What Book to Read?

I really like the way Neal Stephenson writes: it is clever and funny. But Anathem (2008) is a book I have to work at. I think the effort is worthwhile, but I’d understand if others didn’t.

I agreed in an earlier post with Margaret Atwood that her futuristic novel Oryx and Crake should be seen as speculative fiction, because it takes what is already happening and extends it, whereas science fiction changes the scientific rules to allow things that are not physically possible. On that basis, Anathem should be science fiction, but the boundaries of science and technology are in such flux that I hesitate to say that the scenario in this book is not physically possible. Quantum Theory? Philosophy? Cosmology? It has all these and more – and it is a great adventure story.

The setting for the book is the planet Arbre, which, Stephenson notes in a foreword to the reader, is in many ways similar to Earth. This planet has a recorded history longer than that of the Earth but some events in it recall those on Earth. We are now living in what in Arbre’s history is known as the Praxic Age, which was nearly three thousand seven hundred years before the events in the story. For thousands of years, groups of men and women who wish to study theorics – science and philosophy – have chosen to become avouts and live together in concents. At earlier days they were at the forefront of technological advances in areas such as sub atomic physics and gene sequencing.  Since the Terrible Times, which occurred at the end of the Praxic Age, the avouts have lived almost entirely closed off from the rest of the world, following an ascetic way of life with little modern technology.  The names of many recognisable things in this world are different – jeejah for mobile phone/network browser and Reticulum for the internet being two of my favourites. There is a comprehensive glossary, and key terms are defined in the text as extracts from The Dictionary, 4^th edition, A.R. 3000. Stephenson has created a complete and complex society, both inside and outside the walls of the concert, in a way that I find quite brilliant.

The story follows the doings of Fraa Erasmus, first in his Concent of Saunt (as in savant) Edhar, then after he is ‘evoked’ – taken out of the concent – by the secular power to help meet a crisis threatening the planet’s future.  Erasmus is an endearing character and Stephenson is a master story teller; there’s lots of exciting action to enjoy, as well as the interest of the world he has created.

I do, nevertheless, have two related problems with this book. First, it is, like all Stephenson’s books, very long, coming in at around 900 pages. Does it really need to be so long? Is this self indulgence on the author’s part? Second, some of the length comes from fairly protracted philosophical discussions among the characters. These primarily cover the views of philosophers that can be recognised as Plato and Aristotle and their successors. There is the notion ‘that the objects and ideas that humans perceive and think about are imperfect manifestations of pure, ideal forms that exist in another plane of existence’.  Or, ‘Put simply’, says someone on the other side of the argument, ‘… language, communication, indeed thought itself, are the manipulations of symbols to which meanings are assigned by culture – and only by culture.’ There is also discussion of consciousness and language, and of various mathematical concepts, to say nothing of configuration space. This is a bit of a stretch for me. It would be bad enough if the real names were used, but I find having to remember which argument goes with which avout saunt distractingly difficult. Are these discussions really necessary to the plot, or are they just Stephenson having a bit of fun? They certainly slow down the pace. I can see the general relevance, but struggle with much of the detail.

Someone has created a Wiki page where everything in the story is given an earthly equivalent. This is quite interesting, but I find there is pleasure in teasing out for myself the ways in which words sound similar to other words, yet mean something rather different. The physics of how the same matter can develop in divergent ways to produce outcomes that are different but still similar is at the heart of the book, so Stephenson’s play with language mirrors this in a very pleasing way.  

And his command of the technology he has (I assume) invented is awesome.

You can read more – though not a lot more – about Stephenson here. If you haven’t come across him before, you can read my earlier post on his book Cryptonomicon (1999) here.

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I tried the second book of Stephen Donaldson’s First Chronicles of Thomas Covernant (The Illearth War, 1977) but it’s really not my thing. So I turned instead to Ursula Le Guin, hoping to have my faith in the fantasy genre renewed. I wasn’t disappointed. The Quartet is a classic. The books that make it up – A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore and Tehanu – are really children’s stories, but somehow reading them together in one volume gives a coherence that is adult in its appeal.

Earthsea is a group of islands inhabited by diverse peoples, surrounded by uninhabited seas. Its people are mostly farmers, merchants or artisans but a few are wizards, trained in the high arts on the island of Roke. They (mostly) observe the Balance and the Pattern which keep magic and ordinary things in equilibrium, as unwisely used, a wizard’s power is dangerous. It should ‘follow knowledge and serve need’. But there are older powers and fallible or malevolent wizards that disrupt the balance; all four books are in different ways about these.

A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) tells how the wizard Ged comes from boyhood into his full power, and how in his arrogance he causes a Nameless spirit to escape into the world. Magic power is based on the power of naming; Ged must find the name of this spirit in order to return it to the land of the dead and restore the balance of his own life. In The Tombs of Atuan (1971) Tenar becomes Priestess of the Tombs, dedicated to the service of the Nameless Ones. In the darkness of the Undertomb, where no man is allowed to go, she is outraged to find a somewhat older Ged, who is looking for the other half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, which if made whole has the power to bring peace to the islands. In The Farthest Shore (1972), Ged, now Archmage of Roke, and the young prince Arren, undertake a mighty journey to find out why magic is no longer working properly. And in the much later Tehanu (1990), some of the characters and themes of the earlier books are further explored. It is this last book that gives the quartet its unity and makes it more than a series of separate children’s stories.

Le Guin writes simply but lyrically, with a sort of high seriousness appropriate to a fantasy epic. Here Ged is explaining the Balance. ‘Do not you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted the earth is lighter, the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends.’

Le Guin has created a fully coherent world for her stories. It is pre-industrial in its physical setting; people mostly live on what they can grow or make, leavened sometimes with a bit of magic. It is also a hierarchical and paternalistic world. Men rule in both the temporal and the magic spheres. Only men can become wizards; those who don’t meet the demanding standards of the school on Roke become sorcerers. (And before you start making comparisons with Hogwarts, think which came first.) Women with magic power only become village witches. There is a saying ‘weak as women’s magic’. Wizards and sorcerers are highly respected. But women with power are distrusted; there is also a saying ‘wicked as women’s magic’. In the last book, Tehanu, Le Guin offers a challenge to these assumptions through the fates of Ged and Tenar, and also the abused child, Therru. The humanity of this story makes it as much an adult book as is The Lord of the Rings.

It is not surprising to find that Ursula Le Guin, now over 80, maintains a strong interest in issues of feminism, ecology and the free speech issues around Wikileaks. You can follow up on her wide range of interests on her amazing web pages here. Details of her career and other writing are summarised here.

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Published in 1977, this is the first of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. There are three sets of Chronicles: the First, Second and Last. The first two contain three books; the third will have four. Against All Things Ending, the ninth book – the third of the Last Chronicles – was published in 2010. Lord Foul’s Bane is the only one I’ve read so far.

The Chronicles are a fantasy epic. Donaldson rightly acknowledges his debt to Tolkien and other great fantasy writers like Mervyn Peake. And I wouldn’t be surprised if writers of more recent fantasy stories would in turn acknowledge their debt to Donaldson; Avatar comes particularly to mind. He has an important place in the fantasy tradition. That said, I had somewhat mixed reactions to the book.

Thomas Covenant, a successful writer, lives in a small American town, but is totally rejected by his community when he is diagnosed with leprosy. He wife leaves him, taking their young child with her. Leprosy becomes the defining fact of his life. He decides that the only way he can survive is to damp down his emotions – the rage and loss – and concentrate exclusively on his disease. Then one day he falls and hits his head. He wakes up to find himself in a different world where he doesn’t have leprosy, and seems to have some part to play in saving the country – ‘the Land’ – from Lord Foul’s creature, the Cavewight, Drool Rockworm. But he can’t accept that the Land is real; he thinks he is dreaming. He doesn’t want to become attached to the Land or anyone in it – ‘he could not afford to be anyone’s friend’ – and he doesn’t want the power – the ‘wild magic’ – it seems he possesses. He fears the conflicting demands of his leprosy and the Land will drive him mad. And is he in any case inadvertently doing Lord Foul’s bidding?

The book (indeed the whole series) has millions of devoted fans. Apart from being an exciting story, readers seem to like the physically and morally flawed hero Covenant, and enjoy the psychological dimension of his predicament. Others hate it, largely for its turgid prose. One critic suggested that rather than reading it, people could simply play a game of who could find the most uses of the word ‘clenched’ on every page.

I certainly read eagerly to find out what happens in terms both of the quest to defeat Drool, and Covenant’s own battle about how to act. But while it’s maybe impossible to over-write a fantasy epic, some of Donaldson’s prose is decidedly over the top. A few of random examples: ‘The night beat about him on naked wings like vultures dropping towards dead meat’ or ‘he had discovered a frontier into the narcissism of revulsion’ or ‘It stood in granite permanence like an enactment of eternity’. I accept that elevated language may be needed to describe the inhabitants of the other world – the ur-viles, the Bloodguard, the Warmark and the Ranyhyn to name but a few. But I found Covenant’s inner conflict was sometimes obscured by the density of the prose. What is ‘the narcissism of revulsion’ anyway? And recent political events aside, I think most Australian readers would find there is something incongruous about the lore of ‘High Lord Kevin’.

Ultimately it is the quality of the fantasy world that determines the success of a fantasy epic. And while there are clear debts to Tolkien, I think Donaldson has done enough in creating the Land, its people and its creatures to warrant his popularity. I’m not sure if Covenant’s psychological conflict can be extended into further stories, but it here makes him a distinctive character and adds some depth to the fantasy battle between good and evil. I’ll at least read the next one.

You can find out more about Donaldson and The Chronicles here.

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