Terry Brooks, Shannara 3: Shan Hard With A Vengeance (1985)

Wishsong of Shannara is the third Shannara I've read (this was the first, and this the second) and I think I'm finally getting a sense of what's going on here.  I mean: a sense of what the distinctive thing is that Brooks brings to the Tolkien-derivative table. It's this:

In the forests of Shady Vale the leaves had already begun to turn. Brin Ohmsford paused by the flowebeds that bordered the front walkway of her home, losing herself momentarily in the crimson foliage of the old maple that shaded the yard beyond. [1]

A full moon hung above the eastern horizon like a white beacon, and stars began to wink into view. The trail dipped downward into the sheltered hollow where the village proper sat ... the inn was busy this night, its broad double-doors flung open, the lights within falling over tables and a long bar crowded with travellers and village folk, laughing and joking and passing the cool autumn evening with a glass or two of ale. [9]

It's Thomas Kinkade. Which is to say: it's Thomas Kinkade avant la letter, since Brooks is writing in 1985. So what I really mean is -- it's one iteration of a much broader aesthetic of specifically American quasi-rural Kitsch.

This is interesting, I think, in the particular context of genre Fantasy. Celeste Olalquiaga traces the beginnings of ‘kitsch’ to the nineteenth century, linking it with (as she puts it) the way ‘industrialization transformed nature into an artificial kingdom of miniature scale’ [Celeste Olalquiaga, Artificial Kingdom: a Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (University of Michigan Press 1988), 7]. For Olalquiaga this aesthetic is ‘at once exhilarated and melancholic’; and although she doesn’t not specifically discuss Fantasy (or indeed SF) she might as well do. The desire to model the cosmos, to ‘reduce’ it to a more comfortable scale, as much as the proneness to a particular logic of visualisation, and the cosy-worship buried narrative of Dark versus Light, Christianized to a greater or lesser degree: these fingerprints are all over Fantasy. Fantasyland, like the materially real but equally fantastical Disneyland, is similar to the real world, but kitschier: smaller, more colourful, more conventionalised, safer and more manageable. For a certain kind of Fantasy novel, this is the whole point of the worldbuilding.

Perhaps I over-reach myself in trying to identify this as a distinctly American sort of kitsch, but the way religion works in these supernatural Good-versus-Evil yarns does seem to me differently encoded to the way Tolkien's old-school Gothic (in the strict sense) Catholicism operated in his art. Wishsong of Shannara is, like Tolkien, Christian in form without including specific religious content in its worldbuilding (its main through-line and climactic pay-off has to do with the pure and redemptive love between a brother and sister). It reminds me of the way Kinkade painted cottages, landscapes and Disney characters rather than (say) churches or chapels, yet always worked the Christian Ichthus fish-symbol and references to 'John 3:16' into his signature. It's tweeness as transcendence: hollow plastic blue-and-pink models of the Madonna with a light bulb inside; images of the face of Christ discovered in a potato crisp; angelic beings as simpering putti rather than terrifying figures out of Rainer Maria Rilke. Part of me wonders if this isn't the genuine religious salient today. Maybe this quality's own (inauthentic) campness is actually what guarantees its authenticity. This is because religion is not just about the Sublime; it is about the interaction between the Sublime and the ridiculous, between God and us. The fact that we are much more ridiculous than we are sublime beds-in a kitsch element at the heart of worship. When Eliot’s bird pointed out that humankind cannot bear very much reality, it meant divine reality; and the marker of that falling short—kitsch—is to be celebrated. You may be too sophisticated to be actually moved by Kinkade's cottage-scenes; that's fair enough. I expect none but the most refined and sophisticated readers to this blog, of course. The real question is: are you snotty enough to mock those who are so moved?

Part of the point of kitsch is that visual texture (pastel-y; illuminated; moonlit; shadowy) isn't primarily about the visual appearance of things so much as it is a way of connoting affect. This is why Brooks, not an actively incompetent writer, can pen a sentence of such prima facie ridiculousness as: 'His dark face was pale' [97]. 'He' is Allanon, our Gandalfalike, and he's described like that because he has just drained himself in some strenuous magical spellweaving or other. The sentence becomes less daft when we clock that 'dark' isn't really there to evoke dark skin, but rather to connote the exotic otherness with which magic in this novel is mildly racialised (see also: 'magic negro'. Our heroine, Brin, is likewise kitsch-orientalised, on account of her skills with the magical wishsong: 'dusky skin and black eyes ... soft delicate features'). And 'pale' here doesn't mean actually pale; it connotes an emotional state of being worn out in a good cause.

Still: not to get over-serious. I enjoyed reading Shannara 3, but not in a way that leads me to believe I'll be reading any more of these books any time soon. Not sure I need to. Shannara 3 is basically the same story as Shannara 2 and indeed as Shannara 1: an ancient evil has arisen that threatens the whole world; Allanon must persuade an initially reluctant scion of the Ohmsford clan to use Interchangeable Magic Item (in this vol: the titular 'wishsong' that Brin sings, which can change the natural world, or make people hallucinate spiders are crawling all over them, depending) to address this evil. The evil this time round is a Ring of Power analogue called 'The Ildatch', a malign book of evil which must be located and then destroyed. Since the main protagonist is called 'Brin' and possesses magic skills in singing I kept picturing this:

But actually she's supposed to look like this:

Cheer up, love! It may never happen.

So: Vol 1 was about the middle of the map. Vol 2 gave us a whole new map of the Westland; and this vol adds a new map of the Eastland. I'm racking my brains trying to work out what Brooks will do for vols 4 and 5.

The Ring of Power Ildatch is located past the terrible or-wait-is-it-a-typo? 'Wolfsktaag Mountains', beyond the sentient and malign 'Maelmord' marsh. So off Brin treks, on her requisite Cook's Tour. She travels to the sentient and malign lake known as the Grimpond to ask it for its knowledge ('"Tell me what I would know!" she sang. With frightening suddenness the Grimpond's words came pouring out as if released with the anguish that tore its forgotten soul ... "Spider Gnomes!" the shade cried desperately.' [344]). Then she has to pass through endless underground caverns called, of course, 'The Caves of Night', and then go back underground again through a complicated sewer network under Castle Graymark. Finally she reaches the evil book of ultimate evil which, with a slight touch of anti-climax, is described as being 'squarish' [455]. Really? 'Squarish'? There's a perfunctory battle against the temptation of the book during which Brin is saved by her brother turning up in the nick; and Shannara 3 ends with the destruction of the Ildatch. Brin turns it to dust, or perhaps to Ildust. Books eh? Burn them, I would. More trouble than they're worth.

Anyway: once the bad book is gone the whole malignant expanse of the Maelmord marsh simply vanishes away. Not sure how this latter thing happens, actually. But it means that Goodness is restored to the land. And by goodness I mean: Thomas Kinkadeness. 'Autumn had settled down across the land, and everywhere the colors of the season brightened and shone in the sunshine's warmth. It was a clear cool day in the Eastland forests where the Chard Rush tumbled down out of the Wolfsktaag' [489]. Ah. Not a typo, then.

SPIDER-GNOMES!!

Sorry. That just slipped out.