Peter Ackroyd, "The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein" (2008)

:1:
Adaptation, as (for instance) from book to film, entails both simplification and complication. There's an obvious and a less obvious aspect to this. To start with the obvious: a 90-minute movie must inevitably simplify a novel, even a short novel, like Frankenstein. If, in a film version, all of Mary Shelley’s characters were included, and all spoke exactly the words she puts into their mouths, if every scene-setting were lingered on so as to bring-out all the specific details she mentions ... why, then, the movie would not only be fifteen hours long, it would be a very strangely shaped and pitched piece of work indeed, clogged with intolerable longeurs, exposition-heavy and wrongfooting. As well as simplification (the process, in effect, of modelling the original text in miniature), film-makers must adjust for the two key salient differences in media: novels are verbal and strong on interiority, films are visual and strong on exteriority. If one wishes to convey to a movie audience (or, mutatis mutanda, to a theatre audience, a TV audience, a video-game audience) what is going on inside a character’s head your options are limited. A monologue or voice-over, that clunky and crudifying convention, is one possibility. It is, though, a bad one. Better is to work with what you have, the exteriorities, in order to utilise the beauty of inflections, and indeed of innuendoes, to imply what is happening inwardly. It turns out in practice, though, that only the greatest directors can pull this off with any panache. Otherwise we find ourselves mired in the sink of visual cliché, where we know the main character is sad because it is raining and know that s/he is happy because the clouds have parted with meteorological implausibility and the sun is now shining. Don’t get me wrong: movies are capable of extraordinary and beautiful effects. But they aren’t as good at capturing interiority as novels, which is one reason why I write novels and don’t make films. There are other reasons, not least the lamentable lack of big-money producers hammering at my door waving fistfuls of moolah, but: you know.

I am not, to be clear, suggesting there's anything second-hand, or second-rate, about adaptation. So far as that goes I remain persuaded by Linda Hutcheon’s argument in her and Siobhan O’Flynn’s influential Theory of Adaptation book, a study that refuses to accept that an adaptation is in any sense a belated or subaltern matter (and which indeed argues, à la Derrida/Post-Card, that the line of influence sometimes runs the other way). It is not that James Whales’ Frankenstein (1931) or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) are secondary to the, as it were, primary text of Mary Shelley’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Nor, Hutcheons argues, should we be distracted by the false criterion ‘fidelity’ when judging an adaptation. We should, rather, take every adaptation as valid on its own terms—for (she insists) the bald fact of intertextuality, quite as much as its uniquity, means that adaptation, in various ways, is what literature as a whole is.

Of course some adaptations are better than others, and setting adaptations alongside quote-unquote original texts can be a way of highlighting elements in both. Two aspects of Shelley’s original novel that are rarely or never carried-through into adaptations are: the Russian-doll narrative form (Walton’s outer narrative contains Frankenstein’s narrative which contains the Creature’s narrative) and her roman philosophe ambition—for her novel is actually a Rousseauian or Voltaire-ian experiment in prose, imagining how a Lockean ‘tablua rasa’ consciousness might fare in a world that judges on appearances rather than inner worth. We think of Frankenstein as a Gothic novel, but in many ways it’s an Englightenment conte like Candide (this is why Shelley sets her story in Switzerland, and afterwards in Edinburgh: those two great centres of Enlightenment thought). Her monster is not, whatever the adaptations say, stitched together from used body-parts—it's true that we’re told Frankenstein spends ‘days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses’, but that’s to examine corpses so as to deduce how the human body works, and more specifically ‘to examine the cause and progress of [postmortem] decay’ [ch. 4]. Shelley doesn’t tell us how, or from what raw materials, Frankenstein actually makes his golem, so that (she says) we are not tempted to imitate him. When Dr F. finally infuses the metaphorical ‘spark of life’ into his creation, it is during a scene which Shelley pitches as deliberately low-key, downbeat, anti-climactic:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Contrast this with the scene in Whale’s uber-influential movie: ‘that great manic scene,’ in Michael Wood’s words; ‘—operating table hoisted on pulleys through the open roof of the tower to face the night sky, wild storm raging outside, whizzing electrical effects inside, all kinds of mad inventor’s equipment everywhere looking as if it would suit a power station in Toytown—as operatic as can be imagined.’ Compare it again with the even more hysterically hyperactive and overblown equivalent scene in Kenneth Branagh's version.

Whale is staging the external correlatives for his inventor’s interior excitement, and in doing so he sets-up a quite different emphasis so far as his overarching story is concerned. For Whale has jettisoned Shelley’s conte philosophe premise wholesale. His monster’s consciousness is not a tabula rasa; Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant, sent to recover a Normal Brain to fit into the creature’s cranium, has instead returned with an Abnormal one. Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein so beautifully parodies this moment: ‘whose brain did you take?’ Gene Wilder's Frankenstein demands of his idiot assistant. ‘Abby somebody,’ Marty Feldman's Igor replies. ‘I’m pretty sure that was the name on the jar. Abby Normal.’ Not Tabby Rasa, at any rate.

The point is that Whale’s monster is a rebus for the outsider, the socially rejected, the defective, not a vehicle for Lockean thought-experiment. The formal alterations Whale makes reinforce this: he does away both with Walton’s framing narrative—all that north pole gubbins—and with the monster’s own narration, nested in the middle of the novel. Shelley’s monster is superbly eloquent and articulate; Whale’s monster a lumbering, grunting hulk. Branagh, although he sometimes gets credit for directing what Wikipedia calls ‘the most faithful film adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel’, follows Whale in both these strategies, and indeed doubles down upon them: Karloff’s monster is ‘simple’, but de Niro’s monster is a bad  man before his death and therefore a bad monster after his resurrection. And by jettisoning the central narrative Branagh similarly flattens Shelley’s complex web of interacting subjectivities. This reduces the frame narrative to something approaching fatuity: Aidan Quinn’s Walton starts the movie a tyrannical captain driving his crew on towards the pole at all costs; then the movie reverts to its main narrative, Frankenstein’s story before returning, briefly, to Walton at the end: he has ‘learned his lesson’ and tells the crew to set a course for home. It's thin fare, narratively, and doesn't justify the frame narrative's inclusion.

In fact Branagh’s is a much-too-frantic adaptation, in which neither actors nor camera can ever be allowed to rest but must constantly be hurtling forward or spinning around or swooping up and down. It also contains a lot of goo and gunk, lashings of blood and slime and amniotic fluid, Kristevan abject matter that illustrates something not particularly well brought-into-focus overall, something about childbirth (poor old Cheri Lunghi as Victor’s mum, dying in a bloodily rendered childbirth at the movie's beginning) and sex—the creature is animated not by lightning, but by a gigantic phallic tube pumping a mass of wriggling electric eels, like gigantic spermatozoa, into his chamber.

Whale’s adaptation is better because it is cleaner, both formally (there is real subtlety in Whale’s precise movements of the camera; a slow pan up or down here, a restrained dolly zoom there) and in terms of what is represented: Victor’s spacious castle, the unhurried pace, Karloff's superb make-up, so often copied because its so eloquently copyable. It is hardly original to note that Whale, a gay man who confronted the conventions of his time by sharing his house with his partner, here made a movie about queerness, about the way society refuses to accommodate gayness, and how awkward and ungainly and, well, monstrous this state of affairs renders gay experience. The knee-jerk hostility of the villagers metaphorises the moral panic queerness so often provokes, just as the scene in which the monster plays with and then kills the little girl Maria by throwing her in the lake, reads like a bold appropriation of homophobic slurs (‘won’t somebody think of the children?’ and so on).

What is Frankenstein, after all, but a story about how a man makes another man without going through the scare-quotes ‘natural’ process of female mediated pregnancy and birth? Whale’s monster captures how physical, how erotically embodied one’s sense of self can become: the monster’s hefty, masculine frame poking out of its too-small clothes: so very unmissably male, so physical, so somatically overdetermined. It's also a film that apprehends the queerness of what, talking of his own project, Whale called ‘the ritual’. Here’s Michael Wood again:

Karloff and Whale had an argument during the shooting about the way the creature was to kill the little girl he was innocently playing with. Karloff wanted to ‘pick her up gently and put her into the water exactly as he had done to the flowers’, but Whale wanted the girl to be thrown into the water, in what Karloff called ‘a brutal and deliberate act’. Whale insisted, and trying to explain to Karloff and the rest of the cast, now committed to a view of the monster as an ugly, lovable innocent, said: ‘You see, it’s all part of the ritual.’ The ritual, I take it, involved the violence of the creature’s innocence, and horror in this sense would be closer to tragedy than we like to think, or would be tragedy as grand guignol, provoking pity and fear in unmeasured proportions.

According to Wood ‘the creature is dangerous and bewildered: we can’t really give him our sympathy or refuse it to him – well, we can sentimentalise him, but only if we refuse to pay attention to the ritual.’

The important thing, in the movie, is that we can’t regret his creation, and not only because there would be no movie without him. We can’t feel it was wrong to create him, and the whole question of the creator’s caring or not caring for his creature, so important in Mary Shelley, is entirely absent here. Frankenstein has made not an animated doll or puppet but an ungainly travesty of a man, a would-be person who suffers, beseeches, smiles, rages and murders. The creature can’t die, even when he is killed off, because we don’t know what to do with this life so curiously pitched between the human and the non-human, because he represents not only our fear of the unmanageable but also our addiction to it. The making of the creature is not a blasphemy or a desecration, as the story is supposed to say; it is what happens when you want the rough beast to slouch towards Bethlehem to be born.

We can’t, I suppose, call the movie a full-throated celebration of gayness, since the emphasis of the movie (in this respect, Whale is taking his cue from Shelley’s novel, I think) is on the hostility of the larger world to difference and the unusual; but it is a powerful and enduring movie because it has something to say, and says it. That’s not really true of Branagh’s film, I think.


:2:

Which brings me to Peter Ackroyd’s The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008), another adaptation of Shelley’s story made by a gay man. In this novel the action is moved from Switzerland to England. Frankenstein studies at Oxford and befriends Percy Shelley, the two of them discussing the possibilities of animating dead matter. After Percy is sent down for his atheism Frankenstein follows him to London, and Ackroyd gives us a clothier’s yard of atmospheric metropolitan gubbins, heavy on the dirt (‘these alleys were like some black shadow forever following its steps. We picked our way around the prone body of a woman in the last stages of intoxication, her legs were covered with her own filth’ [20]). Victor lurks in morgues:

One middle-aged man, thickset with a heavy jaw and a shaved head, appeared to have been burned … livid red bruising and swollen limbs … the face of an adjacent female was almost unrecognisable, looking like nothing so much as a bunch of bruised and overripe grapes: I could fathom no reason for the savage pulping of her visage, unless it were some frightful accident. The rest of her body was quite untouched, and it occurred to me that with a new head she might have been an object of lust. [71]

I tell you what, mate, with a new head even I might be an object of lust. Anyway: Frankenstein hears that his sister Elizabeth is ill with ‘consumption’ and returns to Switzerland just in time to be present at her deathbed. Provoked by his grief, he returns to England resolved to discover the secret of life, and establishes a lab at the outskirts of Oxford where he is supplied with dead bodies by ‘resurrectionists’. Whilst working, he is also hanging out with all the important Romantics: Coleridge, Byron and of course Shelley (‘Bysshe was eager to explain his schemes of future happiness … a little community in Wales dedicated to the principles of equality and justice [and] an epic poem on the subject of King Arthur’ [159]). Soon enough his experiments come to fruition.

In the course of these trials I noticed that, in the corpses of the younger specimens, the phallus became erect at the slightest excitation … my work on the phallus was at first confined to an examination of the three columns of erectile tissue, but then I advanced to an attempt at the measurement of the spermal fluid. By means of the firm pressure of my fingers I brought one body to a state of ejaculation, at which point there came a groan; but no spermatozoa appeared. There was no fluid, but there was instead a sprinkling of material with the appearance and consistency of dust .[163-4]

Ackroyd does not stint us the penile stuff:

I backed away, taking a few paces, and found myself against the wall of the workshop … he seemed to lose interest in me. He noticed his penis, still erect, and with a groan he began to stimulate himself in front of me. I looked on in absolute astonishment as he laboured to produce the seminal fluid. What monstrous issue might emerge from one who had died and had been reborn? His most devoted efforts were unavailing, however, and he turned to me with a curiously submissive or perhaps embarrassed look. [183]

Look away granny, it's Wankenstein! ‘Had he,’ Frankenstein-the-narrator wonders, ‘sinned like Adam in the Garden?’ recalling the famous verses in Genesis where the father of mankind mucks about with his enormous schwanzstucker. After this scene of *clears throat nervously* monsterbation Ackroyd's creature jumps in the river and zooms off: ‘he was able to swim at an extraordinary speed, and within a very few moments he was out of my sight.’ Michael-Phelpsenstein!

Frankenstein spends a week delirious with shock, going up to the Lake District to recuperate. But the monster follows him.

A small boat emerged from the other side … to my utter horror and amazement I realised who it was who stood in the boat … I could see the lurid yellow hair and the blank grey eyes. Now he held out his arms: his hands were covered in blood. [199]

Frankenstein scarpers, afterwards pondering what he had seen with the acuity and logical penetration of a Romantic-era Sherlock Holmes: ‘this visitation was evidence of some terrible event. I was sure of it. His bloody hands were the token of some crime perpetrated in vengeance.’ You think? At any rate, the monster kills Shelley’s wife Harriet, and later confronts Frankenstein in his lab (‘Are you my God? You were the first thing that I saw upon this earth. Is it any wonder that your form is more real to me than that of any other living creature?’ [227]). This is the occasion for a long, monsterly monologue: he learned to speak and read by eavesdropping on a labourer and his daughter sheltering in a barn; using Frankenstein’s notes he tracked down the sister he had loved before his death—she is Annie Keat, and he, we discover, was John Keat [sic]. But his reunion does not go well: ‘on seeing me she screamed out “my God! Out of the grave!” In a frenzy of fear she ran towards the bank of the river.’ [250]. She dies (‘of panic, or immersion, I did not know’).

The monster blames his creator. ‘I have read somewhere that suffering shares the nature of infinity’ he tells F., a reference to the lines from Wordsworth’s The Borderers: ‘suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,/And shares the nature of infinity’—which, since Wordsworth didn’t publish this play until 1842, is a quite remarkable prolepsis on the creature's part. ‘I am wrapped in anger,’ he assures Frankenstein, ‘and the contemplation of revenge!’ Rather than heed this warning, however, Frankenstein joins Shelley, Mary Shelley and others for a short holiday in a Thames-side villa near Marlow. Mary has nightmares and wakes screaming (‘I dreamed I saw a phantom by the window. It was a dream I am certain of it. There was a face’ [268]) but the party ignores all presentiments of ill. A local woman is murdered. The party return to London, hook up with Polidori and Byron, have a quick snack (‘William [the waiter] returned with the sandwiches. Bysshe fell upon them’ [328]) and resolve to visit the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, which Byron has rented for the season. Not, however, before another quick nibble: ‘William, without prompting, had brought over another plate of ham sandwiches. Bysshe attacked them.’ [330] The novel dallies on the shores of Lake Geneva for a couple of chapters:

“The servants tell me,” Byron said as we sat down to breakfast the following morning, “that a sea monster has been glimpsed in the lake.” [342]

Lake monster, surely? Or else, maybe, the Sea of Geneva? The Creature pops up to bug his creator (‘“Why are you here?” I asked of him. “Where else am I to come, if I seek for a companion?”’ [371]) and Frankenstein hurries back to London.

We're almost at the end of the novel now when, with hurried and ill-judged ta-dah!, Ackroyd pulls a twist ending out of his conjurer’s hat. It will come as a surprise, I suspect, to few readers: we discover that what the novel we've been reading is more Jekyll and Hyde than Frankenstein, and that, moreover, it’s all been in Frankie’s head. ‘Given to me by the patient, Victor Frankenstein, on Wednesday November 15th 1822,’ read the final words of the novel, ‘Signed by Frederick Newman, Superintendent of the Hoxton Mental Asylum for Incurables.’ There never was a monster; it was Victor killing all those people. The rapidity of this final turnaround is an extremely clumsy note on which to end, one notch up from “…and it was all a dream.’ The novels ends with that dull thud you experience when climbing stairs in the dark and reach the landing one step sooner than you think, so that your reaching foot slaps down hard. Is that it?

This twist ending is deflating because it forces us to reappraise everything we’ve just read. In part this is irksome because it boxes the reader into a series of more-or-less barren speculative forays (did he actually meet the Shelleys and Byron? Or was that also part of his hallucination? How did Shelley come to write her story about a character called Victor Frankenstein if she never met this Victor Frankenstein? Or is the idea supposed to be (as per that final date) that the narrator is actually called something quite other, but the balance of his mind has been disordered by reading Mary’s novel in 1818?) But it’s more irksome, I think, because it reverts the painstaking Whale-ian exteriorisation of the creature’s monstrosity so clunkingly back into interiority again. It sells the queer potential of the telling short.


:3:
Here’s the cover art to the last book Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published in her life, Touching Feeling Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003):

Sedgwick discusses it in her preface: the black and white photo was ‘the catalyst that impelled me to assemble the book in its present form’: the woman depicted, who is so awkwardly clutching that object, something like a gigantic pupa, or a wasps nest, made of sticks and twine, is the ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott, with one of her pieces, a mysterious core ‘hidden under many wrapped or darned layers of multicoloured yarn, cord, ribbon, rope and other fibre ... whose scale bears comparison to Scott’s own body’. Elaine Showalter comments: ‘on the most immediate visual level, the photo is used to represent the act of touching feeling, the effort to hold and explore and seek comfort from something wordless and precious. For those familiar with Sedgwick’s own life and career, there are other correspondences. Sedgwick has often written about her own sense of alienation, outsideness, otherness, queerness.’ To be gay and out is to summon a monster as alter ego to walk the streets with you, to sit beside you on the bus, to join you at the restaurant table, and not only in the sense that homophobes, and a homophobic society, see you as a hideous Boris Karloff to be hunted down with flaming brands. Monster, as generations of critics of Frankenstein have noted, means something shown, something demonstrated (see the monster in the middle of that word), something not just meaningful, but meaningfully ‘out’. In classical times if (say) your cow gave birth to a two-headed calf, the birth was a monster in the specific sense that the gods were trying to tell you something (compare the French montrer; consider the original meaning of the English word muster). The best modern monsters are doing the same thing: Godzilla, say, is a monster in the demotic sense, but is also trying to tell us something (about, I suppose, the dangers of nuclear testing). The Mummy is a monster in the hide-behind-the-sofa sense, but it's also trying to tell us something (about the violation of history and memory entailed by imperialism, or something along those lines).

I take Sedgwick's choice of cover-art to be a way of talking about the monstrous beauty entailed by accepting, by hugging-close, one's queerness; a point (if I don't stray too far from the echt Sedgwickian line) as true of straight as gay individuals. We're all perverse, to one degree or another. Sex, as a human connection, is monstrous in the montrer-sense as much as in the Othello-ian beast with two backs, weird-creature sense. Ackroyd's problem, in his Casebook, is not that he tackles the queer aspect of Frankenstein's story, but that he's so plonking about it, so foresquare: his creature both male-model gorgeous (‘he was the most beautiful corpse I had ever seen ... the body itself was muscular and firmly knit ... chest abdomen and thighs perfectly formed’ [179]) and a literal embodiment of the sterility of same-sex desire, wanking dust and lurking in the shadows. Shelley's Frankenstein agrees to make his creature a mate, and only changes his mind at the last moment because he is afraid such a couple would populate the world with a race of monsters to overwhelm humankind. Ackroyd's monster begs his Frankenstein for a mate, but Ackroyd's Frankenstein refuses immediately; instead the final act of the novel concerns a machine of unmaking the scientist constructs, one that dissolves bodies down to their bones and then dissolves the bones themselves (he tests this on a ‘barbary ape’ he buys ‘at great expense’ at London Docks). F. hopes to use this is eradicate his creature altogether, although when he finally persuades the monster inside it proves useless. Apes, symbolic of heterosexual desire, can be unmade; but not the monstrous embodiment of queer sexuality it seems.

Casebook is a novel about London: more Newgate novel than Gothic, and a long way from the rational clarity and Adorno-Horkheimer inhumainty of Shelley's Enlightenment inspiration. Its problem is that it can't hug its monster; that it sees only sterility and, in its lumpen final twist, evanescence and hallucination in its creature. A much less eloquent articulation of queerness than Whale's.

Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman (eds), "The Unicorn Anthology" (2019)

Unicorn vol., unicorn vol.,
Tales of the horse with the forehead-pole:
What's it like? It's not important
Unicorn vol.

Is it a horse, or is it a trope?
Is it just money for old rope?
Or does the rope get us instead?
Nobody knows, Unicorn vol.

Virginal lass, Virginal lass
Virginal lass lures unicorn horse
They have a fight, Virgin-girl wins
Virginal lass.

[Accordion solo]

Similar tales, similar tales
Lots of really quite samey tales
Most are OK, a couple are not
Similar tales:

They've got a horse with an ivory horn,
Narwhal horn and a dildo horn*
(Should you fancy some uniporn)
Slightly odd, unicorn tale.

Is't a success or is it a mess?
Does it feel totally worthless?
Who pitched the idea to the press?
Nobody knows, Unicorn vol.

Virginal lass, Virginal lass
Virginal lass lures unicorn horse
They have a fight, Virgin-girl wins
Virgin-lass.

-------
*‘“Anyhow,” she went on, “the ivory horn was carved into the shape of a penis by the king's most skilled artisans. The result was so revered it was even placed in Solomon's temple, alongside the Ark of the Covenant.” ... she was wearing [it], fitted into a leather harness strapped about her hips ...“I'm going to give you a gift, Nat. The most exquisite gift in all creation. You want to know what the unicorn does. Well, I'm not going to tell you. I'm going to show you.” ... She mounted me, and I didn't argue.’ [113-20]

Stephen Donaldson, "The War Within" (2019)

I read Lord Foul's Bane as a teen sometime at the end of the 70s, shortly (I suppose) after it came out. There wasn't much else back then for those of us whose sensibilities had been lit-up by Lord of the Rings and Earthsea: those of us all keen on Tolkien, those of us in Le Guin's le gang. A friend who'd read The Sword of Shannara (1977) assured me it was bad, so I didn't bother with that one (I've since made good the omission). Zelazny's Amber books had not, by the late 70s, penetrated into my suburban-parochial corner of SE England (though I did read Zelazny's Damnation Alley, for some reason) and I was too hidebound in my reading to explore older, pre-Tolkienian iterations of the Morris, Howard, Mirrlees or Fritz Leiber variety. A cultural wasteland it was, I'm telling you.

At any rate, hobbit-hungry me read the first three Covenant of Thomas Chronicle books, and, having done so, decided to give the follow-up trilogy a miss (although when I went to university my first-year flatmate was an enthusiast for all six books, and especially the big metaphysical ending of White Gold Wielder (1983), so I dipped back into them). Since then, Donaldson has written much and sold many copies, although over this period I found the temptation to follow him through his third Thomas Covenant quadrilogy (2004-13) easy to resist, and I was unenamoured of his five-volume Gap series (1991-96). Both series sold shedloads though, so evidently lots of people liked what he was doing.

The selling point of Lord Foul's Bane, back in the day, was the way it elaborated a charming, hippyish Tolkienian fantasy realm (called ‘The Land’) only to flag-up horriblenesses of a kind Tolkien would never countenance—for example, Thomas Covenant, leperous visitor from our world and the series protagonist, starts his sojourn in The Land by raping someone. It was the first intimation of what was to become Grimdark, I suppose, although it would presumably read as thin stuff to today's more committed and Sadean Grimdarkster.

The other notable thing about Donaldson was his prose, what David Langford somewhere calls his ‘knurred and argute vocabulary’, an attempt to elevate the idiom of Fantasy that crashes precipitously into the ceiling of the Ludicrous: ‘they were featureless and telic, like lambent gangrene. They looked horribly like children’ [White Gold Wielder] and the like. Nick Lowe invented his game of Clench Racing with Donaldson in mind:

The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word ‘go’ all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word ‘clench’. It's a fast, exciting game—sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out—and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.

As Langford noted at the time, Donaldson was still up to these old tricks in his Thomas Covenant farewell-tour series, Last Chronicles:

‘Infelice shed distress like damaged jewels’; ‘wreathed around her limbs, her bedizened garment resembled weeping woven of gemstones and recrimination’; ‘... as profound as orogeny’; ‘but it evaded him, illusive as a swarm of gnats’; a character's laughter is ‘like the barking of ghouls’; ‘he was merely a spectator, as oneiric as a figment’; ‘around Linden, the wan glitter of starlight lay like immanence on the friable crust’; ‘in hollows like denuded swales, cold and scalding as congealed fire, the flat wilderland ached towards its illimitable horizons.’ [all Against All Things Ending, 2010]

Now, though, Donaldson has stepped back from such gaudier excesses of style. Both volumes of his new Fantasy series, The Great God's War [Seventh Decimate (2017) and The War Within (2019)] are written in a markedly plainer prose, a gambit in which the advantage of not being actively fucking ridiculous must be balanced against the disadvantage of positive dullness. Swings, we might say, and roundabouts, although in this instance there are rather more roundabouts than swings.

The set-up here is a Generic Fantasyland where the kingdoms of Amika and Belleger have been at war for generations using sorcery—there are six ‘decimates’, or magical powers (shooting lightning, foment earthquakes etc) although in Vol 1 the Amikans discover a seventh, the power to render their enemy's sorcerers completely inert. This leaves Belleger on the brink of defeat, despite their newly-discovered technology of ‘gunpowder’, so a Bellegerian prince called Bifalt (‘Biff-olt’? ‘Bye-fall’? don't know) must undertake a perilous quest to find a magical library and so restore the balance of yaddayadda. The novel goes on too long, but it doesn't go on too long in the way The War Within too-longs its going-on-too-long. This second installment is set twenty years after the first, with Bifalt now king, married to a Queen from Amikan so as to unite the two realms and end the war, which alliance is essential since a New and Terrible Evil, more powerful than any yaddayadda, is prophesed to arrive from over the western sea. The anticipation of this direful eventuality is the book's main narrative hook and most tediously is its anticipation drawn-out. The novel is all anticipation, with one huge diversion into backstory, followed by more slabs of anticipation: a Cook's Tour of Bifalt's two-kingdom realm, many cardboard details of the preparation for the coming invasion, various crank-the-handle machinations at court and a healthy supply of yaddayadda.

The one interesting thing here, I thought, is the treatment of religion. Donaldson's conceit is that in the old days, when there was plenty of magic sloshing about, religion was a null category, not needed by the populace. Now that magic has been stifled for the larger good, and as the kingdom stockpiles guns and cannons against the coming assault from the West, religion has been, as it were, invented out of whole cloth to fill the void left by magic. It's a nice idea, although a novella-length one, and The War Within is 564 pages.

Otherwise what most struck me, reading this, was that SD has elected to replace his knurred and argute vocabulary not with good writing, but with a twofer that alternates the tiresomely repetitive and the plain bonkers. So far as the former is concerned, Donaldson seems to lack faith in his readers ability to take his point. Here, at the book's beginning, and over multiple pages, is how he informs us that Magister Sirjane Marrow in the beseiged Magic Library is anxious his defensive strategy will fail unless the caravan of Set Ungabwey arrives in the nick of time: ‘the wagons, that had left the Repository almost three weeks ago, were not in range of the Magister's senses’; ‘those wagons were the most essential conveyances in the caravan. If they did not come in time—’; ‘the caravan was Sirjane Marrow's latest gambit; only the most recent of his moves in the game he had played against ruin, but by no means the least crucial’; ‘the enemy was close. If Master Ungabwey had failed, the librarian's entire defensive strategy would fall apart’; ‘he had no idea what he would do if the caravan did not accomplish its purpose’; ‘the library's survival was his driving obsession’; ‘he already had too many piercing anxieties, and each of them felt like a fresh sting’. Got that?

The caravan arrives, of course. Tension-baiting this clumsy can only ever lead to anticlimax. This rat-tat repetition of key points over and over sounds throughout the whole lengthy narrative, like a prose-style deathwatch beetle. It's irritating, but at least its not mad:

Her face resembled poorly-kneaded pastry, with currants for eyes, a baked fig for a nose, and a mouth like a line of silvered almonds. [107]

Meswipeth left, sirrah. When Donaldson's prose-style pendulum swings to the opposite amplitude, it really swings.

Her mental jaw dropped at prince Bifalt's willingness to concede. [151]

Her mental jaw. Next to that, this passage of undiluted Spinal Tappage seems positively homely:

He was all in black. He wore a black cassock cinched with black rope, black sandals on his feet. His hair and his full beard were ebony. His eyebrows formed thick streaks of obsidian of his forehead. His eyes were so dark that they resembled pits leading into the heart of midnight. [112]

Black, black like the heart of a crow etc.

If lines marked his face, they were obscured by his short, blond beard. [264]

We may never know!

He tugged on his beard, trying to pull his expression into a more respectful shape.[322]

I have a beard myself and can vouch for the effectiveness of this yanking strategy upon the playdoh expressivity of my face.

He stared at Estie's mouth as if it horrified him. [95].

Not because it horrified him; as if it did.

The King seated himself and poured a small amount of grot into his mug before he gazed at his brother again. [419]

Surprising to see obscure brands of Czech beer being served in such a place, I'd say. Mostly, though, The War Within is a novel that treads water. The threat of the invasion is trailed right at the beginning, and by p.442 we're still at ‘the enemy was coming. That was certain now.’ Presumably the invaders will actually arrive in Book 3. To quote the man himself, ‘an interminable amount of time passed’ [183]. Indeed.

Justin Call, "Master of Sorrows" (2019)

It is ‘The Silent Gods: Book One’, it is. How many books of divine silence may we expect? Three? Seven? Seventy times seven? I don't know. I do know that story takes nearly 600 pages to barely get off the ground, so I'm assuming there are many-many more hush-hush-gods vols to come.

Our hero is Annev de Breth. He's there in the prologue as a newly delivered baby, born with only one hand (‘“The child,” Tosan said. “Sodar, he's a Son of Keos!” “He's what?” Sodar's heart thudded in horror’). Annev's mum is killed immediately, for the terrible sin of having given birth to a Son of Keos, but Annev himself survives. Then there's a chunk of cod-Silmarillioniana (‘on the thirty-first day of Thirdmonth, one hundred years after the death of Myahlai the Deceiver, the Gods and their children came together to celebrate the day Evil was cast out of Luquatra; yet Odar, the eldest of the Gods, objected deeming that mingling with the merrymaking of their children was ill-thought’ [15]; not the only thing here that's ill-thought, methinks, gadzooks). Then we're into the bulk of the story. Annev is now a kid at a kind of anti-Hogwarts, an Academy dedicated to the tracking-down and rooting-out of Magic, which is considered an Evil throughout Greater Luqura, or perhaps Jreacer Iuqura, it's hard to read the handwriting on the inevitable frontispiece map:

Physical handicaps are viewed with suspicion in Treajer Iuqura, and the afflicted banished or killed, but Annev has a special magic prosthetic hand, so nobody notices, at least until later-on in the story. A quantity of frankly blathery stuff occupies the next manyhundreds of pages, as Annev and his pals struggle with the strict training of the Academy on the way to graduating as ‘Avatars’ (‘Avatar?’ ‘No thanks, I'm trying to give them up’)—studying, learning how to fight, confronting bullies, slaying monsters and all the other familiar YA Potterstuff. They have ‘magic rods’ instead of wands and Annev has a fake-hand instead of a zigzag scar but the provenance is hard to miss: various elaborate tests and quests, like brought-to-life video games, old Sodar and his white beard overseeing things like a low-rent Dumbledore. About two thirds of the way through Annev learns the Terrible Truth of his Origins and Destiny, and the story lumbers through to its inconclusive conclusion, setting-up for Book Two. The twist is that the chosen one turns out to be the evil one, but I daresay that may change in future instalments.

It's a 150-page story told in 580-pages, but that's not unusual for the genre. Most of the text, by bulk, is dialogue, great scads of flavourless chatter within the friendship group at the heart of the adventure. Despite the fact that the story is often very violent, in a throwaway, heartless, quote-unquote ‘badass’ manner (one e.g. among many: Kenton—a kid, let's not forget—‘stabbed the guard's exposed neck, the man dropped to the ground, a fountain of blood pulsing from his neck’ [426]), the prose throughout is possessed by a spirit of terrible Blandness. There's nothing at any point stylistically arresting, or deftly expressed, or witty, or memorable, or beautiful. Instead there is a marching column of petty clichés, like a phalanx of ants crossing the jungle and devouring everything in its path: characters are forever glowering at one another, gritting their teeth, reeling in shock, waking with ‘a start’. They several times feel things (dread, for instance) ‘in the pit of their stomach’—does your stomach possess a ‘pit’? I appear to have been born without one, rather like Annev's natal lack of a hand. An older character has ‘a twinkle in his eye’ (the narrator explains that this twinkle ‘suggested he was pleased’ [361], which is good to know). ‘Therin ruffled the younger boy's mop of yellow hair’  [49]; ‘Annev's stomach lurched horribly’ [99]; ‘Sodar leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands’ [333] (he's not the only one: ‘the witwoman glided towards Duvarek, her hands steepled in front of her’ [69]). ‘The cylindrical block was about four inches in diameter and eight inches in length’ [294]. What was it the immortal Wordsworth wrote about his pond?

I've measured it from side to side
Tis six feet long and two feet wide.

‘The armies of Western Daroea had been camped on the river, holding the line against Keos for a hundred years’; and they might have held firmer for longer, had their nation not been given a name that so closely approaches the word diarrhea. ‘Titus's wide eyes had fallen on Annev's rounded stump’ [479]; pop those back in Titus's wide sockets, I would. ‘While he ate and changed his boots, Annev's mind churned’ [245]. If I were reduced to eating my boots I'm sure my mind would churn too. I could go on. What's that? You'd rather I didn't? Alrighty.

Like an attentive parent our narrator won't allow his/her nouns out-of-doors without accompanying and presumably prophylactic adjectives (‘he smoothed his blue robes, stepping inside the beige tent’ [2]; ‘the young woman stood beside her blonde friend, her dark auburn hair tied back; her eyes lingered on Fyn's handsome face’ [69]; ‘men in black and blue uniforms poured in, their short capes flapping’ [425]). Inexperienced writers think this makes their descriptions more vivid. Experienced writers know it has the opposite effect.

A black drape reached down to the floor, creating a faux wall of sorts, and Annev stopped behind it. [84]

I mean, it seems to me an author might write ‘a faux wall’, or might write ‘a wall of sorts’, but that it takes a peculiarly tone-deaf author to write ‘a faux wall of sorts’. I mean, if I were able to cast magic spells I might slip out a quiet one that froze the fingers of the writer who attempted to frame any sentence containing the word ‘atop’.

Sodar placed his manuscript atop the plates, raised his eyes to the congregation and began. [170]

How does that not trigger an autonomic ugh! in the writing? But wait; here is this book literally doubling down:

A low cackle came from atop the ridge and Annev turned to see the witch standing atop the knoll. [281]

I suppose this is all breaking a butterfly upon a wheel; or, rather, it's worse than that, a mode of prosaic elitism. Tactless, really. The briefest of online searches reveals that Masters of Sorrows has been garlanded by fans with a positive embarrassment of 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Fans love this kind of thing. They don't register bad, clichéd and flavourless prose as a problem. On the contrary, they prize it, since it offers no impediment to them getting at the stuff that really matters, the action, the characters and their sophomoric interactions, characterisation in which All The Feels and cod-intensities of tension and adventure-excitement combine with a none-too-healthy psychopathology of casualised violence. The book will, I'm sure, do very well. We'll surely be seeing a lot more of Annev de Breth: able to watch every Breth he takes, every move he makes, and so on, and so forth. Not me. Annev is annev. I remember, back in the day, when he was still alive and when I still listened to late-night Radio 1, John Peel finished one particular show in the small hours with the following sign-off: ‘I don't know why I bother.’

What Peel said.

Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" (1957)

I decided, on the principle that one should not condemn an enemy from a position of ignorance of their work, actually to read Ayn Rand’s sumo-size Objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). This I did.

Indeed, I found myself surprised by how readable the book was. I’ll confess that somewhere around page 300 the relentlessness of the novel’s combination of gnashing, effortful intensity of outrage and the sheer pressure of industrial-economic pseudo-detail was starting to wear me out. But I pushed through, and the last eight hundred pages just slid by. Which is to say, eventually they slid by. Which is to say, what with me drawing deep on my stubbornness reserves, and the fact that there was nothing much on the telly, eventually I read to the end.

Speaking of telly: the novel does elaborate a version of society not entirely unlike Dynasty: a few brilliant, beautiful members of the super-rich, a few powerful villains, and lots of spear-carriers. Dynasty, as I recall it to mind, was meretricious soap opera. Rand's novel raises the concept of meretricious soap opera to positively surfactant-Wagnerian levels. Der Roman des Mussolinibelungen. Had Dynasty possessed the courage of its convictions and spent a series tracing the decline of its America into a dystopian economic collapse brought about by the ressentiment and incompetence of the masses manipulated by evil politicians via spurious slogans of ‘social equality’, and thereafter televising the resurrection of a cleaner, better, grander enterprise society led by a few brilliant greedy plutocrats, then it might have very much resembled Atlas Shrugged.

TV-parallels aside, the novel is surprisingly redolent of a particular era of American science fiction the novel is. In tone it reminded me of Robert Heinlein—the long declarative sections in which characters debate the best way to get a misfiring country working again, the stress on engineering competence as the touchstone of human value, the vigorous simplification. There’s also something of Philip K Dick, in the first half at least, in the sense of a flattened, rather greying representation of social disintegration; although Dick was too canny to invest his hopes in the Wellsian utopian idealism of a society planned and run by geniuses in the way Rand does.

In obvious ways, of course, the book is science fiction. For instance it posits the creation of certain technological novums, as well as a superstrong variety of steel, a motor engine that draws its power from ‘static electricity in the air’ as it drives along; a weapon that destroys using only sound waves. More to the point, its worldbuilding is of the sub-Orwellian, or sub-sub-Orwellian, variety, where everywhere in the world has been swallowed by malign ‘people’s republics’ (the whole of Europe, for instance, is a place of mass slavery, death camps and wicked pseudo-Communist tyranny). America seems to be the last place in which Capitalism still operates, but it’s under threat at the beginning and succumbs about halfway through. Our main characters are: brilliant and beautiful Dagny Taggart, of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad (keeping the entire company operating through sheer force of her will and genius, and in the teeth of the company’s nominal director, her venal brother James); brilliant and handsome Hank Rearden, owner of Rearden Metal and inventor of the new sort of steel, trapped in a loveless marriage; and the handsome and brilliant Francisco D’Anconia. These three have a few loyal and worthwhile friends and deputies, but otherwise all the other characters manifest the physical ugliness of the self-evidently corrupt (“the pendulous face of Orren Boyle with the small slits of pig’s eyes. The doughy face of Mr Mowen with the eyes that scurried away from any speaker and any fact”, [560]).

For about two thirds of this 1100-page novel Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden undertake heroic struggles to keep their respective companies afloat in the face of the tide of public hostility, governmental tyranny and a race-to-the-bottom ideological idiocy. D’Anconia on the other hand, though posing as a skittish international playboy, is actually working for a hidden cabal of geniuses, organised by one John Galt. In the world at large the question with which the novel opens (“Who is John Galt?”) has become a meaningless slogan, uttered by people when they mean to say “who knows?” But John Galt is real. He has a plan to save the world.

The world he is trying to save is sketched by Rand via emblematic figures. For example, the Arts are represented by a wholly meretricious novelist called Balph Eubank who writes novels with titles like The Heart is a Milkman and The Vulture is Moulting. It might be considered, shall we say, brave of a writer who called her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged to crack wise at the expense of pretentious novel titles. But never mind that for the time being. There’s also an evil Relativist philosopher called Pritchett who preaches the fluidity of all meaning and the absence of absolute values, and who, in the rigorously pared down logic of the novel, has replaced the only other philosopher in the world – a virtuous quasi-Objectivist called Hugh Akston – in public affection and influence. Akston is working as a fry-chef in a café in the middle of nowhere, but he’s perfectly happy. Indeed, as the “looters and moochers” grasp more and more power into their greedy, incompetent hands, the people of real talent (almost all such people, according to Rand, are businessmen and factory owners) are silently vanishing, whither none know. Corrupt Washington politicians enact more and more oppressive legislation, until the country grinds to an absolute standstill. Then, when Rand has squeezed every last dribble of outrage from her polemical spleen, she reverses the movement; the novel ends as the disappeared geniuses and great wo/men return, poised to set the world to rights, and get their proper reward: healthy profits, lots of money, and a world fit for rugged individualists to build railways across.

Most of the novel is written in a declarative, rather grey prose, in which characters discuss various practical matters at length.

“All right Hank,” she said, “we’re going ahead with the new Rearden Metal bridge. This is the official order of the official owner of the John Galt line.”

He smiled, looking down at the drawings of the bridge spread in the light on his desk. “Have you had a chance to examine the scheme we submitted?”

“Yes. You don’t need my comments or compliments. The order says it.”

“Very well. Thank you. I’ll start rolling the metal.”

“Don’t you want to ask whether the John Galt Line is in a position to place orders or to function?”

“I don’t need to. Your coming here says it.”

She smiled. “True. It’s all set, Hank. I came to tell you that and to discuss the details of the bridge in person.”

… He was not looking at her; he was looking at a sheet of figures on his desk. “I’ve had my engineers prepare a breakdown of the cost of the bridge,” he said, “and an approximate schedule of the construction time required. That is what I wanted to discuss with you.” He extended the papers. She settled back to read them. [204]

There’s an awful lot like this. From time to time Rand puts the declarative mode on one side in order to purple-up her style. The result is not what any individual in possession of a sound mind would be liable to call “good”. Here is Dagny riding a train:

The green-blue rails ran to meet them, like two jets shot out of a single point beyond the curve of the earth. The crossties melted, as they approached, into a smooth stream running down underneath the wheels … Trees and telegraph poles sprang into sight abruptly, and went by as if jerked back. … The glass sheets of the cab’s windows made the spread of the fields seem vaster: the earth looked as open to movement as it was to sight. Yet nothing was distant and nothing was out of reach. She had barely grasped the sparkle of a lake ahead, and in the next instant she was beside it, and past.

Rand is fatally drawn to over-emphatic expression. At moments of intensity (and this novel is prodigiously over-supplied with such moments) she turns the prose-style dial all the way up to 11, and, in some cases, to 12. This is how something occurs to one character: “it was not a thought, it was like the punch of a fist inside his skull” [224]. Nothing moves; everything whirls, or thunders, or convulses. Characters are not afraid, the fear “goes through them in spasms”. Instead of “speaking” people cry and scream. Here, from a few pages in the middle of the novel:

“Dagny,” he screamed. “Don’t go …!”

The screaming of the telephones went on through the silence.…

He flung the glass door open and from the threshold, in the sight and hearing of the room, he screamed: “where is she!” …

“I won’t tell you.”

Taggart’s scream rose to the shrill impotent sound that confesses a miscalculation. [624-5]

Most people's scream dials only go up to 10, you see; but the Randian has that extra ‘1’ for when you're screaming at the top of your lungs and just need to ramp things up a notch. The point is that when intensity has no other mode, it palls. There are times—and actually, the times are all the time without exception—when it is simply more effective to write “he got to his feet and spoke” than it is to write “he shot to his feet with the stored abruptness of a spring uncoiling, his voice driving on in merciless triumph” [620]. But the idea that less could ever be more was clearly one alien to Rand’s aesthetic. Often the writing is really heroically bad, impossible simile following impossible simile. Here we read of “an announcer, with a voice like a machine-gun spitting smiles …” [826]. There we read:

A gray cotton, which was neither quite fog nor clouds, hung in sloppy wads between sky and mountains, making the sky look an old mattress spilling its stuffing down the sides of the peaks. [518]

If Objectivist philosophy called for people to sleep on mattresses stuffed with sloppy wads then no wonder it didn’t catch on.

But, wait, what am I saying? Objectivism not catching on? Objectivism has become, via indirect routes, the dominant ethos of the world today. Alan Greenspan may not individually have been the world’s most powerful figure, but his long period of prominence and influence reflected a half century in which the principles of profit, individualism, greed and selfishness achieved unchallenged dominance across most of the Western world. It has conquered even China and Russia now. The paradise-on-earth Rand prophesied: we’re pretty much living in it. Atlas Shrugged is about as timely a book as is imaginable.

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, there’s an obvious answer and a less obvious one. The obvious one is that Atlas Shrugged is a polemical Objectivist novel, designed on every page to advance Ayn Rand’s philosophical world-view. It’s not that her authorial thumb is in the balance; it’s that she has jammed her whole arm in there – that she’s clambered her entire body into the balance and is jumping up and down to get it to register the quantity she wants. It seems to me that the flaws in Objectivist thinking are such as to render the novel inert as polemic, and without that there is only the rather empty Soapy pleasures of the narrative. But a Randian would complain, with some justice, that I’m only voicing my own ideological preconceptions.

But there is another problem here, and it has to do with dramatic conception. Atlas Shrugged is a one-dimensional novel, despite Rand’s very strenuous efforts to breathe life and depth into it. It is one dimensional because Objectivist philosophy holds to a strictly non-dialectical, one-dimensional metaphysic. Whether this is a valuable philosophical position or not is a matter about which interesting discussions, perhaps, can be had; but in a purely dramatic sense it is a fatal limitation.

Characters in the novel repeat, not once but many times, that there is no such thing as contradiction. “If you find a contradiction,” says D’Anconia, time and again, “then examine your premises. You’ll find one or other of them to be mistaken.” This is the caricature image of Objectivism as a whole: a hectoring insistence that one “examine one’s premises!” But, to put the matter in artistic terms, it robs narrative of dramatic tension. For Rand there is nothing tragic in Antigone; there cannot be a clash between Creon and Antigone. All there can be is one party (I’m guessing she’d side with the latter) in the right and one in the wrong.

But this would be to misread Antigone; or to put it another way, the reason why aesthetic theoreticians have over many generations kept banging on about the play, is that it embodies with attractive clarity precisely the motor of the greatest art: not only tragedy, but all properly engaging or moving dramatic representation. Conflict. Without conflict there isn’t drama. And for all the pop-eyed cod-intensities and enormity of scale of Rand’s novel, there isn’t really conflict, or drama, to be found anywhere in the text. Her politicians don’t really believe in social equality and justice; they’re all venal self-serving villains. It would have made a more interesting novel if they did really believe in social equality and justice, or if Rand had been able to think herself convincingly into the mindset that did. Her heroes are in the right on page 1, and in the right on 1168, and the reader is never allowed on any page to doubt that they are right.

SledgeLit 2015

So, this weekend I was one of the Guests of Honour at 'SledgeLit 2015', the Derby-based science fiction convention, along with Alison Moore, Charlie Stross and Robert Shearman. It was a very well-run con, with a good and lively crowd: I had some fascinating conversation in the bar, there were interesting panels, Derby looked lovely in the early winter sunlight. I was honoured and flattered to be invited.

For my GoH speech, I was asked, as I think all the GoHs were, to read not from my own writing, but from something that inspired us. Clever of the organisers, this: how dull it can be to hear an author trudge through his or her published work; how much more intriguing to hear something fresh, to get a new perspective on the author. To that end I decided to read Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess', the short poem in half-rhymed pentameters he wrote as dedication to his big work of mythopoeic creation, The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, first published 1948, revised editions in 1952 and 1961. Now, this book was huge for me when I was growing up. I pored over it as a teen, reading it in a disorganised, barely- and sometimes non-comprehending way (for it is really not an easy book to navigate) yet drawing from it all sorts of wondrous ideas and moments of beauty and depth and resonance. One of my holy books. Now that I'm old, I've read the whole thing in a more systematic fashion and have, I think, a clearer sense of what it is about. That's not a particularly good thing, I think. The fact that I didn't wholly understand, as a youngster, meant that I didn't try to force its central insights into a procrustean schema, but allowed them to spark and flare in my own imagination. It also meant that I wasn't so aware of the many lapses and errors that mar Graves's scholarship, but never mind about that for now.

When I was young I assumed the broader narrative that frames Graves's many fascinating insights and speculations (that Europe was ruled by a matriarchal society dedicated to the worship of the triple goddess, maiden-mother-crone, which was in turn conquered by a patriarchal warrior caste who suppressed this religion, silenced women and instituted their God-the-Father deity) was true. It's not, of course. But it doesn't matter that it isn't, because Graves isn't writing history, or anthropology or seriously researching religious studies. The White Goddess is no more a work of historical anthropology than Yeats's A Vision is a work of ophthalmology. Rather, Graves is confecting a powerful, individual mythic story to give meaning and depth to the things (poems) that mattered most to him. Tolkien, another writer I spent my teenage years reading and re-reading obsessively, was doing the same thing at around the same time (Lord of the Rings was written through the 1940s, first published 1952-3). Tolkien wrote his myth to provide an imaginative mythopoeic frame for the things that mattered to him (languages, certain types of story, Englishness), and nobody confuses what he was doing with 'history'. Tolkien even met Graves: there's a hilarious letter JRRT wrote after attending one of Graves's Oxford 'Professor of Poetry' lectures in which he describes him as interesting and eccentric and engaging 'but ... an ass!'

Now I loved, and still love, Tolkien. But for my GoH speech I tried to set in parallel these two books as representing and anchoring two very different possible-narratives of 20th-C 'Fantasy'. The one is about story as linear, populated with likeable, comprehensible characters who overcome adversity to triumph in the end, set in an imagined world painstakingly constructed to be coherent and graspable. A story not only overwhelmingly male in terms of dramatis personae, but overwhelmingly masculine in ethos, about courage and endurance and war, about power-over dynamics and Force and so on. The other is not linear, not pitched to be likeable, not interested in character, but rather a matrix of moments of poetic intensity that works and reworks certain themes in a spiralling, circular dance of signification and insight and bafflement; a story (because The White Goddess is, amongst other things, a story) overwhelmingly female. One of these two stories went on to become world famous, massively influential, creating a genre of writing in which even those Fantasy writers reacting against Tolkien do so by tweaking the elements he put in place. The other remained obscure and little read. That SF and Fantasy fans are still so deeply wedded to a model of linearity—linear narratives, straightforward characters, moral hierarchies,—seems to me to drive a narrowness in terms of the way writing in fantastic idioms happens. It's not, shall we say, coincidental that this linear logic correlates with an aesthetic masculinity, and that attempts to address this by keeping everything about our stories linear and heirarchical but swapping a kick-ass heroine for our kick-ass hero strike me as problematic for structural as well as for ideological reasons. Most people, I'd guess, don't think so, though. Maybe most people are right. Hard to say.

There are quite a few interesting things to say about these things, I'd say, and I talked around them for a while on Saturday, linking them briefly into my own writing praxis, and saying something about the formal circularity of my forthcoming novel, The Thing Itself. I think it is possible to explore the way these questions intersect with gender without becoming gender-essentialist about them. And I finished with a reading the poem. A poem I presented as about the way Fantasy and SF is ruled today by Apollo's golden mean when what it needs is more mirage and more echo:

All saints revile her, and all sober men
Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean—
In scorn of which we sailed to find her
In distant regions likeliest to hold her
Whom we desired above all things to know,
Sister of the mirage and echo.

It was a virtue not to stay,
To go our headstrong and heroic way
Seeking her out at the volcano's head,
Among pack ice, or where the track had faded
Beyond the cavern of the seven sleepers:
Whose broad high brow was white as any leper's,
Whose eyes were blue, with rowan-berry lips,
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips.

The sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir
Will celebrate with green the Mother,
And every song-bird shout awhile for her;
But we are gifted, even in November
Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruelty and past betrayal,
Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

This, then was the topic of my GoH speech. I could write up my thoughts on wizards and white goddesses, on Tolkien and Graves, on what they both meant to me growing up (an immense amount) and what they represent in a broader sense where mythopoeic literature, or 'Fantasy' as we genre-pigeonhole it, is concerned. Or then again, I could leave it at that. Sometimes it is indeed a virtue not to stay. Even in November, rawest of seasons.

Boxing up