What Makes This Book So Great Read online

  All of this is interesting and weird background, but the thing that makes reading In the Wet painful now is David Anderson’s unfortunate nickname: “Nigger.” Shute may have been prejudiced against the working classes, but he really was vastly less racist than was average for his time. Indeed he was miles ahead of almost everybody on not being racist—for 1953. There’s a thing that happens sometimes where people are way ahead of society on some issue like this, where because they’re out there alone they’ve made up their own rules, which look much odder to us (who have advanced with society or been born since) than the default ordinary racism (and also sexism) of the time, which we’re at least used to.

  David Anderson is “a quadroon”; his mother was a “half-caste” Aborigine. David has a “built-in tan.” Now in some ways, Shute deals with this excellently, even by today’s standards. He has David say proudly that he’s “an older Australian than any of them,” his “grandmother’s tribe ruled the Cape York Peninsula before Captain Cook was born or thought of.” Shute’s reason for making David a quarter Aboriginal is intended to demonstrate that people of colour are as good as anyone else, and also to give David a disadvantage that he’s overcome—he was “born in a ditch in North Queensland” and he is entirely self-made. It’s hard to think of another character of colour done this well in popular fiction at this time. I think David must have been quite a surprise to white readers in 1953. I have no idea how Aboriginal readers, or people of colour from other backgrounds, would have taken him, but it was a time when it was notable to have a non-white character visible at all. David is an entirely admirable character, and the book’s hero and romantic hero, and the Queen’s own pilot. Also, Shute doesn’t make this easy by making it a world where colour prejudice has disappeared. David has had to deal with racism all his life. He explains his origins twice in the book, once when offered a job and again when he meets a girl. He says the reason he hasn’t married is the colour problem. (That everyone immediately reassures him that he doesn’t look all that dark is another indication that prejudice hasn’t gone away.)

  David’s main way of dealing with prejudice is to get it right out into the open by using the nickname “Nigger,” so as to have the issue of his mixed-race origins in people’s faces. The text seldom or never refers to him that way, but his friends do. It wasn’t a nice word in 1953, and Shute was clearly trying to show a world where things were better, and it might be a nickname like “Blondie” and the word has been reclaimed—though it does say that David used to fight people who used it in an unkind way. However it is surprisingly difficult for a modern reader (well, me anyway) to read sentences like “Good night, Nigger darling,” without wincing. The word hasn’t become neutral, hasn’t been reclaimed and is so much more unacceptable now than then. As for actual racism, there are two bits of it. There’s the one sentence where David gets to be a “magical negro”—David has an instinctive feeling that something is wrong aboard the plane: “He was one quarter Aboriginal, not wholly of a European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men, which possibly accounted for his excellence in flying and his safety record.” It’s only one sentence, but it’s pretty bad. There’s also the implication that Stevie’s rebirth will be lower down the karmic chain, as Stevie has been an alcoholic wastrel, and I’m not sure the Aboriginal blood isn’t supposed to represent that.

  But anyway, it’s in print again, and there certainly isn’t anything else like it.

  NOVEMBER 11, 2009

  72. Twists of the Godgame: John Fowles’s The Magus

  The Magus (1965, revised 1977) is one of those books that ought to be science fiction and is ultimately less satisfying than it could be because it isn’t. Fowles himself admits in the introduction that it is a book with problems, and that the people who really like it are adolescents. He’s right: I adored this book when I was a teenager. At the same time I was gulping down Heinlein and Piper and Le Guin and Brunner, I couldn’t get enough of this. I think of this sometimes when people talk about writing simple books to appeal to young adults—the complexity of The Magus was part of what I loved about it. At the same time that I was failing to understand why Lord of Light (1967) was a classic I was writing lists in my notebook (“Best Books In The World, Ever!!!”) that ranked The Magus second only to Tolkien, with The Dispossessed third, Triton fourth and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress fifth. I like it rather less now for a variety of reasons.

  I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria. I was sent to public school, I wasted two years doing my National Service, I went to Oxford; and there I began to discover I was not the person I wanted to be.

  The Magus is a coming-of-age story. A young Englishman, Nicholas, gets a job teaching on a Greek island in 1953. It’s worth noting here that the book was written in 1965 and revised in 1977, which allows Fowles to have Nicholas make correct remarks about future trends. Once on the island, Nicholas encounters a Greek millionaire, Conchis, who tells him his life story and involves him in what is eventually called the “godgame,” a set of masques, masks, and mysteries, in which nothing and nobody is what they seem, psychological games are played on Nicholas, scenes acted out with and about him, and he is led to question everything he has complacently accepted about himself and the world. What’s brilliant about it is the masque, the whole thing is fascinating. Fowles’s prose really is marvellous. The stories of Conchis’s life are absorbing, and the constant hints of revelation of the purpose of the psychological wringer Nicholas is put through are intriguing. This is a story that twists and turns and tantalises but never quite makes satisfying sense, because the palette with which Fowles found himself equipped didn’t lead him to the possibility of any really interesting answers.

  When I read this as a teenager, I could identify wholeheartedly with any first-person protagonist—I didn’t appreciate that both Bron (the protagonist of Triton) and Nicholas here were supposed to be unsympathetic. I did notice some weird gender-essentialism, but supposed it to be one of Nicholas’s psychological problems. I’m reluctant to ascribe to authors the faults of characters, but I’ve since read enough of Fowles to find his women very odd. He seems to think that having a woman withdraw and encourage a man to chase her is the essentially feminine thing—and framing that as women being better than men at seeing relationships doesn’t actually help. He also sets up oppositions of England in relation to Europe which don’t quite work in this filter.

  The Magus is a really good example of the advantages and disadvantages of writing in first person. As Orwell said, we’re inclined to believe anything an “I” tells us they did, no matter how improbable. It’s easy to swallow improbabilities, it’s easy to enter into sympathy. Unsympathetic first-person narrators are a nifty thing to do, but some people won’t get it, and not just fifteen-year-olds. The story is filtered entirely and completely through them, you’re inclined to believe them and you have to believe them, you have no other source of checking. It’s perfectly possible to have a first-person narrator who isn’t observant, or who isn’t introspective, or who isn’t intuitive or a good judge of character—but the norm is to make them all these things because it makes the writer’s life so much easier to be able to have them notice things about the world, themselves, and other people. Fowles does some bravura first person in The Collector, and he really is an incredibly good writer. But here he wants to have it both ways—he wants Nicholas to be selfish and unempathic, and yet he wants to get away with Nicholas’s guesses and intuitions to be more often right than wrong. You can see from that first paragraph I quoted that Nicholas is insightful, has a wider context, and yet we’re simultaneously supposed to accept him as insular and ineffective. Fowles has him lurch from one to the other as it’s convenient.

  I’m going to talk about the end now, so stop readi
ng if you don’t want spoilers.

  After having the benefit of being the focus of the godgame, having all that attention and all those people revolving around him, nothing could possibly ever be enough for Nicholas. Alison wasn’t enough for him before and wouldn’t be again. Fowles himself clearly didn’t know how to end the story—it had a different ending in the original 1966 version. And by making the focus of the end Alison, it makes the godgame—and by extension life—all about love, about Lily rather than Conchis, it twists at just the wrong moment and sends it away from metaphysics into triviality and romance. Yes, love is important, yes, trusting people is important, yes, Alison is authentic, but can that be the point of the stories of Neuve Chapelle, Seidvarre, de Deukans and the Occupation? I have always been unsatisfied with this resolution. They are at the end floating in blank space, as Cherryh puts it, desperate for any input, any echo. I’m not sure sanity is reachable from there. I can’t believe it is supposed to have been a healing. Nicholas’s earlier image of himself taken to pieces and needing help with reassembly seems even more apposite at the end.

  This is a long book and I always enjoy it as much as or more than I am frustrated by it. But as I was reading it this time, I found myself thinking about the hints Stephenson drops about Enoch Root in Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle. I am absolutely sure that Stephenson knows the whole backstory and that it all makes sense and is satisfying and that I will one day either figure it out or have it revealed. In the exact same way, I’m increasingly sure Fowles doesn’t know what he’s doing, that the underlying reality that is never explained doesn’t make sense. I think that what Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” does is what Fowles may have wanted to do. In Chiang’s story, the protagonist learns an alien language and everything is transformed forever. Chiang manages to convey a sense of that, Fowles doesn’t.

  It’s beautifully written. The characters are so real, I’d recognise them if I saw them at the bus stop. And there’s nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed by having them go off in an alien spaceship at the end.

  NOVEMBER 16, 2009

  73. Playing the angles on a world: Steven Brust’s Dragaera

  Dragaera is a really cool world, and the publication of Iorich in January will be the seventeenth book set there. Seventeen is a pretty significant number for the Dragaerans, and for Brust, so even though I did a post on the Vlad books when Jhegaala came out, that was ages ago and it seems like a good time to do some re-reading. Brust tends to write books with seventeen chapters, or double-length books with thirty-four. The Dragaerans have seventeen Houses, and a cycle that gives each House power in turn—though all the books are set when the House of the Phoenix is due to give way to the House of the Dragon real soon now.

  Dragaera looks like fantasy but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s science fiction underneath, even though there are sorcerers doing magic, witches doing witchcraft, and the occasional person who can manipulate the forces of chaos with his bare mind. (This goes spectacularly wrong sometimes. The Great Sea of Chaos and the Lesser Sea of Chaos, the one where the capital used to be, are evidence for that.) What gives it the science-fictional underpinning is the detailed complicated backstory and the underlying axioms about how things work. You can argue about it, but there are aliens and genetic experiments. It’s at least as much science fiction as Lord of Light. One of the things that makes Dragaera so real is that Brust has given us two different kinds of stories set there, which lets you triangulate on information in a way I really like. You get this with Cherryh too, but it’s unusual. It may also be what’s stopped Brust souring on the world and the series—there have been gaps between books, but he has kept them coming, seventeen books since 1983, as well as unrelated books. The series isn’t finished, but it is continuing pretty reliably, and there’s no sign that Brust’s tired of it.

  No spoilers at all.

  There are the Vlad books (Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla, Taltos, Phoenix, Athyra, Orca, Dragon, Issola, Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich), twelve of a projected nineteen. They tell the story of an Easterner (human) assassin who lives in the underworld of the Dragaeran (elf) Empire. Vlad’s all wiseass first person. He has a flying lizard (jhereg) familiar, Loiosh, who’s always making psionic wisecracks like, “Can I eat him now, boss?” and “Two dead teckla on your pillow!” Vlad knows a lot about witchcraft, a lot about cooking, quite a bit about how House Jhereg runs its criminal activities, and a lot about how to kill people individually without getting caught. He’s less good on history, geography, the way the empire works, and personal relationships. He has some powerful friends, including Morrolan, who has the only floating castle in the world these days. (That disaster that destroyed the capital stopped sorcery from working for a while, so everybody’s floating castles crashed. Talk about the bottom falling out of the housing market.…) The Vlad books aren’t all entirely from Vlad’s point of view, Athyra’s from the point of view of a Dragaeran boy he meets, and Orca alternates between Vlad and another very interesting other person. But mostly, we have Vlad telling the story of his life—and the question of who he’s telling it to and why has some interesting answers.

  Then there are the Paarfi romances. Paarfi is a Dragaeran, which means he expects to live for at least a couple of thousand years. He’s writing historical romances set in his world, about real historical events and real people, much the way (and in the style) Dumas did in ours. The Paarfi romances (The Phoenix Guards, Five Hundred Years After, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode) are (mostly) set years before the Vlad books, and deal with events that are backstory or history to Vlad. But some of the people, being Dragaerans, are still alive, and Vlad knows them well, whereas Paarfi is working from historical accounts. Paarfi’s good on getting titles and dates right, he understands how the Empire works, he’s also great at making up dialogue and motives. If Vlad and Paarfi contradict each other, for instance about the origins of the Interregnum, you have to consider that Vlad knows some of the participants well, but Paarfi will have looked things up. Vlad is Morrolan’s friend, and knows some things about him Paarfi doesn’t know, but Paarfi’s researches might have dug up some information about him that he never mentioned to Vlad, because Vlad didn’t meet him until four hundred years after the events of Paarfi’s books.

  These books are all great fun, good adventures, you don’t have to read them looking for background-world clues. All the same, one of the things I love about them is the way you can absolutely trust that Brust knows what he’s doing, that his details add up, that he mentions a really good restaurant called Valabars a handful of times and finally takes you there in Dzur, that by the time you meet the Jenoine and the Serioli you have such a healthy curiosity about the hints dropped about them that you want to ring your friends and tell them there’s a Serioli! And it never falls flat. Brust pulls off bravura tricks of storytelling, revelations, secrets, backstory, complexities, and it’s never silly, never too much, never unbelievable. Although he’s been writing these books since 1983 they are consistent in feel, almost never contradictory, and build up a solid world.

  So, onwards to the individual volumes!

  NOVEMBER 17, 2009

  74. Jhereg feeds on others’ kills: Steven Brust’s Jhereg

  One of the things we disagree about in our house is series reading order. (Families in movies always squabble about whose turn it is to take out the garbage or wash the dishes. It must be very boring to be them.) However, generally where publication order and internal chronological (IC) order are different Emmet likes reading a series in publication order and I like reading them in IC order. (We first met on rec.arts.sf.written disagreeing about reading order for Womack’s Dryco books, so this is a long-standing difference of opinion.) I think I mentioned when I re-read the Miles books in publication order that I always normally read them in IC order. I used to do the same with the Vlad Taltos books until with the publication of Dragon Brust made that impossible. The reason I prefer it is that with readin
g in publication order you can see how a writer develops and how they develop their idea of where the series is going, but by IC order you can see how the characters develop when events happen to them in order. Pamela Dean once said that you should read Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books in order if you normally read chapters of a book in order. That’s how I feel. Reading them out of IC order requires building a structure in my head to fit the characters and events into, with “how we got from here to there” arrows and bars as part of it. But since playing with structure and making you hold things in your head is one of Brust’s things, here we go, publication order.

  I have to say that Jhereg (1983) is a very satisfying introduction to the series and to the world. There are seventeen Houses of the Dragaeran Empire, and the series is intended to have a book for each House plus an introduction and a conclusion, making nineteen in all. In each book, there’s a significant character belonging to the House in question, and also Vlad acts in the way characteristic for that House. So in Jhereg he is hired to kill someone and it runs into complications. Jhereg begins with a little about Vlad’s early life and how he acquired a jhereg familiar—a poisonous flying lizard with human intelligence and psionic capability. It then plunges directly into the story, showing Vlad running his own area, happily married, with powerful friends, he accepts a contract for more money than he’s ever had before, we learn a lot about the world.