Month: March 2014

Light Goes On

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

George R. R. Martin has become nearly ubiquitous since the advent of his massive, multi-volumed and cable-networked Song of Ice and Fire, more commonly known as The Game of Thrones (even though that is only the title of the first book in the series).  Before that, he successfully helmed a network television series, Beauty and the Beast, and before that he worked on the excellent reboot of The Twilight Zone in the mid-1980s.

Even before that, however, he was establishing a reputation as a fine writer of speculative fiction and fantasy with a handful of novels and short story collections.  His first novel, Dying Of The Light, published in 1977, demonstrated his strengths and served notice that what would follow would be worth anyone’s time and attention.

Returning to early work like this can sometimes be a dubious exercise.  Writers grow into themselves, rarely doing anything approaching their best work in the beginning.  But sometimes the talent and skill are evident from page one and early work is as polished and significant as anything that comes after.  That appears to be the case with Martin.  Dying Of The Light is work one might expect from mid-career, a deft exploration of complex themes of identity and myth set against a background of rich cross-cultural shifts, all vividly portrayed.

Dirk t’Larien, living in the husk of a life in a city laced with canals, receives an esper jewel from the woman he lost years before.  t’Larien has been wallowing in self-pity and ennui ever since Gwen Delvano left him.  Before parting, they had these jewels made, psychic encodings of their emotional selves, and exchanged them with the promise that when one sent their jewel to the other, the receiver would come at once.  Dirk sent his, years before, and Gwen did not come.  He has mourned her since, mourned himself, and has been slowly crumbling in on himself since.  Now he has received hers, a summons he swore he would honor.

Should he, though?  She did not answer his call, why should he answers hers?

He does.  He has nothing else.  This is the last obligation, the last devotion he has.  Without Gwen, he has nothing.  As he sits in his room, debating what is undebatable, he watches a gondolier drift by in the waning light of day, and in that image we understand the story about to unfold.

This a journey to the underworld, a quest to rescue Eurydice from hell.  That gondolier is Charon and Dirk t’Larien is a phlegmatic Orpheus.  Worlorn, the rogue planet briefly brought back to a kind of life by its passage close to a group of stars on its way out of the galaxy, is a kind of Hades.

Too-close comparisons have the drawback of forcing a reading that limits truth-seeking.  The framework of the Orphic Myths is here, but it is only a framework, because our erstwhile Orpheus is neither a musician nor a particularly attentive lover.  He dwells too much on a past that turns out to be partly mischaracterized, as Gwen, when they are reunited on Worlorn after Dirk responds to her summons, bluntly schools him.

“I did call you. You didn’t come.”

A grim smile.  “Ah, Dirk.  The whisperjewel came in a small box, and taped to it was a note. ‘Please,’ the note said, ‘come back to me now.  I need you, Jenny.’  That was what it said.  I cried and cried.  If you’d only written ‘Gwen,’ if you’d only loved Gwen, me.  But no, it was always Jenny, even afterwards, even then.”

Dirk, during their time together, had created a persona for her which he—playfully, he thought, affectionately—used as a private sign of their love.  But “Jenny,” his alternate Gwen, was not Gwen.  And what Gwen teaches Dirk now, on Worlorn, is the power of names.  When you name a thing, she tells him, it becomes that thing.  Whether he intended it or not, Gwen had been becoming someone for him she was not for herself. She had to leave and when he called the wrong woman back, she had to refuse or surrender.

The novel is replete with this game of names.  The men, the “family” to which Gwen has tied herself, are Kavalars.  Kavalan is a harsh world, one that had been cut off from all the other human colonies by a long, savage war, part of which was conducted on Kavalan and formed them into the tradition-bound, violent society of codes and honor and ritual commitment into which Gwen—because she met Jaan Vikary while he was visiting one of the older, more cultured worlds and fell in love with him—has given herself.  Names mean everything, and yet they mask inaccuracies parading as history, myth as religious practice, race memory as an excuse to remain unchanged.

Vikary wants to change it all.  He is a scholar, something of an oddity among his people, and he has learned the real history of what happened on his world, and understands how that history had been transmuted into myth.  Now that the war is long past and recontact with the older colonies has been made, Kavalan looks like a barbaric, hide-bound world of obsolete ritual.  Vikary sees the necessity of change if his world is to enter as an equal into the fold of human civilization.

But it will be difficult, almost impossible.  Tradition is all the Kavalar have as a source of identity.

Dirk arrives on Worlorn well after the major event that clearly will one day become part of new myths.  The Festival.  When the world was detected and it was understood that its proximity to certain stars would thaw it, allowing a brief window during which it would support life, 14 of the human worlds came and built exemplary cities and held a great festival.  Doomed, to be sure, but a momentary, beautiful gesture, a testament of life against the inevitability of eternal night.  For as Worlorn continues on, it will once more freeze and die.  All the forests transplanted to its surface will perish, the oceans will turn to ice, as will the atmosphere, and these lovely cities will become fossils for the archaeologists of another galaxy to find and puzzle over.  A pointless gesture, in some ways, but a fist in the air and a rude gesture to the gods of entropy.

Gwen is here with her co-spouses because she is, as further resonance with the myth of Eurydice, an ecologist, a woman of the woods, so to speak.  She’s here to study the interactions of all these varieties of never-before combined plant and animal life, even as the world itself is dying.

Yet Dirk is convinced she wants to leave her Kavalar husbands, return with him, try again.  And for a short while it almost seems true.

What plays out subsequently is a contest between tradition, bigotry, and a desire to cast off chains.  Dirk is a catalyst in all this, the necessary ingredient to create the transformations.  In so being, he undergoes his own rebirth, which, after all, is the whole point of journeys through the underworld.

The dying in all this is not so nihilistic and tragic as the lines from Dylan Thomas might suggest.  The light is fading from several people and institutions in this novel, but that is not Martin’s major revelation.  He deftly weaves an understanding of how myth works and how traditions are created and at the same time shows how they become bonds that hold back even while they provide sustenance.  But it is not death at the center of this novel but enlightenment, and the things dying are ancient and near-parasitical distortions.  Misinterpretation, mischaracterization, and misapplications all dies in the full light of truth.  Jaan Vikary is casting light on his own past; Gwen shines new light on Dirk’s incomprehensions; the essence of human is newly revealed by fearless looking.  And even if it is not a wholly successful venture, a new accord is struck by the end, that new ways will at least be sought.

Paradoxically, Dirk, who is largely a cipher throughout the novel, finds the possibility of rebirth in an embrace of a very old and oft misunderstood trait learned from the Kavalars he has come to respect—honor.  In keeping with the game of names Martin plays throughout, Dirk’s name is telling. t’Larien. Larien is a variant of Lawrence, which comes from the Latin  Larentum—place of the laurel leaves.  Laurels usually indicate honors, but it can also be seen as a criticism, as is “resting on one’s laurels.”  This is the case for Dirk in the beginning—and also the case for some of the other Kavalars present on Worlorn.  At the end, Dirk decides it is time to stop living in the past.  It may mean a new name.  Certainly it means a new beginning.  Even as he goes to face a potential death, he has found a new way to live.

The Wimsey Principle

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 2 Comments

Recently I read my first two Lord Peter Wimsey novels.  An acquaintance has long held Gaudy Night to be an exceptional work, so I settled down to indulge a period mystery, only to discover a very different sort of work full of surprises of remarkable relevance.  Finishing that, I picked up Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter novel.  What I found between the two was a substantial exhibition of intellectual and emotional growth.

It is always striking to encounter a character at two far-removed periods.  Reading novels in a series in the order of their appearance can have a leavening effect of the profound changes visible.  You grow along with the characters, if there is growth (and too often, it seems, in murder mysteries there is little growth in the principle character—but then that’s not what such series are about, is it?), and what may be striking changes seem natural, depending on the author’s skill.  In this instance, Sayers’ skill was masterful in that the older Wimsey of Gaudy Night is so believably one with the much younger and more frivolous portrayal in Whose Body? even while the experiences of a life spent finding murderers and other assorted criminals have eroded the finely-modeled lines of youthful enthusiasm, allowing the layers beneath to rise, transforming as they emerge into a new kind of intellectual sensitive.

The real story in Gaudy Night is not the solution of the mystery driving the plot—which Wimsey solves in a fairly short time—but the demonstration of honest love rooted in genuine respect.  Demonstration rather than revelation since the latter has already been done.  It’s reception and acceptance are at question, hence the demonstration.

The hang up?  Harriet Vane, subject of Lord Peter’s amorous devotion, cannot get past the suspicion that she is in fact merely an object of his devotion.  She is invested, wholly, in being her Own Person. Their meeting (in the novel Strong Poison) was one more likely to elicit profound gratitude and a sense of obligation rather than the congeniality of equals, and Harriet has fended off his protestations of love and repeated offers of marriage since.  She does not trust either her own feelings about him nor his motives toward her, even though she is willing to take him at his word regarding their sincerity.  It is a delicate set of problems, a minefield around her heart, and in order to successfully consummate what is likely to be a fine companionship Wimsey is required to demonstrate time and again that he will not dominate her, will not coddle her, will not in any way treat her as lesser in any respect.  All this while wanting above all else to protect her.

This is the classic conundrum of true love.  In order for it to be true, one must not only allow but genuinely enjoy the independence of the one loved, even at the cost of letting them go.

Harriet Vane wants to be, and has worked very hard at being, her own person.

Sayers sets the story at a women’s college attached to Oxford, Vane’s alma mater, where a series of ugly, often childish, increasingly destructive acts of vandalism threaten to spoil the reputation of the school.  This is all the more threatening because this is at a time when serious public debate over the utility of women’s education is ongoing and scandals add fuel to the fires of reaction.  Harriet herself is emblematic of the pitfalls of living a life consistent with education and independence.  The man she had lived with—not married—had been murdered and suspicion fell on her.  This was the incident that first brought Wimsey and her together.  Wimsey proved her innocent, hence the weight of obligation that causes Harriet to distrust the sincerity of her own feelings.  She was held up as everything bad about the New Woman.  She knows the problems a woman has making her own way without a man, yet she has persevered and made for herself a successful career as a novelist.  Independence hard earned and not lightly surrendered, especially after having been nearly hanged for killing her lover.

What Sayers gives us turns out to be a thoroughly-considered examination of the problems of emancipation.  It is astonishing how the arguments, pro and con, seem as fresh today as they doubtless seemed radical in 1935.  Condescension is absent, questions of class and personality are examined, and the difficulties of maintaining individuality and pursuing ambition are laid out, all within the context of a thoroughly engaging mystery.

Harriet Vane is asked by the Dean of the college to come and help them discover the culprit.  Calling in the police has its drawbacks as the events could become very public to the discredit of the college.  Something, as it unfolds, the culprit very much wishes.  Harriet, frustrated by the intractability of the case, finally sends a letter to Wimsey.  The assistance she asks for is not what she gets.  Instead of advice or a suggestion, he arrives.

Here it becomes tense.  It would be easy for Wimsey to take over the case.  He is the experienced detective, Harriet only writes about detectives and detecting.  But Wimsey has far too much respect for her to simply butt in.  And he knows that would lose her forever.  He believes she can solve it.  He provides assistance and no more, although he does give her some needed distraction, and renewed attention.

The dance Wimsey undertakes is as finely-performed as any solution to any murder.  His object is to be what Harriet needs him to be and no more.  He is clearly bursting to just do for her, but he knows he cannot, because the fragile bridgework between them must be based on equity and sharing and mutual respect.  In some ways, it is a one-sided effort.

Gaudy Night is very much a comedy of manners.  It is also a disquisition on self-possession.  It is also a feminist critique.  And it is a romance.  All at once and successfully achieved.

Whose Body? on the other hand is a straight-forward Who-Done-It, an introduction to the character of Lord Peter Wimsey.  Serviceable.  The pleasure of the novel is the characterizations involved, which are ample and sophisticated.  Sayers portrays Wimsey as someone very much in need of distraction.  He is damaged by service in WWI.  He is too intelligent by far to be satisfied with the usual and stereotypical distractions of his class.  He is a rare book collector, a fair pianist, a gourmand.

He is also impatient with a tendency to be judgmental.  He is in a hurry.  Too lengthy an immersion into a case threatens to open old psychic wounds.  Therefore, what patience he exhibits in the course of solving a case must be an act of will.  He seems shallow to some.  This is a side effect of his aversion to too-deep an introspection, although he cannot avoid it.  At the end of the book, we are left with the impression of someone who needs to unravel and solve his own self as a way toward healing, but he can only do so indirectly.  Solving murders is his way of occasionally showing a mirror to himself, finding another piece.  Had he met Harriet then, they could never have worked together, they would never have found each other.  He would not have survived her rejection, she would never tolerate his insistent perceptions.

In Gaudy Night there is a long discussion of principles and morals.  Principles, Wimsey maintains, are inherently destructive, morals possibly a chimera.  Yet he clearly has both and knows it.  In Whose Body? the question arises as to why he bothers with criminal investigations and clearly the answer is that a principle is at stake.  He can do this, he has the skill and talent, so how could he—morally—not do it?  It’s never asked quite so baldly, but it threads through the entire book.  It does, in fact, put the question forward.  By Gaudy Night it seems Wimsey has answered it, at least for himself.  And the evidence for the principle is the way he is willing to walk away from Harriet rather than impose anything on her.  The imposition of one’s will on another is abhorrent to Wimsey, and what is murder if not the ultimate imposition, the total denial of self?

But even without murder, the principle maintains.  Even built in to the crime being enacted at the college, there is the question of imposing wills on others.  At the heart of the vandalism is a different sort of crime, or perhaps the same sort at a different level, a lie, a libel.  Choices are all we have, really.  To be able to make a choice freely is a kind of ideal state.  But it is what we strive for, one hopes as a civilization.  Wimsey goes to impossible lengths to guarantee that freedom.  It is fascinating to see the answer to the questions he poses himself emerge between these two novels.