Low Fantasy Done Right: "Priest of Bones" by Peter McLean

It's sad that so many people hear the phrase "fantasy" and automatically associate it with lack of quality. In reality, "fantasy" describes a setting as much as anything else - once you accept that your setting is fantastical, then it is a fantasy novel. Everything else is "sub-genre".

Ishiguro and Atwood are being - sadly - realistic when they try to avoid the label, as many people won't bother if the book has that label attached to it. It would be nice, however, to once hear a "literary fiction" author who has written a sci-fi/fantasy book say "yes, it's fantasy/sci-fi, and it's great - it's deep and thought-provoking and filled with themes of love and loss and an exploration of memory and truth, as are all of the best books, including many books in this genre. I believe mine is better, of course, but that's because I'm a great writer, not because of the genre I write in."  With so many 'literary' writers using genre themes and settings, from Paul Auster to Jonathan Carroll and indeed Atwood (who seems to have come to peace with genre) to Ishiguro (who may yet see the light one day) sometimes it’s hard to understand where SF (Speculative Fiction) lies.

Still, indeed, who cares, really? That battle has been fought and 'story' has won. Not all the old generals may have noticed that the fight is over and some will claim the Tower is still standing strong but soon enough the Ivory knights will look like those people who do those Civil War reenactments (be that the American Civil war or the War of the Roses - some of those knights are really crusty...) On genre's side we should really stop to be so bloody defensive - and yes, precious. It would be rather ironic if we now would try to build some genre High Church, with dedicated priests who would guard the Eucharist with rituals and dogmas and anathemas: "Thou will call it SF: SciFi is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord!" et cetera.

In short, it's all story, and it's all good, as long as the writer is any good at his/her craft.

I've just finished “Priest of Bones”. It's a lot cleverer than the description fantasy would suggest even when we take into account that it’s Low Fantasy (a sub-genre a very much prefer over High Fantasy). And I love it when we get a “in media res” in SF! It allows the way McLean slowly unfolds the story and introduces some of the characters slowly in a way to give me a feeling of collective history and memory that's been lost to the mists of the Dark Ages and turned to legend.

But how can you separate a genre from its stylistic features? The features are what make the genre; it has nothing to do with the quality of the writing or whether it can be considered "literature". If the features don't constitute the genre, it must therefore be possible to have a fantasy story without using any of those features whatsoever. But then how would we know it was fantasy? I feel the problem is that fantasy, or specifically heroic/high fantasy, is full of very lazy works that don't do justice to the genre as a whole. The reason is that it's just easier and simpler to create your own - shallow - world than to try to adapt your own work into an existing world with preset rules. That's why fantasy like Tolkien or George R. R. Martin (or even “His Dark Materials” by Pullman, even though he's no fantasy writer) have done so well: they have put time and effort into creating a real, deep world, complete with languages, cultures and history.

Writing good fantasy, be it Low or High, much like writing good historical fiction, takes time, effort and research. Writing quickly just results in bland heroic fantasy that gives the genre a bad name. Low fantasy, on the other hand, has to somehow fit into our current understanding of science and history (vide Joe Abercrombie and now Peter McLean). This usually leads to magic being secret or hidden, leading to a grittier story. Why? You got to explain that the dragon in Lisbon was invisible and it didn't hurt anyone because it was bound by a magical oath…It’s a pain I know, but it’s the only way I’ll read Fantasy. The Low Variety, not the High one, so to speak.

Non-Fuckfort SF: "The Great Leveller (#4-6)" by Joe Abercrombie

Every time I re-read one of the First Law novels, I find myself thinking, “Why the fuck am I reading an western disguised as SF (the Fantasy variety) with lots of adventure/revenge/war that actually makes me feel downtrodden as I tear through the books?” Maybe because I get stuff that I can’t get anywhere else SF-wise (or Fantasy-wise). For instance, in one of the volumes in this trilogy, “The Heroes”, there’s a scene that gets me every goddamn time, where a character follows a person in a battle until that person dies, then that person follows whoever killed that person until that person also dies, then follows whoever killed that person, and so on and so forth; I don’t get this kind of recursive narrative in my usual Fantasy fodder. That’s you notice the guy’s writing chops. I would put his work (minus the juveniles which are crap) and K. J. Parker’s against anyone in any genre since Tim O'Brien for illustrating the truth of war. Moreover, Grimdark is not killing fantasy. But something is killing fantasy. Maybe only Fantasy writers can kill Fantasy as they’re doing right now. For instance, did Laurell K. Hamilton's romance-but-with-vampires/werewolves/zombies bullshit spawn do it? Or Jordan? Or Goodkind? Or Eddings? Al of them belong to the regular re-outbreaks of Tolkien rip-offs, the so-called the herpes of the genre. I hope this trend will pass, but I’m not sure a return of Elves and Druids or some such crap won’t happen. I think we get the fantasy we deserve. What Joe Abercrombie does is not easy; he not deviate too far from the traditional path but introduces something new. We've all seen these heroes before, we recognize the old fart disguised as a wizard who plays things close to his chest (a la Heinlein), the cynical warrior who is just tired of it all (a la Parker). The brilliance of Abercrombie is that he makes these characters come alive. I've met these types before in Fantasy but they've always lacked something. Abercrombie gives them a soul, makes me believe.

For me, Abercrombie is George R. R. Martin but grown the fuck up. There is wonder and (almost no) magic but none of the stupidity of some of Martin's characters. I've just finished re-reading the second First Law Trilogy (novels 4 to 6), and in these 3 novels he is impressively extra cynical in a way I think really appeals to me. If he had written some of Tolkien’s stuff, I think it would have turned out that Gandalf was really Sauron, Aragorn was just a dude who found a broken sword at a flea market, and Frodo and Sam were going at it behind the bushes, and at the same time both were cheating on each other with Gollum (and also secretly brothers). Even people who do good stuff in his novels only do so accidentally. There are some pretty clever subversions of fantasy tropes which I love. Why? I just don't like heroes anymore. They suck! I prefer reading them on old books, because they’re kind of a quaint notion from a vintage time. In the sense that Abercrombie’s SF (Fantasy) is an attempt at a modern form of ancient myth; when some people Grimdark is modern, nope. Grit (and Grimdark) has always been in SF in a way. I mean if the Sophocles’ plays (the Theban plays in particular) aren't considered Grimdark, I don't know what is.

One thing that ruins Martin’s GoT for me is my inability to sustain suspension of disbelief; his characters, do not become pants shittingly terrified over the possibility that all of the terrible stuff happening around them (or that they were perhaps inflicting on other characters) would eventually happen to themselves. I mean, every single character is so full of silliness, cockiness, or absurdity that they never start wondering if not living by the sword might be a path to avoid dying by the sword. Or that the characters who aren't full of silliness, cockiness, or absurdity are all so mentally balanced that not one of them lays awake nightly, too anxious to sleep, worried that someone from the Fuckfort will peel them like an orange, or burn them alive. I could believe a bit more strongly in the GoT if there at least one over-sensitive character who was absolutely mortified by the Grimdark surrounding them. With Abercrombie it’s a different story altogether.

Why have I re-read the first 6 novels set in First Law World? Because the seventh, “A Little Hatred” will come out in September…

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Non-Standard Fantasy: “The Blade Itself” by Joe Abercrombie

I "discovered" Abercrombie in 2012 when I was actually looking for some fantasy novels that "weren't Dragonlance-level shit". Back in 2012 I started off by reading “The Heroes” first. Only in 2013 I got to reading the First Law from the beginning.

Abercrombie does not sugar-coat his narrative. That’s for sure. That’s the first indication you’re not reading your running-of-the-mill fantasy:  it’s disturbing because it skews closer to real life than we are used to or comfortable with fantasy-wise. Protagonists fail, start things but don’t finish them, have their plans changed in mid-stride and generally push through as if they were making it up as the narrative progresses. While reading “The Blade Itself” I kept expecting conventional fantasy storytelling to assert itself and bring the characters back around to the “right” path, despite evidence to the contrary. I’m not that well versed in fantasy lore, but I think this first novel in Abercrombie’s fantasy milieu sets up a precedent for an ending that just isn’t what you expect, but I still kept waiting for that tide to turn back and give me a the usual happy ending cropping up in a lot of fantasy nowadays.  What I found most unsettling is that there IS a happy ending – it’s just the last person in the entire book you’d expect gets everything he wants. It was one of those endings, and one of those books, that sits with you for a very long time.

A lot of the fantasy I still read tends to have 'evil' as an abstract, exterior force and 'virtue' as somehow innate and hereditary. There is room for moral complexity in fantasy but a lot of people make good money without bothering, which dilutes the impact of the better stuff (as does the tendency of critics and publishers to pretend that anything not thud'n'blunder broadsword-opera is magic realism or some kind of new genre, and to misprise anything that looks naturalistic until a particular point as 'going off the rails' or 'getting confused'.)

There are probably simple reasons too, but shrugging and saying 'the public like simple' rather weakens your case that there's more to fantasy than that. I reserve the right not to only like what a lot of other people like, but more to the point I think other people might like the less, um, generic work if it were more widely available. If I wanted to make a point about the processes of 'othering' in the rather linear world-view of the tabloids, I’d say that many fantasy works examine this process either directly or as a side-effect of the way we read fantasy. "Simply 'Good vs Evil' stories" aren't as satisfying. I've read all that before. Identifying evil is a tricky enterprise. The smoker and the loud biker were --- and maybe in some degenerate places and times still are --- considered good, by way of "cool", while in reality they are evil polluters. It's all down to how much bollocks a society can live by before they wake up and smell the coffee of reason.

Most fantasy these days (i.e. the last 20 or so years) has shied away from the cliché of evil overlords and his countless, faceless minions. In fact, even at its most prevalent form, it was only the most visible form of "evil," rather than the most common. I might even go so far as to say that an awful lot of fantasy focused on the snark between the main characters rather than the "good vs evil" thing - hell, the thing everyone remembers from the endless "Dragonlance" novels is the parasitic relationship between Raistlin and his twin brother Caramon, just as a f'r'instance. But to get back to the main thrust of this skewed-sort-of-review, in K. J. Parker's novels the heroes are quite often men and women who would be regarded as evil in other circumstances and much of his appeal as a writer is in the moral quandary this creates. I would point everyone reading these words in the direction of his excellent and grimdark-before-it-was-cool “Academic Exercises” and “The Folding Knife”.

NB: I’ve been told repeatedly to read Brent Weeks which I never did (I’m looking at you Bookstooge...). It’s time to rectify this. Weeks is probably the only major fantasy writer I haven’t read yet.

The Glamorisation of Suffering: "City of Stairs" by Robert Jackson Bennett

When is it necessary to kill a character to get a point across? I’m thinking about Vo here. By the time we get to the point when things get moving, I’ve already seen how damaging his religious upbringing had been to him. I've already seen how it had wreaked him and how this agony had shaped him into the character’s he'd become. I got that; bumping him off does nothing to further highlight the deed, nor to bring forth the message I got from killing him off. His death is just lazy writing. In fact, his death serves no narrative purpose and hence, it saps the very directive it was supposedly delivering. People don't just suffer in a void. Not all pain leads to tragic and abject death. Such “glamorisation” of suffering is a method to avoid endorsing and responding to that suffering. When everyone dies, it's sad, but we aren't called upon to answer for how we or our society has contributed to their suffering. We ache and move on. Nothing we do can change the fact that they are dead, and we have no impetus to change our ways because that impetus has ceased breathing. But when there's a living person staring you in the face, you are forced to acknowledge and come to terms with the reality of that person and how their suffering takes place in your world. This state-of-affairs is not so much with the Urban SF writers themselves as it is the culture of apparent "laziness" that they seem to have inspired (e.g., Grimdark comes to mind with so many bad imitators out there).  All good writers tent to spawn lazy imitators. They also can have beneficial influence on serious, hardworking younger (or unborn) writers. Bad writers tend to only spawn other bad writers. It was ever thus. Perhaps that's what young writers are trying to achieve. They want to write in a way that matters. They confuse style with content and relevance. It takes years and years and years to be able to put a decent sentence down, but often they just look at you like you're a complete c**t, mostly those people who talk about writing! One thing I would add, is that a writer needs to be able to write in the third as well as first person. It is very easy for writers to hide incompetence in the first. Not so much in the third. In the third everything comes to light.

What this novel reminds me of is that moment in 1976/77 when established rock musicians realised that punk was here to stay - what, no more 15-minute guitar solos based on Bach fugues? Where is their sense of tradition and craft? Where indeed? Picasso, Braque, etc. did the same in the visual arts with cubism shooting mimetic art out of the water - yes, nowadays people draw and paint even though they have no years of experience drawing from plaster copies and the life model. Admittedly a knowledge of what has gone before SF-wise can be advantageous, but we don't have to construct beautifully crafted sentences to write clearly of our experiences and lives, or engage with a reader. Personally I prefer passion, commitment, and humour to craft and tradition, but I am merely a consumer and not a clever author.

There's also that tale about Picasso (it could have been van Gogh - but it still makes my point) that once paid for a meal with a drawing. After said meal he took the landlord aside and drew for him a bird in about four or five swift strokes. The landlord was aghast: "call that a painting! It's just mere brush strokes!" Picasso took the landlord back to his atelier and showed him hundreds upon hundreds of drawings of the same bird, the same brush strokes, the same swift, perfect execution. What may look like it breaks the rules with passion and flair and humour was created after painstakingly learning its craft.

You can learn your craft and still be new and fresh. The space that SF literature occupied has changed, there are other games in town (movies, TV Shows, etc.). Should a SF writer ignore the past? My position is simply that our language is ours to do whatever we want with, but it does matter what anyone has done with it beforehand. I can't imagine a rejection letter from a publisher : “Dear Mr. Antão, you obviously haven't read Shakespeare...” And me thinking, oh shit, I knew there was something I missed!

It's not elitism; it's just an intrinsic belief that writing is a craft that must be learnt. I find very irksome the countless writers I read who eschew the building blocks of language and still think they can play with form and structure.

And though I'm somewhat illiterate, I'd like to presume that Bennett is as good a SF writer as we humans have produced so far.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Progressive Rock SF: "Devices and Desires" by K. J. Parker

When Tom Holt uses his K. J. Parker heteronym, at his best, is a very good genre writer: which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than) their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which is true even now. I must admit I found Gene Wolfe's work to be good too, rather than something to be proselytised for, or raved about. Moorcock's essay "Epic Pooh" is a good analysis in some respects (though perhaps influenced by Terry Eagleton et al, and Marxist Lit-Crit in general) and admits the fact the LOTR writing is at least accomplished. Of Moorcock's work "The Dancers at the End of Time" series is both funny and readable and "The Condition of Muzak" to me seems still his best. Folk finding Peake to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit: Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we can no longer cope with sentences with sub clauses, or paragraphs full of metaphor via elision. Oh, well. It's just that when folk write stuff like "The Book of the New Sun" is the best fantasy ever written, I must assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or otherwise.  No doubt all shall be well in the ground of our beseeching, if that's the phrase I'm stretching for. 

Much modern fantasy suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality (Staveley comes to mind). Parker maintains a personal scale, even though world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them - rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Staveley, Ryan, Cameron, etc.). This approach pays dividends in his mastery of character development. His books follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment on the part of the reader, Parker can be bruisingly unsentimental. That’s why I say fantasy is the progressive rock of literature. It has its ardent fans who champion its cause in the face of utter derision from critics. It has its fair share of pretentious tosh but there are nuggets of excellence to be found if you look hard enough with an open enough mind, a bit like its sister, science fiction. Another factor in fantasy's 'rehabilitation' that might be worth exploring is the prevalence of fantasy in computer and video games. Why does that work so much better than, say political fiction? Anyway, from someone who has read SF (science Fiction and Fantasy) for over 30 years, I’m still surprised we can still find writers writing non-magic fantasy. I like prog rock too, naturally, but that's another story... Parker is a peerless creator of genuinely unearthly mindscapes.

The other great thing about K. J. Parker is that even with his fantasy potboilers he still entertains me with his florid use of language, the weird and wonderful names, and the little details he drops into his stories, products of his wild imagination that elevate even the most mundane tales.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Subverted YA: "Half the World" by Joe Abercrombie

Published February 17th 2015.

I’ve always been intrigued why we read YA fiction. Is it because it deals with first time experiences? Or because it’s all about experimentation? Or is it because we no longer want to be adults? Maybe we yearn for those childhood years without a care in the world… I think some read YA because it helps (some) adults to re-live adolescence. Our adult life is full of constraints/responsibilities: mortgage, job, and family. We read it from the safer distance of adulthood.  Reading YA can be something that allow us to believe many things are (still) possible. It allow us to reconnect with the adolescent experience even we are talking about SF.

This YA instantiation is riddled with (some) clichés as was to be expected.  This is YA fiction after all. From the get-go I could see where the story was going. On top of that I “knew” how the fates of the two main characters (Thorn and Brand) were connected and the culmination of that particular plotline was so predictable as to be disheartening when everything occurred just the way I thought it would. Unfortunately being this a YA the characters also had less moral shades than those in Abercrombie’s earlier novels.

Why did Abercrombie go down the road of YA? I’m not sure, at least I’ve never read anything by him justifying that decision. Nowadays publishers only want to publish the cardboard cut-out books of what worked before, and not anything original, i.e., we are living in a literary world where publishers want dumb-down books, in order for them to be published, and have them appeal to a wider audience. If I want to wear my cynical hat, this is my definition of YA fiction. A combination of dumbed down language and approaches, smartass-marketing, and over-glossiness of the texts. YA is riddled with this. Fortunately Abercrombie is one of the good guys, i.e., he always trying to subvert the “rules”: “The suitors were queued up outside my house all the way to the bloody docks. There’s only so much of men weeping over my beauty I can stand. And she pressed a fingertip to one side of her nose and blew snot into the mud out of the other.” Not exactly run-of-the-mill YA fiction…

Even when writing in YA-constraint-mode, Abercrombie is always able to surprise me with something not quite with the verve akin to YA fiction:

“I stood and pissed myself.”

“You won’t be the only one.”

“The hero never pisses himself in the songs.”

“Aye, well.” Rulf gave his shoulder a parting squeeze, and stood. “That’s why those are songs, and this is life.”

We’re not exactly in Harry Potter milieu… What Abercrombie did in the YA fiction straightjacket was trying to destroy some (not all) of its core approaches. It’s still messy fiction (a term I much prefer. “Grimdark” seems just something the guys from the Marketing department came up with). 

The messiness that characterizes his books is still present, but it’s much more romanticized.

One more book (the 3^rd) to go. And then we’ll have our “old” Abercrombie back…

YA = Young Adult

SF = Speculative Fiction