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

The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014)

So, what with the Oscar nominations, and the fact that this movie popped up (conveniently) on Sky Movies, I decided to re-watch it. It really is a splendid piece of work: charming, witty, laugh-out-loud in places, gorgeously framed and designed and acted. Fiennes' Gustave is a beautiful performance (boo to him not getting Best Actor nod), and I would hazard the only character from any of this year's films who will enter popular consciousness in a longer-term sense. There's also the sheer pleasure of seeing Anderson make his most Andersonian film yet, and registering all the little tropes and signatures of which he is so fond: the uncondescending absorption in kitsch, the use of models, the sly but telling staging of generational misdirection and love. Charm, I have had occasion to say more than once, is really very hard to fake, and this is a thoroughly and deeply charming movie.

The question is: is it anything more? I've read criticism suggesting it is style over substance, all icing and no actual cake. Suggesting it isn't really saying anything. There is lots of running around and some artfully staged gags and set-pieces, but to what end? The first time I saw it, last year, I wondered if it was saying something about American attitudes to Europe, specifically that other-side-of-the-Atlantic sense that there is something old and elegant and a bit faggotty but above all something out-of-time and doomed about the mitteleuropäisch world. Which is fair enough, though a little shallow and caricaturing.

Rewatching it, however, was a revelation. The whole movie erects its filigree gorgeousness across a chasm, and only a fool (like me, evidently) could fail to grasp the nature and depth of this abyss. The repeated scenes, like visual rhymes, in which the old-school cultured European is on a train that is stopped in a field. Peering through the window and wondering 'why are we stopping in a field?' A whole movie structured across a tacit divide: we get the pre-war elegance and the post-war Sovietised shabbiness and downbeat melancholy. But what is the gap, exactly? What story does the film keep telling, in its various ways? Deputy Kovacs, played with swaggering elegance by the Jew, Jeff Goldblum, tries to execute the legal will of his deceased client and for his pains is murdered by the thuggish, skull-faced Jopling (played by the Aryan, Willem Dafoe). Serge X (played by the Jew, Mathieu Amalric) helps Gustave and Zero by packing 'Boy With Apple' for Gustave with the true will in the back, is also murdered by Jopling. Zero himself (played as a young man by the Guatemalan actor Tony Revolori, but realised in old age by the Jew [update: I was corrected on this point on Facebook: the actor's parentage is Syrian Christian and Italian], F. Murray Abraham) relates how his whole family has been murdered, and faces several close brushes with death himself. He survives, but everyone he loves vanishes into the abyss between the pre-war and post-war iterations of the movie. The Nazis are never mentioned, never shown on screen; but they, and the Holocaust, are the invisible centre of gravity around which the whole film bends. This is not to suggest it's in any way a gloomy or morbid movie. On the contrary the lightness and humour with which Anderson tells his story is not only wonderful in its own right; it is a very clever way of narrating the Holocaust. As M Gustave says of the perfect lobby boy, he is completely invisible, yet always in sight. I have heard the eternal footman, or in this case, lobby boy hold my coat and snicker. What happens to Gustave in the end is that 'they' shoot him. As the man himself puts it: 'You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant... oh, fuck it.'

I was put in mind of a sentence from Nabokov's 1948 story 'Symbols and Signs', perhaps my single favourite short story. The characters are two elderly Russian Jews, living in New York after the war and trying to find the wherewithal to keep their deranged, paranoiac, possibly suicidal son in the institution that cares for him. At one point, the mother pulls out a photograph album and looks through the photographs. Her attention is mostly on her son, of course; but the sentence I'm talking about is the last of this quotation, the one concerning Aunt Rosa.

She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs. As a baby, he [the son] looked more surprised than most babies. A photograph of a German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé fell out of a fold of the album. She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus. Here was the boy when he was four years old, in a park, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from an eager squirrel, as he would have from any other stranger. Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

There's a whole novel in that sentence (I often think Nabokov doesn't get enough credit for the sometimes extraordinary tenderness with which he writes). Rosa was right to worry, we might think; it's just that she worried about the wrong things: she fussed at the near-by trivia and did not see the storm-front rearing over the horizon. I'm not sure that's right, though. We live our life close at hand, after all; the people we care about tend to be near, and they matter a great deal. It's reasonable to hope that the huge impersonal forces of death and horror pass us by, but it's a mistake to obsess about those things. In its attention to detail, to the surface textures and delights of life, even unto the icing, Grand Budapest Hotel understands that. It also understands the abyss, into which the middle years of the century shovelled literally millions of Jewish and Queer corpses. It just doesn't put that centre-frame. When I watched it first I thought the movie charming but lightweight. Now I wonder if it isn't a masterpiece.

Kameron Hurley, Infidel (2014)

The excitedly-named but short-lived 'Vol 2 Week' comes to an end at Sibfric, with a brief notice of the second volume in Hurley's Bel Dame Apochrypha trilogy. It's a 2011 title, and old news for true Hurley fans ('Hurphiles'?). Still, better late than never. This novel, then, carries the story of Nyx, warrior-assassin for the matriarchal 'Bel Dame' Guild, past the end of the war that characterised volume one of the sequence, God's War. I reviewed that novel here, if you're interested. Barebones summary: Nyx is now too-old-for-this-shit, no longer a Bel Dame and working as a bodyguard for a diplomat's child. In an opening scene that reminded me, somewhat, of Tony Scott's Man on Fire (with Nyx in the Denzel role), she is ambushed whilst escorting her charge. Ah but the twist is: it seems the Bel Dames themselves have put a hit out against her, rather than the kid she was guarding. Throw in a wasting disease slowly killing our hero, lots of juicily repellent Bug-tech, and an incident-ful narrative more cannily paced than God's War, and the result is a very readable book. Hurley's descriptive chops are better in this instalment too, I thought. The whole is better crafted without losing its visceral, tearing-off-heads shock and vigour.

Downside: the narrative barrels the reader through so effectively that the post-reading experience involves reflecting back in a way that starts to notice a general thinness, literally for Nyx, figuratively for the book as a whole. Of course it is marking time until the end of the trilogy; but it doesn't move us very far forward. And the villains and their evil schemes are underdeveloped, in part because the focus is so largely on Nyx and friends. There's also a degree of individual mismatch, unavoidable in the case of books and (some of) their readers, and which will certainly not bother most. In this case it has to do with the conceptualisation of war. Hurley is unflinching in showing the horrible, sickening and bloody mess war entails; and her baseline assumptions are the post-world-war-1 consensus that battlefields are arenas of savagery shaped by the hypocrisy of leaders and the pitiable plight of the front line soldiers (“We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying," Nyx said. "Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”) Not being a warmaker myself, and shaped as I am by the predominantly anti-war aesthetic of 20th-century literature, I don't exactly disagree with this; although it's enough of a consensus now (cf also: Grimdark) as to risk becoming deadening. And it opens up upon some dangerous side-alleys, not the least of which is the general contempt for 'politicians', a word treated as a synonym for 'corrupt leeches', as against honest salt-of-the-earth street brawlers and criminals (“I'm a bloodletter, not a politician," Nyx said. "I just take off heads”), which was exactly the attitude that softened the ground for the sowing of Fascism in the 1930s.

That's not my problem, though. Not really. Hurley is scrupulous in showing how much Nyx's career as a fighter has harmed her, ground her down, wrecked her body (even in a world where new body parts are easily purchased), deadened her soul. But it seems to me that the harm war does to soldiers is not the most interesting or important story to tell about war. More to the point is the harm war does to people who aren't soldiers. Both God's War and Infidel are about unaccommodated woman, the life solus, the costs and exhilarations of fighting and surviving. But that's easy. What's hard is not surviving yourself, but keeping other people alive. My own personal prejudices predispose me to think the most interesting stories are about people who raise kids in a warzone. The opening scene of Infidel made me wonder if this novel was going to address this; but it doesn't. Ah well. The thing about Achilles is that he doesn't have kids. In one sense, better than the whole of the Iliad is the scene in The Magnificent Seven where Charles Bronson spanks the Mexican kids for despising their parents. The point of that scene is: being a parent is much harder, and requires a different, more complete form of bravery, than being a gunslinger. It's the same logic that says: the Dad in McCarthy's The Road is a finer warrior than Han Solo.

I hate to extend this, really quite simple point further, but I need to clarify. One of the great strengths of this novel, and its predecessor, is the way it challenges the calcified attitudes to gender and the 'proper' role of women in society. So I need to stress I'm not talking here about anything procrusteanly woman-ish. I'm well aware of the deep-rooted bias in society (one that Hurley tackles head on) that women are 'naturally' nurturing and men are 'naturally' belligerent. Fuck that for a game of soldiers. My point is not that I wanted to read a story about Nyx caring for a child (blimey: can you imagine how that would even go?). Women are not to be defined by their capacity for caring for children. But human beings are to be defined by their capacity for caring for one another. Nyx is a warrior, indomitable and self-reliant and marvellously lacking in self-pity; but there are other, more collective and less individualistic modes of making war, and they work better. There are better military strategies than violence, too, although they may be less immediately dramatic for story-telling purposes. Gandhi made deeper and more permanent inroads into the British Empire than Hitler, after all.

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[Note: to sink into mere pedantry, I know (of course) that Greek myth attributed a son to Achilles: the ferocious Neoptolemus. But there's nothing paternal, or parental, about Achilles in the Iliad. He has his self-reliance, and his superb fighting skill, and his glory, given extra sweetness by his foreknowledge of his tragic doom; he had his lover Patroclus, his slave-girl Briseis, and that's all he wants. That and killing people. He's Nyxish, or Nyx is Achillean. One of the two.]

John Gwynne, Valour (2014)

The improbably named 'Sibfric Voltwo Week' continues with Volume Two of John Gwynne's ongoing saga The Faithful and the Fallen. I shall not hazard a review of Volume One, since to do so would be to cross swords with the not-to-be-surpassed Jared Shurin, whose detailed account of Gwynne's Malice can be found here. As you can see, vol 1 is a reassuringly or depressingly (pick whichever term you prefer) familiar High Fantasy fable-cum-potboiler: Corban, growing to adulthood, begins to comprehend he is the Chosen One as his cod-medieval kingdom is George-R-R-Martinned around him. Valour continues the story. For those desirous of orienting themselves, the publishers have provided the following jacket text.

The Banished Lands is torn by war as High King Nathair sweeps the land challenging all who oppose him in his holy crusade. Allied with the manipulative Queen Rhin of Cambren, there are few who can stand against them. But Rhin is playing her own games and has her eyes on a far greater prize... Left for dead, her kin fled and her country overrun with enemies, Cywen has no choice but to try to survive. But any chance of escape is futile once Nathair and his disquieting advisor Calidus realise who she is. They have no intention of letting such a prize from their grasp. For she may be their greatest chance at killing the biggest threat to their power. Meanwhile, the young warrior Corban flees from his conquered homeland with his exiled companions heading for the only place that may offer them sanctuary - Domhain. But to get there they must travel through Cambren avoiding warbands, giants and the vicious wolven of the mountains. And all the while Corban must battle to become the man that everyone believes him to be - the Bright Star and saviour of the Banished Lands. And in the Otherworld dark forces scheme to bring a host of the Fallen into the world of flesh to end the war with the Faithful, once and for all.

Also provided is a five-page list of dramatis personae. That's five full pages packed tight with names like 'Dath', 'Gar', 'Heb', 'Rafe', 'Vonn', 'Kai', 'Morc', 'Rhin', 'Rath', 'Jael', 'Wolf', 'Bos' ,'Walk', 'Tanc', 'Flai', 'Jam', 'Nitti', 'Grittay', 'Tolkien', 'Tutti', 'Bois', 'Frum', 'Dee', 'Bigg', 'Bad', 'Citi', 'Dissis', 'Djamhodt', 'Dissis' ... look, I'm making these up now, I freely confess, and have been doing so since 'Bos'. But at least 'Bos' is an actual character in this book. There are also two individuals called 'Fray' ('Benothi Giant, companion of Uthas') and 'Ventos' ('a Helveth travelling merchant-trader') who, one earnestly hopes, come together in the main narrative to sell meat pies. Then: a map.

Not a bad map, as these things go. Then a poem:

Not a good poem, as these things go. Then: a cauldron!

The cauldron was a hulking mass of black iron, tall and wide, squatting upon a dias in the centre of a cavernous room. Torches of blue flame hung upon the walls of the chamber. Uthas of the Benothi giants strode towards the cauldron ...

Now that I have 'pies' in my head, I can't read 'Benothi' without salivating. Mmm! Anyway:

...strode towards the cauldron, his shadow flickering on the walls. He climbed the steps and stopped before it. It was utterly black, appearing to suck the torchlight into it, consuming it, reflecting nothing back. [1]

None more black! This gives you a flavour of the whole: unafraid of a bit of cheesy Gothic melodrama. When the story gets going it's all about the many characters all travelling from place to place and scheming and fleeing and fighting. Perfectly serviceably done. You, for instance. Yes, you. You may well be looking for a huge swamp of a narrative in which you can lose yourself, like sinking into a warm bath. If so, then this is for you, It's utterly unoriginal, full of violence, lots of things happen and it doesn't really go anywhere. Me, I found the prithee sirrah idiom hovered uncomfortably between too wincingly archaic ('"Did you see Akar fall?" "Aye. Calidus spoke true. A giant did slay Romar"' [19]) and frankly not archaic enough ('Textual inconsistencies are remarkably rare in the giants' histories' [316]). There's every dramatic cliché you can think of, most of the stylistic ones, and that irritating convention by which characters' inward thoughts are rendered onto the page in slabs of italics. Aye, he thought to himself, that has always annoyed me, when writers do that. What do they hope to gain?

The world is early medieval, largely Celtic in flavour with a strong dose of Norse: giants, dragons and other monsters are real. But the worldbuilding is the usual Fantasy mishmash and omnium gatherum: bits of French ('"I'll not be a corsair for you!" [333]), Greek ('amphorae of wine' [117]), Persian (carpets are mentioned on p.141) and Indian ('"Avatar of Elyon!" [179]) and so on. Chapters are short, heavy on the dialogue, threaded with detailed descriptions of stabbing, mauling, decapitating, torturing and slaying, and each ends with a mini-cliffhanger or duh-duh-DUH! revelation. The author's website suggests he plans four volumes of The Faithful and the Fallen, but I see no reason why it couldn't go on forever. I admit I found it draggy and stale, but your George-R-R-Mileage may vary.

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword (2014)

This week is 'Vol 2 week' at Sib Fric, as we move (is that a sigh of relief I can hear, or a puncture deflating?) towards the end of this ridiculous reviewing-2014-titles-splurge. And today's vol 2 is Ann Leckie's second Ancillary instalment: after Justice, Sword. Perhaps because our hero Breq now has to shore up a corner of Radchaii space using just his sword. Or else. You know. Not. Quite apart from anything else, Breq's possessive is a 'her' not a 'his', just like everyone else in the novel. The sword in this case is a huge Fuck-Off class spaceship, the Mercy of Kalr, with a crew of bristling, honour-obsessed Radschaii officers for Breq (who has been given command of the craft by the Emperor herself) to whip into shape. Or line, is it? Does one 'whip into line'? Or is that lick into shape and ... what into line? Straighten?

Sorry, my attention keeps wandering. The story picks up soon after the end of Ancillary Justice; thousand-bodied emperor Anaander Mianaai gives Breq command of the ship and sends her to Athoek to guarantee the system's safety after two 'hyperspace' gates were attacked and destroyed. She is given three officers: two experienced lieutenants called Seivarden and Ekalu and a 'baby', the inexperienced but well-connected 17-year-old Tisarwat. When they get to their destination they tangle with local politics, including the ethical problematics of a programme of in-all-but-name enslavement of the locals.

I daresay Leckie was writing this follow-up before Ancillary Justice created such an impressive splash in the rock-pool of contemporary science fiction: Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, BSFA, Nobel, Olympic Gold and Jules Rémy, all in one year and all for a debut. Genuinely impressive stuff. At any rate, A. Sword has all the marks of an ambitious writer determined not simply to repeat herself. So, where A. Just. was a multi-P.O.V. action-packed adventure, A. Swo. is all Breq, and very low-key on the Things Happening front. The emphasis is on character interactions, and interiority; the beauty of inflections rather than the beauty of Big Explosions (though there is a bomb and some fighting near the end). It's a cooler, more considered book, interested in the protocols of interpersonal interaction, and also with protocols as such. There's a great deal of pother about using the right crockery, about the dos-and-don'ts of courtesy, hierarchy and propriety. More Silver Fork than slash-and-burn. There's also an attempt to engage with questions of colonialism, slavery and class prejudice, although here the evident wrongness of all three quantities (speaking absolutely, but also in terms of Leckie's moral universe) rather undercuts the novel's drama. It's not that the book's various moments of righteous outrage aren't right-on; its more that they feel as though they could be cut-and-pasted into any number of contemporary online situations. One major theme is that the requirement that women and other oppressed minorities register their disaffection 'politely' is itself oppressive:

“When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?” ....

“For my part,” I replied, “I find forgiveness overrated. There are times and places when it’s appropriate. But not when the demand that you forgive is used to keep you in your place.” ....

“You are so civilized. So polite. So brave coming here alone when you know no one here would dare to touch you. So easy to be all those things, when all the power is on your side.”

One problem I had with the first novel was the way the experience of belonging to a vast hive-mind, of splitting oneself into myriad individuals and then recombining them, was rendered in traditional, monadic-human terms. Leckie's imagination does not, in this case, run to a deleuzeguattarian body-without-organs, or even to a Hardt-and-Negri multitude. And in paler form the same limitation haunts A. Sw. too. Breq is on her own now, although able to augment her mentation by connecting with the systems of her ship. A couple of the perkier, livelier elements read like they come from another novel altogether. For instance, 'Translator Dlique, a diplomat for the scary warrior alien race 'the Presger', with her pleasantly scatty inability to remember such human social conventions as sitting up straight and not dismembering people, has a very Iain M. Banks vibe about her. Also Banks-y is the tendency to name alien races after the sort of noises associated with coughing and wheezing ('Geck! 'Rrrrrrr!'). But reminding her readers of Banks runs the risks of reminding her readers of those Banks qualities (verve, humour, energy, spuming inventiveness) that don't particularly characterise this novel.

Leckie's decision to downplay the bang-bang-bang, and aim for a different set of novelistic qualia, a more thoughtful low-key narrative, is commendable. But commendable isn't necessarily the same thing as likeable, and I didn't rattle through A.S. the way I did A.J. Too much gubbins about bowls and plates; the ‘justice, propriety and benefit’ trilectic had its handle cranked a little too often. The whole thing just cooled an already cool set-up. But that's OK. Maybe you like your set-ups on the gazpacho side.