think all the time about immortal billionaire Faerie Lords so handsome they hurt your eyes, somehow both dangerous and sweet, violent and kind, serious and fun, perfect in every way except for one flaw or problem that only you the perky earth girl can resolve, can you be happy with actual existing men? I wonder.
Sarah Maas, one piece of advice: you should never make it a key element of your plot that your characters cannot solve a riddle I guessed in about a second. That just makes them look really stupid. As a veteran dungeon master I understand it is hard to create riddles that are hard to solve but still solvable, but you can do better than this.
ADDENDUM
I just flipped through the second volume of this series, A Court of Mist and Fury. The sex starts right at the beginning – Feyre and her Faerie Lord are newlyweds, after all – and is significantly more, um, throbbing. So maybe the series gets smuttier as it goes along.
Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was born in 1878 and to me his writing feels deeply Edwardian. He lived for much of his life in Dunsany Castle, near Dublin. Although he wrote a bunch of books – I have seen numbers varying from "more than 50" to "more than 90" – he is famous these days for The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924.
The story is very simple. A mortal king sends his son to woo and wed the daughter of the King of Elfland. With some help, he succeeds. They have a child. Eventually, the elf princess misses her home and goes back. The hero quests for her again, while their son grows into a different sort of hero. Eventually, all is resolved by magic.
But that is not the point. The point is the evocation of the eldritch, the magical, the strange, and the wonderful by the deployment of prose that drips with paradox, archaism, and the highest extremes of extravagance. Some examples:
Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. . . .
Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, all lean toward Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. . . .
He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twilight; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty. And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as phrophets tampering with forbidden lore gaze into cloudy crystals. The little cries of the earthly evening behind him he heeded no more nor heard. And with all these little cries were lost to him also the ways and the needs of men, the things they plan, the things they toil for and hope for, and all the little things their patience achieves. . . .
The Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions, for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it.
It is sometimes lovely and sometimes frankly tedious. When it works, it evokes the longing one might feel standing by the ruin of an ancient castle, wishing fervently that a gate into wonder might open in the gray stone. When it doesn't work, it makes you wish the story were more compelling or the characters at least halfway plausible.
Lord Dunsany's words are like the notes of an elvish music, calling us away to a more beautiful place; Catherynne Valente's are like the spears picadors thrust into the bull to drive it mad. Valente is a contemporary writer, born in 1979. I first discovered her through a novel for older children, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making (2011). As I said when I reviewed it, I was immediately captured by her language, which seemed to me to evoke perfectly the feel of a fairy tale.
I have now read two more of her books, most recently her first, Labyrinth (2004). The point of Labyrinth is also to take our minds away to someplace else, but this Labyrinth is nothing like Elfland. It is an absurd, grotesque dreamscape. The language is like a psychedelic drug, destroying our normal sense of reality and replacing it with an incomprehensible vision. I was reminded of the visions of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick, absurd on the face but hinting at mysterious depths. But if there are any mysterious depths, I confess that I did not find them.
Our narrator is a nameless female being of unknown origin:
I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze.
An entirely typical passage goes like this:
A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless – Each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming or going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban.
Our narrator wanders, feeling her mind slip away, meeting various spirit guides that don't seem to be much help, seeing strange wonders, speaking strange words. Another snippet:
And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman's hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder.
I find this sort of writing very impressive, and also tempting; it might be fun to try to write like this, to spin out dreams and visions without worrying over whether anything makes sense, to let the sound of the words guide my mind rather than the dictates of the story. But, ultimately, I find books like this very hard to read. I finished The King of Elfland's Daughter mainly because it is a classic near the roots of modern fantasy, and The Labyrinth only because I had already decided to write this post.
I want the books I read to have stories, and characters. I want them to make sense. I have never been tempted by vision, in the form of drugs or any other way. I prefer to see clearly. I wonder if this is a limitation. Are there, perhaps, truths that I cannot see because I am so wedded to the mundane, too earthbound to hear the call of the woodpecker who would be my spirit guide?
Lord Dunsany was a friend of W.B. Yeats, whose poetry I love but whose philosophy sounds to me like gibberish. Thinking over these two books, I have a sense that their language is more suited to short poems than to novels. That way, the way of the quick insight and the tremor of feeling, they can hint at meaning, can seize us for a moment from this world. Stretched out to 180 pages, they cease to charm or to summon, and their lack of any truth to tell us beyond the hints of another world begins to drag and grate.
Fantasy novels by young women make me suspicious. There are so many bad ones, shelf upon shelf of sprightly books saturated with sentimentality, childish notions of romance, and utter ignorance about both the actual past and the grand traditions of myth. But I keep trying, driven by a hunger for wonder and a desire to give all these young, earnest writers a chance. So when I saw Uprooted (2015) on a "Staff Recommendations" shelf in an old and beloved bookstore that I like to support, I took a look. The first few pages displayed a rather remarkable array of endorsements, including one from from Ursula LeGuin. So I bought it.
Somewhat to my surprise, I liked it. The plot begins in fairytale territory. A wizard lives in a tower, from which he defends the villagers of The Valley against the encroachments of The Wood. Every ten years he chooses a 17-year-old girl from the neighborhood to be his servant. She is freed after ten years, but all the women thus freed leave the valley and never come back. Our heroine, despite being of middling appearance and accomplishments, is chosen. Begin the adventure.
The remarkable thing about Uprooted – as LeGuin said in her blurb – is the magic. Probably 20 percent of the whole book is descriptions of spell-making. When magic first appears in the story, it irritated me, because our tower-dwelling wizard can do things like transform bland stew into excellent roast chicken with a wave of his hand. But we have to blow past little things like transforming kilograms of matter at the molecular level because we have to make much bigger magic. There is a world to save, after all.
Spells, it seems, are written in books where you can read them, but unless you are the right reader, nothing happens. That means you must have the basic talent for magic, but there is much more: the spell must be of the right style to match your own, and the performance must be done in the correct way, in the right circumstances, and so on. Sometimes it is done in pairs, which is described as extremely powerful and dangerously erotic. It is, I thought, something like music.
The story ends the only way a modern story about a war against a corrupted wood can end, but the journey was well worth it to me.
Addendum: After writing this, I looked up Naomi Novik, and it turns out she is older than she looks in her book-back photo. She was born in 1973, so she was about 40 when she wrote this. Which explains a lot. Interesting to me that I almost put this back because I thought she was much younger than she is, so, ladies, consider that when pondering whether to use a photograph that makes you look young.
Robin Hanson asked his Twitter/X followers, "Is there any 'fantasy' world where you'd prefer to live there as a regular person, compared to living in our world now? They all seem pretty bad to me."
The most common actual answers were "Star Trek" and "Harry Potter." Several people said, "Any world with an afterlife." One said, "Narnia. God is real, good, and actively involved," and one wanted LOTR if a regular elf counted as a regular person.
Pondering this, I find myself back at the issue of most magic being inherently aristocratic. There aren't many worlds in which everyone has magic, so the cool things about magical worlds are pretty much limited to special people: wizards, heroes, jedi knights, etc. Star Trek is the only world I can think of where ordnary NPCs can have lives both better and more interesting than mine, and you could say that isn't really "fantasy."
Part of what makes "fantasy" "fantasy" is that it creates a fantasy for the reader; yes, I could be the special hero who finds mights magic and saves the world. Often the world-saving is utterly ridiculous (e.g. Brandon Sanderson), but I would say that saving the world is closer to the core of Fantasy than just having cool powers.
Fantasy is not about imagining places where NPCs want to live.
It is hard even to imagine a world where everybody had powers like Gandalf or Yoda, and to me it doesn't even seem very appealing; if everybody can cast spells then they're just like guns and who cares?
Which perfectly captures, for me, the mood of the vast bulk of this book: whimsical, somewhat childish, but with a brave determination to squeeze the by-then vast tradition of Arthur and his court for every ounce of entertainment. Arthur famously refused to sit down to feast until some adventure should happen, and Malory is like him; he demands a strange and thrilling tale on every page, preferably with multiple deaths and many pretty damsels.
I started listening to this vast book because I was in the field for a whole week hundreds of miles from home, necessitating many hours of driving, and thus something of epic length to listen to; plus, my youngest daughter was assigned part of it in her first pre-modern English lit class, and I was somewhat ashamed never to have read it.
Whoever he was, our Malory must have whiled away his years in prison retelling the stories of Arthur and his knights. He freely confesses that he copied them from French books, and many of his sources have been identified. Arthurian chivalry was by his time centuries old, and Malory's goal was to pass on this lore, not change it.
My overwhelming reaction to this book is to marvel at how much tastes in entertainment have changed since Mallory's time. The top Arthurian knights are superheroes able to defeat whole fields of lesser men, but they lack the sort of strange traits and tragic backstories that distinguish modern superheroes. On the contrary they are all pretty much the same – they fight the same way, dress the same way, and they have the same virtues (courage, loyalty, courtesy) and the same vices (pride, anger). All fight scenes are described in exactly the same way. I skipped several chapters of this questing and fighting, thinking I had heard enough.
Listening to this folly I felt my boredom warring with my frustration.
My recommendation is that if you have any interest in Arthur you stick to modern versions that conform better to our idea of what a story is supposed to be.
Zoraida Córdova has had an interesting career. Born in Ecuador, she moved to New York as a young child and grew up bilingual. After the usual writing workshops and so on she published a raft of young adult novels and silly romances. She made her first real money with a series on the "Brooklyn Brujas," which wikipedia describes as "a Latinx version of Charmed." She wrote a Star Wars story for a collection, and that led to her getting hired to write two Star Wars novels. She branched out by writing, under a pseudonym, a series of romance novels about male strippers finding true love.
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (2021) seems to be her attempt to get beyond all of that and create something more adult and serious. I liked it. It is certainly the best example I know of explicitly Hispanic American fantasy. It blends Latin magical realism with Anglo fantasy, European fairy tales, and a creepy circus story, and I enjoyed the result.
What if there were a family that was a story? In which everything that happened was driven by the unfolding of a plot, in which everyone simply accepts that they are characters something is toying with, settling into the strange current that sweeps them along toward a frightening climax and a new state of being? You may be thinking, wait, John, all families in novels are like that. But the descendants of Orquídea Montoya are more like that. When this works, it is amazing. The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina has a lot of problems that keep me from calling it great, but it does the thing that seizes my heart: it makes magic feel magical. There were moments, listening to this, when I had to stop the audio and marvel at what I had just experienced. There were also long stretches I found irritating, but I will read a lot to get to a page of magic that transcends the mundane world.
Orquídea Montoya is a witch from Ecuador who flees (something) to the US, building a sort of magical fortress in the New Mexican desert. She had five husbands and a number of children I lost track of, and at the start of the book she announces that she is dying and summons her descendants to her home to receive their bequests. Her strange passing (death? transformation? something else?) weakens her magical protections and the things that hunted her can now reach her family. Chapters on Orquídea's life alternate with the story of her puzzled descendants. I liked Orquídea's story much better, and found the lives of the 21st century Montoyas mostly dreary or predictable. But the climax is interesting and has those moments of real magic I mentioned. If I were a star-giving sort of reviewer I would probably give this four out of five.
I listened to this book on my way home from my latest round of fieldwork, and it brightened a long, weary drive through rain and heavy traffic. It is 1910, more or less, and Emily Wilde is a Cambridge scholar of faerie lore in a world where faeries are real. She falls into faeryland adventures, as she must, and emerges intact largely because her great knowledge of faerie stories tells her how to handle every situation.
This ties into what is of course an old fantasy of mine, that if I were somehow transported to a world with magic based on the traditions of old Europe, I would be a force to be reckoned with.
Also, of course, our heroine acquires a faerie lover, because for a certain sort of (mostly female) author, romance with a faerie lord/vampire/werewolf/dragon/generic magical being is an essential part of the fantasy. This gives me a chance to wonder why this is not true for me.
I commented on this when I reviewed E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales, that in the story where the main character chooses the daughter of the King of Salamanders over a mortal woman, I found the mortal woman more appealing. The mountain of superlatives heaped on the beauty and charm of the otherwordly woman did not move me.
I have considered various complex and arcane explanations for this, but I think it actually simple: for me the erotic is not about escaping from earthly, physical, bodily life, but reveling in it. And I don't mean just sexually; the most romantic thing I have ever done is have babies, which is as profoundly earthly and physical an experience as one can have.
I enjoyed this book, and was at times delighted by it. Lev Grossman is best known for the "Magician" series, which I did not like at all, but this book is something very different and much more fun.
Imagine taking all the versions of the King Arthur story that you know – the high medieval knightly quests, the late medieval tragedy of Arthur's betrayal and fall, the "historical" Arthur defending post-Roman Britain against the Saxons, The Sword in the Stone, the feminist Arthurian books of the 1970s with Morgan le Fay as the protagonist, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – mashing them up together, and trying to set a story in that world. It's mad, but it worked well enough to hold my interest all the way through.
I especially liked two things about it. First, Grossman has done enough reading to have a real familiarity wth all the Arthurian worlds he invokes, not just the names and narratives but something of the style and attitude, and I very much enjoyed recognizing where all the patches in this quilt came from. Second, I thought Grossman's tone was perfect for a book like this. Mainly it was light, but it was serious enough when it needed to be to convey the wonder and high stakes of the story. Most of the story takes place after Arthur's death, and I felt the characters' struggle to figure out what the new world would be like. Camelot had been, they all recognize, a very special place and time, and they would like to go back to it but know that they cannot.
Quite a few reviewers declared The Bright Sword to be one of the best books of 2024, and I understand why.
In the NY Times this week, Alexandra Alter has a very interesting profile of Susannah Clarke. Clarke gets my vote for the most creative fantasy writer of the 21st century, and, yep, she's pretty crazy.
Clarke burst onto the scene with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies and was widely proclaimed a truly great work of fantasy. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, it is full of wonders; one of my favorite bits describes ancient fairy roads that still run across northern England, now mostly abandoned and choked with trees and brush, never mentioned by the people who live nearby. The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends. I devoured these details, and transcribed half a dozen passages into my commonplace book. On the other hand, I disliked the plot and found one of the two main characters (Norrell) to be one of the most irritating people in the history of fiction. So I didn't love it like many others did, but I did recognize it as a remarkable achievement.
From the moment it appeared there were rumors that Clarke was working on a sequel, but somehow it never emerged. Most fans only learned years later what had happened:
Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.
In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.
Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.
“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”
Clarke eventually recovered enough to write seriously again, but she abandoned her first world and wrote something completely different instead. Piranesi (2020) is the story of a man trapped in a labyrinth with no end. Part of what traps him is the weak state of his own memory, his inability to recall who he used to be and how he became what he is. I loved it, read it straight through from beginning to end. But when you think about it, the story transparently springs from Clarke's experience with her mysterious illness, and Alter confirms this:
The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.
Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.
“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.
Which is an amazing example of making lemonade from lemons. It also connects back to what may the second oldest trope about art, that it has roots in pain and suffering: the sadness of life is the joy of art. If Susannah Clarke's illness birthed Piranesi, doesn't that raise the question of whether her suffering was ultimately a bad thing?
Should artists have to suffer so the rest of us can read books like Piranesi, or enjoy paintings like the ones Van Gogh did in Arles?
But I want to get even broader than that. Alter finds that Clarke seems to be recovering from her illness, but she remains a strange person:
In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”
“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”
Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”
Which gets us back to where we started. What if it is true that to be a great artist one must be crazy, or at least strange?
Or, to get more personal, have I generally failed as a fantasy writer because I am simply too sane, too happy, too rooted in this world?
Clarke's troubles don't seem to have broken her spirit, and she is forging ahead with new plans:
Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.
Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.
“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.
She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.
“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”
If you're looking for something fantastical and very weird, this might be the book for you.
Robert Irwin (1946-2024) was a British scholar of medieval Islam who in his twenties tried to become a Sufi saint and lived for a time in a Dervish monastery in Algeria. Among other things he was an expert on The Arabian Nights. So he knew Islamic culture very well, especially in its more fantastic versions.
The Arabian Nightmare (1983) focuses on an Englishman who journeys to Cairo in 1486 in the company of several Venetians and other western travelers. It's hard to describe what happens next, except to say that he falls into madcap misadventures that involve sleep. Also hidden gardens, talking apes, magicians, athletes of self-harm, and so on, but especially sleep. He spends much of the book unsure whether he is asleep or awake, "waking" from one dream only to enter another, and so on and so on. He begins to wonder if he has something called The Arabian Nightmare, which, well, here is Irwin's description:
The Arabian Nightmare is obscene and terrible, monotonous and yet horrific. It comes to its victims every night, yet one of its properties is that it is never remembered in the morning. It is therefore the experiencing of infinite pain without the consciousness that one is doing so. Night after night of apparently endless torment and then in the morning the victim rises and goes about his daily business as if nothing had ever happened, and he looks forward to a good night's sleep at the end of a hard day's work. It is pure suffering, suffering that does not ennoble or teach, pointless suffering that changes nothing. The victim never knows that it is he, though he may well know the story and speculate on it, but there will be people in the marketplace who will know him by certain signs. There will be talk behind his back, for he has been marked — as a sort of idiot Messiah, perhaps. That is the Arabian Nightmare.
If nothing else, the book is an extraordinary feat of imagination. In its pages we meet the Knights of St. Lazarus, a crusading order who are all lepers; the craziest game of three wishes with a djinn ever played; "the gnostic escapologist who wriggles free from any body he may be entrapped in"; and many others.
The plot, alas, is utter nonsense. As things go along the reader starts to think that this or that scene is a pointless distriaction from the main story, but then wonders – wait, what was the main story anyway? At one point the tale dissolves into a tangential story, within which is another story, and another, and so on until you suspect that the goal is to set the world record for story nesting.
But as I read, sometimes entertained and sometimes only baffled, one thing kept nagging at me: Robert Irwin was both a scholar of Sufi mysticism and, for a time, a practicing mystic. He later moved away from Sufism but this was his first novel, and I wonder if he had a lot of Sufi thoughts he needed to get off his chest. Is this book really some kind of exploration of Sufi theology, or maybe a riff on Sufi themes? The problem is, I know next to nothing about Sufism, and I can't find a review of this book by anyone who does, so I am left in the dark.
There is ceretainly much here that is at least vaguely philsophical. The theme of waking from one dream into another is a common one for Christian mystics, so it would not surprise me to hear that it is known to Sufis. One keeps coming across sentences like this:
It seemed that the friar must speak, that the friar himself must confess and admit there was no struggle between good and evil in the World, that there were not two parties to the struggle but only one, the party being of those who knew, and that those who did not know were their playthings. (172)
I did find one academic article about the book, but the authors either know less about Sufism than I do or consider that theme unimportant compared to obscure musings on "post-modern fantasy." (I am not surprised to encounter a scholarly discourse on modern fantasy, but after this taste I am resolved never to read a word of it again.) These professors do call The Arabian Nightmare a "mixture of popular fantasy with learned intertextuality," another hint that there might be something a little deeper going on. They also report that Irwin once said, "I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness," which once again makes me think that he was trying to convey something about Sufism.
The theme of suffering may also have religious meaning. Irwin once said, "There may be ecstasy, but there is also a lot of suffering in Sufism."
On the other hand, Irwin also once said that while some Sufis are religiously strict, others are "merely playing lateral-thinking-style mind games." "Lateral-thinking-style mind game" might be a perfect description of The Arabian Nightmare.
Another way to think about this book would be to consider it a mediation on dreaming, and the relationship of dreams to stories. I thought Irwin conveyed quite brilliantly the confusion and frustration that are central themes in my own dreaming. Of all the things people claim to be able to do, lucid dreaming might be to me the strangest. To me, a state of powerlessness is central to almost all my dreams. Dreams are something that happens to me, not something I do. I am sometimes able to do small things, but only with great effort, and usually not with any very good result. Also, I regularly find myself in stupid situations that are bad, but in ways that my waking self would immediately dismiss as preposterous. My dream self, alas, lacks the facility to identify the absurdity, leaving to experience real angst from nonsense like crashing my car by driving from the back seat with my eyes closed.
The Arabian Nightmare is more like a dream than any other book I have ever read. It has the absurdity of a dream, the mystery, the sense of narrow constraints and shifting geography. It unfolds with the logic of dreams: rather than being causally or coming in temporarl order, one scene inspires the next by a sort of free association. This is an achievement of sorts, but it also brings out how different most dreams are from stories. Irwin has one of his characters, the storyteller who is supposed to be telling this story, comment on how weird everything is, and apologize for being so distracted.
As well he should. He has given us a collage of scenes from dreams and nightmares, richly enlivened with his knowledge of Islamic history and lore, but shapeless, senseless, and, so far as I can tell, ultimately pointless.
A writing experiment, my response to stories like Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot.".
The old professor welcomed me to his office with a formal politeness that did not hide his clear desire to be left alone. He lifted a stack of files off the chair before his desk, somehow finding another place for them in the fortress of books that surrounded him. I introduced myself and he said that he had heard of me as a formidable student. Pleasantries behind us, I pulled out the stack of papers I had brought and laid them in front of him. They were interlibrary loan slips from four different universities, signed with four different names but all in the same handwriting, and in a range of languages that I knew only he of all the scholars in Boston had mastered.
“So,” he said, “you have found me out. Why have you done this? What business is it of yours how a retired scholar spends his time?”
I said, “I think I understand what you are doing, but I need to know.”
He sighed and then looked at me for an uncomfortable time. His expression shifted from annoyance to something I eventually recognized as pity.
He said, “I suppose I must. If you have already guessed, then you know it is the tradition for all sufferers from this affliction to pass on their stories before they leave this earth. The great book in which I had planned to reveal all will never be written, so you will have to serve as the conduit of my knowledge.”
He leaned back, crossed his hands over his stomach, and stared at the ceiling. Then he began to speak. He never once looked at me during the whole long tale. His eyes were focused elsewhere.
When I was eighteen years old, I fell severely ill. Some kind of fever, they tell me. For two weeks I lay on death’s door, hardly breathing, eating nothing, although sometimes they were able to make my limp body drink a little water.
Then my body recovered. My fever cooled, my breathing steadied, the pallor of death left my skin. Yet I did not awaken. I still lay in my bed, unreachable. The doctor feared my brain had been damaged. My grandmother summoned an exorcist who had learned his craft in the old country, sneaking him in while my mother slept. He examined me but refused to do the rite. He said, my grandmother told me on her own deathbed, “He is not possessed. He has gone away.”
I did not awaken until another month had passed. My younger sister injured herself and cried out in pain, and I ran to her and found her burned by hot oil. I was alert, coherent, able to run water on her wounds and then call the ambulance when my mother was too hysterical to speak in English.
People called it a miracle, and they held a special mass for my recovery. All the old women in the neighborhood came. Everyone assumed that I had been unconscious and remembered nothing, so they asked me no questions and I did not have to lie. But the old exorcist was right. I had gone away.
He paused again then, for several minutes. When he resumed, he said,
It is different for everyone. The monk Gregorius journeyed to a fortress that guarded the lands of light against the forces of darkness, a place where gold-helmed heroes did endless battle against armies of demons and the great fell beasts that served them. He was their physician, healing their wounds with outpourings of love.
The scholar al Halam dreamed of a long flight on the back of a gigantic bird and woke to find himself in a vast and beautiful city full of learned, cultivated men. There he frequented coffee houses and pleasure gardens where he debated philosophy with all the sages of past times. Their thoughts, he said, soared to heaven with their words. When they tired of debate, they listened to music, watched splendid dancers, ate of delicacies that took the physical body to the same heights as their learning.
For me, it was a garden.
I woke in a pleasant glade surrounded by leaves of a hundred shapes and shades of green, on a bed of moss dotted with tiny flowers. After I sat up, I realized I was thirsty. I heard water trickling, and brushing aside a branch I found the stone head of some grotesque creature with a gentle stream of water flowing from his mouth. After I had drunk my fill, I explored and found that this head was one piece of a crumbling stone fountain. Pushing through the bushes I found other faces, other bits of strange and marvelous sculpture.
I was drawn on. I never questioned where I was or how I had come there. In that place there are no doubts, no nagging questions. One simply goes on from one delight to the next. When I felt hungry, I found a grove of bushes hung with red and purple berries sweeter than a mother’s love. When I wanted to rest, I found more beds of moss softer than cotton, or carved stones that made splendid seats.
In that place there is no north or south. One simply moves toward what one wants and finds it. When I felt lonely and wanted company, I turned in that direction. I found a grove of vast trees with wide spaces between them where two dozen young people were dancing. They welcomed me among them, for of course they were lacking one man, and I danced and ate and laughed with them.
When I wished to be alone again I turned in a different direction and resumed exploring the vast overgrown ruin. In it I found a colony of scarlet birds nesting in the nooks of a vast relief carving depicting some ancient battle. They spoke to me in musical tones that I could understand, and they told me about the joys of flight and the secrets of the trees.
Later on I felt an urge for something different, so I climbed toward the mountains visible in the distance. I entered a grove of dark hemlocks where the rocks took eerie shapes, and voices whispered in the breeze. I reached a great rock shot through with veins of crystal and climbed atop it. Looking out over the valley I saw that the garden went on to the horizon, cut by gleaming rivers and dotted with striking towers. In the distance I saw a great storm looming up. As it came toward me the air cooled and the wind shook the hemlock branches. The voices did not now whisper, but shouted curses and warnings. Lightning burst forth and thunder boomed, and in the air I saw two great armies battling. The fury of their fight was astonishing, and when the storm reached me the rain and wind had the same fury.
But then it passed, and the garden gleamed in the sun. As I stood on the rock, looking around me in wonder, a wolf came out of the trees. It came up to me gently and nudged me with its long snout, scratching the ground with its huge paws. When I looked into its eyes I understood that it was summoning me to follow. I leaped away with it, and together we ran through the forest and across the mountains, deer and rabbits and animals I could not name fleeing before us. We came to a secret valley where we joined the rest of his pack, and I played with wolf cubs and shared their meal of warm flesh.
When I turned from the wolves’ valley I felt a sudden desire to be at once back in the familiar garden around the crumbling fountain, and so I found a route that brought me back quickly and easily from a journey that had taken over a day.
So it went the whole time I was there. I was never sad or bored, but went on exploring and learning, making friends with animals of a dozen kinds. For company there were my new friends, who lived in a town that surrounded a plaza where an event of some kind was always taking place, dance or play or musical performance. Among them was a woman who took me as her lover. After one of our dances she grasped my hand and leapt into the air, and we flew as falcons to a splendid chamber in a high tower where we passed the night.
You may be thinking that this was my dream, a boy’s dream so different from those of the monk and the scholar. And so it was. But consider that I was a boy, and not a bookish one. My passion was natural history, collecting insects and classifying snails. What did I know of paradise? I had read no stories of armies battling in the sky, knew nothing of ruined cities or the grotesque faces on ancient fountains. What did I know of love, who had never even kissed? And who ever had a dream so long, so consistent, so detailed? I believe the place I travelled to was real.
I believe the other worlds are vast, so vast that our earth is only a little corner of their vastness, and that is how all who journey there find places where their souls are at home.
I have spent the rest of my life struggling to return. All the work I have done, the languages I have learned, the studies I have undertaken, the travels to remote monasteries, all were part of my quest. Which has led nowhere. In all the years since then I have had only brief glimpses, mostly in dreams. This great career of mine, the books, the awards, they had meaning to me only as steps along a journey that I see now I will never complete. My colleagues often marveled at how long and hard I worked. But of course they could never understand what drove me.
He turned his eyes on me again and grew grimly serious. He said,
My body is failing, and soon I will go to my death. I tell you, with all my heart, do not do as I have done. Do not seek the path, for you will not find it. It is not in your power. It happens, or it does not; the door opens without your knocking, or it never opens at all. Find some other kind of life than the pathetic one I have lived.
I left him then. His advice had been sincerely given, but I knew I would not follow it. For I had also been given a glimpse of paradise, and knew I would never rest until I either found my way back or died as he was dying, a sad old man amidst the piles of paper that were all that was left of his dream.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across the comment that E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was “the first master of modern fantasy.” This made me curious, since honestly I did not know anything about him beyond “The Nutcracker” and his general reputation for the uncanny. Since I needed something to listen to during upcoming fieldwork, I got an audiobook of one of the many collestions of his “Tales.”
Hoffmann was 13 years old when the French Revolution began and 39 when Napoleon was defeated, so he came of age with the era of revolution and continental war. He earned his living as a bureaucrat for the Prussian state but was in his heart a Romantic in the most profound sense. Which is an interesting fact about human nature. He had his first really good job as a legal official in Prussian-ruled Poland, which meant that he was in Warsaw in 1806 when Napoleon's army marched in. (Wikipedia says “The Prussian bureaucrats lost their jobs. . . they divided the contents of the treasury between them and fled.” Which is just the kind of thing that might happen in a Hoffmann story.) Hoffmann later ended up stuck in the middle of the Battle of Dresden, bullets whistling through the house where he was taking shelter. And when the war finally ended and he got another good job, he fell ill with syphillis, which, among other things, killed him at the age of 46.
On the other hand the stories themselves are for the most part quite traditional, firmly rooted in the fairytale universe. Hoffmann's world is full of princes and princesses, sometimes recognized and sometimes in hiding or under spells that make them forget who they really are. There are wizards, witches, talking animals, faraway kingdoms with outlandish names. One of his tricks is to take a character who has magical or sinister associations in folklore – an apple-selling crone, a natural philosopher, a wandering poet, a scholar of ancient languages – and, after introducing these people in a naturalistic way, show that they have magical powers after all.
Hoffmann had a fascination with doubles. He shared this with the German literati of his time; Goethe swore that he had seen his own doppelganger on the street in Bonn. In one of Hoffmann's stories two regular citizens of Rome dress up as the prince and princess of an exotic kingdom, who just happen to be in Rome visiting for the carnival, and great confusion ensues. The two ordinary Romans end up believing for a time that they are the real prince and princess, and this somehow, in a very Romantic way, makes them into better, nobler souls.
Hoffmann also had a thing for stories within stories. The written version of “The Nutcracker” devotes half its words to a story the toymaker Drosselmeyer tells Clara about how a prince came to be transformed into the Nutcracker. In general, if things ever are explained in a Hoffmann story, they are explained by a long and often rather tedious mythical tale; but just as often the relevance of the mythical tale is not at all obvious, and one wishes it had been left out.
Longwindedness is, I found, one of Hoffmann's two biggest faults. I don't think he was being paid by the word, but he certainly wrote like he was. The other weakness is the problem he had making the fairy world wonderful. When the Other Lands are only hinted at, they can seem marvelous, but when they are described they become pages of purple prose about Suessian flowers and buildings carved from gem stones. In “The Golden Pot” the hero is presented with a choice between marriage to an earth girl who is pretty and charming in an ordinary way and the magical daughter of the King of the Salamanders, and despite the vast weight of adjectives lavished on the Salamander's daughter (beautiful, wondrous, gleaming, etc.) I thought the ordinary girl seemed like the more tempting choice.
Making things wonderful is just hard. Consider all the trouble Christian writers have making heaven appealing. In The Lord of the Rings the hints we get about the ancient cities of the elves make them seem amazing, but when you read about them in The Silmarillion they are pretty drab. Like Hoffmann, H.P. Lovecraft devoted pages of overwrought prose to the gemstone cities of the Other Lands (he must have read Hoffmann, I think) but the effect is to make me think my suburb is a nicer place to live.
The same goes for horror, of course; in very few horror stories does the final reveal live up to the dark hints one gets at the beginning. Hoffmann has a dark reputation but at least in the stories I read, there wasn't much to be afraid of. Sometimes things are weird and confusing, but not at all scary.
What did magic mean to Hoffmann?
I don't want to be too simplistic, because a lot happens in these stories, written across 20 years, and the atmosphere in them varies a great deal. But to me the core is that magic is gnosis; magic is the secret knolwedge that allows us to make sense of our chaotic world. In “The Golden Pot” the narrator tells us straight out that in Atlantis, as in poetry, “the sacred harmony of all being is revealed as the deepest secret of nature.” Through their crazy Roman carnival, our two young lovers reach some kind of understanding that makes them love each other more deeply and face the future with more confidence. When other characters learn that they are actually princes or princesses under a magic spell, mist falls from their eyes and they finally see things clearly.
This is a major part of what we mean, I think, by Romanticism; a belief in a kind of knowledge one cannot study but may reach through art, love, and experience, a knowledge that lifts us up above the sordidness of human life and makes us, for a while, the princes and princes of Trebizond or Atlantis. Hoffmann rewrote fairytales in the light of this understanding. Sometimes the results are marvelous, but more often the flood of words gets in the way.
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence, which won the 2022 Nebula award, is a pretty good historical fantasy: the writing is good, the characters are fine, and the magic system is a stroke of genius. In Kuang's world, magical power comes from the impossibility of exact translation: spell casters, known as translators, create magic by pairing words in different languages that mean slightly different things, chosen so that the difference between them resonates with the power sought.
But that isn't what seems to interest most people about Babel; wikipedia's summary of the plot begins, "the book criticizes British imperialism, capitalism, and the complicity of academia in perpetuating and enabling them." One reviewer wrote that Babel "educates and urges us to reframe—to (re)translate—the dominant narrative of what the West calls its civilization."
The story is set in Britain and Canton circa 1840, and the plot has much to do with the outbreak of the Opium Wars. The main characters have come to Oxford to become translators, studying in the tower known as Babel to master this arcane art and thus become important, powerful people within the British empire. One is half Chinese, another Haitian, a third from a wealthy Muslim family in India; they have a fourth classmate who is English, who struggles to understand why they hate the Imperial system that seems pretty good to her. Radicalized by the experienced of helping to launch a sleazy imperial war, the three non-Brits join a secret society plotting rebellion against the empire, and in the end things come to an explosive conclusion.
Ok, fine, there was a lot to hate about British imperialism. To me that means especially the contempt that the British (and French) showed toward the rest of the world's peoples; the radicalism of Babel is most powerful when it dwells on the face-to-face racism and snobbery that the non-British characters have to endure. But it seems to me that if your idea of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world gets too caught up in personal slights, you are missing some really big and important things. What follows may strike you as pedantic, but Kuang filled her book with footnotes justifying the historical accuracy of her claims. For example, when the British classmate says that the British eliminated slavery in India, one of the other characters responds that this is only partly correct; the 1833 law banned chattel slavery but explicitly exempted a lot of statuses in India that were very close to slavery. This is true, and kudos to Kuang for knowing the history at this level.
The thing is, the British did not invent any of the ways that people in India oppressed each other. Some, such as debt slavery, go back to our earliest records of Indian life, while others emerged after the conquest of most of India by Muslim invaders. Rather than loading all the evils of life in India onto the poor Brits, Kuang might have glanced at the writings of a certain Narendra Modi, who regularly asserts that India suffered under foreign rule for centuries before the British arrived. Modi assigns at least as much blame for India's woes to Muslim conquerors as to Europeans. Me, I think even that is short-sighted, and I suspect earlier native tyrants were just as bad.
But as I said the main events of the plot have much to do with China, so lets look there. In 1840 the British attacked China in what we call the First Opium War, the spark for which was the refusal of the Qing government to allow "free trade" in the opium that the British were shipping from India to China. The British easily smashed the Qing fleet, destroyed Chinese coastal defences, and in 1842 forced the emperor to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, which legalized the opium trade, handed Hong Kong island to the British, expanded the foreign enclaves in other Chinese cities, and generally re-arranged the China trade in ways more favorable to the Europeans.
Which was dastardly. But let me ask a question about China: who, exactly, was in charge there? Not the Chinese. China had been ruled since 1644 by Manchu invaders who called their rule the Qing dynasty. Among other things they imposed restrictions on the dress and hair of their Chinese subjects that many Chinese found every bit as galling as European racism. The Opium Wars did, in fact, trigger armed uprisings by Chinese people, but not against the British; instead they rebelled against the Manchus under the slogan Fǎn Qīng fù Míng, that is, "Oppose Qing and restore Ming." (Ming was the last dynasty led by Han Chinese emperors. Incidentally the end of Qing rule in 1911 led to genocidal massacres of Manchus so effective that there are now very few Manchus in China.)
So when Chinese ambassadors told British traders that there was nothing they wished to import, since China already had everything it needed – a statement Kuang takes at face value – what they really meant was that the Manchu elite had everything they needed, and that they saw foreign trade as a destabilizing influence that threatened their rule. Future events showed that plenty of Chinese people did want European goods like steam engines and cheap cotton cloth.
Kuang, in her books, never, ever, even once acknowledges that non-Europeans oppressed each other; all of oppressive evil mentioned is perpetuated by the British. This is, you know, wrong. But that's not why I write about it; I write about it because I think it is a highly pernicious and destructive doctrine that is all too pervasive in our world. We have had to witness the sad spectacle of anti-imperial westerners praising vicious thugs who wrap themselves in the banner of anti-American, anti-Western sentiment: Vladimir Putin, the Assads, the mullahs in Iran, the Shining Path, the Khmer Rouge. Anti-imperialism is an ideology that destroys thought as powerfully as any other ideology does; once you put on those glasses, you are forced, it seems, to go around excusing Russian, Syrian, Chinese or whatever other tyranny and murder because at least its perpetrators are standing up against western imperialism.
But that is, to my mind, the disputable part. Western imperialism was often terrible, and it exacted a grim political and psychic price in many parts of the world. But for Kuang, as for many others, that is not enough. Her rebels are not satisfied with accusing Britain of political crimes and evil racism, but somehow want to blame it for disease and famine as well. This is a worldwide habit. We have Indian historians who insist that the British caused horrible famines, Native Americans who attribute epidemics to some kind of primitive germ warfare involving infected blankets, and on and on.
So another question: when we are "educating" each other about "dominant narrative of what the West calls its civilization," are we talking about civilization as in good manners, or are we talking about who lives and for how long? Because if you care about preserving and extending human life, if you think that people dying of famine and disease is bad, then the rise of modern Europe was the greatest event in the history of humanity, and this is not disputable at all.
Demography is a grim, amoral science. It is a numbers game that does not care about good intentions. Confusion about this is another horrible mental habit that I wish to fight. People being mean and nasty to each other, or oppressing each other, has very little to do with how long people live or how they die. Death by famine and epidemic disease was the reality of human life for 7,000 years, and there was very little governments could do about it no matter how kind-hearted, virtuous, or impecabbly native they might have been.
It was Europe, with some later help from the US, that gave us the science and technology that multiplied human life beyond anything ever seen before. Maybe some colonial wars were accompanied by destructive famines, but it was western inventions – the railroad, the steamship, the tractor, artificial fertilizer, hybrid seeds, chemical pesticides – that made famine practically obsolete. When two German chemists named Bosch and Haber figured out how to make ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, they added more years of human life to the planet than have been lost in all of humanity's wars put together. Even if you want to blame Europeans for all the 100 million or so Native American deaths caused by disease, well, India recently added a billion people in thirty years.
The explosion of the earth's population was almost all caused, not by rising birth rates, but by falling death rates. The seven billion people we have added to the earth in the past 150 years are all alive because of the revolutions in science and technology that began in Europe. Penicillin, a British discovery, has by itself saved more lives than were lost to the whole 300-year regime of Atlantic slavery.
I believe, as I have argued here before, that what made Europe so wildly creative was gathering all the knowledge of the world together in a few cities; and of course part of that accummulation of learning was funded by the profits of colonial trade and the exploitation of slaves.
Which means that if what you care about is people not dying, then you ought to cheer Europe's global expansion as the greatest event in history.
If you want to object to European racism, slave trading, imperial double-dealing, or their nauseating self-backpatting about sometimes fairly minor reforms, sure, fine, whatever. I don't think they were any worse than previous generations of conquerors, but that might be a matter of taste.
But spare me all talk of Europeans killing people or causing famines. Because if human life is a surpeme value, then modernity, mostly created by Europeans, has succeeded like nothing else ever. If you care about extending human lives and ending hunger you should forget about reframing the narrative and try to get people more science. While you're at it, maybe you could try to get them more democracy and more human rights.
Sometimes it is not violence that is necessary; it is wisdom.
This frst novel from Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera is the most exciting fantasy I have read in a long time. It's set in a weird version of contemporary south Asia, much about the power of cult leaders and other Asian themes. Unlike anything I have ever read before, and not just because of the setting. It is wildly inventive and sometimes quite strange, but it always hangs together.
Camps of various kinds loom large: refugee camps, internment camps, quarantine camps, prison camps, some so large the residents of the remoter districts have forgotten that they are interned. In big parts of the world such camps are a major feature part of life, and of how people imagine their reality.
On the other hand, it plays with the variant timeline theme that dominates contemporary science fiction and fantasy; there are some themes you can's escape from even in Sri Lanka.
Who is the highest rated fantasy writer on Goodreads? Brandon Sanderson.
So, in my ongoing quest to remain up-to-date on the world of fantasy writing, I got a recorded version of his first book, The Final Empire, to listen to with my youngest son on a recent trip. After half an hour my son was so bored we turned it off.
So there's my first gripe, that after being told by all the agents that my book was too long and slow-moving, I discover that Brandon Sanderson got published despite his book being much longer than mine and having a dreary beginning.
But I forged on. It does get better, at least in one limited sense: there is a lot of entertaining action. Think John Wick or The Matrix, not LOTR. The magic system makes its practitioners into a combination of Spider Man and Wolverine, and they spend a lot of time flying around cities and dispatching evil minions by tricks like using telekinetic powers to turn coins into bullets. It's kind of fun, even exciting at times, but it is not the least bit magical, at least as I understand the word.
So that's my second gripe: The Final Empire does not do, at all, the thing that makes me love fantasy, taking me away to a world of mystery and wonder. Instead it takes us into a comic book.
And third: I have an ever-growing list of Things that Tick Me Off in Fantasy Writing, and Brandon Sanderson checks every single box.
To begin with, the bad guys are pointlessly, self-destructively bad. The Dark Lord – he is called the Lord Ruler, but we might as well just call him by his proper title – is really, really bad. He is so bad that under his reign, all the plants are brown. But making plants that survive without chlorophyll is not the limit of his prowess as a plant geneticist! He has also, somehow, eliminated flowers, even though the main thing the nobles of this world seem to eat is fruit. Fruit without flowers! Truly this man is an evil genius to be reckoned with.
Then there are the nobles, who are both puzzlingly irrelevent and just as pointlessly bad as the head bad guy. Most of them seem to live on plantations where the serfs are so oppressed they would make your heart ache if it weren't so ridiculous. First, they are always starving, which is a lousy way to treat your workers if you want anything done. Second, the attractive women among them are always being taken away by their lords for sexual purposes, but that isn't evil enough, no, because, see, the Dark Lord has a stringent rule against the creation of half-breeds, which means that all the women so used have to be killed. The nobles don't care that they routinely murder the healthiest females of their working population because the serfs somehow have a very high birth rate – up to twelve per woman, we hear – despite surviving on a calorically inadequate, nutritionally pathetic diet. Third, these people are so oppressed that they seem to have no culture at all; no music, no stories about clever rabbits outwitting wolves and lions, no local recipes for cheese, nothing at all except misery. Nobody suffers like they suffer.
The Final Empire has, we are told, a very impressive canal system along which most goods move, but I don't believe it because all the canal boats are pulled by teams of men. I mean, mules can do the same work at about a tenth of the cost, but that wouldn't be evil and oppressive enough.
But besides oppressing their poor serfs, the nobles don't do very much. The running of the empire seems to be mostly carried out by a caste of religious bureaucrats. The nobles spend their time trying to get rich off half-baked business schemes and inviting each other to balls. Business seems to be mainly transacted via deals between noble houses who are always worried that the other party is cheating them.
So I'm reading this and thinking, if I were a minor noble in this world I wouldn't have any trouble making my house the richest in the empire within a few years. First, I'm going to pull my canal boats with mules, which will allow me to massively undercut the prices of all my competitors. Using some of the profit from that radical scheme I'm going to set up an actual market where things can be traded and prices can find their natural level. I would think a one percent commission on this genius innovation would make my house the richest around in no time, and surely the other houses would pay this to escape from the constant fear of being cheated. I could even regulate the grain trade using, say, the provisions in the Code of Hammurabi, since the Mesopotamians somehow managed to invent regulated public markets at a technological level 4,000 years behind that of the Final Empire.
What is the technological level of the Final Empire? Glad you asked! Warfare is medieval, mostly done with swords and spears, and books are all hand-copied. But everything else seems taken from a random grab bag of European centuries. Besides the aforementioned canal system we have seventeenth-century political writing, eighteenth-century clothes, nineteenth-century ballroom dancing, limelight (invented in 1820), anarchist noblemen like certain Russians of the 1860s, and, of course, hidden somewhere offstage, the genetic labs where the Dark Lord develops marvelous innovations like flowerless fruit. The poor live in Timelessly Miserable Huts but the rich have private rooms with doors and other modern arrangements of space, so anyway after 1650. I know it is pedantic of me but this sort of guess-the-century historical miscellany plays havoc with my suspension of disbelief.
And who are our heroes? A gang of about a dozen thieves. Yes, in Brandon Sanderson's imagination, the people to overthrow this whole gigantic system of oppression (it takes months to travel across even the central districts of this empire) are a "crew" of swindlers who call their rebellion a "job."
They have a Plan, or Scheme, which is completely ridiculous under whatever name you want to give it. Imagine sending the Dirty Dozen to overthrow the Soviet Union. True, two of the dozen are Spider Man and Wolverine, but the Final Empire has dozens of supervillains who are their match, and the Dark Lord is at least rumored to be the greatest supervillain of them all.
And yet, protected by unbreachable plot armor, our band of heroes trundles on toward a Great Confrontation with the Dark Lord.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that the Plan depends on some of these low-class thieves being able to impersonate nobles, this in a society where the distinction between the classes is at least as profound as any on earth, and they can learn to do this in two weeks. And during the two weeks when our cute irrepressible heroine is learning to act like a noble she is also learning to read. Within a month she is pounding her way through thick, thousand-year-old tomes of history.
Sigh.
So here, it seems, is the new formula for popular fantasy: lots of action, a couple of superheroes who fly around dispatching bad guys in neato ways, some sort of psychic powers to which one might apply the word "magic," and a bad, bad, bad Dark Lord. Very bad. Oh so bad. He must be opposed by a Band of Unlikely Heroes, each with his or her own traumatic backstory. The Dark Lord must be incredibly, astonishingly, superhumanly, superabundantly, way over the top powerful, but he must also have some bizarre weakness that nobody else has figured out in a thousand years but which the cute, perky heroine can divine in the midst of a twenty-page battle scene. Wrap it up with some vague stuff about ancient myths and prophecies, and, well, here we are.
Another review from my old web site:
The more I learn about J.R.R. Tolkien, the more amazed I am by The Lord of the Rings. The latest work that Christopher Tolkien has managed to salvage from his father's voluminous notebooks, The Children of Húrin, is much like all of the other material we have seen since The Silmarillion: it has a few intriguing inventions and the occasional memorable phrase, but it is really only a curiosity, not a book worth reading in its own right. Nobody but a true fan of Middle Earth would get past page five. The writing has long patches of dreariness, the story is not especially interesting, and the flashes of Tolkien magic don't redeem the overall drabness. One reviewer said that the plot of The Children of Húrin "unfolds with the inevitability of Greek tragedy," which is one way of putting it. You could also say that nobody ever does anything remotely surprising, and that the future bad consequences of various acts are so obvious when they are performed that you have to wonder how the elves ever got their reputation for "lore and craft."
The Children of Húrin is a longer version of a story already told in The Silmarillion. I am going to ruin the plot for you now, without regret, since part of my purpose is to give you an idea of what the book is like without your having to read it. It begins in confusion. In a few pages we cover the genealogy of the protagonists, the geography of Middle Earth in the Elder Days (not the same as it would be later), and the cosmo-political situation. This is nothing like the marvelous way in which the struggle against Sauron slowly unfolds as we follow the gripping story of The Fellowship of the Ring. There is no artistry here, just a textbook rolling out of facts and names. Unpronounceable high elvish names that all look rather alike, I might add, so if you don't remember The Silmarillion you won't have any idea who is who anyway. (A friend pointed out to me, after I published this the first time, that the introduction might have been written by Christopher Tolkien to make this fragment publishable on its own.)
What is going on is a war between the elves of Middle Earth and Morgoth, the original Dark Enemy of Tolkien's universe. The most important elves are the Noldor. Long ago the Noldor left Middle Earth to live with the Valar, the lesser gods, in the enchanted realm of Valinor. After an age or so they got bored with happiness under the gods' protective wings and, corrupted by Morgoth's whispers, staged a sort of rebellion. They left Valinor, after killing some other elves to steal their ships ("this was the first kinslaying of the Eldar") and landed back in Middle Earth. There they found that while most of the elves had remained loyal to the Valar and opposed Morgoth, most of the men had gone over to the dark side. Only three "kindreds" remained loyal, including the family of Húrin.
At first the war with Morgoth goes well for the elves. The Noldor have been filled with divine knowledge and something also of the gods' powers during their time in Valinor and, "mighty in lore and craft," they defeat Morgoth's armies of orcs and balrogs. Unable to destroy his great fortress, Utumno, they besiege him within it. Across the northern half of Middle Earth they build mighty kingdoms and gleaming cities, full of magic weapons and other wonders. These are the places that float in the background of The Lord of the Rings: Gondolin, Nargothrond, Menegroth of the Thousand Caves.
But Morgoth is himself a god, and final victory is beyond the power of the elves. The Valar will not help them, because of rash and terrible oaths sworn when the Noldor were leaving Valinor, and Morgoth's cunning and power slowly wear down their defenses. His favorite trick is to get his enemies to fight each other, and this turns out to be rather easy with the Noldor. They are so proud and quick to anger, and so given to swearing Great Oaths that cause those around them to "quail at the fell words" and always lead to something bad, that they have trouble uniting even in the face of ultimate evil. Morgoth breaks the siege of Utumno and defeats the elves in a series of battles, culminating in The Battle of Unnumbered Tears.
Among the elvish army at that great defeat was Húrin, leader of one of the free human kindreds. He and his wife Morwen, who is said to be nearly as beautiful and proud as an elvish princess, have a son named Túrin and a newborn daughter named Niënor. Morgoth tries to extract from Húrin the location of the hidden city of Gondolin. He refuses.
Then Morgoth stretching out his long arm towards Dor-lómin cursed Húrin and Morwen and their offspring, saying, "Behold! The shadow of my thought shall lie upon them wherever they go, and my hate shall pursue them to the ends of the world. . . . The shadow of my purpose lies upon Arda, and all that is in it bends slowly and surely to my will. But upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom, and it shall bring them down into darkness and despair. Wherever they go, evil shall arise. Whenever they speak, their words shall bring ill counsel. Whatsoever they do shall turn against them. They shall die without hope, cursing both life and death."Morgoth then binds Húrin into his high seat on the mountain of Thangorodrim, saying "with my eyes you shall see, and with my eyes you shall hear, and nothing shall be hidden from you."
"Evil have been all your ways, son of Húrin. Thankless fosterling, outlaw, slayer of your friend, thief of love, usurper of Nargothrond, captain foolhardy, and deserter of your kin. As thralls your mother and sister live in Dor-lómin, in misery and want. You are arrayed as a prince, but they go in rags. For you they yearn, but you care not for that. Glad may your father be to learn that he has such a son, as learn he shall." And Túrin being under the spell of Glaurung hearkened to his words, and he saw himself as in a mirror misshapen by malice, and he loathed what he saw.Glaurung knows full well that Morwen and Niënor left Dorlómin long ago, but Túrin is tricked by the dragon's power and goes in search of them. Meanwhile, Niënor comes to the ruins of Nargothrond to find Túrin, and instead finds Glaurung. She asks him about Húrin, and he answers:
"I know not. He was left here to defend the women and weaklings; but when I came he deserted them and fled. A boaster but a craven, it seems. Why seek you such a one?"Her memory erased, Niënor wanders aimlessly in the woods until she stumbles upon a village of woodmen, who take her in. Of course, Túrin and his sister eventually end up living side by side, fall in love, marry, and conceive a child. At this point Glaurung emerges from Nargothrond and attacks the land where Túrin and Niënor are living. Túrin slays the dragon, but in his death throes Glaurung reveals all, saying to Niënor, "and the worst of his [Túrin's] works grows inside you." She throws herself off a cliff, and Túrin throws himself on his sword.
"You lie," said Niënor. "The children of Húrin at least are not craven. We fear you not."
Then Glaurung laughed, for so was Húrin's daughter revealed to his malice. "Then you are fools, both you and your brother," said he. "And your boast shall be made vain. For I am Glaurung!"
Then he drew her eyes into his, and her will swooned. And it seemed to her that the sun sickened and all became dim about her; and slowly a great darkness drew down on her and in that darkness there was emptiness; she knew nothing, and heard nothing, and remembered nothing.
Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment.But you can only take so much of this. One of the models for this prose must have been the high-minded speeches Shakespeare gave to his most annoyingly noble characters, like Henry V and Brutus. Shakespeare, though, had the sense to break up this sterile nobility with other kinds of speech, something Tolkien, writing about the Elder Days, refused to do. He gives us Henry V without Falstaff. This is a frigid desert of language, and if sometimes it has the beauty of arctic sunsets, it is too cold and inhuman to be endured for long.
