Raymond E. Feist, ‘Magician’ (1982)

 

Raymond Feist’s Magician (1982) was the first title in what has become the ‘Riftwar’ series: presently some thirty novels, with, presumably, more to come. This is another one of those late-century Fantasy novels that began life as Dungeons-and-Dragons-style gameplay. The major premise of this series is that two worlds, a D&D-like medieval European-y realm called ‘Midkemia’, and a quasi-oriental world called ‘Kelewan’ (influenced by M. A. R. Barker's role-playing game Empire of the Petal Throne 1975) collide with one another. While studying at the University of California San Diego, Feist and his friends would play their own D&D-style game set in Midkemia. In the years after his graduation Feist wrote-up the lengthy—800+ page—Magician, set in this place. Its success led to everything else.

We start with a conventional Fantasy storyline: a boy from a humble background (one ‘Pug’) goes on a series of adventures as he grows in importance, eventually achieving eminence: in this case, as the titular magician. We might call this a Bildungsroman, except Bildungsroman traces the evolution of character, and it would overdignify Pug to describe him as a study in character. He’s a type, as all Feist’s figures are, and subject neither to growth nor psychological depth.

Midkemia is Tolkienia by another name, and indeed is Tolkienissima: a medievalised land of kings and wizards, of trolls and dragons, elves and dwarfs. Feist transfers across JRRT’s worldbuilding and character types (who is this elf-friend and haunter of the wilderness? ‘Large-shouldered, tall, and solidly built. He had dark hair and beard and the raw, weather-beaten appearance of one who spends most of his time outdoors’ [7] … Strider? Is that you?) also, unfortunately, passing across some racialised stereotyping, as with this Jew, sorry, dwarf: ‘a short figure, no more than five feet tall … heavy brows of brown-red hair came together at a point above a large hooked nose’ [151]. Such alterations as Feist makes to his source material have the flubby energy of a poker-player’s tell: not giant spiders, but giant ants; not Gondor but ‘Krondor’, not Thorin dwarf-lord but ‘Tholin’. And so on.

No sooner has Pug’s story gotten underway than strange warriors wash up on the shore, first a mystery to be investigated, then a series of battles to be fought, and ultimately a world-wide war. It transpires that a portal, the series-titular ‘rift’, has been opened between medieval Europe and medieval Japan—that is, between Midkemia and Kelewan—such that warriors from the latter place have invaded the former. The rest of the novel, and indeed the series, details the development of this war and its eventual resolution. To his credit, this set-up mostly avoids the flattening moral binarism of classic Fantasy’s ‘good versus evil’. Kelewan—a realm without horses or advanced metallurgy, a strongly hierarchical, warrior culture where twenty gods are worshipped—is not ‘evil’, any more than Midkemia is ‘good’. This is a novel ‘about’ culture clash, about east meeting west; and it is worth nothing that with Feist (born in the 1940s) we are only a generation away from American writers penning hysterically racist fantasias about the ‘yellow peril’ in which the Far East is a bestialised and demonic threat to all that is good and decent. Magician is, happily, nothing like this. Then again, later novels in the Riftwar sequence revert to the familiar moral bivalve, with our heroes battling various ‘evil’ forces, including a near-immortal wizard called Macros the Black, a Genghis-Khan-esque mass-murdering warlord called Murmandamus and a gigantic magic power known as ‘The Enemy’. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

On the plus side: Magician’s story, as narrative, in terms of things happening, and small things building to bigger things, is well-paced and readable. On the negative side the whole is cripplingly derivative, imaginatively limited, thinly characterised and poorly written. To say so is not to deny the very great commercial success the book enjoyed in the 1980s, though it is, perhaps, to perpend the relative paucity of post-Tolkien material then being offered for sale.

Stylistically Feist is not skilled. Insofar as he has ambitions beyond the writing of merely utility prose, he lacks the powers euphony or vividness. The first description of Pug, in Magician, absolutely drowns in sibilance: ‘the sun sent sparkles through the sea spray swirling around him [and] his sun-streaked brown hair … Pug set his sack down, making sure it was securely tied, then squatted on the sand’ [Magician, 3]. How could a writer write such a sentence and not tone it down, even a little, in revision? Kick a few of those geese out of the boat?

Feist begins every chapter with a short (usually three- or four-word) sentence, set portentously apart as a paragraph on its own: subject + verb + object, sometimes just subject + verb,: ‘the ship sailed into the harbour’: ‘The storm had broken’; ‘The breeze was cool’; ‘Pug was restless’; ‘The Inn was crowded’; ‘The troops stood silently’, ‘The priest struck the gong’ and so on. It’s a gimmick, and, over-prolonged, it starts to seem like a nervous tic. He thinks the way to introduce a character is to describe a handful of physical features, much as a dungeon master might thumbnail Mr or Mrs Cardboard-Invented, to enable players to visualise them in the simplest terms whilst the gameplay, the really important part, proceeds. Here’s a blacksmith: ‘the stocky figure of Gardell the smith, a barrel-chested man, with little hair and a thick black beard. His arms were grimy with smoke’ [103]. Here is a wizard: ‘with high forehead and deep-set black eyes. His beard was black as night. He wore a brown robe of simple material. In his left hand he held a sturdy oak staff.’

“Are you a magician?”
The traveler stroked his long black beard. “Some have thought me one.” [198]

Here’s the Elf Queen: ‘beautiful … her eyes were large and a pale blue; her face was finely chiseled, with high cheekbones and a strong but not masculine jaw’ [89]. Without that qualifier—but not masculine! heaven forfend you think there was anything masculine here! —this is commonplace stuff; its addition betrays a depressingly hidebound imagination.

‘With his light brown hair and blue eyes, Roland stood tall for his age’ [25]

And without his hair and eyes he was, what? A midget?

A shout of incredible joy went up. [617]

What is it about this joy that provoked incredulity? Who doesn’t believe the joy—the shouters? The author? But it’s his story!

A fondness for archaisms, gestures towards the medieval-ness of Midkema, spreads stiffness and gawkiness through the prose: people are ‘garbed’ rather than dressed (‘a man garbed in brown leather’) and ‘don’ clothing rather than wear it. One magician describes another as ‘a most puissant artificer of magic’ [10], which may or may not be a typo for pissant. There’s a quantity of thee-ing and thou-ing (‘“Thou mayest take whatever else here pleaseth thee, … Take whatever else pleaseth thee, also, for thy heart is good.”’ [179]) and, however much the reader might wish they wouldn’t, characters insist on saying ‘hearken to me!’ and ‘ease your doubts!’ and ‘let us cast off and go a-roving!’

At the same time, Feist’s ‘medieval’ world is supplied with a wealth of anachronistic, or cod-anachronistic, details: there’s much silk and many potatoes (‘Pug’s plate … was fully laden with hot lamb, greens, and potatoes’ [43] ‘[his] tunic was a bright yellow affair of the costliest silk, and the hose were a soft pastel blue’ [58]—though pastel is an art medium that didn't come to actual Europe until the 18th century). Chocolate and coffee are not words Chaucer would have recognised (‘his skin was dark like unclouded choca or coffee’ [507]) any more than he would have understood ‘orange’ (‘his black-and-orange-striped armor sparkled as he dismounted from his dragon’ [388]), a colour the medieval English called ‘saffron’, and which doesn’t properly enter the vocabulary until the 17th-century. Ships’ decks have metal rails, people eat puff-pastry, folk play not medieval village-to-village football but an 1880s English FA-rules version (though with open barrels for goals rather than nets). Every window has glass in it and halls are adorned with gigantic chandeliers. ‘Arutha crossed over to large glass doors and peered through them. “I can see Father and the King sitting on the royal balcony”’ [224]. Sliding glass doors, we assume, double-glazed? Feist has said in interview: ‘I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.’ In that case, maybe work a little harder to get the ‘history’ closer to an approximation of right?

You might object that this is so much pedantry on my part. I might concede the point. But I might also suggest that it bespeaks a novel uninterested in the medieval life it purports to address. It’s all set-dressing and cosplay, framing an otherwise modern world: a place of guilt rather than shame, of individuality rather than community, bourgeois values rather than feudal ones. Characters say ‘it is considered axiomatic’ [82] and ‘right you are!’ [86]. Magic is used to achieve effects for which we nowadays rely on Persil:

Blood splattered the white tabard, then flowed off, leaving it spotless. [538]

There are sentences here that seem to have dropped out of a Guy Ritchie screenplay:

Trevor Hull looked to Jimmy the Hand, who answered with a grin. [487]

Is there a more 1950s name than Trevor? In fact, Jimmy the Hand is a main character. Indeed, later in the series he gets a whole novel devoted to his loveable roguery: a book that fills-in his backstory (story-wise it fits, we are told, between the sequel to Magician, Silverthorn [1985] and the third-book published A Darkness at Sethanon [1986]). Just as Jimmy steals various items in the city of Krondor, before his larger destiny as part of the ‘Riftwar’ takes over (he ends up a Duke) so Feist takes not only details from Leiber’s Lankhmar and Tolkien’s legendarium, but whole phrases from other sources: ‘crazy like a fox, Jimmy thought, motionless, as implications ran through his mind. Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan’ [Jimmy the Hand (2003), 39]—John F Kennedy’s words, lifted from his famous 1961 speech, the serial numbers filed off and sold-on to the readers of this book.

The magicians in this world are all male. Indeed, in a later book characters travel back in time through the multiverse to the Big Bang itself, and on every imaginable world magicians are male. The same can be said for almost all figures in authority in both Midkemia and Kelewan. A patriarchal social and sexual logic generally obtains. Here, a character called Keili, renamed ‘Talon’ for reasons to do with a magic prophesy, is distressed that the beautiful Lela is ready to have sex with him but not to marry him.

Talon looked as if his world was falling in on him. “Is she … what is that word?” “What word?” “A woman who lies with men for money.” “A whore,” supplied Caleb. “No, my young friend, she is not. … she’s from a land where people don’t think twice about lying with one another for amusement.” Talon felt an empty pit form in his stomach. “It’s not right,” he muttered. [Talon of the Silver Hawk (2002), 85-86].

M.N.H. Claessens has crunched the numbers on the balance of male and female characters in eight novels across the first 25 years of The Riftwar Cycle, noting that male characters outnumber female five-to-one: ‘at best, female characters form 30% of the cast, with equivalent dialogue. Furthermore, female characters are often marginalised, put in traditional roles or are victims of sexism’ [Claessens, ‘The Presence and Role of Female Characters in Raymond E. Feist’s The Riftwar Cycle’ (University of Utrecht, 2018), 2]. Claessens also quotes Feist’s offhand response, in 2000, to criticism of the lack of female magicians in his Fantasyworld: ‘it's a male domination thing, certainly. We never explored the historical reasons behind it, just set it in place as a social norm.’ Rarely has the embedded nature of structural sexism been so laconically expressed.

But the greatest weakness in Feist’s writing is how pinched is its moral imagination. At the heart of his dramatic vision there is nothing but insipidity and platitude. ‘Magnus fell silent for a moment, then he said: “the ways of the heart are complex.” He looked out at the ocean again. “The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings”’ [Feist, Talon of the Silver Hawk, 152]; “Life has shown me all too often it’s a fragile gift. Remember, no one gets out of life alive” [Feist, Rage of a Demon King (1997), 131]. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” “You buy cheap you buy twice.” “The open hand has the strongest grip.” “Never parachute into an area you’ve just bombed.” And in fact, adverting, as of course I am here doing, to (one of my single favourite scenes in all TV, this) the moment when Rev met Aslan-in-a-tracksuit, reminds me of another lack in these novels: their po-faced lack of any sense of humour, the absence therein of irony and therefore of eloquence in his vision of how the world goes.

There are, as I said, thirty-or-more Riftwar novels. I have not read all of them. Those unread titles might be Tolstoy for all I know. Back in the 1990s I did read the ‘Empire Trilogy’, set in Kelewan/Fantasy-Japan: Daughter of the Empire (1987), Servant of the Empire (1990), Mistress of the Empire (1992). All three books were co-written with Janny Wurts, and my memory is that they were less male-centric and better written (Wurts is no Nabokov, but she is a more skilled writer than Feist, I’d say, so this perhaps won’t surprise us). Though, again, my memory for all three books is hazy. Maybe I should revisit them.