The Third Annual Serene Wombles

Sorry this is so late. I had, like, three significant life crises happen all at once, and I only had this half finished by 3rd October, which was my blog’s birthday. I really wanted to get this out on the day itself, but that’s life. Let the post begin!

Wow, we survived a whole ‘nother year, and for some reason you lot are still interested in what I have to say about various forms of speculative media and other awesome shit. Weirdos.

For the n00bs: The Serene Wombles are the awards I give once a year, on my blog’s birthday, for the stuff I liked best of all the things I have reviewed. The skinny:

Eligibility for a Serene Womble is conferred by being the subject of a review on In Search of the Happiness Max in the past year. There may have been better or more worthy things that came out this year, but if I didn’t find them relevant to my interests, or if I simply didn’t have the time to review them, they won’t be eligible for a Serene Womble. I make no pretense that these awards are significant or important in any way, but I enjoy having the opportunity to praise and draw attention to things I have loved.

The Serene Wombles are divided into two categories, those that apply to recent releases, and special Time Travelling Wombles for the most awesome things in my Reviewing Through the Time Machine posts. The division between the former and the latter may at times seem arbitrary – why should a film that came out in 2009 count as a recent release, whilst a TV Show that ended in 2009 requires a time machine? It’ll always be a judgement call, and the call is mine. At the end of the day, these are not the Oscars, they’re the highlights from a blog, and are therefore subject to my whim.

Due to illness and stress and stuff the pickings have been a little thinner this year than I would like. Nevertheless, there have been some really awesome and creative things out there, and I still want to praise them.

The Serene Womble for Best Film

Poster for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Elligible films: Looper, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Star Trek: Into Darkness.

So… guess who hasn’t been to the cinema a lot this year?  There are a whole bunch of films that I wanted to go see this year  – summer of bloody superheroes indeed! – but illness and lack of funds have prevented me. As a consequence, this was basically no contest. Looper made me angry. Star Trek: Into Darkness was tiresome and disappointing. And I enjoyed The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey a very great deal. I said when I watched it at Christmas that it would be the one to beat, and, alas, nothing rose to the challenge.

This was an exceedingly pretty film that I found well-paced and which realised the story very well. I didn’t mind the extra stuff added in, and actually like that Peter Jackson took this once-in-a-generation-or-two opportunity to explore Tolkien’s world more fully. Bags of fun!

The Serene Womble for Best TV Show: Hemlock Grove

Eligible TV Shows: Hemlock Grove, Doctor Who, House of Cards, Game of Thrones, Hannibal, America’s Next Top Model, Sleepy Hollow.

For the first year, Game of Thrones is not the winner of this category! I still enjoyed it, and it had some of my favourite moments of the whole series, but the pacing was rocky, and for consistently good value there was some significant competition.

Hemlock Grove was original, genre bending, narratatively interesting, conceptually challenging, and thoroughly addictive. It wasn’t quite like anything I had seen before, in a good way.

Hannibal deserves an honourable mention, but although it was addictive, entertaining, and well-acted, I can’t say it was anything especially new or original, just very well done. House of Cards was well-acted and reasonably well-written, but fairly unoriginal and tiresomely another privileged white man plotting petty revenges that it’s hard to care for when he’s not really received any very great slights. Doctor Who is… Doctor Who. This really isn’t going to be a contender until Moffat leaves. If an episode doesn’t leave me wanting to scream, it’s a good sign. I thought there were a couple of somewhat interesting episodes this year, but that’s all. America’s Next Top Model, much as I am in the business of defending it, is not remotely in the same league. Sleepy Hollow snuck in as a last minute entry. I enjoyed the one episode I’d seen at time of review, but it’s basically entertaining fluff.

So, it’s a hearty congrats to Hemlock Grove. You seriously impressed me and I hope I can spread the love to my readers.

The Serene Womble for Best Novel – Null

There was precisely one entrant in this category: A Dance with Dragons. Given that this is just a couple of chapters from the longer Read Along with Rhube chapter by chapter review that I have been doing for the last year (two years?). It feels a bit cheaty to give it a free pass to a Serene Womble by default of multiple entries and the fact that I just haven’t reviewed any other (current) novels. Plus, it just isn’t that good. Entertaining, interesting enough for the time and attention I have devoted to it? Yeah, I guess. But it’s also deeply problematic and I doubt it would win against any competition it might have had in another year. (It did not win last year, for example.)

Fair? Unfair? It’s my blog, I get to choose.

The Serene Womble for Best Blog – Escher Girls

Eligible blogs: Myths Retold, Academic Men Explain Things to Me, Escher Girls

Oh man, this was a really hard one. I want to give the award to all of them and actually changed my mind a couple of times. One of the difficulties is that Myths Retold is a very different kind of blog to the other two, which are in turn very similar to each other in both content and impact. I considered making a separate category for ‘Best Fiction Blog’, so that I could honour Myths Retold as well, but then I couldn’t think of any other fiction blogs and it seemed like that would be getting needlessly specific. Basically, I’m saying that all three of these are very good and worth your attention.

I’ve picked Escher Girls for the win for the scope of its impact. Escher Girls is the creation of Ami Angelwings, an awesome Canadian woman who started the blog to ‘archive and showcase the prevalence of certain ways women are depicted in illustrated pop media’, namely: women are contorted into physically impossible poses for the pleasure of the male gaze. The blog functions as a demonstration that the way women are drawn in comics and other illustrated media is dramatically different to the ways that men are drawn, that we are sexualised to extremes and that this sexualisation is commonplace, and in ways that do not compare to the male power fantasies of ripped muscles in skin-tight costumes which are so often held up to minimise women’s claims of unfair treatment. The volume of examples that Ami has collected (both personally and from submissions) is staggering, and the comfort this provides to women (who have long been told that their experience of alienation by sexualisation in mainstream comics is a mere subjective impression) is extensive and powerful.

Academic Men Explain Things to Me serves a similar function, in providing a platform for women to voice their frustrations with the phenomenon of ‘mansplaining’, in which women frequently find that men explain very basic things to them, often in areas for which the woman is herself an expert and the man a novice. Again, this is an area in which women have often been told that they are imagining being treated in an overly patronising manner, that there are ‘know it alls’ of both genders, and that our subjective experiences are not as valid as men’s (who, of course, are privileged by a default supposition of objectivity that does not exist). By creating a venue to archive these experiences in detail and volume, Academic Men Explain Things to Me has provided a powerful vindication of women’s experiences – one which I genuinely believe is helping men to rethink their behaviour, as well as providing women with a sense of justification long denied.

In the end, I chose Escher Girls for its breadth of impact. I feel that there has been a palpable shift in comic and visual culture over the past year, where the misogyny in mainstream comics has come under increasing scrutiny from more mainstream critiques and fans. I don’t think Escher Girls have been the sole cause of this. Blogs such as DC Women Kicking Ass have also provided a sustained critique and made significant contributions, as have prominent critiques from individual women, such as Kelly Turnbull and Kyrax2. But to concede that a leading light is a part of a movement need not minimise the specific contribution. I think the impact of Escher Girls can be seen in the fact that it was able to spin off other projects, such as The Hawkeye Initiative, which highlights the discrepancies in treatment of men and women in comics by showcasing redrawings of sexualised female images with the male character, Hawkeye, in an identical pose.

Moreover, Ami’s blog is impressively organised in a way that facilitates citation and comparison from multiple angles – the tags page not only collates posts by trope, but also by artist, company, character, series, and Genre/Medium. And the blog integrates a Disqus commenting feature, allowing for debate and discussion of issues in a way that usually isn’t possible on Tumblr style blogs, and which Ami manages with great sensitivity.

It’s hard to compare a project like this with an artistic endeavour, like Myths Retold, which is not aiming at the kind of social change Escher Girls enables. Myths Retold demonstrates an artistry and poetic sophistication that simply doesn’t apply in assessing the other two blogs. All I can say is that whilst I recommend all three blogs to you, I felt that in this year, Escher Girls seemed most significant to me.

The Serene Womble for Best Webseries: Welcome to Night Vale

Eligible webseries: TableTop, Vlog Brothers, Welcome to Night Vale

I admit to using the term ‘webseries’ loosely. I reviewed quite a lot of things this year that don’t fit neatly into large categories, and although I might call TableTop a webseries, Vlog Brothers a vlog, and Night Vale a podcast, having each win a category for which it was the only entrant, I don’t think that’s a good use of my time and attention or yours. In any case, there is no question in my mind that Welcome to Night Vale outshines the other two, and I do not have the qualms I had for the previous category, in that I feel these compare fairly well, for regularly web-distributed entertainment.

TableTop is a nice idea, and if I were really into game mechanics I might find more value in it, but ultimately it fell flat for me. It’s basically just like watching other people play fun games. The games look fun, and maybe you like the people, but you can’t help but feeling that the whole thing would be more enjoyable if you were actually playing, too.

Vlog Brothers is entertaining, amusing, thoughtful, and informative. I recommend it. But it can’t hold a candle to Night Vale.

Welcome to Night Vale is one of the best, most enjoyable, most original shows I have had the pleasure to stumble across in a long time. The idea of using the podcast format as though it were a radio station for a fictional town is not one I had come across before, and it has been put to good purpose. Funny, strange, and more than a little bit dark, Night Vale is like a ray of sunlight that never fails to make me smile or to delight me with its unexpected changes in direction. It’s also surprisingly durable in terms of being something I can listen to over and over and still find new things to enjoy. I’ve had a hard year, especially the last few months, and being able to tune in to Night Vale any time I would otherwise have been alone with my thoughts has been remarkably soothing. It comforts me to know that wonderful, joyful, eccentric people are making such wonderful, joyful, eccentric works of art.

Not to mention that it manages to be progressive in terms of representation of gender, race, and sexuality without ever being po-faced. I can’t not give this an award.

The Serene Womble for Best Music: Stephanie Mabey

Eligible musicians: Garfunkel and Oates and Stephanie Mabey

Garfunkel and Oates are witty and entertaining, but occasionally problematic. By contrast, Stephanie Mabey’s music is pure joy. I’ve listened to her album, Wake Up Dreaming, again and again, often on loop, since downloading it, and I’m not sick of it yet. Her music is delightful, witty, and often beautiful – a real must for the geek music lover. I can’t recommend her work enough.

The Serene Womble for Best Webcomic: City of the Dead

Eligible webcomics: City of the Dead

OK, this one was the only entry in its category – I haven’t been reading as many webcomics this year, focussing, as I have been, on trying out different new media instead. Nevertheless, this comic is dynamic, atmospheric, and fun, making full use of the online medium to present a fast-paced and cohesively presented story. It’s no Romantically Apocalyptic (the winner from last year), but it’s certainly a cut above the average, and worthy of your time.

The Time Traveling Wombles

The Time Travelling Womble for Best Novel: The Count of Monte Cristo

Eligible novels: The Count of Monte Cristo.

A consequence of the sparse nature of this year is that the categories for the Time Traveling Wombles each has only one entry, but as each are stellar examples of exemplary works, this should not count against them.

I had no idea that The Count of Monte Cristo would be either such a rip-roaring adventure, or that it would be so progressive for its time (I ship Eugenie/Louise forever). Some classics are classics because they are fun as well as intelligent, and I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

The Time Traveling Womble for Best Non-Fiction Book: Wild Swans

Eligible non-fiction books: Wild Swans.

In my original article on this I wrote that this is one of the books I would say everyone should read before they die, so it should be no surprise that I honour it here, also. Wild Swans is a biographical and autobiographical work of heart-rending and exquisite expression of three women’s lives across turbulent twentieth century China. The tale is worthwhile and breath-taking in itself, but for people living outside of China – people for whom the ‘Cultural Revolution’ is just a term – this intimate, detailed, and thorough history is an absolutely essential piece of reading that will change your perspective in the world.

Time Traveling Womble for Best Blog – Inexplicable Objects

Eligible blogs: Inexplicable Objects.

Dating from a time before there was any such thing as a ‘blogging platform’ (the first was launched in October 1998), one can’t help but feel that Inexplicable Objects, which updated weekly from April 1998 to June 2001, would have made a phenomenally successful Tumblr. The archive is still active, more than ten years since it stopped updating, and it’s still one of my very favourite things in the world. Chocked full of delightfully strange objects, coloured by the witty commentary of Bill Young, this little website is a welcome piece of harmless absurdity to brighten your day. It may be the only entry in this category, but it is assuredly worthy of the Womble.

And finally:

The People’s Choice Award 2013: Hemlock Grove, Season One

By far and away the thing you most wanted my opinions on that I reviewed this year was Hemlock Grove. Netflix’s original fantasy/horror/weird show, released as an entire season, all at once, in April this year has garnered nearly 2,500 hits, with over a thousand more than its next nearest rival, Looper. This should possibly give pause for thought, as my review of Looper garnered attention more because it was negative and controversial than because the film was well-liked, but I hope that those who came to read my review of Hemlock Grove came away with a more positive image and their interest was more than car crash theatre.

Incidentally, last year’s winner, The Guild, Season Five, still has more hits than any other page on my website (including the home page) at over 14,000. What do these figures mean? Who knows, but something captured a lot of people’s interest, and maybe that’s something that’s worthy of your attention, too.

And that’s about it for this year. I hope you’ve enjoyed my reviews (or at least found them interesting) and that those who have won Serene Wombles of one kind or another get something positive out of the experience. It’s amazing the volume of wonderful and engaging things out there to culturally consume  in this crazy internet age; I hope I can continue to provide some kind of useful commentary on the tiny section of it in which I partake.

Meditations on death

Spoiler Warning: some spoilers for The Dark Tower vols 1&2, Buffy, Season 6, and Fool’s Fate. I have tried to be restrained, but some things were unavoidable.

‘Good, all right, I’ll drown, he thought, listening to the roar of the sea. Let me drown.‘
– Roland in Stephen King (1989: 2), The Dark Tower, Volume 2: The Drawing of the Three

‘”Wherever I… was… I was happy. At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. […] And I was warm… and I was loved… and I was finished. Complete […] I think I was in heaven. And now I’m not. Everything here is… hard, and bright, and violent […] this is hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that…”‘
– Buffy in ‘After Life’, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Espenson (2001)

‘”It was such a good dream. I dreamed that we both died here and it was all over. There was nothing more we could do, and everyone agreed that we had tried and it wasn’t really our fault. They spoke kindly of us.”‘
– The Fool in Robin Hobb (2003: 437), Fool’s Fate

‘O that this too too [solid] flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!’
– Hamlet in William Shakespeare (1996), Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii

‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’
– King (1995), The Dark Tower, Volume 1: The Gunslinger

I went for a bath after my run today but was unable to find the book I had been reading. I searched half-heartedly for a bit, but my eye kept being drawn to my bookshelves – to books I had already read and reread. The favourite ones that spend their time waiting for me to decide that there has been just enough time passed that I might read them again without finding that I know every word by heart. And my gaze snagged on possibly my most dearly beloved of all the books – the one I ration to myself with the most treasured care: volume 2 of The Dark Tower, The Drawing of the Three.

Long-term readers of this blog will be aware of the deep and complex feelings I have for the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. Sometimes I feel like a small part of my mind will always be alternating between trying to puzzle out why it affected me so, or holding it at arm’s length, mentally swooning on a couch and crying with all melodrama: ‘It is too much! The wound is still too raw – ask me in another year!’ It’s a level of emotion that I feel uncomfortable expressing. Like someone who has left the ‘get a room’ line behind and is just full-out having sex on the couch whilst other people look on uncomfortably and wonder if it would be worse to say something now or let you get it out of your system and then pretend it never happened. But I’m kinda repressed in that stereotypically British way. I know other people feel fully confident and able to launch in unabashed squee about their most beloved artifacts of affection without fear that others will laugh in their faces. I want to be like that. But I’m not. So I end up putting these awkward caveats out there when I want to talk about The Dark Tower. It may seem to an outsider (i.e. one outside of my head) that I am being a bit over-zealous. If so, I apologise. I just don’t know how to talk about it in mixed company (i.e. Dark Tower converts and those who have yet to adore it/have never seen what all the fuss is about).

Anyway, as I was preparing for my bath my eye kept snagging on this particularly special book and I found myself thinking… ‘You know what? I think maybe it is time again’. And so I picked it up and I ran my bath and I settled down amongst the bubbles, and I read… Within a few short sentences I felt the old feelings beginning to stir again. I had recently finished The Wind Through the Key Hole – King’s supplementary volume ‘4.5’ of The Dark Tower, which I will review in full eventually, but for now will simply remark that it was not the equal of its litter-mates. Almost instantly my pulse quickened, the old excitement and recognition building, saying ‘Yes! Yes! It wasn’t mere hyperbole – this is a better book, the prose is as astonishingly tight and evocative as I remember – Oh! I have missed you!’ But more than this: I had not gone four paragraphs before I hit a sentence that opened up to me yet another layer of nuance, meaning, connections that I had not consciously seen before. For of anything, this is a book of connections, building meaning from references that pluck on our minds and our associations, our deep, shared, psychological rhythms and the cultural artifacts that draw the lines – the supporting beams of our psyches – between them.

Which is lovely, and all, but I’d just settled down for a bath with a favourite book, and now my mind was racing down the connections, seeing new webs and maps of shared themes, mentally composing a blog post I could not sit down to write until after I had washed my hair. I laid down the book, did what I needed to do as quickly as possible, and climbed out of the bath to beginning chasing down quotes.

The line that tripped off this frustrated wave of mental activity was this: ‘Good, all right, I’ll drown, he thought, listening to the roar of the sea. Let me drown.‘. It’s an odd line for the first page of your book – a melancholy line, a line of endings – and odder still for a force of nature like Roland of Gilead to think. Odd or masterful. Roland is dreaming as he lies on the beach at the ‘point of pointless ending’ (King, 1989: 2). He has just sacrificed his symbolic son and symbol of hope in quest of the Dark Tower, having passed through an underworld of tunnels under the mountains that might be likened to Hades, or Hell, or Moria*. A change of landscape can mark emotional transition, and he had come out on the other side of the mountain tunnels, following the night that lasts ten years, to lie here, as water (always symbolic of emotion) roils around him, washing ever closer towards his precious gunbelts – dealers of death, but also his way of life. And here he lies on the edge of consciousness, dreaming that it is not Jake who has ‘drowned’ (the man in black had read the gunslinger his fortune before apparently dying himself, and the card of the Sailor had symbolised Jake ‘He drowns, gunslinger… and no one throws him a line‘) but himself. And he thinks of this: ‘Good, all right, I’ll drown‘.

It’s an opening thick with death metaphor and potential of rebirth, but the rebirth is not presented as a gift. No, here, death is suggested as the release. It is seductive, appealing, absolving. Death is forgiveness from transgression and freedom from responsibility. In his dream, Roland can take the sacrifice upon himself and absolve himself of Jake’s death, but he can also shirk the responsibility of his all-consuming quest for the Tower. It’s a peculiarly selfish dream, given that he has already sacrificed Jake, and therefore the burden of responsibility has been added to by the price of making that death worth it.

So much great fiction – so many truly great moments in literature – has centred around this thought. It’s what makes Buffy’s description of what she calls heaven so achingly powerful: death to her was freedom from pain and responsibility. It was knowing that everyone else was alright, and she didn’t have to protect them anymore. So it is also conceived of in the Fool’s dream from Fool’s Fate. The Fool and Fitz are struggling to survive in the ice-tunnels in a glacier that once housed a city and now forms the living tomb to a dragon whose ‘rebirth’ would enable a whole species to be revived. The symbolism of location and themes is strikingly similar to the underground station in The Dark Tower, only here the metaphor is overladen with ice where the gunslinger’s world is one of dry, dusty, radioactive deserts and barren beaches. Ice is a killer, and it is killing the Fool, who is tempted by the lethargy induced by his slowing metabolism, but it is also a preserver, lowering the metabolism of the dragon so that it has survived in a fantasy equivalent of cryogenic stasis. Moreover, prophecy hangs over this scene, too: the ‘Fool’s Fate’ of the title is the Fool’s own prediction of his death in such a place. It is a death he thinks is necessary, but also fears. The death he dreams of is a different one – not the one he has predicted, one where he simply sits down and gives up; a kinder death, but one he knows he should fight against because he believes that dying in the correct way will bring about a better world. A terrible sort of responsibility, and in the face of that, it does seem like just sitting down and dying might be a good dream, if only: ‘There was nothing more we could do, and everyone agreed that we had tried and it wasn’t really our fault’.

This theme of death as a release from the anguish of responsibility is central to Hamlet, as well. Interestingly, the quotation as I have taken it above is disputed. Some argue that it should read ‘Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh should melt’ (Shakespeare, Act I, Scene ii). I have always held with ‘solid’ because it more accurately reflected the emotion of desiring to dissolve one’s physical self and melt away, emphasising the ‘solid’ implacable impossibility of such a wish, and thus how bitter the emotion is that such release is impossible. It also makes sense from the point of view that Hamlet has not really ‘sinned’ at this point. He might accuse Gertrude of being ‘sullied’ (whether you think he is right to do so or not, that emotion is clearly present) and when he speaks of ‘things rank and gross in nature'(ibid.) possessing the ‘garden’ in which he must persist, one feels he is accusing Claudius of corruption and a pollution of Denmark in contrast to the purity of Hamlet’s own father. But at this stage he has no cause to cast doubt upon his own actions. In fact, he is rather self-righteous in professing that he alone seems to be adequately grieving for his father. On the other hand, the wish to cleanse oneself with self-destruction certainly fits a theme. Tellingly, in his most famous soliloquy, which more consummately concerns suicide and the release of death he remarks:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep –
To sleep: perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause; there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make,
With a bare bodkin; who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards [of us all]
– Shakespeare (1997), Hamlet, Act III, Scene i

‘And thus conscience doth make cowards of us all’. It’s an odd twist on the emotion we’ve seen so strongly evinced in the other texts mentioned above: conscience is what makes Buffy continue to fight despite her despair at being torn from heaven; conscience is what makes the Fool and Fitz press on, even though the Fool believes he walks to a much more terrible death than what the ice alone could offer; conscience is what spurs the gunslinger to wakefulness to fight to save his life and his bullets from the waves and from the lobstrosity that is crawling up the beach towards him. Surely it is conscience that makes a man bear the whips and scorns of time, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Ah, but, Hamlet speculates, would we not all give ourselves into that good night (as Dylan Thomas would say), that ‘sleep of death’ if we did not fear what might come after? If ‘the Everlasting [God] had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter’ (Shakespeare, Act I, Scene ii)?

The answer seems to be ‘no’ – or at least, many of us would not. Our heroes do not. Roland’s beliefs about the after life seem jaded at best. Buffy explicitly states that: ‘I don’t understand about theology or dimensions, or … any of it, really … but I think I was in heaven’. It is her friends’ fear that she might have gone to ‘an untold Hell dimension‘ (Xander in ‘Once More with Feeling’, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Whedon 2001) that pulled her back to life. Buffy sacrificed herself not knowing what would come next, and it was that sacrifice that was honoured and rewarded with ‘heaven’. Truly, it is not death that she fears, she fears life. Her heroic act in Season 6 is to go on living. The Fool is not typically heroic. He fears death, but he would accept a good death, freed from responsibility.

One of the interesting things about science fiction and fantasy is that these genres allow us to explore our emotions on the other side of death – to attempt a mapping of the undiscovered country. Buffy comes back from a death knowing that death, for her, was easier than life. Roland and the Fool are provided with prophecies concerning death, and Fitz has experienced a sort of death and resurrection. The unique experiences of the Fool and Fitz allow Fitz to comment: ‘”See how pleasant it can be, to have died? Once you’ve died, no one expects you to be a king. Or a prophet.”‘ (Hobb, 2003: 647) and for the Fool to respond: ‘”Years later, when I came to see you at your cottage, I thought, ‘surely he will be healed by now. Surely he will have recovered.’ […] But you had not. You had just… stopped. In some ways. Oh, you were older and wiser, I suppose. But you had not made any move on your own to reach out to life again.”‘ Admittedly this latter is not literally a comment on Fitz’ death and ressurrection, but rather that his magic-enabled actions to remove the worst pains from his memories, and his willful turning away from the responsibilities of life, have been damaging.

There is a wrestling, here – in Hamlet, in Buffy, in Fool’s Fate, in The Dark Tower – with the death wish, and a sort of romance of death, as well as the fear of it. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but also to be fought against. There is honour in facing your struggles, but again and again the question is raised as to whether this ‘honour’ is worth the sacrifice of living the pains of life. There’s something darkly humourous in how The Gunslinger‘s famous first line encapsulates this:

‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’
– King (1995: 1)

The man in black is frequently identified with death or presented as an omen of death. His attire resembles that of a priest, and Jake describes how the man in black was the last thing he saw before dying for the first time, and how Walter used Jake’s death as a gateway over to Roland’s world, like the ferryman over the river Styx, taking the dead to the underworld. Yet the gunslinger is himself a purveyor of death. This dealer of death actively pursues the personification of death across a dead landscape and death flees before him. It marks an ironic comment on how all of us are racing towards our graves in a battle we can never win. Every step taken in the struggle for survival brings us closer to the grave. Roland may (or may not) be fighting to save the world, but ultimately the tower that is his goal is dark in the same way that Walter, the man he pursues in the first volume, is darkly clothed. His quest to save the worlds leaves a wave of destruction in its wake. Roland suffers under the weight of the death he deals as well as his responsibility. They are intertwined. Every life he takes in the name of his goal is a promise that the goal will be worth it and it will be reached. And at the start of The Drawing of the Three, where my thoughts on this matter began, he has come to a point of pointless ending. The point where the world seems to drop away and you might step into the waves, you might lie back down and let the lobstrosity do its work, you might accept the sleep of death. And the story of this book is Roland’s tortured climb back out of the metaphorical Moria – the black chasm, or ‘black hole’ as depression is sometimes called for its apparent inescapability.

Roland is emotionally deadened at the start of The Gunslinger, but Jake reawakened a rusty paternal affection. In allowing him to die those flutters of emotions have been crushed. In order to return to his quest, Roland must find a way to revive these reawakened feelings without allowing them to destroy him. Within two pages his potency as a dealer of death, as a quester for The Dark Tower, is dramatically reduced. His bullets and guns are wetted – many of the bullets will never fire again. And, shockingly, he loses two fingers and most of a toe to a lobstrosity. When I first read this it was my first encounter with such shocking and permanent injury to a protagonist. I kept expecting him to get his fingers back. It’s powerful. Moreover, the lobstrosity is possessed of a powerful poison, which is already working in his blood stream by the time he reaches the first door to our world via which he will draw his ‘three’. The rest of the book is the story of an emotionally and physically damaged man learning to lean upon and help other people at least as emotionally and physically damaged as himself: Eddie, the heroin addict; Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker/Susannah Dean, the black lady in a wheelchair with multiple personality disorder; and even Jake himself, in a way.

Not that Roland ever becomes a ‘soft’ man. There’s a grim and delightful humour in one character’s likening him to the Terminator, as an unemotional dealer of death. But pulling yourself out of the mines of Moria doesn’t mean a complete personality overhaul. It’s a fascinating journey through different kinds of recovery, bringing drops of water to the stark desert of Roland’s life. Above all it underlines the difficulty and pain involved in turning away from death and ‘choosing life’ (the opening monologue from Trainspotting, ‘Choose Life’ (John Hodge, 1996), can be seen as setting a frame for exploring this, also).

There is a ‘romance’ of the western, and it is a romance of death. But this romance, this fascination, is not limited to any one genre. It has a strong and complex hold on all our lives. Which is why it can hit so deep when a truly powerful piece of art hits out with something that seems to encapsulate the complexities and contradictions of our emotions on the subject. Strange that I both saw, and didn’t see this in The Dark Tower before. But, for me, that is the mark of truly great art: its rich complexities work on your emotions to powerful effect without your even having to know how such feelings were brought about.

—
Footnotes:
*Random note prompted by the Wikipedia article on Moria linked to above, because it gave me chills. Wiki notes that: ‘Moria (Sindarin for “Black Chasm”) was the name given by the Eldar to an enormous underground complex in north-western Middle-earth, comprising a vast network of tunnels, chambers, mines and huge halls or ‘mansions’, that ran under and ultimately through the Misty Mountains… It has been suggested that Tolkien — an ardent Catholic — may have used this name as a reference to the mountains of Moriah, where (according to the book of Genesis) Abraham was to sacrifice his son, Isaac. However, Tolkien categorically denied such derivations.’ Anyway, ‘north-western’ initially caught my eye because I thought that the mega electronics and robotics coporation in The Dark Tower was called ‘North Western Positronics’ – it’s not, it’s called North Central Positronics; I am a bad fangirl. However, although no map ever appears in The Dark Tower books, there are indications that the great station and the tunnels than lead there are located in the north-west of Mid World. The second, and more interesting, thing that caught my attention was the biblical reference. Although Tolkein may have denied it, I don’t think King could have been unaware, given that this is the scene for Roland’s sacrifice of Jake. I have suggested elsewhere that these mountains referenced Moria; I think this evidence makes the reference pretty clear.

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Espenson, Jane (2001) ‘After Life’, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
Hobb, Robin (2003), Fool’s Fate, London: Harper Collins
Hodge, John (1996), Trainspotting
King, Stephen (1995), The Dark Tower, Volume 1: The Gunslinger, London: Warner Books
King, Stephen (1989), The Dark Tower, Volume 2: The Drawing of the Three, London: Sphere
Shakespeare, William, (1997) Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition, G Blakemore Evans et al (eds), Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company
Thomas, Dylan (1996), ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ (pp. 1465-6), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fourth Edition, Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stalwarthy (eds), London: W. W. Norton & Company

Poetry in Fantasy

So, this is a divisive thing. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about random poetical interludes in fantasy writings. The use in fantasy is no surprise, really. Much early fiction we know about was poetical. That’s how you got your story remembered. The metre helped your verse steep in a performer’s brain, back when people hadn’t moved to see that writing could be used for fiction as well as accounting. And even when fiction became a genre divorced from both the performative and poetical aspect, if one wrote epic, one could not help but think of Homer, Virgil, and (later) Milton. Not to mention the folk music in which the fantastical continued to breathe in the shared consciousness to preserve aspects of celtic culture, and other magical tales: fairies, druids, dragons and other lore*. (See, for example, the Ballad of Tam Lin, which inspired Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire and Hemlock.)

Verse is embedded in fantasy.

However, I don’t know about you, but I can’t write poetry for toffee. And neither can many much more successful fantasy authors. I have no fixed opinion on Tolkien’s verse, but at least half the people I know who call themselves fans readily confess to skipping the ‘song bits’. (I can’t bring myself to skip any of it, personally, but I can’t deny it wasn’t the main draw on the books.) I’ve heard the same about Watership Down, but I have to say, on rereading, I found the rabbit epics both captivating and spine-chilling. (But then, that is a book very carefully and subtly tied to the Homeric root.)

In the average fantasy, though, what is your opinion? Love? Hate? One can’t blame an author if they aren’t a natural poet, but then, why try if you know you suck? And yet…

And yet some poems of fantasy and SF poetry genuinely catch me. Take but one piece from Anne McCaffrey’s song-rich Pern books:

Drummer, beat, and piper, blow,
Harper, strike, and soldier, go.
Free the flame and sear the grasses
Till the dawning Red Star passes.

I know this rhythm is yanked from some famous poem, but I can’t for the life of me think what it is**. I just know that if I start out intoning the original I usually end up wanting to finish with the one from Pern. And that’s OK – every poet is a thief. Churchill stole rhythms from classic literature to create some of the most powerful and iconic speeches in history, and I think that’s a good thing.

Or take John Brunner. I remain in profound awe of his achievement in Stand on Zanzibar, not least the folk poems and dirty limericks that add colour to the ‘Tracking with Close-ups’. Oddly, on a random flipping through of this rather lengthy book I only found the dirty ones about the woman who attacked the super-computer, go figure (e.g. one of 5 poems given in ‘Tracking with Close-ups’ 17):

The case of Teresa’s instructive-
It shows how extremely seductive
A shiggy can be
If her an-atom-ee
Is first rendered super-conductive

I also find Pamela Belle’s sparsely but powerfully used poetry profoundly moving. Take this, describing Sar D’yenyi, and giving us a first, personal glimpse into Ansaryon’s heart, as he quotes it:

Though skies may fall, and put an end to dawning:
Though seas run dry, and fiery mountains roar:
I once saw Sar D’yenyi in the morning,
And my heart is filled with joy for ever more.

***

Some fantasy poetry sucks bottom, I think most people would agree to that, but some of it is profoundly beautiful, moving, and effective. Do you have a favourite bit? Is there some fragment of made-up epic you want to hear the rest of? These are just some of my favourite SF&F fragments, what are yours?

*Of necessity I realise I’m giving a woefully brief and hopelessly anglocentric account.

** I remembered. Try this on for size:
Double, double, toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
Free the flame and sear the grasses
Till the dawning Red Star passes…

Oh, wait now, I’ve done it again…