Katherine Kurtz, ‘Deryni Rising’ (1970)

 

Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Rising (1970) was the first installment of what has since grown into a very lengthy series of linked trilogies of fantasy novels. The titular Deryni are a race, or caste, of humanoid warrior-sorcerers, possessed of various magical powers, who once ruled over the muggle human populations of Gwynedd—a version of early medieval England and Wales. Their power was overthrown centuries before, their people outcast and persecuted for many years, but as the series starts the Deryni are starting to re-emerge into human society again. 

I had not previously read any Deryni novels, but reading a little about them made them seem promising. Kari Spelling notes that Deryni Rising was the first book included in the Ballantine Modern Fantasy Series that was not a reprint from an earlier or dead author. Though ‘unequivocally fantasy’ it is, she says, ‘written more in the mode of the historical fiction of the time than its companion books on the Ballantine and other lists.’

It is closer to the complex and thoroughly researched novels of Dorothy Dunnett, Maurice Druon, and Zoe Oldenbourg than the fantasy that surrounded it …. Its treatment of magic too was dramatically different. This is a world of highly formal, ritual magic, without sorcerers, or demons, or exoticized and stereotypical “witchdoctors.” Magic requires training, careful and sometimes demanding preparation. It is never easy, or casual, and it is hard to come by … And it is set against a background of closely observed and detailed faith, which is closely intertwined with every aspect of her characters’ lives. [Kari Sperring, ‘Matrilines: The Woman Who Made Fantasy: Katherine Kurtz’, Strange Horizons (30 March 2015)]

Kurtz herself claimed that ‘in 1969, when I actually began writing Deryni Rising, the sub-genre of what I now refer to as historical fantasy did not exist. I was making it up as I went along, though at the time I thought that all fantasy had to have magical creatures, rhyming spells, and special languages.’

Reading this got my hopes up. Reading the actual novel, though, got those hopes right back down again to where they belong. It is possible that the later books in the sequence are more detailed and nuanced, more complex and rounded, but Deryni Rising is, well, not. It's a pulp melodrama with medieval trappings. The king of Gwynned, Brion Haldane, drinks poisoned wine whilst out hunting and dies. His teenaged son Kelson Haldane, inheriting the crown, must protect himself and his kingdom from the Deryni usurper who murdered his father. It' is easily readable, page-turny, and with some gestures towards things like court politics and the importance of church power. But there's nothing here of, say, Dunnett's richly woven complexities and textures.

Character are central-casting, stereotypes. Or, flatter than that: monotypes. The good characters are heroic in look and deed (‘dark, lean, with just a trace of grey beginning to show at his temples, he commanded instant respect by his mere presence in a room. When he spoke, whether with the crackle of authority or the lower tones of subtle persuasion, men listened and obeyed’). The wicked characters are decadent, devious, orientalised. If a man, feminised and semiticised. The main villain is the sorceress Lady Charissa, ‘the Shadowed Lady of the North’, attended by her dark-skinned ‘Moors’. This is how she first appears: ‘sat motionless on the pillow, a slender, pale figure shrouded in richest velvet and fur, delicate hands encased in jewelled doeskin gloves [her] blue eyes searched serenely across the clearing, noted with satisfaction the black-robed Yousef standing guard over the horses.’ Here is her accomplice, the cruel and wicked Ian Howell. Not that Ian Howell. This one:

Tall, slim, almost ascetic of face and feature, Lord Ian Howell viewed the world through a pair of eyes even deeper brown than his hair. A meticulously-tended beard and moustache framed a rather thin mouth, accentuated the high cheekbones, the slight cant of the round eyes—eyes which outshone the dark jewels that glittered coldly at his throat and ears. [17]

Howell, Howell, Howell, Howell! O, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack and so on.

Stylistically the novel is egregiously in hock to cliché. It’s not often one encounters the phrase ‘why oh why’ in the wild, used in earnest rather than as Private-Eye satirical ridicule (‘why oh why had he promised Jehana there would be venison for her table tonight?’ [3]). Characters ‘laugh mirthlessly’ and ‘toss their heads defiantly’, heroes move with ‘catlike tread’, eyes ‘sparkle’ and ‘flash angrily’, and sometimes leap clean out of skulls and go scuttling around.

His eyes darted briefly over the Moor who reached up for his horse’s bridle, then came casually to rest on the grey-shrouded form of the woman. [14]

Characters scheme and plot in an excessively obvious plotting-scheming manner:

“I must confess, I rather like your little plan, my pet,” Ian murmured. “The deviousness of your lovely mind never fails to intrigue me.” He glanced down at her thoughtfully through long, dark lashes. “Are you certain no one besides Morgan will suspect, though?” Charissa smiled complacently and leaned back against his chest. “You worry too much, Ian,” she cooed. “Brion will feel nothing until my hand clutches at his heart—and then it will be far too late”

People don’t fight, they ‘cross swords’. Nobles pour themselves glasses of wine out of ‘crystal decanters’ from tables ‘of burnished oak, claw-footed legs resting solidly on the polished marble floor.’ Libraries have secret doors (‘a portion of the wall recessed to reveal a dark stairwell descending’). Deryni magic is an early video-film special-effect: ‘long sparks of golden light streamed from her fingertips’; ‘blue and red auras met, a sparkling violet interface crackled brightly in the darkness’.

Morgan whirled defensively on his haunches. [189]

That’s a neat trick! Not easy to do.

As he headed slowly for the door, watching her every flicker of an eyelash, every rustle of her gown, she smiled languidly. [131]

Can one watch a rustle? (‘a soft crackling sound similar to the movement of dry leaves’). Or perhaps we should say instead: eyesight sharp enough to capture such a thing would naturally make short work of a single flickering eyelash. So it all works out. On occasion the prose strains desperately for effect, bathetically-hilariously:

Brightness ... pain... swirling colors ... pain throbbing . . . a cool shiver of—what? . . . Pain subsiding... better now... cool weight in the hand ... Look! ... Colors ... swirling... faces: ... light, dark . . . light fading... faces... growing darker... spinning ... darkness ... Father! … [173]

The novel is not long, and the story not complicated. Though it should be obvious to any simpleton that Charissa is behind the poisoning of King Brion, the wrong person is suspected until the right person is. In the antepenultimate plot-turn, it seems Charissa has triumphed. Her champion Ian fights, single-combat, against Morgan, the king’s champion, and though cut down Ian manages to throw one last dagger, badly wounding Morgan. Charissa crows over him.

Charissa began to laugh. “Yes, who now is ruler of Gwynedd, my proud friend?” she taunted, as she strolled easily to where Ian still writhed on the floor. “I had thought you better trained than to turn your back on a wounded enemy.” 

As Kelson, Nigel, and other of Morgan’s friends gathered around the wounded general, Charissa glanced down at Ian and prodded him with her toe. When he gave a low moan, she stooped over to look him in the eye. “Well done, Ian,” she whispered. “What a pity you. won't be here to see the outcome of our little conspiracy.”

Ian grimaced with the pain, tried to protest. “Charissa, you promised! You said I would rule Corwyn that we would—Charissa, please—”

Charissa put her fingers across his lips. “Now, you know I detest pleading.”

… Charissa’s other hand moved in another spell. For a few seconds, Ian struggled to breathe, his hand clutching at her cloak in desperation. Then he relaxed, the life gone. Casually, Charissa stood up again. [246]

Of course there’s a final twist: Kelson, despite being a human and not Deryni, discovers he has within him Deryni powers, and blasts Charissa with a beam of scarlet magic: ‘the crimson at last engulfed her, she let out a long, agonized scream, edged with fury, which slowly faded as she grew smaller. Then she was gone.’ [267]. So much for her. Thereupon Kelson is crowned king, by a human crowner and also a sort of spectral Deryni crowner: ‘figure supported the crown above Kelson’s head—a tall, blond man garbed — in the shining golden raiment of the ancient High Deryni Lords … the shining stranger used the ancient Deryni formula, which bespoke quite a different destiny for the brave young King he crowned.’ [269]

Now it may be that Deryni-fans, the Deryniphiles, all those Deryni-girls (and Deryni-boys), the knights-who-say-Deryni, will tell me: I need to read on in the series. That it improves as it goes, gets less clumsy and gnashing. If so I will persevere. Should I?

Hannes Bok, ‘The Sorcerer's Ship’ (1942/1969)

Hannes Bok was the pseudonym (the moniker being, it seems, a variant of ‘Johannes Bach’, a favoured composer of the author) adopted by artist and writer Wayne Francis Woodard (1914-1964). Bok is known today for his fantasy-themed illustrations, many of which appeared in Weird Tales, and, amongst odd books on codes and astrology and whatnot, his writing of two short novels: The Sorcerer's Ship (first published in the magazine Unknown in 1942; reprinted as a Ballantine Adult Fantasy series paperback, 1969) and Beyond the Golden Stair (1948). To look at the first.

Gene Trevelli, a man from ‘our’ world, goes swimming off Coney Island and nearly drowns. He wakes to find himself floating on a ruined raft upon a strange ocean, rescued eventually by a ship that appears like ‘an old Venetian galley, two sails puffed and ablaze with colored lanterns’ [6]. He finds himself in a Fantasy realm, and is caught up in the battle between Koph and Nanich, two large island nations (the ocean is occupied only by them and ‘the uncharted isles in the far seas beyond’). The ship belongs to the beautiful Princess Siwara of Nanich, who is sailing upon a peace mission to Koph. But there is a traitor on board! Gene is immediately caught-up in the political machinations, whilst also developing a romance with the toothsome Siwara. The passage from mundanity to fantasy is explained away by Gene himself as an arbitrary Fortean happenstance (many people, we’re told, have ‘passed through a door which was a flaw in the elements which make the world … a man named Charles Fort compiled books of them’ [39]).

The ship, blown off course, odysseys through the uncharted islands, running upon a dead pyramid-city whose only inhabitant, an ancient fish-man creature, worships a mad god called Orcher, which deity obligingly makes himself known to the voyagers.

Orcher’s musical voice was enlivening, like a psychic wind which fanned the fires of life into a fiercer heat. Though it was tainted by nothing remotely resembling humanity, it was colored with passions, but passions no human could ever hope to know, so intense that at their faintest they would have blasted a mortal's body into atoms. And though the strange entity was only a great splash of light, Gene knew that it had eyes. [116]

At this encounter the tone of the book shifts, from a rather arch, rococo bookishness to a tenor of intensified violence. Koph has sent an armada to invade Nanich. Orcher decides to intervene, which he does by scattering destruction indiscriminately around, raining fire from the sky, summoning giants to crush the houses ‘like paper boxes’, and obliterating everything on both sides. His point, it seems, is at once to teach humanity the futility of war, and yet also somehow to taunt them into more fighting:

Orcher’s voice beat down on the captured city like a sledge of sound. “So you would make war, would you—you puny microbes! But can you do this? And this? And this? Then what good are your wars—what good can they accomplish? Some of you wanted power — what are your powers beside mine? Can you fight me? Will one of you — all of you — come forth to try it?” [196]

Then he vanishes leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Gene and Sirawa sail away to find refuge on an island somewhere. That's where the novel ends.

The romance between Gene and Sirawa is entirely without spark or believability, in part because the Princess is so entirely spindly and two-dimensional, more doll than woman, given equally to childish ingenuities and childish tantrums (‘she peered up at him, stamping a small foot in rage’ [54]). That Gene, a New York office worker without military training, suddenly finds himself a potent warrior with sword and bow in a Fantasy war is, of course, improbable; although that improbability is itself merely the index of the function of the novel as, precisely, wish-fulfillment. But that Sirawa is so cardboard, so unenticing and sexless, speaks to a more interesting disconnection of desire and reality. For all that this is a novel, in Paul Kincaid’s words, about how ‘a traveller from our world who finds himself in colourful, magic lands that are far more attractive than our own’ [Kincaid, ‘American fantasy 1820-1950’, in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, (CUP 2012), 46] the actual colour and magic here are all told rather than shown, enchantment declared rather than evoked (‘the air here—it seems different—as if charged with electricity’ [12]). The book is a two-tone composition, half a faded and exhausted gesture in the direction of an—enchanted, heroic, heteronormative—adventure, half a violent swamping of that very fantasy in apocalyptic destruction.

This, it seems to me, is what is most interesting about his odd little novel. It was not the actual ‘fantasy’ of bookish, hermetic, gay Wayne Francis Woodard to leave his comfortable New York apartment, festooned with his artwork and horoscopes and precious items, and range out into the hostile world as an oceangoing warrior who seduces a conventionally-categorised beautiful princess-woman female. And yet this is what he has written. ‘It has caused me the greatest trouble,’ Nietzsche said in The Gay Science, with a lesser flavouring of his complex irony than usual, ‘and still does always cause me the greatest trouble: to realise that what things are called is unspeakably more important than what they are.’ There’s a great truth in here, alas. The individual called ‘the man who makes America great again’ is unspeakably more important than the satsuma-coloured idiot-buffoon Ubu Roi who actually occupies the White House. History is what the winner call prior events, even though those prior events do not flatter or justify the winners. Performative statements such as the marriage service’s ‘I do’ and even the one-on-one’s ‘I love you’ name, but do not necessarily actualize, these realities. Bok knew he wanted the harmony and beauty, the enchantment and glory of Bach, but he cannot quite reconcile Bach with Book and ends-up truncated. Perhaps this is the real insight of this slight, spotty and yet strangely compelling book: that it dares to put into words not just that what we think we desire is not what we desire, but the more radical proposition: what we desire is not what we desire. The fantasy (as with ‘Fantasy’) is not what we crave, so much as we desire the catastrophic annihilation of what we have fantasized, which is to say, of fantasy itself.

I appreciate that this is a reading that depends upon finessing ‘Fantasy’ as a cultural mode (Narnia, Middle Earth, fairyland) with ‘fantasy’ as a psychological operant that numerates and denominates human desires more broadly. I don't expect you simply to accede to this: there are things we desire, and Fantasyland might be desirable to us, but these two qualia don't necessarily, of course, map precisely one upon the other. Nonetheless it seems to me ww miss the point of Fantasy as a genre if we pretend that it is not informed by prodigious psychological cathexis on behalf of the reader, or viewer, or fan of that Fantasy. And so far as that goes, it is worth noting that people don't Fans might claim that they love this or that Fantasy world because it aligns with their values, or desires: because it is suitably diverse in representational terms, or because it elaborates a satisfyingly complex and coherent worldbuilding and magic system, or simply (I would have said this, if you'd asked teenage me why I was so obsessed with Tolkien) because I really wanted to be there rather than here. Such responses are not being, although they are perhaps a touch unaware of the dynamic of desire itself. Hungarian poet and novelist Sándor Márai published Conversations in Bolzan in 1940 (it was not translated into English, by George Szirtes, until 2004). It's a novel in which Casanova confronts his own hyperbolic desires, under the rebuking logic of the Duke of Parma, who says:

You know very well that we do not love people for their virtues, indeed, there was a time when I believed that, in love, we prefer the oppressed, the problematic, the quarrelsome to the virtuous, but as I grew older I finally learned that it is neither people’s sins and faults nor their beauty, decency or virtue that makes us love them ... We simply have to accept the fact that we do not love people for their qualities; not because they are beautiful and, however strange it seems, not even because they are ugly, hunchbacked or poor; we love them simply because there is in the world a kind of purpose whose true working lies beyond our wit, which desires to articulate itself as much as an idea does.

And so here we are.      

Poul Anderson, ‘Three Hearts and Three Lions’ (1961)

Poul Anderson here reworks Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), although without the humour, and replacing Twain's satirical critique of the horrors of modern war with a reactionary valorisation of the heroic soldier and the Just War. Holger Carlsen a member of the Danish resistance fighting the German occupation of his country, tangles with strange Nazi technology in a battle at Elsinore (‘Hamlet’s home town’ the novel tells, in case we didn’t know) and finds himself transported to a parallel universe, a medievalised European realm. Carlsen must resume his combat on a more existentially prime level, as the forces of ‘Law’ battle the forces of ‘Chaos’—Anderson, who published the first short-story version of the novel in 1953, may claim precedence for establishing this as a concept of Fantasy, something Michael Moorcock, Sword and Sorcery more generally and especially ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and other RPGs wholeheartedly took on.

Kitted-up as a chivalric knight, and accompanied by the dwarf Hugi and Alianora, a swan maiden, Holger goes on a series of peripatetic adventures and quests, aiming at once at victory in the fantasy war, to win the heart of the beautiful Alionara and to find a way home to ‘our’ world. The amalgam of tough-guy adventure narrative and medievalised cod-archaisms, especially of dialogue, makes for a sometimes tonally dissonant blend, and the latter in particular is not beyond mere ridiculousness:

“‘Tis Alianora, the swan-may.” Beer gurgled down the dwarf’s throat. “Hither and yon she flits throughout the wood and e’en into the Middle World sometimes, and the dwellers tell her their gossip. For she’s a dear friend to us. Aaaaah!” [29]

The storytelling logic here is pastiche: the novel is perfectly upfront about recycling the Matter of France, Arthurian romance, Norse mythology, witchcraft—in this realm, with indiscriminate panache, all these myths and legends are ‘real’, as are the character of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Eventually Holger comes to understand the intertextual primacy of Twain's book as the original upon which his own adventures are merely a midrash, and is able, by ‘taking a crib’ from the book, ‘from literature—the Connecticut Yankee’ [150], to triumph. Whether the explicit embracing of this notion, of Fantasy as a palimpsest of jumbled-together prior Fantasy, remits the novel from the pitfalls of mere cliché is the question. We could say it’s playful, a game of spot-the-source (Mirkwood is mentioned, as are Wargs—though with madcap adulteration of the Tolkienian source: ‘“there in Mirkwood do the Pharisee lairds hunt griffin and manticore,” whispered Hugi’ [44]). Then again, we might say its plagiaristic, tired and tiresome. Hugi, meeting Holger for the first time (after expressing himself indistinctly in what Anderson perhaps believed was attractively flavoursome Scots dialect: “oh, Ay git aroon, Ay do, we-un bin a-drayvin’ a new shaft thisaboots”) announces: “Thar’s gold in them thar hills.” [25]. Is this funny? Lame? It's not just stylistic. The gender politics of the novel are clichéd in a more substantively malign manner:

Holger decided he had troubles enough without a hysterical female on his hands. He pulled her around, shook her, and said between his teeth, “I have nothing to do with this. Hear? Now will you come along like a grown human being, or must I drag you?” [75]

Alianora’s response? ‘She gulped, stared at him with wide wet eyes, and dropped her lashes. He noticed how long they were. “I'll come wi’ ye,” she said meekly.’ Those lashes are a major part of what perhaps we might call Alianora’s ‘characterisation’. They are what Holger first notices about her:

She approached shyly, fluttering long sooty lashes. Her only garment was a brief tunic, sleeveless and form-fitting, that seemed to be woven of white feathers; her bare feet were soundless in the grass. “Welcome,” she said, in her soft contralto. “Sir Knight, sith ye be a friend to my friend.” [30]

And so on, passim (“please,” purred Alianora. She waved her lashes at him’ [117]). The novel ends as she finally declares her feelings (“I love ye, Holger”), although this moment is swamped, rather, by the fact that this is the precise time Holger finally understands who he is—a version of what Moorcock would later call ‘The Eternal Champion’—and so rides off into the dawn, abandoning her:

Holger Danske, whom the old French chronicles know as Ogier le Danois, mounted into the saddle. And this was the prince of Denmark who in his cradle was given strength and luck and love by such of Faerie as wish men well. He it was who came to serve Carl the Great and rose to be among the finest of his knights, the defender of Christendie and mankind. He it was who smote Carahue of Mauretania in battle, and became his friend, and wandered far with him. He it was whom Morgan le Fay held dear; and when he grew old, she bore him to Avalon and gave him back his youth. There he dwelt until the paynim again menaced France, a hundred years later, and thence he sallied forth to conquer them anew. Then in the hour of his triumph he was carried away from mortal men. [178]

In an epilogue we learn that Holger is back in our world—sequels by Anderson and other writers detail his quest to return again to Alianora—and that he has converted to Catholicism. This final touch speaks, I suppose, to what Charles Taylor might call a ‘de-buffering’ of Holger’s sensibility: a return to the old religion and the enchanted world which it frames. I’m not convinced the novel, though it is lively, readable, full of incident—actually communicates this sense. There’s something pat, a strange combination of frantic and stale, about the texture. But that may just be my long, silky, waving lashes speaking.