The Knight

Today I sat in a saggy old armchair at the back of a coffee-shop named after antique phonographs and finished reading Gene Wolfe's latest novel, The Knight. I liked it, of course; I don't think I've yet read anything of Wolfe's I can truly say I didn't like. Some of his books I like more than others, and it is thus natural to ask exactly where on the scale of Gene-Wolfe-likingness The Knight falls. It's hard to be sure until the second part, The Wizard, comes out, but one might have an inkling, mightn't one?

The trouble is, it's so difficult to work out exactly what I think of it. I'd like to know what John Clute thinks. (Although a Clutean review might prove more opaque than the text itself in this case, given the transparency of Gene Wolfe's [or rather, Able's] language in the book.) Mr Clute appears to be keeping his own counsel, as far as my half-assed Googling can determine; so I have little to play off in forming this so-called opinion of mine. (There are other reviewers out there, and other reviews, but I don't trust the average reviewer to say something interesting or able to spark fresh thought in my tired old nag of a brain.)

I do know what I think about the matter of names. Much of the mythology of The Knight takes its inspiration from the legendry of our past, primarily Norse but Arthurian as well, and most likely there are more. However, very few of the names are the names we are familiar with. The world of men is called Mythgarthr, which is recognisably close to Midgard, yet--and this is important--isn't. One of the problems with using Norse mythology is that people think they know it. If Wolfe called his world Midgard, readers would think they knew where they were. And they would be wrong. The Valfather is clearly a figure inspired by Odin--yet to think of him as the Odin we all know and love, despite his eight-legged steed and his Wild Hunt, would be wholly misleading. For one thing, the Valfather seems to worship Hebrew angels.

It must be said that Wolfe's cosmology is very cute. Most mythologies are maddeningly vague on the relationship of one world to another: where is the Christian Heaven, and where was Tolkien's Valinor after it was excised from Middle-Earth? Or in what sense are the Norse worlds connected by the World-Tree? Wolfe takes a vaguely Hellenistic approach, with worlds above worlds not unlike the celestial spheres...The Gods of Earth live in the world above Mythgarthr, called Skai. This world is, appropriately, the sky. Or something like it. And there is a great symmetry here: when one looks up in Aelfheim, the world below Mythgarthr, the 'sky' one sees is Mythgarthr, and the people of that world are the Gods of the Aelf. As above, so below...The sky of Skai, whatever it looks like, is where the Hebrew angels live, Gods of the Gods. What lives in the world above theirs?

Much of the fun of The Knight comes from its setting, a world not unlike the worlds of familiar legendry, but different in ways that keep the reader from becoming complacant. There is knighthood and there are giants and there are talking beasts and there is a boy's coming-of-age story, but they may not always be what you think they are. Although they might be. It's an attempt to do High Fantasy without turning into a Tolkien ripoff, a D&D tie-in, or a hopelessly fluffy farce.

That's the potential problem, too: it's an attempt to do High Fantasy. If anyone can make knights and honour into something vibrant again, it's Gene Wolfe...And it's a worthy start, entertaining and well-crafted...But it is still, despite its freshness, inextricably entangled in the cobwebs of High Fantasy, a book written and read in a world where--let's face it--honour and decency and the idea of knighthood are all stone dead. And the gallant knight is not necessarily a creature worth mourning. The historical world of knighthood, like Wolfe's Mythgarthr, was a place of stultifying poverty, ignorance, and brutality, of shit-caked peasants scrabbling for jousting despots. Some might be benevolent despots--ideal knights like Able or Sir Ravd, ideal monarchs like Arnthor--but a despot is still a despot. Most of Wolfe's worlds are ruled by despots of one sort or another, but Mythgarthr is different from most Wolfe worlds...One feels as if one should love it, since the narrator does. One never feels like that about Urth, or the Whorl, or even Blue, really. (All places it might be fun to visit, but which one is glad not to live in.) Perhaps this is Able's essential boyishness: he loves Mythgarthr because he can't see it as a man (of our time, and Able's) might?

This, for me, has always been the troublesome thing about fantasy: the Mediaeval world was caked with shit. You don't think about Merry and Pippin wiping their arses with oak leaves in Fangorn Forest, but there it is. And one doesn't even want to think about the toilets in Camelot. Or the trail of horse-dung left by a questing knight. Fantasy worlds inherit this uncomfortably fecal aspect, one constantly downplayed and ignored, but one that nags at one from the dark places of one's head: what did these people wipe their bums with, and what did they do when they got the runs?

Err.

What I meant to talk about, actually, was the stratification of feudal society and the harsh and ingrained economic and political inequality, although I suppose Monty Python summed it up thus:

"...Must be a king."

"Why?"

"He hasn't got shit all over him."

Is it possible to read a book whose main character seeks to be just yet buys into an essentially hideously unjust world without feeling the prickings of an aggravated socialist conscience?

Are there fantasy novels about peasant revolts and workers' communes?

Should there be?

It seems to me that Able's origins as a young American have thus far been much under-used. While he will occasionally use a phrase or make a cultural reference that pegs him as one of our lot, he doesn't appear to see the world around him in a way coloured by modern notions. It's hard to imagine working modern characters into a fantasy world without turning the work wholly into satire, and Wolfe manages that...But the price paid is that the modern eyes through which we see are not really modern at all.

But I am just a simple mathematician, and I have little place opining on such things. We will see what cleverer people than I make of this...

Posted by aloysius at May 30, 2004 08:22 PM | TrackBack |