Long, long ago, so long ago that it seems almost like earlier this year, I put virtual pen to virtual paper and scribbled a few thoughts about Gene Wolfe's The Knight, to which I wasn't quite sure how to react. I've now read The Wizard, the second half of the story there begun, and I'm still not quite sure how to react. It's a weird world. All fantasy worlds are weird. Not theologically or cosmologically, but politically and economically. This is due to the fundamental fact that it fucking sucks to be a peasant in a world made almost entirely of feces. I find myself, whenever confronting a piece of fantasy these days, paying a great deal of attention to how the author handles this.
Gene Wolfe seems to take a very idealised approach. I don't mean that he sweeps the crap under the rug, because he's pretty open about the prevalence of dung in his world. I mean that, to his characters, it just doesn't matter much. That is how their world works, and they, by and large, seem to accept it. As do their gods. This is not implausible: humans actually did live this way, scrabbling in the filth for petty warlords, for a very long time indeed; there are still people who do. But this is problematic. The characters may accept this, but the reader simply cannot. This is particularly the case in The Wizard, as Wolfe's characters are so concerned with honour and their codes of conduct. There is something shallow about Sir Able's devotion to honour while a cog in a vast machine for crushing peasants. He is better than the tyrant Arnthor (Able, as we discover, is also an Arthur-analogue; perhaps this story is, in some small way, the story of two competing visions of the Arthur legend, or perhaps it isn't), and he believes in being fair and just; but he is only, it seems, interested in fairness and justice insofar as these are possible within the existing framework of his society. This, perhaps, is the essential boyishness of Able, who, no matter how much time passes, continues to think of himself as a little boy thrust into a man's body and role. He is too in love with the world his discovers to think of changing it.
After my original musing on the place of shit in fantasy, Patrick Nielsen Hayden suggested in a comment that I ought to investigate Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels, which I completely forgot to do until I saw the omnibus volumes The Book of Jhereg and The Book of Taltos while I was killing time in a bookstore and my father was footing the bill. The two volumes contain five novels in all, and I have just finished the fourth. Brust deals with the absence of technology by replacing it with industrial-scale magic, which does for the Dragaerans what telephones, flashlights, motorised vehicles, and atomic bombs do for us. The social structure is still very feudal, however: the Dragaerans are organised into Houses with titles of nobility, live by various codes of honour and behaviour, and defecate on the great fearful and powerless masses of the peasantry, made up of Dragaeran Teckla and Eastern humans. The first two novels are basically plot-driven, as Vlad, an Easterner squeezed uneasily into one of the Great Houses as a low-to-middling-level crime boss and assassin, meets new and interesting people, and then kills them. They're fun reads, though not particularly deep or difficult. They set up a world which Vlad, like Able, essentially accepts as it is; he wants to advance within the social order, but wouldn't dream of challenging it.
Then suddenly there's Teckla, the third novel. Suddenly this world comes alive. The peasants are revolting! ("You said it," replied the King. "They stink on ice.") Teckla was a real delight for me to read: this sword and sorcery world suddenly discovers revolution, and the peasants are taking up arms and building barricades in the streets. This contrived world suddenly starts to breathe. And it does so without satire. Teckla comes at it from a very interesting perspective, too, as Vlad, our narrator, is a counterrevolutionary fellow, a few rungs, like Able, up the social ladder; but unlike Able, he is forced to confront the profound injustice of his society. He attempts to dismiss the revolutionary spirit as slogan-mongering and ideals over people, but when he crosses words with the chief slogansmith, Vlad loses so thoroughly that even he begins to wonder. Vlad seems to realise, at the end, that the revolutionaries are right, and that his inability to join them is symptomatic of his being really fucked up. Nothing is really resolved by the end--the Empire still stands and the poor are still hip-deep in waste--but revolution is in the air, and it is heady, and the world has begun to acknowledge its own ugliness. I hope the later Taltos books follow up on this; the fourth, Taltos, was another straightforward adventure yarn...
A fantasy world is a very unstable thing. One can suspend one's disbelief enough to accept magic, perhaps, and fabulous beasts, and the suspension of physics, and a lot of tinkering with the physical world. But it's hard to accept much tinkering with psychology and economics. Beneath every king, behind every bold knight, just around the corner from every mighty wizard or down the street from every daring thief there is a grumpy mob with pitchforks and dung, and sooner or later their shit will have to hit the fan.
Posted by aloysius at December 17, 2004 05:43 PM | TrackBack |