The Dark is Rising

Children’s fantasy literature is rapidly becoming one of my chief interests, particularly as it develops and sustains a system of metaphysics, epistemology, and linguistic purity.

Also, it’s just fun to read.

The latest addition to my reading list is a series of five books written by Susan Cooper. Cooper is a British/American novelist, dramatist, and journalist now living in the United States. Her first novel, Over Sea, Under Stone, was followed by four more to complete The Dark is Rising sequence, finished in 1977.

The books were recommended to me “in the vein of Tolkien, Lewis, and L’Engle.” I was curious not only to compare the new series to some of my favorites, but to see how it fit into my developing schema of children’s fantasy (see Heroes Need Mentors Too).

The Dark is Rising met some of my expectations and not others. Here is a brief recount of what I look for:

High fantasy is concerned with the purity of language and its deterioration over time.

Fantasy acknowledges a connection between name and being.

Young heroes must break decisively with their past, often through violence done to a loved one.

Young heroes require tutelage from an older, more experienced person, often a father-figure.

A period of respite, often traveling, trains the hero, through minor conflicts, for a final confrontation.

A defining moment in the hero’s journey occurs when the guide steps aside or is killed.

One of the biggest differences between Cooper’s novels and some of the others I have read is that there is no clear break with the old world, nor a full integration between the heroic and the mundane. Will, one of the Old Ones, returns to normal life with his family when he is not battling the forces of the Dark.

The Drew children, the original protagonists of Over Sea, Under Stone, go on to take secondary roles in the later books. They are not brought in to the secrets of the Old Ones (Will, Merriman, and others), but are left to see a merely one-dimensional view of the events that take place.

This creates an interesting duality between the way good versus evil, dark versus light plays out as seen by human eyes (Jane, Simon, and Barnabas) and as seen by immortal eyes (Will and Merriman). Perhaps because targeted to a younger age range, the degree of danger in the books is muted for the humans, who are guaranteed safety by the immortals. In consequence, however, the weight of their “quests” diminishes as well.

The duality is bridged–and given a new life–when several liminal (borderland) characters enter the tale (John Rowlands and Bran). They have awareness of, and ultimately impact on, both levels of sight, so they are able to blur and blend the distinctions between the two.

Language and naming again play key roles, in an interesting twist, partly through an introduction to the pronunciation and ongoing use of the Welsh language.

At some point, I hope to do a more in-depth study of these books as they relate to others in the children’s fantasy “canon.” In the meantime, they served as an excellent refresher from the likes of The Odyssey, Literary Theory, and Rescripting Shakespeare.

Book Review: The Vagrants

Li,Yiyun. The Vagrants. New York: Random House, 2009.

In Muddy River, a small city in China, in 1979, everyone has lost daughters. In the midst of winter, the corpses of abandoned infant girls are a common find along the banks of the river. The grief and pain of the parents must remain unspoken.

One character says, “A child losing her parents becomes an orphan, a woman losing her husband a widow, but there was not a term for the lesser parents that those who had lost their children became. Once parents, they would remain parents for the rest of their lives.”

The Vagrants opens on the day of a young woman’s execution, an event that reminds the people of Muddy River how much parents have had to endure. Death is nothing new. But this death will touch off a line of gunpowder that singes the entire city and its cast of broken people.

The victim is Gu Shan, a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Once a passionate Red Guard who, at 14, kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach, Shan is to be executed for writing a prison journal that expressed anti-communist sentiments.

Teacher and Mrs. Gu, Shan’s parents, just want to avoid trouble. They are intellectuals in a world where intelligence has brought only suffering. They struggle to repay and forgive their daughter’s failings.

Nini was born crippled as a result of the injuries dealt to her mother by Shan. Unwanted, she dreams of being truly loved, but she knows people will always let her down. She once received help and compassion from the Gus, but after Shan’s death, she is no longer welcome at their house.

Mr. and Mrs. Hua are former wanderers, now a street cleaner and a rubbish collector. They are known throughout the city as ones who take in the unwanted, like the seven abandoned infant girls they rescued and were later forced to turn over to the state. They are natural contacts for an unpleasant task like finding someone to bury a dead woman no one wants to claim.

Lu Bashi, the 19-year-old son of a war hero, wants to know things, especially about women. Privy to the gross violation of Shan’s dead body, he seeks information about her death. He is everywhere, using words and pulling threads to create pain, all the while trying to fill his own need for love. Nini is an easy target for his attentions, but as the events surrounding Shan’s death push them together, he finds his fascination becoming something deeper.

Tong is six. He has just come to Muddy River for school and is getting to know his parents for the first time after being raised by his grandparents. He wants nothing more than to make them, and the Communist Party, proud, but little things, like the disappearance of his dog Ear and Shan’s death, keep getting in the way.

Kai is the voice of Muddy River. A successful news announcer with a husband and child, she is expected to forget her past as an actress and the incorrect people she once knew: Jialin, an idealistic counterrevolutionary, and Shan.

Death is nothing new for any of them, but this time, some will say, Enough! We have been silent long enough. Murmuring spreads as the river’s ice thaws into spring. The eventual meltdown will affect everyone in Muddy River.

The Vagrants is the beautifully written debut novel of short story writer Yiyun Li. In many ways, it reads like a series of sketches woven together by the thread of Shan’s death. Everything has a consequence, Li tells readers, even if it is unseen. Everyone is connected. Everything has a cost.

One prominent theme is speech and silence, and with it, guilt. Slogans compete with whispers; rumors compete with the written word. Everyone tells stories and frames reality to his or her own ends. To be safe, it is necessary to be silent, compliant, Tong’s mother tells him.

The Vagrants also addresses the concept of value and permanence. Kai’s “perfect” voice is just one of many on the news. Nini’s sisters “little fourth,” “little fifth,” and “little sixth,” are not even worthy of names.

“Dogs got stolen and eaten all the time, [Tong’s] father had said the night before, and there was no reason to cry over it; the world would become a crowded place if dogs, or, for that matter, little children, did not disappear.”

The novel opens with an epigraph from W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”:  

…their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

This is an apt description of the characters in The Vagrants. In some way, each one is a vagrant, seeking something permanent in a society that is always shifting under their feet. To survive, one can hold tightly to nothing…

As a result, there are many ugly things in The Vagrants. The events are violent. The characters are flawed, short-sighted, prejudiced and self-seeking. There is as much to dislike about them as there is to praise.

But each one is impossible to hate. Like the rest of us, they are afraid. They are all trying to get by. They all long for acceptance, for love, for freedom from shame and fear. In a word, they are human. The success of Li’s novel is that it not only weaves them together, but it draws us, the readers, into the tapestry as well.

Book Review: Unwind

The power of science fiction is its ability to ask a very old question in a way that makes it seem new. Unwind, a young adult novel by Neal Shusterman (Simon & Schuster, 2006), does just that.

The Heartland War, which some call the Second Civil War, is over. A compromise designed to satisfy both the pro-life and the pro-choice armies is in effect. It is called the Bill of Life. Its basic tenets are:

• Human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.
• However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively “abort” a child…
• …on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t “technically” end.
• The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called “unwinding.”
• Unwinding is now a common, and accepted practice in society.

Connor, Risa, and Lev, have all been selected for unwinding: Connor has behavioral issues; Risa lives in a state home overcrowded with orphans; Lev has been chosen as a “tithe” by his religious family.

As their paths converge, each one chooses to fight back in his/her own way. On the run, doing what they must to survive, these three very different individuals usher readers into the complex moral propositions underlying the Bill of Life:

• When does life begin?
• What gives life value/meaning?
• Is it better to die or to be unwound?
• Should children be required to earn the right to life?
• Who has the right to choose the definition of life?
• Should the greater good rule supreme?
• Do you have to change human nature or the law first?

Even the minor characters are round and woven into the surprisingly complex and well-orchestrated plot. Stylistically, Shusterman’s tight, minimalistic prose and dialogue is very effective in portraying the precarious lives of his characters. The “big ideas” are, for the most part, integrated in a pithy, natural manner. I was pleasantly surprised that Shusterman avoided graphic violence in his depiction of the “unwinding.” The scene is horrifying, perhaps more so because it is left to the reader’s imagination. 

Shusterman keeps his conclusions vague. If anything, the ending lacks force as a result. However, the internal logic of Unwind’s world does not admit any other sort of denouement. Both life and choice are important, Unwind affirms. The Bill of Life is not right: what the best solution actually is, Shusterman does not say. 

The book’s blurry picture becomes clearest in the moments when Shusterman points a finger at both sides. At one point, the General says, “A conflict always begins with an issue—a difference of opinion, an argument. But by the time it turns into a war, the issue doesn’t matter anymore, because now it’s about one thing and one thing only: how much each side hates the other.” Both sides of the abortion question would do well to take this message to heart.

Another character, Sonia, says, “One thing you learn when you’ve lived as long as I have—people aren’t all good, and people aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives.”

Even Connor, the non-philosophical one, muses, “In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world.”*

How very true. 

In the final analysis, Unwind shines first as an opportunity to open dialogue about a subject that is often so sensitive as to render it unapproachable. The rest, like the novel itself, is a question of perspective.

*Emphasis added.
To read a review of this book from The New York Times, click here.  

 

Book Review: The Tenth Circle

Jodi Picoult is known for her ability to give a human face to intense ethical, moral, and social dilemmas. The Tenth Circle, published in 2006, is no exception. Although the book is two years old, it has received additional attention with its recent release (June 2008) as a Lifetime movie.

One of the elements that makes The Tenth Circle stand out is the integration between graphic novel and traditional text novel. In the acknowledgments of The Tenth Circle, Picoult commends one woman for her response “when I gave her a book that was like nothing she’d ever seen before.”

As media converge, with cell phones carrying Internet access, cameras, and MP3 players, it should be no surprise to see a similar phenomenon taking place in book publishing. Although most graphic novels and print novels stay at a respectable distance and appeal to different crowds, the lines are beginning to blur. (See this website for further rhetorical analysis of the intersections in postmodern texts, particularly this page discussing structure).

The Tenth Circle is about a family’s struggle to deal with events surrounding their fourteen-year-old daughter’s alleged rape. Picoult has handled this theme before (see Salem Falls, 2001). As usual, she does not simplify the issue. She portrays all of the conflicting emotions and muddled scenarios that make the line between consensual sex and rape difficult to define and impossible to gloss over.

Laura Stone is a college English professor. Her favorite class to teach is on Dante’s Inferno, the first of a three-part epic poem called The Divine Comedy. Her daughter, Trixie, is a ninth grader struggling with relationships, fitting in, and a recent breakup. Daniel Stone is a stay-at-home dad and comic book artist. He is working on a graphic novel that follows his hero, Duncan (and alter-ego Wildclaw), through the nine circles of Dante’s hell in search of his missing daughter.

After Trixie comes home and tells her father she has been raped, the ongoing investigation frames a family struggling to rediscover each other. Each section of the novel is preceded by several pages from Daniel’s graphic novel. The events in the graphic novel mirror the events in the text novel, suggesting that Daniel uses his artwork to wrestle with his own life.

Picoult has a gift for portraying raw, sometimes illogical, human responses to tragedy. This feature can make her books painful to read, but it also gives them a high degree of realism and emotional impact. Picoult begins the book in the prologue with these words: “This is how it feels when you realize your child is missing.” She goes on to describe the precise sensations of panic. Daniel’s memory of losing Trixie when she was a small child acts as a concise, symbolic picture of the entire novel.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and his guide, Virgil, proceed one level at a time through hell. Information about the fates of sinners is revealed level by level. Picoult’s book follows this structure in more ways than one. Obvious techniques involve the graphic novel excerpts at the start of each chapter, and the progression of discussion in Laura’s college class on the Inferno. Greater subtlety surrounds the gradual revelation of details about Daniel and Laura’s history together and about the truth behind Trixie’s alleged rape.

Like Dante’s Inferno, The Tenth Circle is heavily symbolic, using elements of the Inuit culture in Alaska as well as literature and language to reinforce its main themes. Daniel remembers losing a friendship in Alaska because of cross-cultural differences in communication (verbal versus non verbal). The same dilemma permeates Laura and Daniel’s struggling marriage and Laura and Daniel’s loss of closeness with their daughter.

A telling moment comes in Laura’s class when she asks her students whether Dante’s image of nine circles and nine classifications of sinners remains accurate and comprehensive today. With a jolt, she realizes, “there was a sin Dante had left out, one that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?” (p. 274).

“There should have been a tenth circle,” Laura decides, “a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin, with room for infinite masses. It would be overcrowded with professors who hid in ivy-covered towers instead of facing their broken families. With little girls who had grown up overnight. With husbands who didn’t speak of their past but instead poured it out onto a blank white page” (275).

Although honesty with self and others ultimately offers the single lifeline of hope and restoration to Picoult’s characters, her conclusion remains ambiguous. Does honesty simply mean accepting yourself for who you are, or does it mean a willingness to accept the consequences for your choices? Does it mean allowing others to face the consequences of their choices? Does it mean holding others accountable?

As in other books, Picoult circumvents answers, choosing rather to emphasize the hard questions and complex decisions that individuals are forced to make; because unlike the world portrayed in most comic books, everything in our world cannot be reduced to black and white.

(…Picoult’s newest novel, Change of Heart, was released in March.)

Pullman’s Dark Materials

*Warning: spoilers throughout.*

Tragic.  That is the one word that first comes to mind as I set aside the nearly 1,000-page collection containing Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass.

The plot is compelling; the characters, alive and covered with skin and hair; the emotion, fierce. From a purely literary perspective, the only difficulty is one of perspective.  Like many other epics, the novels take the viewpoint of multiple characters.  However, Pullman’s novels also transition between omniscient and limited perspectives, alternately warning the reader against information the characters cannot see and sharing the characters’ deepest emotions or limiting description to what they see and do. 

If there are snags in the fabric of story and philosophy, it is because this book is, in many ways a refutation.  Pullman’s premise is that the Christian faith is “a very powerful and convincing mistake” (p. 871).  In one chapter Lyra and Will are battling a harpy in the world of the dead, and in another Pullman is alluding to the questions of grace and works that have occupied the Christian church.  For the reader, the plot has fallen into a crevice and is momentarily lost, but the philosophical treatise replacing it is only half-formed and simplified to a child’s level.

• The metaphysics of His Dark Materials imagines a tri-part human, containing body, soul (daemon), and mind (ghost).  The properties of mind and soul are incompletely distinguished, but the body is declared the most important.
• The epistemology stems from the idea that consciousness (Dust, Shadows, original sin) is a fundamental force in the universe and is the root of knowledge. Pullman paints the overarching narrative of human history as “a struggle between wisdom and stupidity” (p.899) rather than between good and evil. “The rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed” (p. 899). 
• The ethics of His Dark Materials are decidedly situational. Lyra, as the Eve figure, deals with a shifting sense of reality that is not simply caused by her growth and maturity, but related to the nature of reality itself. “I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them” (p. 875), says Mary Malone.
• As a consequence, Pullman’s is a dismal, self-preservationalist political world. Despite closing instructions for Lyra and Will to “show [people] how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly,” other parts of the narrative invoke a Hobbesian view of reality that is parallel to rationales for the use of the atom bomb: “We never knew about [the subtle knife] when I first met you, Iorek,” Will says, “and nor did anyone, but now that we do, we got to use it ourselves—we can’t just not. That’d be feeble, and it’d be wrong, too, it’d be just like handing it over to ‘em and saying, ‘Go on, use it, we won’t stop you’” (p. 682).

Most (pre-postmodern) children’s novels carry the expectation that sacrifice will not go unrewarded and that beloved characters will be rescued from destruction because there is someone who can be trusted.  Pullman’s protagonists are forced to realize that no one is safe or trustworthy, and that life does not have happy endings.  Friends will let you down, as when Serafina Pekkala arrives too late to save Lee Scoresby in The Subtle Knife, or when Lyra unwittingly betrays Roger and fails to save him in The Golden Compass.  

Other elements in Pullman’s novel strike at comparable fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and especially like The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis, of whom Pullman was an especially vitriolic critic.

There are specific elements, like the names of the heroines: Pullman’s Lyra and Lewis’s Lucy.  Motifs are echoed, like the beginning of Lyra’s and Lucy’s adventures with an escape from censure into a wardrobe.  Parallel worlds, initially reached through a neutral world (Citagazze in Pullman, the Wood between the Worlds in Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew) are featured in Lewis and Pullman.   

The remaking of a weapon figures prominently into The Amber Spyglass, just as it does in The Lord of the Rings.  Like Tolkien’s, Pullman’s weapon can be rightfully wielded only by one, but this is a sword/knife that – more like the Ring – has a destructive will of its own.  Its passage from bearer to bearer is marked by damage and pain, not simply by right. 

Like Tolkien’s and Lewis’s fantasies, the battle is not the culmination of the story.  In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo and Sam’s quest is the small, subtle force that gives meaning to Helm’s Deep and the battle for Minas Tirith.  In The Hobbit, the main character, Bilbo, is unconscious during the final battle. Similarly, in Pullman’s novels, Lyra, Will, and the other characters join in battle, but the story never ends with large-scale battle. 

 

Even the dialogue mirrors other works of fantasy.  “I can feel war, Lyra Silvertongue; I can smell it; I can hear it” (p. 692), says Iorek at their parting.  In the film version of The Lord of the Rings, a voiceover by Galadriel phrases it this way: “The world is changing.  I feel it in the water; I feel it in the earth.”  The quote originates from The Return of the King, in which Treebeard says, “For the world is changing: I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.  I do not think we shall meet again” (p. 321).

Pullman readily admits the intertextuality of his books. “I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read,” he said honestly in the acknowledgements.  He cites Blake’s poetry and Milton’s Paradise Lost as central influences, but epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter also quote the Bible (angelic characters are drawn from the genealogies in Genesis), Emily Dickinson, Keats, and others.  An obscure mention of daemons taking the form of an owl and a nightingale in The Amber Spyglass is reminiscent of the early Middle English poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” which contrasted the powers of sin and love. 

Beyond the similarities, though, it is impossible to dismiss the extreme differences.  The worldview in Narnia and Lord of the Rings is something pervasive and natural.  You can read the books without taking away a Christian message.  It is inherently intertwined with the stories, as if the stories were created for their own merits and the worldview simply flowed into them (with possible exceptions in a few of the Chronicles of Narnia).  By contrast, Pullman’s story and worldview are intertwined deliberately, as if the story was crafted to exhibit the philosophy.  It is almost impossible to miss, though I tried to do so.

 

Considering this concept in the terminology of literature, it is easy to conceptualize His Dark Materials as a metaphor.  The philosophy is the tenor (the meaning or word picture), and the story is the vehicle (the object or word).  To use Lacanian terms, the philosophy is what is signified, while the story is the signifier.  There is a greater gap between the two in the case of Pullman than in the case of Lewis or Tolkien.

 

Some have said that worldview is insignificant in works of fantasy.  I think they are right—to a certain degree, and in relation to certain works.  However, there is a significant difference between the works of Tolkien and Lewis and the works of Pullman, which has to do with the difference between positive and negative worldview (speaking in numerical, not ethical terms).

 

Pullman’s novels centrally seek to remove something: the certainty and persuasion of the church.  His attempts to set up an alternate worldview in its place are subtle and fragile in contrast to the crushing arguments he flings at Christian thought.  

 

In The Amber Spyglass, there is a moment of realization and regret that, for me, was one of the most poignant in the entire trilogy.  Mary Malone, who is called on by Dust (consciousness) to act as the serpent to Lyra’s Eve, pauses in relating the story of her downfall from faith.  She says, “And then had come the discovery of the Shadows and her journey into another world, and now this vivid night, and it was plain that everything was throbbing with purpose and meaning, but she was cut off from it” (p. 878). 

This is the emotion that Pullman’s His Dark Materials left with me.  The threads of human love, sacrifice, honor, duty, and compassion are prevalent throughout the trilogy, but they always pause just on the edge of purpose, continuity, and meaning.  It is as if their author, like Mary Malone, had come to that same edge and, turning away, were seeking desperately for an alternative way to find it.