The excitedly-named but short-lived 'Vol 2 Week' comes to an end at Sibfric, with a brief notice of the second volume in Hurley's Bel Dame Apochrypha trilogy. It's a 2011 title, and old news for true Hurley fans ('Hurphiles'?). Still, better late than never. This novel, then, carries the story of Nyx, warrior-assassin for the matriarchal 'Bel Dame' Guild, past the end of the war that characterised volume one of the sequence, God's War. I reviewed that novel here, if you're interested. Barebones summary: Nyx is now too-old-for-this-shit, no longer a Bel Dame and working as a bodyguard for a diplomat's child. In an opening scene that reminded me, somewhat, of Tony Scott's Man on Fire (with Nyx in the Denzel role), she is ambushed whilst escorting her charge. Ah but the twist is: it seems the Bel Dames themselves have put a hit out against her, rather than the kid she was guarding. Throw in a wasting disease slowly killing our hero, lots of juicily repellent Bug-tech, and an incident-ful narrative more cannily paced than God's War, and the result is a very readable book. Hurley's descriptive chops are better in this instalment too, I thought. The whole is better crafted without losing its visceral, tearing-off-heads shock and vigour.
Downside: the narrative barrels the reader through so effectively that the post-reading experience involves reflecting back in a way that starts to notice a general thinness, literally for Nyx, figuratively for the book as a whole. Of course it is marking time until the end of the trilogy; but it doesn't move us very far forward. And the villains and their evil schemes are underdeveloped, in part because the focus is so largely on Nyx and friends. There's also a degree of individual mismatch, unavoidable in the case of books and (some of) their readers, and which will certainly not bother most. In this case it has to do with the conceptualisation of war. Hurley is unflinching in showing the horrible, sickening and bloody mess war entails; and her baseline assumptions are the post-world-war-1 consensus that battlefields are arenas of savagery shaped by the hypocrisy of leaders and the pitiable plight of the front line soldiers (“We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying," Nyx said. "Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”) Not being a warmaker myself, and shaped as I am by the predominantly anti-war aesthetic of 20th-century literature, I don't exactly disagree with this; although it's enough of a consensus now (cf also: Grimdark) as to risk becoming deadening. And it opens up upon some dangerous side-alleys, not the least of which is the general contempt for 'politicians', a word treated as a synonym for 'corrupt leeches', as against honest salt-of-the-earth street brawlers and criminals (“I'm a bloodletter, not a politician," Nyx said. "I just take off heads”), which was exactly the attitude that softened the ground for the sowing of Fascism in the 1930s.
That's not my problem, though. Not really. Hurley is scrupulous in showing how much Nyx's career as a fighter has harmed her, ground her down, wrecked her body (even in a world where new body parts are easily purchased), deadened her soul. But it seems to me that the harm war does to soldiers is not the most interesting or important story to tell about war. More to the point is the harm war does to people who aren't soldiers. Both God's War and Infidel are about unaccommodated woman, the life solus, the costs and exhilarations of fighting and surviving. But that's easy. What's hard is not surviving yourself, but keeping other people alive. My own personal prejudices predispose me to think the most interesting stories are about people who raise kids in a warzone. The opening scene of Infidel made me wonder if this novel was going to address this; but it doesn't. Ah well. The thing about Achilles is that he doesn't have kids. In one sense, better than the whole of the Iliad is the scene in The Magnificent Seven where Charles Bronson spanks the Mexican kids for despising their parents. The point of that scene is: being a parent is much harder, and requires a different, more complete form of bravery, than being a gunslinger. It's the same logic that says: the Dad in McCarthy's The Road is a finer warrior than Han Solo.
I hate to extend this, really quite simple point further, but I need to clarify. One of the great strengths of this novel, and its predecessor, is the way it challenges the calcified attitudes to gender and the 'proper' role of women in society. So I need to stress I'm not talking here about anything procrusteanly woman-ish. I'm well aware of the deep-rooted bias in society (one that Hurley tackles head on) that women are 'naturally' nurturing and men are 'naturally' belligerent. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. My point is not that I wanted to read a story about Nyx caring for a child (blimey: can you imagine how that would even go?). Women are not to be defined by their capacity for caring for children. But human beings are to be defined by their capacity for caring for one another. Nyx is a warrior, indomitable and self-reliant and marvellously lacking in self-pity; but there are other, more collective and less individualistic modes of making war, and they work better. There are better military strategies than violence, too, although they may be less immediately dramatic for story-telling purposes. Gandhi made deeper and more permanent inroads into the British Empire than Hitler, after all.
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[Note: to sink into mere pedantry, I know (of course) that Greek myth attributed a son to Achilles: the ferocious Neoptolemus. But there's nothing paternal, or parental, about Achilles in the Iliad. He has his self-reliance, and his superb fighting skill, and his glory, given extra sweetness by his foreknowledge of his tragic doom; he had his lover Patroclus, his slave-girl Briseis, and that's all he wants. That and killing people. He's Nyxish, or Nyx is Achillean. One of the two.]
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