John Crowley – The Deep (1975)

“Crowned men with red tears running from their eyes held hands as children’s cutouts do, but each twisted in a different attitude, of joy or pain he couldn’t tell, for of course they all smiled with teeth. Behind and around them, gripping them like lovers, were black figures, obscure, demons or ghosts. Each crown had burning within it a fire, and the grinning black things tore tongue and organs from this king and with them fed the fire burning in the crown of that one, tore that one’s body to feed the fire burning in this one’s crown, and so on around, demon and king, like a tortured circle dance.”

In ‘The Deep’, as much as in ‘Engine Summer’, John Crowley displays both his gift with beautiful prose as well as his empathy with everyday suffering. Which is not bad at all for a first novel. Where its political manipulations between multiple morally ambiguous sides anticipates George R R Martin’s ‘A Song Of Ice And Fire’, while Martin delights in dreaming up new and inventive mental and physical punishment to destroy his characters’ lives, Crowley’s characters meet with simple, unglamourous deaths, frequently lost offscreen in the indiscriminate chaos of battle. All that’s left is the sadness of pointlessly wasted human life.

   I suspect you could argue long and pointlessly as to whether ‘The Deep’ is SF or Fantasy. It is set on a flat circular world that is supported on a giant pillar that rises out of the eponymous Deep, a void of nothingness that surrounds the world. The sun and numerous moons orbit around it, and an ancient beast known as Leviathan sleeps underneath the world, coiled around the pillar. So you have a premise not dissimilar to a severely warped Discworld or World Of Tiers, and indeed you might wonder what effect living on such a different world to ours would have on the people living on it. Well, the answer is perhaps less than you would think, seeing as the whole world is caught up in a viscous struggle for power that has been going on for time out of mind. You have your fairly standardish Fantasy set up, where the Folk, your average common people, are looked after – read exploited – by the Protectors, the landed gentry. The Protectors are divided into two factions, the Reds and the Blacks, who have been fighting each other for many generations. The knowledge in the world is controlled by the Grays, a brotherhood of priests and scholars, and just to confuse matters there is a group of freedom fighters called the Just, who see it as their task to assassinate everyone in the Protectors’ class to gain freedom for the Folk. Not that the vast majority of the Folk support their endeavours in any way. The neutral Endwives camp out near battles and clean up the mess, saving who they can.

   Much of ‘The Deep’ deals with the futility of war, the pointless and never ending cycle of revenge, betrayal and violence. The two sides are even named after chess pieces, suggesting how they are all reduced to pawns in someone else’s strategy, pieces on the board. Or perhaps checkers is the more apt metaphor, with everyone’s brilliant strategies shown to be so much hot wind. Much like a game, whoever is in the position of power seems to have absolutely no significance for anyone outside of the people playing. The most sympathetic Protector is the vaguely Ned Stark-ish Redhand, whose honour and general decency get him absolutely nowhere fast in this particular game. At least by the end of the book, there is a sense that everyone is sick and tired of war, and there is at least some kind of hope for a way out of the cycle of destruction.

Guess how many of these people are alive by the end of the book

  
 Into this confusion a Visitor is sent from beyond, a nameless being with silver skin and superhuman skin with a vitally important purpose to bring to the people, if only he could remember what it was. Due to his amnesia he starts the book as a wide-eyed blank slate, and is thrown right in the middle of the power struggle between the Reds and the Blacks, following a Red takeover from the Black king. Slowly we see him become wise in the ways of selfishness and deception as he learns more about the world he’s found himself in. The Visitor’s corruption is deftly handled. In his initial state, friendly, unthreatening and full of a hunger for knowledge, everyone he encounters finds him unsettling for these character traits as much as his bizarre appearance. Up until the moment where he takes action for himself, he is guarding the life of his friend.

   But it’s not just his surroundings influencing his behaviour; the call from his true purpose is too strong to ignore. And his change in behaviour is linked to what that purpose is. The Visitor is a messianic figure, sent from the heavens to redeem this poor war-torn realm. And to a certain extent that’s true. One of the characters spends a large chunk of the book trying to figure out an ancient riddle: if everyone has two parents and so four grandparents and so on all the way back up the line, how come the small world is not overcrowded? Where do they go? Well, of course, they die. The Visitor has been sent to facilitate this by being a bloodthirsty warrior, leading the world even further into mayhem, death and destruction in order to keep the population down.

   This is a brutal and shocking twist, and it gets right to the heart of what the book is about. Just because it is possible to imagine a higher power, should it exist there is no guarantee it would be the kind of higher power we’d like, or that its idea of our best interest would match ours. The world of ‘The Deep’ is ostensibly one where bad things happen on a regular basis, but it’s not in spite of God’s plan, but because this is God’s plan. When the Visitor, having travelled to the very edge of the world, summons Leviathan and speaks to it, he finds that the god-like being – it is never named explicitly – originally took mankind from another planet to this artificial world because people begged for a return to simpler times, without fully understanding what that wish meant. Eternal life as the perpetual motion of eternal struggle and strife. In ‘The Deep’, the covenant God made with humanity is simply a really bad bargain on humanity’s side. 

Catherynne M. Valente - Palimpsest (2009)

"Terrible things occur when you outgrow the space allotted to you. You cannot really circumnavigate Fairyland like September did, not really. It's too big for you." 

   'Palimpsest' is one of those weird, monolithic tales about a different reality that impinges on our own, or, in this case, we impinge on it. The only other books remotely like it are John Crowley's 'Little, Big', in which we learn, by insinuations, that the world of faerie is encroaching on our own, and 'Dhalgren' by Samuel R. Delany, in which the protagonist journeys through a shifting, mythic city cut off from the rest of the world. Indeed, the quote above echoes the central mantra of 'Little, Big' - "The further in you go, the bigger it gets", while the lyrical and evocative closing lines of 'Palimpsest' remind me of the iconic ending of 'Dhalgren'; if the narrative of 'Palimpsest' is not recursive, it does suggest that others will follow the protagonists' journey. More than that, Catherynne Valente's prose achieves a level of hallucinatory vividness and poetic lyricism on a par with Delany and Crowley, although her narrative voice is most definitely her own. And like those two books, 'Palimpsest' manages to weave together strands from mythology and folklore into something so convincing you have a hard time believing it's not real.
   This is all the more astonishing when you consider how loopy the premise is. Palimpsest is a magical dream city that you can only visit by sleeping with someone who has already visited the city. Everyone who has visited it is marked by a tattoo of a portion of a map of Palimpsest. This is the area of the city where you wind up after your night of passion, and the tattoos of your prior lovers mark the limits of the areas within Palimpsest where you are able to travel. When people arrive in the city they are bound together in a group of four known as a Quarto, and all four people feel whatever the others do while they are in the city. The story follows one Quarto on their quest to find a way to move to Palimpsest permanently.
   So far, so bonkers, but from that description you'd be forgiven for thinking this is simply a more risque portal fantasy, a sort of X-rated Narnia. However the book easily transcends such accusations, thanks both to the detailed world-building in the scenes set in Palimpsest and, more importantly, its excellent character work. In many ways, 'Palimpsest' is a deconstruction of the portal fantasy, asking what type of person would want so desperately to escape the real world that they seek to leave it permanently. Obsession, addiction and debasement are all major themes.
   All four of our main characters are severely damaged. Amaya Sei is a Japanese train-enthusiast whose mother was mentally ill and eventually committed suicide; November Aguilar is an American beekeeper who was dragged through her parents' long and painful divorce; Oleg Sadakov is a Russian-born locksmith living in New York who has an intense relationship with a hallucination of his dead sister; Ludovico Conti is an Italian book binder whose wife has left him. All of them are ill at ease in the real world. However, with each of them it's not just a case of being an outcast with a tragic past finding a magical world where everything finally makes sense. The city manages to find exactly the right weak-point in all of their psyches to claw its way deep into their being; it doesn't take long for all of them to be desperate to move to Palimpsest permanently.
   The interesting thing about this is that Palimpsest is not some idyllic fantasy land. It is a strange and frequently hostile and dangerous place. It is revealed early on that injuries gained in Palimpsest will not go away when you wake up in the morning, and that visitors have been killed there. Palimpsest has just emerged from a bitter war, fought between Casimira, who believes that immigrants (i.e. us) should be allowed to visit and stay in Palimpsest, and the other supernatural beings who live there, who see mere humans as inferior being who do not belong there. As a result, visitors are frequently in danger of muggings or worse. In addition, all four characters wind up having to pay a price for entry, likened to the coins placed on the eyes of dead people to allow them to pass into the afterlife. November loses her fingers and is covered in bee stings, Sei becomes accidentally pregnant, Ludo has his tongue cut out, Oleg goes through such a deep depression he almost starves to death.
   For any of this to make sense, Palimpsest itself has to be vividly realised. Valente's descriptions of the dream world are incredible. Despite the danger, the city is genuinely alluring, with its heavy air of mystery, its impenetrable social rituals, its people with heads or limbs of animals and its finely crafted vermin. Valente's command of atmosphere is deft, and she is able to change the tone from whimsical to sinister and genuinely quite frightening without missing a beat.
   Valente also does interesting things with the structure of the book. It is told in the third person omniscient, and devotes alternating pairs of chapters to each of the characters. In the beginning, the first chapter in the pair is set in the real world and the second in Palimpsest. About halfway through, when the characters are starting to become more and more obsessed and entrenched in the world of Palimpsest, the order switches over. The chapters in Palimpsest are written in a different, slightly more ornate font than the rest of the book, and this is matched by the language, which becomes more poetic and descriptive, at times approaching Lord Dunsany levels of floridness, at other times addressing the reader directly. By the end we learn that these portions of the book have been narrated by the city of Palimpsest itself. All these techniques serve to subtly create a solid distinction between the real world and Palimpsest.
   In the end, all four characters are able to move to Palimpsest permanently. I really like that the book leaves it up to the reader whether or not this is was a good choice, or if it was worth the price they paid. At the beginning of the book, when the four characters first visit Palimpsest and are bound in their Quarto, a fortune-teller gives them each a strange tarot card prophesying all the disaster they will face over the course of the story. This being fiction, the prophecies play out, all though not necessarily in the ways you might imagine, so being able to snatch any kind of happy ending from that is an achievement. The book ends with Casimira's war finally won, the gates of Palimpsest opening, and the city itself calling all who hear to enter, which manages to underscore the triumphant and emphasise the sinister.
 
   

John Crowley - Engine Summer (1979)

'Engine Summer' by John Crowley is one of the most moving, lyrical and downright cruel post apocalyptic novels you will ever read. Although I try in these reviews not to give away too much of the plot, it's nearly impossible to talk about the emotional heft of 'Engine Summer' without revealing the twist at the end, so spoilers for a thirty-four year old SF novel to follow.

'Engine Summer' tells the story of Rush that Speaks, a youth on the cusp of manhood who lives in the idyllic pastoral settlement of Little Belair. Inspired by the stories of saints he hears from a wise old woman, he sets out in search of his own sainthood, and in the process suffers a series of revelations about the nature of the world he lives in and the people he shares it with.

Simple enough so far. It is a coming of age story, which is a familiar set up in post-apocalyptic SF; Russell Hoban would use a similar template for 'Riddley Walker'. 'Engine Summer' lacks the almost violent linguistic inventiveness of Hoban's masterpiece, and its spirituality is more subtle and muted, but it achieves a similar sense of pathos for its doomed protagonist and his dreams of a grander, less ruined age. The images of a youth travelling through the flotsam and jetsam of our ruined future, the significance of which has long been forgotten, also form a central part of Gene Wolfe's masterful Book Of The New Sun series. However it's hard to imagine more different protagonists than Severian and Rush that Speaks; in stark contrast to Wolfe's charming but utterly unreliable narrator who creates a tapestry of possible interpretations of every event that he relates, the people of Little Belair, and Rush that Speaks in particular, pride themselves on 'truthful speaking' - to say what you mean and mean what you say. Indeed, this facet of Rush's nature is what allows him to become the redemption to the 'angels' - the people who inhabited the Earth before the great disaster - at his own personal cost.

We find out at the end that our narrator is not Rush himself - he is a recording, whose purpose is to retell his life up until the moment of recording, which he has done over three hundred times in the past six hundred years. Through sharing Rush's formative experiences of exploration, awakening and disillusionment, the angels, and the reader of the book, are able to come to a better understanding of their own life experiences, but this version of Rush is doomed to relive these vivid and heartbreaking experiences over and over again. It is a strikingly cruel ending, and in a way a powerful metaphor for the existence of, and the way we as consumers of fiction use, fictional characters.

All of this conveys little of the wonder of Crowley's prose. He is a wonderfully lyrical writer. The style of 'Engine Summer' is less ornate and poetic than that of Crowley's influential fantasy masterpiece, 'Little, Big', but it is more naturalistic and affecting for being less mannered. It has an almost brutal concision lacking from the epic sprawl of 'Little, Big'. As wonderous as 'Little, Big' indeed is, 'Engine Summer' may well be his greatest work.

Hope Mirrlees - Lud-In-The-Mist (1926)

"It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use."

Hope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel. 'Lud-In-The-Mist' comfortably predates Tolkein and Peake's defining works of 20th Century English fantasy, yet it still feels wonderfully fresh and decidedly odd. Lud is situated on the confluence between two rivers: the Dawl, bringing trade and prosperity from inland, and the Dapple, which flows from the land of Faerie. The citizens of Lud have renounced all things magical, and with the growing influence of the supernatural preying on the town, it's up to Nathaniel Chanticleer, the town's mayor, to put things right. 
   Though here be elves and faeries, they couldn't be further away from Tolkein's wise, good-natured and somewhat twee creations. Mirrlees takes her cues from folklore; the Fairies are mischievous and cunning, and as in folklore, Faerieland is conflated with the land of the dead. As in John Crowley's 'Little Big', which I am sure must have taken some of its cues from this book, the sense of threat is created by the encroachment of the world of Faerie on our reality. 
   None of this really conveys the great strength of the book, which is Mirrlees' writing style itself. 'Lud-In-The-Mist' gleefully and effortlessly shifts through differing styles and tones whilst maintaining a constant and engaging narrative voice. Throughout the book the wordplay is a delight, and is used by the author to set up and subvert expectations. As a result, you get wonderfully vivid mixed or extended metaphors, like the one I've quoted above. This all adds to the synaesthetic feel of the novel, which really helps at the end where Master Chanticleer rides into the land of Faerie and things get seriously trippy. 
   And then there are her characters. Chanticleer himself is a wonderfully unlikely hero, a bumbling, self-important dreamer; yet his heart is absolutely in the right place so you can't help wanting him to succeed. Among the more villainous characters, her descriptions almost achieve the grotesque surrealism of Mervin Peake's 'Gormenghast', although Mirrlees is more gentle in tone, and even the villains remain sympathetic. After all, the book is ultimately about the reconciliation between the magical and the mundane, as represented by the worlds of Lud and Faerie. A theme throughout is how we need something of the magical in our everyday lives, how the power of words to name things and so to deceive is itself a kind of magic. This kind of meta twist, which finishes off the novel very elegantly, wouldn't be out of place in Gene Wolfe's work. But 'Lud-In-The-Mist' predates all that. It's a testament to the power and originality of this novel that you can feel its influence in much of the more adventurous Fantasy novels so many years on.