Andrzej Sapkowski, Narrenturm

The early 15th century CE was a fascinating time all across Europe.  Two generations after the 1348-1350 Black Death had decimated (or worse) Southern, Western, and Central Europe, the feudal social order was in flux.  In England, Wycliffe's Lollards continued to be such a threat to established Church hierarchy that in 1415 the Council of Constance declared him to be a heretic nearly 30 years after his death (his body was later exhumed in 1428 under orders from Pope Martin V and was burned, with the ashes scattered in the River Swift).  There were military innovations, such as the Turks using crude cannons and the precursors to guns in their invasion of southeastern Europe following their recovery from the bloody 1389 Battle of Kosovo.  The English annihilated a larger French force at the 1415 Battle of Agincourt with their use of longbows and pikemen. 

In this climate rose a movement in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) that threatened to overturn the socio-religious/military orders:  the Hussites.  Followers of the Czech reformist Jan Hus (who was burned at the stake in 1415 at the Council of Constance), the Hussites (who in actuality were two distinct branches, the more moderate Utraquists and the more radical Taborites) rose up in Bohemia in protest and soon began nearly 20 years of warfare that engulfed not just Bohemia, but also neighboring states and principalities, including Moravia and Silesia (as well as Poland, Prussia, and several other states within the Holy Roman Empire).  Comprised largely of the lower classes, the Hussites managed to not just stave off repeated "crusades" against them, but to go on the offensive due to their use of handcannons and innovative mobile defensive fortifications that rendered ineffective cavalry charges against them.  The fighting also took on a religious characteristic, not just in the Catholic forces arrayed against "the heretics," but also in the more apocalyptic language used by the Hussites (the Taborites in particular).

This tumultuous era provides an excellent setting for Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski's Hussite Trilogy, which begins with Narrenturm (its name being derived from the German term for a madhouse).  Readers who expect Sapkowski's writing and structure to be similar to those of his Witcher novels may be surprised to see that his writing here takes on more of a historical fiction quality, but with the twist of having certain characters capable of utilizing witchcraft/magic in order to battle their enemies.  The melding of the historical with the magical can be problematic, as the author is constrained by actual events and cannot deviate too far from known events/personages in telling his/her story.  If one deviates too far, such as the case with Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (which contain dragons in Napoleonic era Europe), the author risks downgrading the "seriousness" of the events in favor of "lighter" fare that might be diverting yet ultimately empty entertainment devoid of anything beyond a mindless reading romp.

This is not the case here in Narrenturm.  Sapkowski clearly has imbued this novel (and presumably the trilogy, of which only the first two volumes have been translated so far into Spanish) with references not just to historical events (his prologue consists almost entirely of narrating the historical trends noted in the introductory paragraphs above) but there is a wealth of songs, religious motifs, and other cultural elements that add a richness to the narrative.  In reading Narrenturm, I was reminded not only of Umberto Eco's excellent The Name of the Rose for Sapkowski's citations of Latin, medieval High German and medieval Czech, but also of Serbian writer Goran Petrović's The Siege of the Church of Holy Salvation for its treatment of the chaotic nature of late medieval/early modern society under both literal and metaphorical siege.  As a historian who remembers some of his undergraduate courses on the pre-Charles V Holy Roman Empire and associated lands, Sapkowski's detailed description of the locales and customs is near pitch-perfect.  From his description of a particular Narrenturm to the tactics used by Hussite soldiers to certain medieval customs and beliefs, the setting in the novel is well-realized and dynamic, providing surprising level of detail for a historically-based fiction.

Although the magic scenes do not dominate the action, they are an important part of the narrative, particularly toward the end of the novel.  The magic is based on folk beliefs and does not feel contrived or separate from the religious/social themes explored during the course of the book.  Too easily this magical addition could have weakened the novel's sense of plausibility; here, it feels almost too "natural" to be remarked upon while reading, a testimony to Sapkowski's skills as a writer.  The scenes involving magic serve to add to the compelling events transpiring on stage; they do not distract nor detract from the reader's enjoyment of the historical fiction.

Characterizations in a historical novel can be tricky.  A balance has to be struck between having created characters knowing too much about actual events and characters and having these fictional personages be passive observers.  Sapkowski's characters, particularly that of the star-crossed lover/young scion of Silesian nobility/budding alchemist Reynevan, are knowledgeable, active participants in the chaotic events of the 1420s in Silesia and Bohemia, yet they are not so active that they play a direct role (as yet) in the fighting in Bohemia.  Instead, their main role is to provide a closer look at the transpiring events, to add a sense of "we were there" to theological (and magical) debates, conflicting customs and new-fangled social beliefs, and other, less bloody but still important conflicts of the 1420s.  Reynevan and those around him do not come across as clichéd, static characters; they delve, probe, and they change their minds and attitudes based on what they encounter in their travels (including a sojourn in a "tower of the crazies").  Historical personages are met with along the way, but not to such a degree that it is implied nor stated that Reynevan, Scharley, and others directly influenced the course of events.  Instead, they are witnesses to these massive changes and they serve as a sort of avatar for readers who may find themselves imagining what it would be like to live there at that time.

Narrenturm is a challenging read at times.  Readers who are unaware of the events surrounding the Hussite Wars or who lack knowledge of Latin and medieval dialects of German and Czech (and a bit of Polish) may find themselves consulting the glossary of terms/translations at the back of the Spanish edition.  Yet if a reader is curious to learn more about the Hussite Wars while accepting the fantastical elements presented within at face value, s/he may discover that Narrenturm is one of the finest meldings of historical and fantastical fiction that I have read in quite some time.  Hopefully, there will be an English translation at some point in the future, but for now, there are versions available in Polish, German, Czech, Russian, and Spanish (for the first two volumes; the third is forthcoming) for those readers in those languages.

Danilo Kiš, Early Sorrows (1969); Psalm 44 (1962)

What's that?  There isn't any such street?  Oh, but there must be, sir.  Memories can't possibly be so misleading.

Yes, before the war... There was a school on the corner and an artesian well in front of the school.  I hope you don't think I'm making it all up.  I started out in that school; I went to kindergarten there.  The teacher's name was Miss Fanny.  I can show you a picture of the whole class:  that's Miss Fanny, our teacher, and yes, the boy sitting next to her is me, Andreas Sam; then my sister Anna and Freddy Fuchs, the leader of our gang... Yes, it all comes back to me now, sir.  The street must have been called Bem Street, because I was a member of the famous Bem Boys gang led by Freddy Fuchs (also known as Beanpole), a German or Volksdeutscher, as they were called in those days... Fantastic!  Without our little talk I'd never have remembered the street's name.  Bem was a famous Polish general.  From the forties.  Does that ring a bell?  Bem?  Bem Street?... Oh, I see.  How could you remember if you didn't live here before the war.  Though you might at least know if there's a street lined with chestnut trees.  They would bloom in spring and make the whole street smell a bit sickly, heavy, except after a rain, when the scent of the chestnut blossoms merged with the ozone and drifted all over the neighborhood.

But I have been going on, haven't I?  I'll have to ask someone else who remembers it from before the war, when it was called Bem Street and lined with chestnut trees. (p. 15-16, Early Sorrows)

For tens of millions of European youth, World War II created a discontinuity point; there was before the war and after the war, with the during being understood more by its apparent breaks with either than by anything in common with either period.  In several of Serbian writer Danilo Kiš's fictions, "before the war" carries the sense of foreboding that goes far beyond the inconveniences that most of his age cohort suffered.  For him, the war was a calamity that he revisited in two of his earlier fictions, 1962's Psalm 44 and 1969's Early Sorrows. 

Psalm 44, one of Kiš's two earliest novels (the other being The Attic, also published in 1962), is the more direct of the books reviewed here.  Kiš utilizes some of the imagery from the titular psalm, such as the references to the mocking of nations, the pitiful byword by which the Jews became known, as like the psalm's sheep they were led to the slaughter.  Psalm 44 was a deeply autobiographical novel, as the events narrated resemble closely what Kiš experienced as a child:  the massacre at Novi Sad, the forced expulsion of the Jews and those who had married Jews, the 1944 rounding up of his Jewish father (while Kiš's own life was saved by his baptism into the Eastern Orthodox faith) and subsequent death at Auschwitz.  In his later fictions, "the war" came to symbolize the real and metaphorical separation of the youth Kiš from the older, more troubled adult version. 

In Psalm 44, these troubles are much more transparent.  The images are raw, visceral, as the author pours so much of his own experiences into this short novel.  But as the story of Jakob and Marija (based on Kiš's parents) unfolds, Kiš's narrative struggles at times to capture the full-borne intensity of their time at Auschwitz.  No, that actually is not correct.  If anything, in passages such as the one quoted below, the intensity becomes overwhelming, making it difficult to perceive the other themes that Kiš wants to explore:  the faith in the midst of deceit; love surrounded by hate; kindness that is almost suffocated by cruelty.  Here is part of Marija's experiences as she tries to navigate through one of the camps and encounters another:

...in a gesture of despair he simply took the short pipe out of his mouth and she saw the way his austere gaze grew blurry and faded under his spectacles in their steel frame and then focused onto a painful, desperate decision (precisely, by the way, in the way she had foreseen this happening) until a speech burst out of him all at once flowing like water so that even now she was still wondering why he had spoken with so much intensity which had ensured that despite everything she remembered all of it, and which also meant that she must have really understood it all long beforehand: – "It is not the hatred of Negroes of Irish or of Jews that is at issue here, and it's thus not an ethnic or racial or national collective or group that is at issue but rather it is simply human intolerance that is searching for a pretext in skin color or in customs or in anything else that is different from what is generally found in a given setting; it is the inherent and deeply rooted human passion (if not nature, which would perhaps be more exact and which is perhaps the most accurate means of description but I will not concede that to anyone not even to myself and least of all to you), the passion, that is, for mistreating and humiliating the person who otherwise is happily referred to as your neighbor; or else (most precisely of all perhaps):  it is the atavism of the horde and of the animal that seeks to overpower and annihilate all other species and all other creatures and to establish dominion and that triumphs for the most ordinary and egotistical reasons (but not the reason you probably thought of right away I mean the so-called survival of the fittest) (that they also teach in schools supported by examples from biology and zoology) and to which one can give no other name than refined atavism, and it is something completely different and more beastly than any natural selection that is incidentally to be found to the same degree in humans as among animals; because if the struggle for the survival of our species were the only thing at stake here then injustice crime and violence would not be tolerated or would at least no be tolerated in the name of specific racist national principles and prejudices and people wouldn't say A Negro or A Jewish child was killed but instead would say only A CHILD WAS KILLED and idiotic questions would not be posed about skin color or religion which help people reduce culpability or shed it altogether;... (p. 81-82)

 By itself, this passage captures the heartache, anger, and even the breakdown of normal "rules" within its labyrinthine, pages-long sentence.  Yet it is strangely unfocused when viewed within the context of the story itself.  This is not the outpouring of Marija or Jakob, but instead the venting of another.  While it eloquently captures a certain mood, it does so at the expense of the greater story.  Psalm 44 is a brilliantly flawed novel.  It foreshadows several of Kiš's later themes regarding human life and their fallible societies and governments, but the prose here is too scattershot to distill these into more potent forms.

Yet by the time that Kiš wrote Early Sorrows, he had learned how to create simple yet effective scenes that did not distract readers from the themes he wanted to explore.  Over the course of the interconnected stories, we see young Andreas Sam go from the carefree boy who is hired out to look after a rich neighbor's cattle to a youth devastated by the war.  We see this change, not just in Andreas, but also in companions such as Anna and Andy and Júlia, among others.  The stories are short yet contain a bitterly-sharp edge.  "Seranade for Anna" is barely two pages in length, but notice the juxtaposition of words and images in its first paragraphs:

I heard some noise under the window and thought they'd come to kill my father.

But then a violin called everything into question and calmed my fears.  The person playing the violin under our window was no virtuoso, but he was clearly taken with my sister Anna.  The violin had an all but human voice.  Someone head over heels in love with the stars and my sister was singing shyly, but trying to make his voice sound as deep and virile as possible.

There is the impending horror of possible murder, but also the presence of adolescent love, with its attendant expressions through violin and masked voice.  Scenes/stories such as this do not detract from Early Sorrows' devastating conclusion, but they instead enhance it because we are made more sensitive to the characters' lives and travails.  The horror of World War II and the Holocaust is not just the deaths and tortures of millions; taken by themselves, the numbers (5 million?  6 million?  9 million?) become as impersonal as the widely-imagined mass killings.  Yet a deeper look shows the conflicted passions of youth, of the denied dreams and the horror of realizing that those with whom you had grown up were the ones carrying out the orders of expulsion, transportation, or even execution.  This book works much better than its predecessor because Kiš utilizes a deceptively simpler voice to convey the profundity of the horrors that unfolded "during the war."  The callowness of the earlier chapters/stories has given way to something that is troubling and by us seeing this change through the points of views of the youth, we feel more involved in the story and thus ultimately we have invested so much that by the book's end, we are devastated to see how "The Boy and the Dog" concludes.  It captures in miniature a universality of emotion and response that it helps those who did not directly experience the horrors that Kiš did to understand just a bit more how childhood can represent our innocence and our fall from it.  That perhaps sums up not just Early Sorrows, but much of Psalms 44 as well.

 

Samuel Delany, Dhalgren

This review originally appeared in July 2010 on the SFF Masterworks blog.

 The late 1960s and early 1970s were a turbulent time.  Youth movements throughout the Americas and Europe challenged long-accepted gender, racial, and sexual prejudices.  Radical ways of viewing how the world should be often led to direct and sometimes violent confrontations with authorities of besieged institutions, with several of these confrontations having aftershocks that have persisted until the current day.  From the American Civil Rights movement to the bra burnings in several countries to protest the unequal treatment of women to the Stonewall Riots that marked the birth of the gay rights movement, the decade between 1963 and 1973 has spawned social movements that continue today to urge for a new, transformed world where divisions by race, gender, and sexual orientation would no longer exist.

There was an analogue to this in SF during the same time period.  In both North America and Great Britain (and to some extent in the non-Anglophone European countries),writers such as Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Samuel R. Delany began to question why SF could not be more than the exploration of scientific concepts in a fictional setting.  This "New Wave" of writers incorporated some of the ideas and questions raised by the social movements mentioned above into their writings.  In stories such as Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Ballard's Crash, and Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels, issues of social status, gender equality, and sexual identity were explored.  But it was in Delany's 1975 novel, Dhalgren, where each of these important social issues of the time came to find their highest form of expression.

Dhalgren is set in the fictional American city of Bellona, after an apparent, unspecified apocalypse.  But this event is never referred to directly, only implied.  It, along with the resulting chaos, lurk in the background, like an itch that is never truly scratched.  Dhalgren's first paragraphs give clues to just how dense and foggy Delany's story is:

to wound the autumnal city.

So howled out for the world to give him a name.

The in-dark answered with wind.

All you know I know:  careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors and freight elevator operators grinding a thumbful of grease on a steel handle; student riots; know that dark women in bodegas shook their heads last week because in six months prices have risen outlandishly; how coffee tastes after you've held it in your mouth, cold, a whole minute.

A whole minute he squatted, pebbles clutched with his left foot (the bare one), listening to his breath sound tumble down the ledges.

Beyond a leafy arras, reflected moonlight flittered.

He rubbed his palms against denim.  Where he was, was still.  Somewhere else, wind whined.

The leaves winked.

What had been wind was a motion in brush below.  His hand went to the rock behind. (p. 1)

Here Kid (or sometimes, Kidd) is introduced.  He is a male with no sense of identity; he appears and does not know his name nor remember most of his past.  He is of indeterminate racial background and he is bisexual.  His wandering through Bellona, his hooking up with a quasi-gang known as the scorpions, his interactions with both males and females, white and black alike, are at first told nearly straight-forward.  But there are gaps in what is discussed.  There seem to be nightly horrors that are rarely referenced and never addressed.  Through the book, Kid searches to make sense out of chaos, to forge an identity out of the disparate remnants of his former self.

Delany's story is so encompassing that it is difficult to pick out a single strand (or even three) and say, "this is what the story is really about."  It does not invite easy comparisons, nor does it provide a linear structure.  What one can only hope to do is to take the text as it is and to wrestle with the myriad questions revolving around identity and see if one can forge a self-identification with the text similar to what Kid does with his new life in Bellona.  Although this is not the easiest of stories to read, the effort expended in trying to grasp what is occurring is more than rewarded by the book's end.

Below is an exchange between Kid and a fellow survivor, Tak, discussing not just Bellona, but also the imagination:

"Do you think that's what happened to Bellona?"  Someday I'll die, turned irrelevantly through his mind:  Death and artichokes.  Heaviness filled his ribs; he rubbed his chest for the reassuring systolic and diastolic thumps.  Not that I really think it might stop, he thought:  only that it hasn't just yet.  Sometimes (he thought), I wish I couldn't feel it.  (Someday, it will stop).

"Actually," Tak was saying, "I suspect the whole thing is science fiction."

"Huh?  You mean a time-warp, or a parallel universe?"

"No, just...well, science fiction.  Only real.  It follows all the conventions."

"Spaceships, ray-guns, going faster than light?  I used to read the stuff, but I haven't seen anything like that around here."

"Bet you don't read the new, good stuff.  Let's see:  the Three Conventions of science fiction - " Tak wiped his forehead with his leather sleeve. (Kid thought, inanely:  He's polishing his brain)  "First:  A single man can change the course of a whole world:  Look at Calkins, look at George - look at you!  Second:  The only measure of intelligence or genius is its linear and practical application:  In a landscape like this, what other kind do we even allow to visit?  Three:  The Universe is an essentially hospitable place, full of earth-type planets where you can crash-land your spaceship and survive long enough to have an adventure.  Here in Bellona - "

"Maybe that's why I don't read more of the stuff than I do," Kid said.  He had had his full of criticism with Newboy; the noise was no longer comforting.  "Wasn't there a street lamp working on this block?"

Tak bulled out the end of his sentence:  " - in Bellona you can have anything you want, as long as you can carry it by yourself, or get your friends to."

"It's funny, not that many people have that much."

"A comment on the paucity of our imaginations - none at all on the wonders here for the taking.  No - it's a comment on the limits of the particular mind the city encourages.  Who wants to be as lonely as the acquisition of all those objects would make them?  Most people here have spent most of their time someplace else.  You learn something from that." (pp. 372-373)

This is, I believe, a key passage in the book.  Although it can be taken also as an embedded critique of earlier SF, I think the issue of limits and what the city is perceived to encourage its denizens to think and do lies near to the heart of much of the action that transpires here in Dhalgren.  This issue of limits is brought up again later in the novel, in a much more direct fashion:

I am limited, finite, and fixed.  I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.  I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good.  That is wrestling with what I have been given.  Do I rage at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?)  I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion.  But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and perception.  And what in life can rip that?  Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands?  I am limited, finite, and fixed.  I rage for reasons, cry for pity.  Do with me what way you will.  (p. 583)

This is perhaps the most powerful single moment in Dhalgren.  Kid's questions resonate because so many of us have asked similar questions before?  "Who am I?",  "What am I to do?",  "Why can't I understand?":  these questions and the ones generated from them form the core of our identity shapings.  Kid, stripped of his past (something mentioned directly in this passage), is about to search deep within in an attempt to discover just what sorts of identity he has come to possess.  In the final section of the book, "The Anathemata:  a plague journal," with its marginalia and excerpted texts creating a fractured narrative "time" for the final part of Kid and his companion's experiences in Bellona, this is explored in a fashion where the very confusing layout of these disparate texts serve as a symbol for the inner turmoil that is roiling within Kid.

Is Dhalgren worthy of being considered a "Masterwork?"  It is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most ambitious novels written in the late 20th century.  Thirty-five years later, it still sparks controversy among those who try to process everything that it contains.  Its discussions of gender roles, racial identity, and sexuality are still controversial in many parts of contemporary society and the novel's power to stir strong emotions has hardly abated.  Such powerful works, written in a bold, unconventional narrative style, may not be enjoyed by everyone, but for those who are willing to wrestle with it and to win some sort of understanding (if it only be an understanding of one's own limits to comprehend), Dhalgren is easily one of the best novels of the 20th century in any genre and it likely will continue to be held up as being one of the best New Wave SF novels ever written.

James Blish, A Case of Conscience

This review originally appeared on the SFF Masterworks blog in July 2010.

Religion may be one of the most difficult topics to tackle, especially in a SF novel.  If an author chooses to espouse one religion over another, inevitably that author would invite a host of criticisms, ranging from how could s/he present something that is, in the minds of many, little more than superstitious gibberish as being something credible and worthy of consideration.  However, if that same author were to endorse the opinion that religion is indeed a simple matter suitable only for children who are not ready to outgrow Santa Claus and Jesus the Christ, there would be criticisms that the author missed opportunities to explore the complex relationships people have with received and developed faith in divine entities and in the ethical laws designed to govern their behavior.

American SF author James Blish, although not a religious person himself, was keenly aware of the thematic possibilities that could be mined from exploring the connections and rifts that could take place when an individual's religious beliefs collided with political and social matters.  Blish wrote four novels that dealt with these issues:  Black Easter, The Day After Judgment, Doctor Mirabilis. and A Case of Conscience.  It is A Case of Conscience (1958), the 1959 Hugo winner for Best Novel, that has received the most publicity, in large part due to the nature of the conflicts found within this relatively short novel (which is actually a 1953 novella that had a second part grafted to it, with mixed results).

The story begins with a Peruvian Jesuit, Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, puzzling out a solution to what he terms a "diabolically complex" problem:

...Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani), who desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo Vitellius and Macdugalius, four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius by rendering conjugal duty when demanded.  Anita who claims to have discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius - 

Although Ruiz-Sanchez is interrupted before he reveals too much, this problem involving the hierarchy of ethical dilemmas ties in neatly to a very real situation that Ruiz-Sanchez has to confront.  Recently, first contact was established with a sentient, non-humanoid race on the planet of Lithia.  Lithia presents two major problems for Ruiz-Sanchez and for his cohorts (which for the majority of the novel are relegated to being 2D ciphers of characters):  For Ruiz-Sanchez, the apparent evidence that the Lithians do not lie, cheat, or steal, that they by virtually all interpretations of Church Law live the perfect Christian life without being exposed at all, or even understand the theological concept of religion (much less Original Sin), provokes a major internal debate about how to treat these self-aware beings.  For the others, Lithia is an energy goldmine, a source for cheap energy that unfortunately can only be extracted via the destruction of the planet.

These conflicts are explored throughout the two parts of the novel in varying degrees of narrative success.  Ruiz-Sanchez's interactions with a Lithian traveler to Earth, Chtexa, reveals the depths of Ruiz-Sanchez's conflict:  here is a decent, honest being, yet this being cannot be one of God's children because Chtexa has no concept of Good and Evil; he just acts in accordance to his nature and despite that nature being utopic for the Jesuit, it conflicts with everything he has been taught and believes about Original Sin.  Ruiz-Sanchez, in his attempt to rationalize this conflict, begins to wander dangerously close to the Manichean (or Dualist) heresy.  For the latter sections of Part I, this conflict within Ruiz-Sanchez is clear, present, and dominates much of the discussion.  However, by Part II, this has taken a back seat to the arguments about whether or not the planet of Lithia ought to be exploited for its resources, living and sentient beings there be damned, as well as exploring how the infant Lithian, Egtverchi, copes with life on a Earth where its denizens were driven underground over a century before due to the threat of nuclear attack.

As noted above, Part II was grafted onto the first part five years after the fact.  Although the conflict over the exploitation of Lithia is better developed in this section, the other elements introduced in the first part are relegated to lesser roles.  Blish's attempt to develop a plausible underground society fails to convince the reader, especially those who grew up after the bomb shelter craze of the 1950s and early 1960s.  Although there were some promising scenes showing the juxtaposition of Egtverchi among the humans of this Shelter society, for the most part these do not strengthen (and in some instances, they reduce) the impact caused from considering the ethical conflicts that Ruiz-Sanchez has between what he believes and what he experiences from interacting with the Lithians.

The eventual decision regarding whether or not to let the lifeforms of Lithia live and the planet and its star be spared from destruction follows a seemingly inevitable course.  Blish missed an opportunity in making this decision more intriguing and compelling due to his lack of character development among those who were with Ruiz-Sanchez on the original mission to Lithia.  It is a shame, because these questions regarding ethics and religion could have been developed to the point where they rivaled that of Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz for power of expression.  It is in these key areas of characterization and thematic tightness where Blish's story falters and while A Case of Conscience is still a powerful, relevant story over fifty years after its release, its flaws are noticeable and they do weaken reader appreciation for this story.

Is A Case of Conscience worthy of the title of "Masterwork?"  For the most part, yes.  In the 1950s, this story was much more complex in its thematic conundrums than the vast majority of its contemporaries.  Blish's prose is good and while he was not quite the stylist of some of the New Wave SF writers that followed in the 1960s, his treatment of ethical and religious concerns, despite the flaws noted above, were ahead of its time.  Despite dated references to nuclear fallout shelters and to the looming threat of Communism, this novel reads well in 2010.  For those readers willing to consider the central issues in play here, A Case of Conscience would make for an entertaining read and might spark a few thoughts afterward.  If that is all that this novel does for a reader today, then it is worthy of such a title as "Masterwork."

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

This review was originally written in July 2010 on the SFF Masterworks blog.

Short fiction of 5,000 to 20,000 words dominated American science fiction in the 1950s.  Published almost exclusively in genre-specific magazines that had only been existence for twenty years or less in most cases, these magazines made a name for themselves by being known for carrying the works of say a Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Theodore Sturgeon, or Robert Heinlein, to name just a few of the many renowned SF writers whose legacies are tied, at least in part, to the 1950s pulps.


There was another author writing then who also was mainly a short fiction writer, one not quite so famous as the more prolific writers mentioned above, but one whose works have received much praise in the near half-century since his death.  Cordwainer Smith is the pseudonym for a top Pentagon official, Paul Linebarger.  Linebarger was the son of an American legal adviser to Chinese leader Sun Yat-sen and he lived in China for much of his childhood, taking in elements of Chinese culture that would later be utilized in several of his fictions.  Linebarger also became known for writing the training manual that the Pentagon used for maintaining psychological warfare.  Yet despite these accomplishments, Linebarger was dissatisfied and he decided to try his hand at writing SF under the chosen pseudonym of Cordwainer Smith.


This collection, The Rediscovery of Man, contains most of Smith's published short fiction.  There were several editions.  First, there was the 1970s The Best of Cordwainer Smith, from which the Gollancz edition of The Rediscovery of Man, and then in 1993 NESFA Press released its own The Rediscovery of Man, which included even more of Smith's short fiction, leaving out only one novel and a couple of incomplete drafts.  It is this NESFA edition that was read for this review and while there are probably differences in organization (the NESFA edition placed the stories in a rough storyline chronological order rather than a publishing order), there should not be too many problems in discussing the overall value of Smith's stories, whether they be published in the smaller Gollancz edition or the larger NESFA one.


Smith's fiction, despite being written between 1950 and his death in 1966, has aged rather well, at least in comparison to his contemporaries.  While he is not known for having a great literary style nor for a series of spectacular events within them, Smith's fiction contain a mixture of elements that make reading his stories a pleasure.  Before discussing the Instrumentality history, it perhaps is best to note that Smith's fictions are not military SF akin to those of Heinlein.  Nor are they "hard" SF based on the science of the 1950s.  Neither are they space exploration stories or strict sociological stories referencing the then-present.  No, his stories were neither beast nor fowl and perhaps that is why Smith's fictions went out of print soon after his death and have never been praised as much as the authors listed above.  But there is something about them, something that might be hard to pin down at first, which makes his stories, when read as a whole, one of the more intriguing SF creations of the 20th century.  Let's start with one of the earliest stories, "Scanners Live in Vain," published originally in 1950:

She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron.  She let its field sphere fall to the carpeted floor.  Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a Scanner's wife, she wound the Cranching Wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest.  She avoided the instruments set in his chest.  She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone Up and into the Out.  Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet.  She drew the wire taut.  She snapped the small plug into the High-Burden control next to his Heart-Reader.  She helped him to sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair.  She turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could reap her lips easily.

This quote, which is given in order to provide some description of the Scanners, is at first glance not elegant at all.  Smith's prose is stripped of all but the most functional of adjectives, plus there are elements such as "Cranching Wire" and "High-Burden control" that seem a bit technical and hard to imagine without further context.  But within even this descriptive paragraph there are some interesting elements.  What are these "instruments" that are set in the Scanner's chest?  What are the "radiating scars?"  Why is the Scanner's wife performing a duty that seems to be a humble, daily exercise akin to bathing an incapacitated loved one?  Below is one more short paragraph that provides a lot of understanding to what is transpiring:

Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned.  He took the flash-quick inventory which constituted his professional skill.  His eyes swept in the news of the instruments.  Nothing showed off scale, beyond the Nerve Compression hanging in the edge of Danger.  But he could not worry about the Nerve-box.  That always came through cranching.  You couldn't get under the wire without having it show on the Nerve-box.  Some day the box would go to Overload and drop back down to Dead.  That was the way a haberman ended.  But you couldn't have everything.  People who went to the Up-and-Out had to pay the price for Space.

There is a terrible tragedy implied in one becoming a Scanner.  Smith does not linger overmuch on scenes such as this, and in his latter stories, elements such as this that provide brief glimpses into a person's souls and to the motivations that drive such animae are presented in more indirect and yet even more powerful scenes, such as the ones found in "On the Gem Planet," where Smith introduces very powerful stories in a rather quaint fashion:

Consider the horse.  He climbed up through the crevasses of a cliff of gems; the force which drove him was the love of man.


Consider Mizzer, the resort planet, where the dictator Colonel Wedder reformed the culture so violently that whatever had been slovenly now became atrocious.


Consider Genevieve, so rich that she was the prisoner of her own wealth, so beautiful that she was the victim of her own beauty, so intelligent that she knew there was nothing, nothing to be done about her fate.


Consider Casher O'Neill, a wanderer among the planets, thirsting for justice and yet hoping in his innermost thoughts that "justice" was not just another word for revenge.


Consider Pontoppidan, that literal gem of a planet, where the people were too rich and busy to have good food, open air, or much fun.  All they had were diamonds, rubies, tourmalines, and emeralds.


Add these together and you have one of the strangest stories ever told from world to world.

Within this odd introduction, Smith alerts the readers not just to the wealth (yes, pun intended) of characterizations that shall be explored, but he also reminds readers of his past stories about how he has covered elements such as justice and how easily it could be perverted into revenge, or how love, ambition, and desire can imprison as well as free people.  This story contains more metaphors for the human condition than most of Smith's other stories, making it a personal favorite, but it is also quite direct about how our frailties can continue to haunt us long after we ourselves have, as Shakespeare put it, "shuffled off this mortal coil."


And that is the engine of Smith's stories involving the Rediscovery of Man.  After an unspecified future "dark age" where human weaknesses have led to chaos, destruction, and the enslavement of parts of the remaining humans, there is a rebirth of old cultures, old languages, and old traditions that contain not just the promise of something new, but also a warning that the old evils have not been eradicated.  These stories may not always pack a punch individually, but when viewed as a continuum where events or persons found in one story influence others, there are signs that Smith wove an incredibly deep and moving tapestry of human lives, dreams, failures, and evils in a future where the technology is but a trapping set around the central mystery of what it is to be human.


The Rediscovery of Man is certainly a "Masterwork" that is much more powerful than its modest publishing history might indicate.  Although most of the individual stories, when taken out of the context of the greater whole, do not reveal much grandeur or much in the way of stirring emotions, when viewed in the aggregate, these stories are powerful expressions of the various and sometimes conflicting elements of the human soul.  The Rediscovery of Man may not be fully representative of the types of fictions written in the 1950s Golden Age of American SF, as several of its elements presage the subsequent New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s, but it certainly is a work that contains much to appeal to readers living in the early 21st century.  For these reasons, The Rediscovery of Man is an enduring classic.

George Stewart, Earth Abides

Originally posted in August 2010 on the SFF Masterworks blog.

Après moi, le déluge (After me, the flood).   This phrase, attributed to the dying Louis XV of France, perhaps best sums up our collective view of human life after we have departed.  At some indeterminate time, we know that human beings will cease to exist on this planet.  Perhaps it'll be millions or billions of years in the future, or maybe our species will end in a massive conflagration.  Whenever or however human life should cease, surely it would occur after all of us living now are dead and buried, right?

But what if there were some massive event, like a nuclear holocaust or a more lethal descendant of the Black Death that were to strike us?  What if there were only a few stragglers left as witnesses to a massive near-extinction event that wiped out billions over the course of days or weeks?  What if the entire weight of preserving civilization were to fall upon our shoulders?  How would we decide what to keep and what to discard in case the remnant populations manage to forge a civilization of their own out of the wreckage of our "modern" societies?

Ever since Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) was published, there have been frequent attempts to tell a convincing story of future "lastness."  Several of the books on the Gollancz SF Masterworks list focus on this theme, either obliquely or directly, often through the use of rapid environmental change (such as those described in J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World or Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang) or the chronicling of "deep time" (H.G. Wells' The Time Machine or Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men).  But with the possible exception of Stapledon's novel, none of these stories ever attempts to look at how societies might be reconstructed after the "deluge" of disease/nuclear warfare/environmental catastrophe, except for American writer George R. Stewart's 1949 novel, Earth Abides.  Even after sixty years, this novel is still one of the best post-apocalyptic novels ever written because of its depth of themes and the ease for which readers have in understanding its main character, Isherwood (Ish) Williams.

Set in 1940s California, the action in Earth Abides unfolds over nearly fifty years.  When the story begins, Ish is out alone in a wilderness expedition when a deadly superplague strikes almost simultaneously across the planet, wiping out well over 90% of the world's population in a matter of a couple of weeks.  As Ish returns to his San Francisco home, he learns of the situation after it has alreay passed:

He stared hard against the reflection of the light in the window, and suddenly he saw that there were headlines as large as for Pearl Harbor.  He read:

CRISIS ACUTE

What crisis?  With sudden determination he strode back to the car, and picked up the hammer.  A moment later he stood with the heavy head poised in front of the door.

Then suddenly all the restraints of habit stopped him.  Civilization moved in, and held his arm, almost physically.  You couldn't do this!  You didn't break into a store this way - you, a law-abiding citizen!  He glanced up and down the street, as if a policeman or a posse might be bearing down on him.

But the empty street brought him back again, and panic overbore the restraints.  "Hell," he thought, "I can pay for the door if I have to!"

With a wild feeling of burning his bridges, of leaving civilization behind, he swung the heavy hammer-head with all his force against the door-lock.  The wood splintered, the door flew open, he stepped in. (p. 12)

And in this short scene, we begin to witness the gradual evolution of human life away from its pre-plague years.  The old proprieties on how to interact fade in light of civilization having collapsed.  With this comes the question of whether or not commonly-held moral codes ought to be abandoned or not; Stewart repeatedly comes back to this issue throughout the novel.  After Ish then embarks upon a cross-country tour to see what other survivors he can discover, encountering only an African American farming family in the South and a couple in New York, he returns to San Francisco, where he meets Emma (Em):

"Oh, it's not that!  It's not that!"  she cried out, still trembling.  "I lied.  Not what I said, what I didn't say!  But it's all the same.  You're just a nice boy.  You looked at my hands, and said they were nice.  You never even noticed the blue in the half-moons."

He felt the shock, and he knew that she felt the shock in him.  Now everything came together in his mind - brunette complexion, dark liquid eyes, full lips, white teeth, rich voice, accepting temperament.

Then she spoke again, scarcely in more than a whisper, "It didn't matter at first, of course.  No man cares then about that.  But my mother's people never had much luck in the world.  Maybe when things are starting out again, it shouldn't be with them.  But mostly, I guess, I think it wasn't right with you."

Then suddenly he heard nothing more, for the whole vast farce of everything broke in upon him, and he laughed, and all he could do was to laugh and laugh more, and then he found that she, too, had relaxed and was laughing with him and holding him all the closer.

"Oh, darling," he said, "everything is smashed and New York lies empty from Spuyten Duyvil to the Battery, and there's no government in Washington.  The senators and the judges and the governors are all dead and rotten, and the Jew-baiters and the Negro-baiters along with them.  We're just two poor people, picking at the leavings of civilization for our lives, not knowing whether it's to be the ants or the rats or something else will get us.  Maybe a thousand years from now people can afford the luxury of wondering and worrying about that kind of thing again.  But I doubt it.  And now there are just the two of us here, or maybe three, now."

He kissed her while she still was weeping quietly.  And he knew that for once he had seen more clearly and more deeply, and been stronger than she. (pp. 110-111)

Fairly controversial for pre-Civil Rights, segregation-era America.  This scene where Ish and Em decide to start a family, one that would not be judged on skin color, represents perhaps one of the strongest "breaks" of the many that occur within this novel.  Although this passage may not have the same sort of effect for a 21st century reader that it had for readers in the 1940s and 1950s (after all, it was not until 1967 that anti-miscegenation marriage laws were ruled to be unconstitutional in the United States), Stewart makes an extremely powerful argument about then-present (and still present?) social absurdities through the casual addressing and dismissal of them in this one short but poignant scene.

There are other conflicts that occur as more survivors find each other and found a small settlement of less than twenty people in San Francisco.  As Ish, Em, and new friends George, Ezra, and others, male and female alike, gather together, questions of how to reproduce are introduced (bigamy is not exactly an issue with which most Americans would be comfortable), as well as debates on systems of government, holidays to be celebrated, and how years would be marked.  Sometimes, such as the first couple of years of the new colony, much time would be devoted to what was transpiring, while at two other points, decades would pass in a few pages.  As the settlement continues to expand, the salvaged technology (such as cars, gasoline, and rifles) wear out.  The children have no real concept of pre-plague society, viewing it increasingly as myth rather than a past reality.  The elders of the community see their relationships with each other and with their offspring change in ways that are similar to how pre-industrial societies used to view their ancestors.  

This shift to a more "pre-modern" mindset is done adroitly here.  Stewart does not spend more than a couple of pages on any of the moral, political, social, or technological crises that face the community.  However, he manages to infuse each of these issues with a profundity that adds layers of meaning to these events.  As Earth Abides builds to its moving conclusion (one that references the source of the novel's title), the reader is challenged to consider the import of the issues that are raised throughout the book.  

Is Earth Abides a "Masterwork"?  Considering how well Stewart addresses social concerns of the time, some of which still persist today, it could be argued that this book is perhaps one of the two or three best post-apocalyptic novels, not just because of the vivid nature of the devastation, but rather because of how plausible the post-disaster societies are shown in their attempts to salvage meaning from the event and how fragile social and natural ecosystems can be.  Stewart's prose is direct and devoid of florid phrases, yet still manages to be evocative when necessary.  The problems that plague Ish and his new community make this novel a great, absorbing read.  People's tastes may come and go, but Earth Abides certainly will be a relevant, moving work long after we return to dust.

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010 Booker Prize winner)

'Do you know anyone called Juno?' Treslove asked.

'J'know know Juno?' Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.

Treslove didn't get it.

'J'you know Juno?  Is that what you're asking me?'

Treslove still didn't get it.  So Finkler wrote it down.  D'Jew know Jewno?

Treslove shrugged.  'Is that supposed to be funny?'

'It is to me,' Finkler said, 'But please yourself.'

'Is it funny for a Jew to write the word Jew?  Is that what's funny?'

'Forget it,' Finkler said.  'You wouldn't understand.' (p. 16)

This early exchange between the late fortyish Julian Treslove and his university associate and occasional friend, Samuel Finkler, serves as an excellent entry point for discussing Howard Jacobson's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question.  The passage above contains a sort of dry, sometimes self-deprecating wit to it.  Treslove, confused in love and drifting aimless through relationships and his job at the BBC, is perhaps too apparently earnest, both to himself and in his presentation to the readers.  He so desperately wants to fit in, to "get it," even when his lack of experiences keep him from comprehending what exactly is transpiring around him.  Finkler, on the other hand, is a bourgeois English Jew, one who has been through the casual and overt antisemitism that can be found in Europe and the Americas even today.  He, as the reader later learns, is an anti-Zionist Jew who finds certain aspects of Jewish society, culture, and traditions to be rather ridiculous at times, but he is also someone whose complicated relationship with his native culture (and sometimes, occasionally, his religious faith) makes him a near-perfect foil for the eternally-questing Treslove.  Whether or not The Finkler Question is worth exploring in depth is going to be up to how positively the reader will react to passages such as the one above. 

The Finkler Question depends almost solely on the character dynamics given above; there is little unifying plot beyond the exploration, often through comic scenes, of Treslove's search for self-identity, played out through his inability to grasp just what it was that Finkler shared with a former professor of theirs, Libor, beyond their ethnic origin and the recent loss of their wives.  This 307 page novel is more a series of vignettes that explore matters such as what it means to be a Jew, how can a Jew be an anti-Zionist without being guilty of self-loathing, and why there can be such differences in opinion and outlook among those people who are often divided by a common religious, cultural, and ethnic heritage.  To his credit, Jacobson does leaven these weighty matters with a wry, satirical humor that serves as an undercurrent throughout all of the character exchanges throughout this novel.  However, after a while, these comic scenes lose their effectiveness, as there is a dull, dreary sameness to how Jacobson explores these issues through the baffled, casual racist viewpoint of Treslove.

Although there is nothing singularly bad that I would care to point out (outside of the redundancy of certain themes and how those are executed in certain character exchanges), the biggest complaint I have about The Finkler Question is that ultimately it feels rather small.  Perhaps it is due to having read several novels by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth over the years, but The Finkler Question does not tread any new ground that Bellow or Roth explored, often in more vivid and "important" ways.  It is a short, clever novel which in the end just recapitulates what other Jewish novelists have said before about being Jewish surrounded by blundering, occasionally malicious non-Jews.  There is nothing original about it, outside of it being a decent read that entertains the reader to the point where a few questions might be raises.  Ultimately, it is a forgettable novel, largely due to its characters being smaller than real life in scope, feel, and relevance.  Treslove, Finkler, Libor, and the various female characters that pop up and serve as set pieces for changing the focus from one point of misunderstanding to another?  They end up being little more than small characters, lacking in magnanimity or relevance; their problems define them, without anything ever really being stated other than that some things, some groups just won't ever understand. 

If a reader wants little more than a cleverly-written vignette novel that explores issues of identity and loss through comic, satirical scenes, then The Finkler Question might be the sort of novel to read.  However, for myself, although I was never truly disengaged, I also never found this novel to say anything that had not already been said previously by authors whose scenes and characters were more alive and memorable than are Jacobson's.  Therefore, The Finkler Question is merely a "good" novel that accomplishes what it sets out to do, while at the same time never rising above its original intents.  It is not the book I would have chosen for the Booker Prize based on what I have read of the shortlist to date, as it lacks the narrative virtuosity or subject appeal of several of the others on the list.  It simply is what it is and perhaps it is best judged by how you reacted to the quoted exchange above.

Michael Cisco, The Narrator

Michael Cisco's 2010 novel, The Narrator, is the third book to be reviewed by a weird troika of lit critics (and authors and translators).  This time, we have secretly replaced Jeff VanderMeer's review space with that of J.M. McDermott's.  Paul Smith now has his review up as well.

An army is a horror.  It's a horrible thing.  They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.

It's through rags of fast-moving smoke that I first catch sight of Tref.  I'm standing in the pass, to one side of the pumice road, looking down from my perch on the massed roots of some dusty old cork oaks.  The city below me is like a shining, smoking lake, thrusting its troubled glints into my eyes and make them smart.  Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city. (p. 5)

For the past ten years or so, Michael Cisco has been one of "those" authors, writers whose talents are recognized by those in the know, but who have never enjoyed a mass readership.  His most recent novel, The Narrator, is perhaps simultaneously his most "accessible" (if such an execrable adjective might be employed here) and his most accomplished and sophisticated work to date.  Cisco is a master stylist, who creates dark, twisted, imaginative vistas from the juxtaposition of adjectives.  Take for instance the opening paragraphs quoted above.  We learn that the narrator, whose name incidentally is Low, is narrating a war.  However, we quickly move away from the clichéd "war is hell/horror" motif and into a setting that is strange, full of "fast-moving smoke," with a city being akin to a "shining, smoking lake" while the sky is white.  Wherever this setting might be, we're no longer in Kansas, Toto.

Cisco's stories tend to be quite atmospheric, going beyond lush, descriptive landscapes.  People too make up an environment and in one early scene, he foreshadows certain thematic (and plot) elements by his portrayal of two segregated and yet complementary religious orders:

A carefully ramified division of labor regulates the operation of the life and death priests.  Life priests, urbane, serene, dressed in satiny white and cream gowns, preside at weddings, tend the sick and perform healings when they can; death priests, subdolous and mordant, dressed in shabby subfusc, officiate at funerals, conduct autopsies and embalm bodies, attend to the dying and insane, and cast our even imbibe possessing demons.  Life priests are permitted and encouraged to marry; death priests, while not enjoined to celibacy, are forbidden to marry or to bear children... There is no enmity between these two groups of priests, although they are compelled to avoid each other as a rule in order to maintain a pure distinction.  When they do meet, a complicated protocol governs the exchange of formalities.  In fact, since no one is ever born in the death precincts, all death priests are delivered into this life by life priests of the previous generation.  Naturally, all life priests are ushered into whatever dream comes after by the generation of death priests who will bury them in the death district.  (pp. 13-14)

In his previous works, Cisco tended to rely more on elements such as this to create the "weirdness" that served as a thematic staple in his stories.  Here in The Narrator, at 307 pages his longest work to date, he goes further.  Through the character of the Narrator Low, he explores not just the weirdness of the locale and the strangeness (and hell) of war, but the very semantics that underlie our conceptualizations of the world and the medium of language used to express it.  Several authors utilize the "unreliable narrator" trope to underscore the hidden undercurrents of the narrative, but Cisco is one of the few authors I have encountered who have attempted to undermine the very narrative structure itself through the creation of a character whose purpose is to tell and retell events until the events are forgotten and what is left becomes Story.

As someone whose original field of study was cultural history, I quickly became intrigued by Cisco's plumbing of the semantic depths that bind together the two main strands of historia, History and Story alike.  At first, the war Story took some getting used to; frequently, events felt disjointed and out of sequence.  Then a little over halfway into the novel, things become crystallized in an encounter between Low and another narrator:

Makemin is a good narrator.  He has his own story, a revenge story, and its power has revived in the men the will to fight.  He will get his way.  They will fight.  They believe him.  I failed.  I failed as a narrator, because I didn't tell them that I had had to get my pack from where it fell and was tangled in the bracken by the path, and that Makemin was wrong to believe himself alone in the moments after he struck me. (p. 195)

From this point, The Narrator begins to come into its own as a narrative about narratives and the weird interstices that underlie memory, communication, and the symbols embedded in the actions of which we partake and the words we speak.  What becomes apparent by the novel's end is not the paramount value of "Truth," but that "truths" can emerge that have little in common with the events that engendered them.  I hesitate to say this is the "point" of the story, as I believe Cisco is exploring (and deconstructing) several other points in addition to this one, but certainly this is a key element that I took from The Narrator. 

The Narrator is Cisco's most engaging work, as the reader has the trappings of a war/army narrative to grasp as an entry portal.  Prior knowledge of his earlier writings is not necessary, although there are a few glimpses here and there that hint at some deeper connection with his earlier tales, although these never intrude upon the narrative core.  As stated above, Cisco's descriptive, evocative prose signals the alienation felt by the characters and it is this sense of estrangement that makes this novel a captivating read even for those readers who are not fain to read such narratives.  Highly recommended.

Leatherbound Classics, Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.  It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.  Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.  There is nothing surprising in this.  If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. 

Quote from this first paragraph, especially the opening "Call me Ishmael," and more likely than not, people will recognize it, even if they do not immediately respond with "that's from Moby Dick!"  Published in 1851, Herman Melville's most famous work divides today's readers as much as it did when it was published nearly 160 years ago.  Too frequently, there are criticisms of the book being "too slow," or that it is "too much about whaling," or that its plot does not manifest itself in a fluid fashion.   Sometimes, a book is read too early in one's life; this was certainly the case for me.  When I was assigned to read the book for my English IV Honors class, I could not finish the book; the whaling aspects and the symbolism embedded in the text were tedious to read, largely because my mind was not receptive enough (or perhaps not ready enough, since I was, after all, only seventeen when I first attempted to read the book) to ponder what Melville had created here.  For the next six years or so, I thought of the book (well, the few times that it was mentioned to me) as being one of the most wretched excuses for a novel to ever be read, until I had a conversation with a graduate history professor of mine about novels and symbolism.  He held up Moby Dick as being one of the best examples of American literature and after I expressed my disdain for the book, he urged me to give it a second chance, to read it not as a late 20th century reader would read a late 20th century novel, but rather to read it as I might approach a Paradise Lost.  I did and my opinion of the novel did a 180 after completing the novel when I was twenty-three.  Now that I'm thirty-six, I decided it was time to re-read it again, to see what else might be revealed, as after all, some things do improve with age and repeated trial.  This maxim certainly held true in regards to Moby Dick, as I savored this re-read, stretching it over weeks, reading only a few dozen chapters at a time and then pausing for several days before recommencing.


"Call me Ishmael."  Ishmael, Hagar's outcast son, spared only by the mercy of God.  From that first sentence, Melville begins to build a story full of biblical allusions, both in the character names (Ahab, Gabriel) and in the themes of human desire, self-illusion, revenge, and the holiness of the leviathan.  Around these elements he adds Romantic elements, particularly in the scenes focusing on whaling and why men sign themselves up to be workers on ships such as the Pequod.  There is something innately dangerous about setting to sea in a wooden whaling ship, driven only by the power of the wind and the efforts of her crew.  For Melville's original readers, such ships were fading into the past, being replaced first by steam-driven ships and later by much larger, metal-hulled ships that greatly reduced the dangers of capsizing and drowning.  For us, we can scarce imagine the terrors and the awe-inspiring moments such as this one from Chapter 29:

Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.  The warmly cool, clear, ringing perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up - flaked up, with rose-water snow.  The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns!  For sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.  But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world.  Inward they turned upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.  And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.

Here, as in several other passages scattered throughout Moby Dick, Melville's prose is lush, perhaps too lush for modern sensibilities.  However, passages such as this seek to capture the bewitching wonders of sea, ice, and heavens in a fashion that impels engaged readers to stop, pause, and to reflect on natural beauties.  This is not to say that these natural wonders are safe or that our tendency to pause and behold them are always wise, but rather that such natural elements are just as vital to this roving, winding narrative as are the human characters that flit and flicker across this scenic backdrop to Melville's morality tale.

Melville's characters also play a huge role in this novel.  From the heathen harpooner Queequeg to the revenge-filled desire of Captain Ahab to Ishmael and other characters, both on the Pequod and her sister whaling ship, the Rachel, their motivations for fame, money, adventure, lust, and revenge war with the elements surrounding them.  Some of Melville's detractors have noted that often these characters disappear for long stretches, that their intriguing tales lose their potency due to Melville's tendency to mix in chapters on the sea and whaling with the "current events" aboard the Pequod.  To some extent, there is some truth to this, providing, of course, that Moby Dick ought to be read foremost as a story of the sailors' battle against the famed white sperm whale and the sea.   However, I believe such a reading would miss the key element here, that of what Moby Dick itself represents.

Throughout the narrative, Melville scatters short chapters on the whale as represented in myths from across the globe, from the biblical Leviathan to it being the first of Vishnu's incarnations to it being a terror that represents in concrete form the puny nature and limitations of human beings.  Moby Dick symbolizes not just our lusts and desires, but also the terrible majesty of the unknown and indomitable.  It truly is the leviathan that overwhelms us, revealing to us just how futile some of our aspirations are.  But it is much more than that.  It is awe-inspiring in a way that we today cannot feel as easily as perhaps some could perceive in previous centuries.  We are divorced from nature to an extent and nature's power, encapsulated in the form of Moby Dick, does not excite fear or desire in us as it once did.  Instead of a dangerous foil, Moby Dick's progeny are now viewed as helpless waifs, in danger of being wiped out by human avarice.  One cannot help but wonder what Melville would have made of this if he were alive today.

Perhaps it is this diminution of nature into something less wild, perhaps it is the loss of our awe and dread of nature and nature's beasts, or perhaps it is a reduction in faith in our our dreams that has weakened the power of this narrative.  While certainly the writing conventions have changed and this has impacted our view of how novels should be constructed, I find myself wistfully thinking that something has been lost in the translation of time and place.  There is a powerful story that moves me, but will it continue to move others as the years pass and we move further and further away from natural wonder and fear?

Andrzej Sapkowski, Baptism of Fire (Bautismo de fuego)

Entonces le dijo la profetisa al brujo: "Este consejo te doy: ponte botas de yerro, toma en la mano un bastón de yerro. Ve con tus botas de yerro hasta el fin del mundo y por el camino agita el bastón y riega todo con lágrimas. Ve a través de la agua y el fuego, no te detengas ni mires a tu alredor. Y cuando las almadreñas se te desgasten, cuando el bastón de yerro se deshaga, cuando el viento y el calor te sequen los ojos de tal forma que de ellos ni una lágrima acierte a escapar, entonces, en el fin del mundo, hallarás lo que buscas y lo que amas. Pudiera ser”.

Y el brujo cruzó la agua y el fuego, sin mirar a su alrededor. Pero no se puso botas de yerro ni tomó bastón. Sólo llevó su espada de brujo. No escuchó las palabras de la profetisa. Y bien que hizo, porque era una mala profetisa. (p.7)

Then the prophetess said to the Witcher:  "This counsel I give you:  put on boots of sin, take in hand a cane of sin.   See with your boots of sin until the end of the world and through the road the cane shakes and waters everything with tears.  See through the water and the fire, that you do not detain yourself nor look around you.  And when the clogs are worn away from you, when cane of sin is unmade, when the wind and the heat dry your eyes to such a form that from them not a happenstance tear escapes, then, at the end of the world, you will find what you look for and what you love. It could be.”

And the Witcher crossed the water and the fire, without looking around him.  But he did not put on boots of sin nor take a cane.  He only brought his Witcher's sword.  He didn't listen to the words of the prophetess.  And he did well, because she was a bad prophetess.

Andrzej Sapkowski's third novel (and fifth overall book) in the Witcher series, Baptism of Fire, perhaps is simultaneously the most bleak of the novels in this series and one that is full of those small moments that manage to redeem the despair and destruction that rages throughout its 256 pages.  Each of the main characters (Geralt, Yennefer, Ciri) endure their own "baptisms of fire" after each have been separated by the events at the end of the previous novel.  Ciri, transported within the southern realm of Nilfgaard, has fallen in with a group of rebels and killers known as the Rats.  Thinking that Geralt and Yennefer are dead at the hands of the coup that took place in the previous novel, she has resigned herself to a life of attacks and murders, a task she finds she enjoys all too well.  While Yennefer is preoccupied with quelling the mess caused by the sorcerous uprising, Geralt recovers in the woods of Brokilon from the wounds he suffered in the fighting at Thanedd Island.  There he encounters remnants of the Squirrels, as well as a sylvan guide and a doctor who is much more than what he appears to his patients.  It is in these crucibles that Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri discover some important answers to questions they had not even thought to pose to themselves before the Second Nilfgaarden War began.

Although the above paragraph perhaps gives more "spoilers" than I am usually inclined to give, it is necessary in this case to outline for English-language readers just what is transpiring in this multi-volume series that is slowly being translated into English.  Sapkowski in this series and especially here in the middle book of the five-novel series (and seven volume overall series set in the Witcher universe) takes great pains to reveal the consequences of death, destruction, and despite.  Due to the pride, arrogance, and machinations from multiple sides (there are no true "black" nor "white" characters here; each has their own good and bad qualities, similar to most any nations at war), cities are burning and whole populaces are being massacred to assuage the feelings of disgust and xenophobia between Men, Dwarves, and Elves.  Sapkowski reveals this mostly through his dialogues, which (at least in the Spanish translation; the English translation of the first two books left me feeling cold) contain a wealth of humor, sarcasm, concern, fear, and loathing all bound up in ways that are easily related to audiences of various languages.  

Sapkowski eschews simple characterizations.  Geralt, whom some might see as being a sort of Elric-like character with his white hair and wolfish nom-de-guerre, serves here (as well as elsewhere in the series) more as a facilitator of understanding and concord than he does as a violent solver of problems.  One highlight of this book (and in the entire series as a whole) is his interaction with Regis, whose very nature one might presume would induce the Witcher to slay him.  It is in their conversations on matters great and small where Sapkowski explores issues that might seem at first ancillary to readers but which later on in the series bears unexpected fruit.  Sapkowski is rarely heavy-handed in these discourses; their "naturalness" adds much to the Sword and Sorcery-style environs, creating an atmosphere that feels more "realistic" because the characters that do appear within are realistic, dynamic characters who have defined motives but yet aren't so rigidly constructed as to seem to be little more than pawns in the author's larger narrative game.

For those readers who enjoy quick, surprising plot developments, Baptism of Fire contains that as well.  Sapkowski covers battles and pogroms in the space of a few pages, while the consequences of these actions are often seen through the eyes of his protagonists.  Perhaps some might find themselves wanting to learn more about this battle or why this group decided to take a particular course of action over another, but for the most part, the scenes are fleshed out without feeling as though they were full of bloat.  The prose, at least in the Spanish translation done by José María Faraldo, flows at a quick clip, but yet never feels rushed or underdeveloped.  The characterizations, as I noted above, are developed primarily through interactions with other characters; there are relatively few internal monologues.  The overall effect is that of a fast-paced, meaningful sprint that covers a lot of narrative ground in a short amount of time.  Baptism of Fire is certainly a good middle volume in a secondary-world series that has become one of my all-time favorites to read. 

Andrzej Sapkowski, Time of Contempt (Tiempo del odio)

Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher novels have been a huge international success, with millions of copies sold in over a half-dozen translations.  In 2009, his third book (and first novel) set in the Witcher universe, Blood of the Elves, won the inaugural David Gemmell Award for Best Novel.  Despite the numerous delays for the next book to appear in English translation, the fourth volume (although only the third in English translation, as both Gollancz and Orbit inexplicably have declined to publish the second book, The Sword of Destiny, despite that collection containing the backstories of several important characters and events that are explored in greater depth in books 3-7), Time of Contempt (although Time of Hatred might be a slightly more accurate rendering of the original title; it is the literal translation of the Spanish translation, which I just finished re-reading) continues the narrative and character arcs introduced in the three previous volumes.

Time of Contempt picks up shortly after the events of Blood of Elves.  The Nilfgaard Empire has continued its invasion of the northern kingdoms.  Yennefer, the sorceress who is the Witcher Geralt of Rivera's soulmate, has decided to take Ciri, the heiress to the Kingdom of Cintra and the Child of Surprise, to the island of Thanedd, which houses three academies devoted to training adepts how to utilize their magical gifts.  Geralt, intimately linked to Ciri through bonds of destiny (established in "The Sword of Destiny" and "Something More", both found in The Sword of Destiny), has been slowly making his way through the same region when he learns that Yennefer and Ciri are nearby.  It is in this reunion, foreshadowed perhaps in "Something More," where one of the key scenes of the book transpires:

- Di algo.

- No me gustaría perderte, Yen.

- Pero si me tienes.

- Esta noche tendrá final.

No, pensó Geralt.  No quiero que sea así.  Estoy cansado.  Demasiado cansado para aceptar la perspectiva de finales que son principios, tras los que hay que comenzar otra vez de nuevo.  Yo quisiera...

- No hables. - Con un rápido movimiento, Yennefer le puso un dedo en los labios -.  No me digas lo que quieres ni lo que anhelas.  Porque podría ser que no fuera a poder cumplir tus deseos y eso me causaría daño.

- ¿Y qué es lo que tú anhelas, Yen?  ¿Con qué sueñas?

- Sólo con cosas que se pueden alcanzar.

- ¿Y conmigo?

- A ti ya te tengo.

Guardó silencio durante largo rato.  Y esperó al momento en que ella interrumpió el silencio.

- ¿Geralt?

- ¿Mmm?

-Hazme el amor, por favor. (p. 127)

"Say something."

"I wouldn't like to lose you, Yen."

"But if you have me."

"This night will be the last."

No, thought Geralt.  I don't want it to be so.  I am tired.  Too tired to accept the perception of ends that are beginnings, after which they have to begin again anew.  I wanted...

"Don't speak."  With a rapid movement, Yennefer placed a finger on his lips.  "Don't tell me what you want nor what you yearn for.  Because it could be that you aren't able to complete your wishes and that would cause me harm."

"And what is it that you yearn for, Yen?  Of what do you dream?"

"Only of things that can be obtained."

"And with me?"

"You I already have."

He kept silent for a long while.  And he awaited the moment in which she broke the silence.

"Geralt?"

"Mmm?"

"Make love to me, please."

For those readers who have read "Something More" (and for those who haven't, I translated the key passage in my earlier review), this reunion contains a poignant power because of how well Sapkowski set up Yennefer and Geralt's shared past.  Not only does it provide a thematic mirror to the earlier story collection, but it also serves as a counterpoint to the darker tone that develops throughout this volume.  As Yennefer, Ciri, and Geralt are (temporarily) reunited, the kingdoms around them collapse.  The nefarious mastermind whom the assassin Rience served in Blood of Elves is revealed and from there, at roughly the halfway point of this 272 page novel, the novel explodes into a maelstrom of action as the Nilfgaardians advance; the elvish Squirrels, the dwarves, the gnomes, and refugee humans continue to distrust and poach the weak and unwary among the others; and Ciri discovers some of the elements of her terrible power, leading to a series of surprising events that conclude this volume.

Those readers who disliked the dialogue-heavy scenes in Blood of Elves probably will not find this book to their liking.  However, for those who want to read an imaginative and character-driven Sword and Sorcery-influenced novel, then Time of Contempt will be a pleasing read.  Sapkowski explores not just the external scenic trappings, but he delves into the complex "ecological" relationships between living beings and their surroundings.  He touches upon the traumas inflicted upon individuals, families, and nations in the name of "glorious" warfare.  The "time of contempt" (I much prefer "time of hatred," as that term contains more the sense of active antipathy than does mere contempt, but since the English translation likely will be entitled Time of Contempt, I'll reluctantly employ that phrase here) are seen throughout this novel, as betrayals pile up on top of previously-buried misgivings and distrust.  It adds up to a novel that contains a depth that might not be suspected at first.   Sapkowski's ability to mix in myth (both Eastern European and Anglo-French alike) creates a narrative that moves quickly but without sacrificing the keen wit and pathos that has been a hallmark of Sapkowski's earlier Witcher stories.  If Time of Contempt were definitely being released shortly, I would recommend strongly that readers rush and pick it up.  As it stands, the publishing delays mentioned at the beginning of this review are all the more frustrating because it feels that a great narrative arc is being denied English-language monolinguals.