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.

‘… Is The Name Of My New Band’

 

Click to embiggen. Thanks to my friend Francis Spufford, who has mocked-up this poster in honour of my favourite, and let us be honest over-used, joke.

Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘The Coming of the King: The First Book of Merlin’ (1988)

 

Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Coming of the King (1988) is the first volume in a projected but uncompleted trilogy, a quasi-Arthurian fantasy, larding densely and sometimes estranging Norse and Celtic elements into a peripatetic, rather unstructured whole. Tolstoy's is an unfamiliar version of the traditional story. In this telling Merlin postdates Arthur, and the king whose coming is adverted in the book’s title is his descendent Maelgun. Much of the book concerns hallucinatory spirit-journeys Merlin, more shaman than wizard, undertakes into the otherworld.

There’s a lot of unleavened research into Celtic and Norse mythology and culture dumped into this novel: untranslated names and concepts, archaic flourishes of prose. Merlin is trained by the Salmon of Lyn Liw. The story stops to retell various famous stories. For instance, Beowulf gets rewritten in toto, reworked into prose: ‘dread mother in her underwater lair, stabbing her with a wondrous sword he found hanging upon its stony wall, and hacking off her head which he bore by the hair all bloody back to Hrothgar’s hall at Heorot’ [580] and the like.

There’s also a lot of Bad Sex Award style writing: ‘then is every thought bent towards bed and boudoir … to our snug trysting place’. I hadn't thought of boudoir as a particularly Anglo-Saxon piece of terminology, but I could be wrong. Perhaps it's what Boudicca was named after. Here’s Merlin excitedly boinking Gwenddydd: ‘I draw you to me even by utterance of your name: Gwenddydd, Gwenddydd!’ Not quite as euphonious a name as Nabokov's Lo-li-ta, but you go with what you got, I suppose. And what is it that ‘quickens the blood within my veins and the seed within my loins?’ It is ‘the beam that shone upon me from the scented warmth of your white breasts.’ [410] Luminous breasts. Neat. And here's Merlin boinking Angharat:

Then does my trouserful of wantonness make play with his eager jerking: a long night’s roaming across smooth soft plains, twin rounded hills, white slopes for wandering; and at last the choice warm, wet cavern whose ferny entrance awaits the stiff ram-headed serpent’s gentle entrance. Do you recall what followed, my Angharat of the golden hair, that evening when our fingers met by chance about the goblet’s stem at king Rhydderch’s feasting? Long ages of the earth have passed between us since the night that followed, but it is not I who can forget each move and moan and murmur of our brief meeting. [394]

In other news, ‘Trouserful of Wantonness’ is the name of my new band.

Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts, ‘Daughter of the Empire’ (1987)

 

In my recent blog on Feist’s Magician (1982) I wondered if I should reread the trilogy he wrote with Janny Wurts:

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 than Magician (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.

After I posted that blog, I decided I would revisit them. Perhaps they are better. And, having looked again at Daughter of the Empire (1987), so it proves.

The underlying story of Daughter (that is, the fabula, not the sjuzhet) is similar to Magician: a kid—Pug, in Magician, the 17-year-old Mara in this novel—overcomes adversity, passes through various adventures and eventually achieves power and prominence. The key difference is not just that Pug exists in a fictionalised medieval Europe and Mara in a fictionalised medieval Japan, although that is a difference. It’s that Pug’s ‘power’ is the arbitrary exteriorised folderol of ‘magic’, a  manifestation of the jejune belief that power means the ability to manipulate externalities at a distance, by waving one’s hands or a wand or whatnot. Mara’s ‘power’ is power as it actually manifests, in the world: control over interpersonal dynamics, attracting or compelling obedience from other human beings, being able to get them to do what you want them to, or to support you doing what you want. Power is a politics, not a sparks-and-levitation conjuring trick. Power is an index of human intersubjectivity. And that’s what Mara works towards and finally achieves in this novel, using the structures of belief of her society and her own resourcefulness and determination to bend people, and eventually the whole of her society, to her will.

This is a good story, a better one than in Magician. It’s decently written too—workmanlike and sometimes a little bland, but the prose here gets both story and backstory across and doesn’t litter its paragraphs with solecisms and idiocies. And there’s an attractive cleverness in the way Mara uses her disadvantages—her youth, her vulnerability, her femaleness in a highly structured patriarchal society—as weapons against her combatants, turning the honour-code hierarchies and warrior-logic of her world against her adversaries. There’s nothing so sophisticated as this in Magician. And, setting questions of cultural appropriation aside, it’s refreshing to turn from a Yet-Another-Medieval-Europe Fantasy world to one based on an Eastern society and culture.

Not that it’s a flawless novel. The pace sometimes slows and stagnates. The prose is sometimes awkward and tangled. The inclusion of the interspace rifts, and the presence of Midkemia on the far side of them, mandated by the fact that this is a ‘Riftworld’ novel, is a little clumsily, distractingly done (my memory, though I haven’t reread them yet, is that the next two novels in this trilogy integrate this aspect better).

I have no idea how Feist and Wurts (and might I add how delicious I find Bavaria’s traditional feistenwurst sausages ...) [clears throat] ... I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel. I have written 25 novels, and I work alone. The closest I have come to collaboration is a series of four novels I’m doing with Dave Hutchinson, and there Dave wrote vol 1, I wrote vol 2, he has written vol 3 and I’m now working on vol 4. But I know other writers don’t lurk Oscar-the-Grouch-like in their dustbin, as I prefer to do. Friendship between writers is common, and so is professional collaboration.

When writers collaborate they do so in a number of ways. They might divide up the writing that needs to be done chapter by chapter, or section by section; one might write a section, pass it to the other to rework and continue, they passing it back when they are finished and so on. The two writers might sit side-by-side and wrangle each emerging sentence between them for all I know; though this would, I think, be a laborious way of proceeding. More usually, Writer A will produce a chunk of writing, Writer B a succeeding chunk, Writer A the next bit and so on. So it’s possible that a 600-page novel might be produced by one writer writing the first 250 pages, a second writer adding a couple hundred more, and then the first writer finishing everything off. I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel.

Accordingly I offer the following observation without prejudice or implication. In the first 250-or-so pages of this novel, Mara is described in terms of her resourcefulness and determination. Where her physicality is described the novel mostly stresses her smaller size, her poise, her control (after an opening section in which she is grieving the death of her family, and is more extravert in her bereavement) the beauty and impassivity of her face. Then, for a couple of hundred pages, the tenor of description shifts. Mara is suddenly described almost exclusively in terms of her mammary glands.

Buntokapi watched the rise and fall of Mara’s breasts beneath the flimsy fabric of her day robe … by the time the wine was finished and his goblet thrown aside, he closed his sweaty hands upon that maddening obstruction of silk. [Feist and Wurts, Daughter of Empire, 227]

A toss of her head dislodged a river of loosened hair and the light shone warm on her breasts. Buntokapi licked his lips [289]

The tips of her breasts pressed clearly through the scarlet cloth, and her hair tumbled sensuously over a shoulder artfully left bare. [292]

All Chipaka could remember was she had large breasts … Lord Chipaka might perhaps have thought Mara’s breasts large, since his nose had hovered within inches of her chest as he spoke to her. [304]

A ripe, soft figure with breasts that were high and well-formed despite being large, a small waist and flaring hips. [346]

Mara emerged from behind the screen, swathed in soft towels. The old woman waved the servants aside and dabbed an exotic essence upon the girl’s shoulders and wrists, and between her breasts. Then she lifted the towels aside; regarding the nude form of her mistress, she resisted an impulse to cackle. ‘You’ve a fine, healthy body on you, Mara-anni.’ [380]

Mara turned towards the reflecting glass … Her breasts were slightly larger than before, but her stomach was as flat as ever. [393]

Mara fanned herself, then pulled her bodice open and exposed most of her breasts to Bruli’s view. The effect was immediate. [401]

Her robe gaped further, and Bruli caught a teasing glimpse of [Mara’s] nicely formed breasts and the hint of a taut stomach. Mara smiled as she noted the focus of his attention. With slow, provocative movements, she rebound her sash. [448]

She slipped her robe from her shoulders and bared her lovely breasts. [449]

The curve of her breasts beneath her thin robe [489]

And then, around the 500-page mark, the breasts … stop. Stop, that is, in terms of being a feature of how Mari is described in the novel. Instead the focus shifts back to her resourcefulness, her petite-ness and poise, the way others underestimate her, as she works towards her final triumph.

I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel.

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.