Fantasy

Hild and the World

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Recently, in discussing my own switch from science fiction to history (one novel, testing the waters), I was asked how different the two were to write, and I had to admit that at base not that big a switch. (Science fiction is perhaps more overtly philosophical.) I realized afterward how true this seemed to be, at least for me. Historical fiction used the same muscles, so to speak, as science fiction, and in some ways was a closer pairing than historical and fantasy. If one intends to be true to the historical period in which the work is set, then it must be admitted that it is very similar to visiting a future and/or alien world. The chief difference, of course, is that in history, we have records and we know what happened.

Or do we? 

The farther back we go, the more work we have to do to imagine living in those times, in that world. Because it really isn’t very much like ours, at least not in the ways necessary to move through it. Obviously, on fundamental levels, people are people—we love, hate, grow old, struggle, and feel all the same emotions—but the trajectory and the triggers vary wildly. First Century B.C.E. Romans did not see the world the same way we do, even if emotionally they may have resonated with it much the same way.

And really, how much of those times do we actually know? Some periods are very well documented, we have a great deal of primary material from which to construct (reconstruct) the world. Other periods and places, not so much.

Nicola Griffith reconstructed Seventh Century C.E. Britain almost from whole cloth. We know certain major dates and names of many of the top players, but the world itself? And in the case of her protagonist, St. Hilda of Whitby, we have the remains of her abbey and a taunting reference from Bede. Taunting because Hilda—Hild—is the only woman mentioned in his history of whom he approves (for anything other than chasteness and religiosity), and praised her as an advisor to kings. 

The first question, pulling back from Bede’s history, would be (one would hope), given the context, just who was this woman?

Griffith then attempted to answer that question by building a world in which Hild’s presence, her character, her essence resulted in that singular mention. She wrote a novel so densely imagined and meticulously constructed that one comes away feeling that if it hadn’t happened this way, it should have.

There have been many novels written to such depth, evocative and persuasive. The closest that comes to mind in relation to Hild would be Mary Stewart’s Arthurian/Merlin novels. In a different vein, a few of James Michener’s. Cecilia Holland, Mary Renault. Few wherein the sheer weight of imagined reconstruction counts so significantly. 

Griffith immerses us not only in the details of court life and the politics of the post-Roman Britain, but the environment. The birds, fish, flora, all become players in the life of Hild, who is put forth by her mother, a canny and skillful political manipulator, to be vital to the king. As a seer, a so-called godmouth, a trusted—and occasionally feared—advisor. Hild learns to notice. Everything. She does not, as those with whom she deals, glean knowledge from the air. She pays attention. She has an almost Holmesian capacity to pay attention and recognize patterns. She is a fully present intellect moving through a culture of people easily overawed by mystical confabulations and the power of the supernatural. 

She steps onto the stage at the point in British history when the Catholic church is making inroads against the old pagan gods. There are Irish priests and Anglisc priests and they do not get along, and the king Hild serves is using the tension to enlarge his territory. He decrees that he will be a Christian king and thus the allegiances change, but as Griffith portrays it, there is no ecstatic revelation among the people. This is a matter of allegiance, of loyalty to the king, a practical thing. Hild is baptized, but remains aloof and somewhat puzzled by this whole Christ thing, and in this way Griffith introduces a level of imperial realism at the grass roots of her Britain that is curiously compelling.

In the first novel, Hild, we watch the child grow to young womanhood and not only become an  influential advisor, but also a powerful warlord in her own right, commanding the loyalty of soldiers, and establishing a reputation as she travels as envoy to Edwin King. She strives to make the realm safe from enemies near to hand. 

Her origin story—daughter of a minor king who is assassinated, cousin to Edwin, a wild card to be played even as she learns to be a player—is captivating. As I say, if it didn’t happen this way, it should have. At the end of that first novel, she has found a place she wants to make her own, make safe, and manages to secure it from the king. She marries Cian, who she grew up with, and the bastard son of her father (no one wants to say so, the refrain repeated “Never say the dangerous thing aloud”), who was her sparring partner as a child and grows up to become one of the king’s best warriors. It would seem all may be well.

The place she has found, Menewood, anchors the new novel of the same name. Everything Hild does is aimed at securing this place and its people, making it safe, making it home. 

Menewood picks up where Hild left off and does not disappoint. The time encompassed by the novel is much shorter than the first one, but so much happens, the entire landscape writhes around her, and she must come back from horrific tragedy and loss to step by step engineer alliances and maneuver armies to finally make secure everything she holds dear. It is a hero’s journey of the highest order and Griffith’s command of landscape and emotion and seventh century politics anchors the story in enviable credibility. Hild becomes a force to be reckoned with, as the saying goes. 

As vivid as Hild is, so too are the people around her. She has true friends, people who love her, those who respect her, loyal companions and willing followers, and she is seen to earn it all. These people are the sort one would wish to impress and inspire, be friends in return, and all of them are distinctly themselves. The earning is hard. The consequences of being significant in this world are harsh. We see, though, that Hild has little choice. At times she contemplates running, but she cannot let those who depend on her down. It is not, in the end, who she is. 

But as engaging as all that is, the added pleasure is that Griffith presents us with a world, an environment, that we want Hild to save and preserve and protect. She shows us the bees, the streams and rivers, the hedgepigs, the horses, the seasons, and trees, the fields and makes it all integral to the lives depicted. For Hild, it is all interconnected, one thing. 

As well, there is a thread of social possibility threaded throughout suggesting that the way things turned out later might not have, that relationships could have been less straitened. There are the beginnings of the kind of behavioral autocracy that came to dominate in later centuries, leading to the circumstances in which the Venerable Bede would only think to honor one woman in his histories for anything other than virginity. None of this rises to the level of polemic. Griffith stays immersed in the substance of the period, but it is there to be found.

And there are battles. Two major ones, and they do not disappoint. But rather than minutely-detailed, stroke-by-stroke descriptions of the carnage, what Griffith gives us (more usefully) is context. Preparation determines outcome. She lays out the necessary groundwork for the coming conflict and gives us the details that go into what leads up to what transpires on the field. The heroics of the combatants, noble as they may be, come to naught if the land is not understood, the supplies are not at hand, and numbers are not properly tallied. Success can be months in the making. It is refreshingly realistic.

At the center of all this, Hild carries the knowledge—what works, what fails, why and how, and that which must be done to secure gains and survive losses—and through her, we inhabit this world. 

At the beginning of this I made a comparison between historical fiction and science fiction. It matters in what we have come to know as world building. In Menewood we find the fruit of that process in the inhabitability of the story told, and in significant ways, Menewood is a built world. We know some, and through archaeology and folklore we know enough to fill in the gaps through the imaginary work of world building. It is not a capricious process. The result must work organically because the story must be reliable in ways we might only notice when the work is done poorly or not all. This novel (along with its predecessor) is master class in how it is done.

Welcome to Menewood.

Strange Inversions

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jeff Vandermeer has been mining the hills of what for a time was called New Weird for years. His Veniss Underground stories are exemplars of the power of the oblique, the odd, the displaced, the exotic in service to demonstrating one of the principle delights of science fiction, namely that setting is character. His newest novel is another example of how landscape transforms imagination and redirects the focus of our self-reflection.

The City—unnamed, unlocated, but somehow American for all its desolate ambiguity—has been reduced to the condition of decimated near-abandonment. We are told the entire world has undergone a series of collapses and that this city is representative of most of it. Those remaining pick over what is left, and there would seem to be plenty.  But there is a constant danger, the looming presence of Mord, a giant bear that can fly. It tortures the landscape and the survivors, eats indiscriminately, slams about remaking the skyline according to no discernible plan. Mord is just a great big bear with no table manners.  And that uncanny ability to fly.

Rachel is a seasoned scavenger who finds it useful to shadow Mord. One never knows what good salvage one might find in his wake. The risks have been worth it in the past. As the novel opens, though, she has made a find that will reshape everything she thought she understood about the world she inhabits.  It is an odd bit of biotech, a blob attached to Mord’s hide, just large enough to find and still fit inside her pocket. It is, in its indefinable way, attractive.  She describes it sometimes as a vase that occasionally has wings. She calls it Borne and brings it back to her domicile, the Balcony Cliffs, where she lives a not altogether unpleasant life with her lover, Wick, who is some kind of biotech engineer. Wick immediately dislikes Borne, wants to take it to dismantle to see how it works, but Rachel refuses. This creates the first real conflict between them, which grows worse as Wick begins to see Borne as a threat.

Because Borne is changing.  Growing, certainly, but also acquiring new traits. Rachel discovers one day that it can talk. She hides this fact from Wick. As Borne continues to grow and change, she continues to try to hide its capacities from Wick, but Wick is not fooled.

Into this comes new threats. There are factions in the City, vying for power, control, advantage, in a game that feels purposeful but ultimately has little point. There is Mord, of course, raw power, incontestable, frightening.  There is also the Magician, another human who may or may not have been a colleague of Wick’s back when he worked for the Company, whose facility still stands, still functions, and had much to do with the destruction that befell the city. There is the Company itself, which continues to exert an influence albeit of an almost subterranean kind.  Once it had been the power in the city, but since the general collapse, both locally and globally, it persists because at least it seems to possess structure.

And Wick, after a fashion, because he is a node of stability in the chaos.  He makes things people will trade for, that people need, although his ability to do so is diminishing because the resources he needs, which Rachel is so adept at finding, are dwindling. As they do and his production shrinks, their danger increases.

Borne is a fey factor, an unknown in all this, and Rachel finds her attachment to it both comforting and unnerving. Her attachment to Wick is of a different kind and, for all the stress on it, more secure than she comprehends.

It is a curiously compelling story.  It reveals, offers insight, confers meaning, even when it is unclear what underlies all the struggle. Rachel’s inability to give Borne up resonates, as does Wick’s well-reasoned suspicions of it. The disturbing changes in Borne unsettle in a perversely familiar way. And Mord just scares us with his unpredictable rages and the offshoots of his savage personality which appear to do murder to what remains of order and humanity in this landscape, which as we continue on, feels ever more like somewhere we’ve been before, if only we could remember…

Borne as creation bothers us and intrigues us and somehow we understand that it—he—is not really our enemy.  This is confirmed in the novel, but that confirmation is not what brings this to the forefront of our myth-responsive memory.  Borne takes in everything—literally eats reality—and excretes nothing. Just grows. But he should, because we sense what Borne is. Borne is incomplete.  Borne requires…

Comparisons are never one to one, rough at best, but then originality is not served by direct corollaries.  Something that is “just like” something else may have novelty but it does little to feed the desire of new truths and fresh perspectives. Nevertheless, they are potent when done well, and this is done well.

Wick—in this instance, an obscure form of Wizard—is in some sense the creator of all that Rachel moves through.  He worked for the Company until he was expelled, and when we learn finally all that he may have created his place becomes clear in Rachel’s universe.  He protects her more than she knows because he is responsible for so much, in a way a master narrator. He cannot ultimately protect her from herself, and that is where the elements of this marvelous piece of clock-work aligning and arranging come together.

As borrowings go, Alice Through the Looking Glass will suffice. There’s even a mirror. But that landscape—collapsing, reforming, surprising, terrible and amazing—is what we find when our illusions are outgrown as we persist in living within the precincts of an imagination that will not yield to new possibilities and the stronger forms of mature dreams.  The child must be reborn into a bolder reality, and if in that reality bears cannot actually fly, well, there are other wonders to sustain us.

Sleeping Dragons

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

Kazuo Ishiguro works a consistent theme. Even in his earliest novels, he explores the manner in which people refuse to acknowledge the reality through which they move. Many of his characters display a kind of aphasia, an inability to grasp the issues surrounding them, the motives of people, even those they are close to, or what is unfolding before their eyes. In a way, they are peculiarly narcissistic. I say peculiar because quite often their sense of themselves is the last thing they seem concerned with, even when others are.

At times this has led him to experiment with tactics of evasion that result in novels that resist our attempts to connect, even to access what is going on, but we read them anyway because he cloaks the experiments with plots and devices that hold our interest, but which we suspect are little more than extensions of the evasions at the core of his characters’ lives.

In a few instances, he has his characters actually go out in search of the mystery that seems to enshroud their worlds, though usually they look in the wrong places or simply fail to comprehend what they discover.

Such is the motive behind Axl and Beatrice as they leave their small village in the heart of a post-Arthurian England to find their long-absent and possibly estranged son and perhaps get to the bottom of the cloying fog suffocating memory. Their journey takes them to the source of a strange amnesia in The Buried Giant.

The landscape is mythic. This is a land occupied by Britons and Saxons. It is a land that has only recently been host to the epic struggles of King Arthur, Merlin, his knights, and the aspirations of Camelot. If there is any doubt how real Ishiguro intends us to treat this, he dispels such doubt by having Axl and Beatrice encounter the aging Sir Gawain, one of the few survivors of those days.

There is much of the Quixote in this Gawain, although his skills are impressive. Age alone has blunted his abilities. Ostensibly, he is still on a quest. Not the Grail. No, that is never mentioned. Rather he claims to be on a mission to slay the she-dragon Querig.

Joining them is a young Saxon warrior, Wistan, and a boy he has rescued from a village where because of a wound the boy suffered from ogres the villagers intend to kill him for fear that he will become an ogre.  As, indeed, he is destined to—but not in the way superstition would have it.

Wistan for his part is also on a mission.  He, too, is on the hunt for Querig. But for him Querig’s demise is but a means to an end, and a terrible end at that. He and Gawain come into conflict over it eventually and thereby we learn both the source of the Mist, which robs people of their memory, and a truth about King Arthur not recorded in the myths.

Through all this, even as it would seem rich material for a dense fantasy about knights and dragons and kings and ogres, Ishiguro’s focus is on Axl and Beatrice and the nature and quality of commitment and forgiveness.  For in the mists of poorly-glimpsed memory there are terrible things between them and as they progress on their journey to find their son Axl begins to have second thoughts, not at all sure he wants to remember, afraid that perhaps he had been the cause of great pain and sorrow.  Ishiguro is concerned here primarily—and almost exclusively—with the nature of time, memory, and forgiveness and the many ways they are the same essential thing.

In that sense, the controversy he stirred when the novel appeared by claiming that he was not writing a fantasy—that he did not want to be seen as plowing the same fields as George R.R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss—was unfortunate. He spoke truly.  This is not a fantasy in the sense of contemporary sword & sorcery or secondary-world fantasies.  He is not doing the same thing as Martin, although he may have borrowed a subtheme or two from Tolkein. His disclaimer was taken as a derogation of fantasy, yet one can see from the text that he is fond of those elements of the book taken directly from the long tradition of English fantasy.

If there is a fantasy element here worthy of the name it is in his portrayal of the end of a mythology and the terminus of one world as it transforms into another.  The Buried Giant is about remembering as much as it is about things forgotten.  The changes soon to be wrought by the conclusion of Wistan’s quest and Gawain’s final stand have to do with how history turns and what is taken after a time of interregnum during which things lost are grasped, reshaped, and put to new uses.

But it is always about what is between people and how we use memory and its infelicities.

As in other Ishiguro novels, there is much that annoys.  His characters talk.  And talk and talk and talk and often it is about nothing until we realize that it is all tactic.  Dissimulation as replacement for substantive communication—until finally the act of avoidance itself becomes the point and the things hidden are revealed by inference. Axl and Beatrice as blind and trying to perceive the elephant they explore with tentative fingers. That it is to a purpose, however, makes it no less frustrating, but it would be a mistake to see this as anything other than absolutely intended.

The point of the quest–for all of them–becomes evident when at last they find Querig and it turns out not to be what they had all expected.  And we then see how myth sometimes is more useful than reality.