Xenograffiti (9 page)

FRITZ LEIBER’S SOLIPSISTIC FANTASY
(1983)

Fritz Leiber, Jr., is best known in the fantasy genre for his series of stories about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, although he also wrote a wide variety of fantastic tales in a career which spanned more than fifty years. One of his most obscure works,
You’re All Alone
, is also one of his most interesting, having been intended for the magazine
Unknown
(
Worlds
) in 1943. When the magazine ceased publication later that year, Leiber put aside the unfinished novel, his third, and turned to war work; a few years later he completed the book, but was unable to sell it until the early 1950s. The “soft porn” house which bought it changed its title to
The Sinful Ones
, added several extraneous sex scenes, and published it with a short novel by David Williams,
Blood, Bulls, and Passion.
Ace did a shorter version of the book, closer to the original pulp story, in 1972, under the earlier title. Pocket Books then republished the longer novel in 1980, deleting extraneous material, but maintaining the title used in 1953. For all its checkered history, and under whatever title, Leiber’s book remains a fascinating philosophical fantasy, wholly different from any other work published in the modern history of the genre.

The question here is essentially one of life itself: what is it?, how do men perceive it?, and how do men perceive other men? “Is anyone alive other than myself?” Leiber asks. His answer may be interpreted in several different ways. Carr Mackay is an interviewer at General Employment. One day, a comely young girl appears at his desk; he begins to ask her the usual questions, but is totally mystified by her response, by her obvious terror before a complete stranger. When the girl asks, “Don’t you know what you are?” the puzzle compounds itself. The girl has been followed into the office by a big blonde, a woman whose behavior is just as peculiar as the girl’s. The blonde’s manifest arrogance, her lack of regard for the other people in the office, and her air of superiority, all make her seem somehow otherworldly. After responding to Carr’s questions with
non sequiturs
about the danger he is in, the girl scribbles a note on a piece of paper, drops it on his desk, and walks out. The blonde is waiting for her at the doorway and strikes her across the face. No one notices, not even the girl herself. She continues calmly on her way. The note tells Carr to beware of the wall-eyed blonde, the young man without a hand, and the affable-seeming older man; the small dark man with glasses is his friend, she says. While Carr is watching the charade, another applicant sets himself down in front of Carr and immediately begins answering the questions that Carr would have asked if the interruption had not occurred. Suddenly Carr realizes that the dumpy man is smoking a nonexistent cigarette that Carr should have offered to him and that he is responding like a robot to comments that Carr has never made. Carr tells him to stop, but he pays no attention. When Carr grabs him by the shoulder, the dumpy man begins throbbing and mouthing meaningless drivel. When Carr seeks help from his fellow employees, no one responds. It is as if the entire world is running by itself and Carr has somehow dropped out of it, becoming aware for the first time that the world and almost all the people in it are mere cogs in some vast machinery that just keeps ticking away. Any attempt to interrupt the cycle results in vibration; the machine’s huge inertia struggles mightily to fit people back into their molds.

Carr meets the girl in the park and gradually learns something about her and about reality. A few men and women have somehow become aware of their situation, have suddenly sprung alive into a dead world. Such persons have great power, since the world as a whole ignores them: many use this power in obscene ways. Often these abusers of power band together into small gangs, fighting one another to establish their supremacy, seeking to eliminate the few independents who try to live their awakened lives responsibly. Miss Hackman, the blonde girl, is one member of a gang, together with Wilson, the leader, and a young man, Driscoll Aimes. They hunt their prey with a trained panther (some animals may also become “alive”). Their quarry is Fred, the small, dark man with glasses, the one who, in his loneliness, had awakened Jane from her “sleep.” He is eventually killed by the trio, who have now become aware of Jane’s existence and suspect Carr’s. All the rest of humanity is irrelevant, a mere plaything for these less-than-noble godlings. Jane and Carr play hide-and-seek with the gang throughout Chicago: to escape the cat, Carr must dive into the lake. He is rescued by another independent, Old Jules, who has “connections” who will neutralize the gang. Carr returns to the city and retrieves Jane, but is trapped with her in an old house. As the gang and their beast close in, the house is rushed by a rival gang who mercilessly murder the three humans and their cat; Jane and Carr, hiding on the upper floor, are overlooked during the fight. They decide, conscientiously, to resume their places in the real world, carefully managing their lives toward marriage and trying to awaken others of their friends and relatives in a fashion that will minimize the danger of exposure.

The interwoven questions of delusion, solipsism, behaviorism, insanity/sanity, responsibility toward others, and the machinelike nature of modern society make this a particularly enjoyable book for the inquiring mind. Leiber does not dismiss these questions out-of-hand; one could interpret this novel as the epitome of paranoia or as a fictional treatise on mass self-delusion, as a parable on the temptations of power or as a thinly disguised tract on elitism, pro or con. At the heart of the book, however, is a tale of love, courage, and the necessity of standing up for oneself, of fighting for what one believes in, of having principles for which to fight. The gang uses its situation to gratify the basest instincts; Carr and Jane decide, at the end, to dedicate their lives to awakening what they realize will be a very small portion of mankind. With their commitment to each other and their commitment to humanity, they can bear the pain of seeing reality before them, in its bright, searing ugliness.

SIR HENRY NEWBOLT’S
ALADORE
(1983)

with Mary A. Burgess

Aladore
(1914) is, on its most elemental level, a fairy tale, a story so limpid and gentle in the telling that one is tempted to read it simply for pure enjoyment. Sir Henry John Newbolt’s pastiche of the style made popular by William Morris employs a rich though archaic language which contributes greatly to the beautiful flow of this tale of a medieval quest for love and the meaning of life.

Ywain is the jaded administrator of an unnamed medieval state who is so overcome with ennui that he renounces his rights and turns over his lands and appurtenances of office to a younger brother, takes up the cloak and staff of a pilgrim, and sets off to follow his “desire,” a will-o’-the-wisp in the guise of a child. He first encounters a hermit in the wilderness who teaches him the joys of the aesthetic life: solitude and peace. They break bread together and bathe in a mountain stream (the first of many such allusions to Christian fellowship). Ywain is soothed, but torn between the fellowship and peace of the hermitage and the lure of the child, his desire. This tension is reminiscent of the pull between the saintly life and the knightly quest depicted so well in Geoffrey Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
(1387-1400), and it is never resolved here completely.

Ywain leaves the hermit’s solitary paradise and is directed toward Paladore, a walled city. There he encounters a beautiful lady, Aithne, who entreats him not to desert her as other knights have done in the past. He is distracted by the nearby sounds of battle and, overcome with a strange compulsion, joins the Eagles who are attacking the besieged Tower and helps to win the day. The warring parties converge at the end of the battle, and both sides honor Ywain as a hero. They explain that the battle is part of an age-old custom whereby the Eagles (who represent the liberal forces for change) challenge the Tower (the bastion of conservative power). Ywain is given a house and welcomed to the community. He has an inexplicable interlude with the lady Aithne, whose supernatural powers enable her to travel at will to the magical city of Aladore. He cannot “see” the city when she asks him to look for it, and she turns away in resignation. Meanwhile, the Tower, although outwardly friendly, secretly conspires to rid itself of Ywain’s influence. He is challenged with three adventures which he accepts. Each time, when he is confounded by seemingly overwhelming odds, the lady Aithne appears in the guise of another and saves him.

Finally, Ywain is lured to join a band of knights who seek the City of Saints. Although the company’s motives are varied and suspect, Ywain still longs for fulfillment and so elects to join the group. After much travail, Ywain and his companion Bartholomy happen upon the city and think they have completed their quest. The city is both lovely and unusual, but it is governed by ringing bells. A caretaker, Vincent, asks what they hope to find. “Peace,” responds Bartholomy, but Ywain says, “I look only to love and to seek.” Subtly, both men succumb to the lure of the bells which lull them into a state of forgetfulness. They think they have found peace, but the bells are really their captors. After a period of time, Ywain stumbles upon a garden where he meets again the lady Aithne. Suddenly, he remembers all that has gone before and realizes that she is the image of all that he desires. She asks him to forswear the bells and follow her on a new pilgrimage. At this point, they are startled by a spy for the city slithering away in the grass, like a serpent invading the lovers’ Edenic paradise.

Ywain agrees to break the bonds of the city and follows his lady to the Lost Lands of the South. Here they encounter oreads, naiads, and fauns in a magical kingdom of milk and honey. Ywain falls in with the fauns and is enchanted by their rough pursuit of earthly pleasures. Together with Aithne (in the guise of a shepherdess), he spends blissful days in pastoral harmony. Gradually, Ywain becomes fearful of the fauns and their madcap antics. One evening, he has a vision of the city of Aladore, and the longing for his desire overcomes him once again. He begs Aithne to leave with him and aid him in casting off the animal trappings which make him kin to the fauns.

The fauns, growing bolder, follow the lovers in their flight. Suddenly, Aithne and Ywain are taken up by a strange creature with wings and flown to the city of Doedala, where a race of men carries on the tradition of Daedalus. Ywain is then taught the art and flies off to seek Aladore, leaving Aithne behind. He falls to the ground and is rescued by his old friend, the hermit. Here he bides, again renewing his strength and purpose. The hermit counsels him to return to Paladore and seek his desire among men. Ywain returns and discovers the Tower and the Eagles still at odds. He speaks to them and pacifies them temporarily, although the Tower has grown to hate him and resolves to destroy him.

One afternoon, Ywain follows the sound of many children frolicking and singing. There, on the Sherperdine Sands, he discovers again the city of Aladore. This time, he is permitted to cross through the mist and over the sea to its gates. He is taken to the chamber of the Rhymer’s Hail, where he finds a book containing a picture of Aithne; he turns and finds that the image has become reality and follows her to their bridal chamber. They are wedded, and she tells him he has become the master of his dream, which is her dream as well. They begin an idyllic existence, as Aithne shows Ywain the Rhymer’s magic, wherein all the seekers and lovers of times past, of myth and of history, are brought to life before their eyes. Ywain visits the scene of Aithne’s childhood, Castle Kerioc, where he sees her as a child and there experiences with her all the warmth and love of her childhood years.

Ywain has forgotten that his pilgrimage must also take him past the gates of death. Aithne releases the key to a crypt wherein an old man dwells. The man warns Ywain that the time will come when he will be recalled to the world of man, and with the sounding of the midnight bells, Ywain finds himself in Paladore once more. Aithne follows him and together they are drawn into the final climactic battle for mastery of the city. Ywain is offered the principality, but refuses when he realizes that the offer is an illusion; the real prince is a captive of the archbishop and subject to the wishes of the Tower. Instead, he elects to sacrifice himself, like Christ, to purchase the freedom and salvation of his brothers and companions in arms, the Eagles.

Ywain sees the child of his desire one last time and follows him to the sanctuary where Aithne awaits him. There he sees a bier carried in by knights, and, as he pulls back the pall, discovers his own face. Aithne calls him and they depart hand-in-hand through the battle. They are never seen in Paladore again, but the effigies of a knight and his lady are discovered on the tomb of the altar in the sanctuary. Ywain’s friend Hubert explains: “They are not here but otherwise, and their sleep is but a semblance. And doubtless the pilgrim hath achieved his pilgrimage for he learned of this lady: and she came and went of her own magic, and had from her birth the Rhymer’s heritage.”

This allegory of Christian love is notable for the fact that it is (except for the somewhat juvenile Greenwood tales of G. P. Baker) the only medieval fantasy published between the death of William Morris in 1896 and the twenty-year interlude between World War I and World War II. Newbolt is clearly familiar with Morris’s work, and uses the same style of language, indefinable time period, and medieval trappings. That such a novel, with its emphasis on love and companionship at all levels, should appear on the eve of World War I is indeed ironic; Newbolt, who later wrote the official history of the British Navy in that conflict, never wrote another novel.

THE FANTASY OF JOHN BELLAIRS
(1983)

with Mary A. Burgess

Sepharial, the professional name of Walter Gorn Old, has said in his book
The Kabala of Numbers
(1913) that “what we call an event is but a displacement and rearrangement of the parts of our own sphere of reality.” This is an appropriate comment on John Bellairs’s novel,
The Face in the Frost
(1969), both because the author mentions the
Kabala
as the solution to his character’s dilemma and because he has, in fact, utilized this concept of rearranging known historical facts as the basis for constructing an idealized medieval world of surpassing charm and beauty. Indeed, Bellairs’s novel deals very directly with the question of the nature of reality—and who or what makes things real.

Prospero and Bacon, wizards and old friends, embark upon a journey to save mankind from the evil spell of their former colleague and fellow magician, Melichus. Melichus has found an old book written in curious ciphers that seem untranslatable; when he tries to decipher the strange writing, he can make out only tantalizing glimpses of some basic formulas of power. The more he pursues the question, the more entranced he becomes; what has begun as intellectual curiosity quickly becomes an obsession, first with the translation itself, and then with the power the spells might bring the translator. The formulas somehow contain the secret to another reality or series of realities; the master of these arcane symbols can literally destroy the world of the North and South Kingdoms. This Prospero and Bacon must prevent at any cost.

This is not the Roger Bacon who was the Franciscan monk in the “real world,” a man known not only for his contributions to science (“It is the intention of philosophy to work out the nature and properties of things”), but also as an alchemist and dabbler in magic. Yet he is clearly intended to be an analogue of the real Bacon in a world where magic works. Like his model, this alternate version is devoted to the truth, whatever it may be, wherever it may lie; like the real Bacon, Bellairs’s wizard is a man of honor and courage. Prospero, on the other hand, is modeled after William Shakespeare’s fictional sorcerer, the practitioner of “this rough magic.” In
The Tempest
(1611), Prospero sets out to right the wrongs of his world, and in so doing, employs his magic one last time to bring about a proper balance of persons and events. Bellairs’s character is also concerned with balance, with setting right his world; a bumbling and forgetful man, clearly no match for the brilliant and logical Melichus, he nevertheless sets forth with a desperate kind of courage to fight the good fight. His very lack of pretension, his refusal to fool himself by championing his own considerable abilities, are major assets in this struggle to the death.

The mark of Melichus’s growing power over the land is the ever-recurring image of “the face in the frost,” a yawning, vacant visage which, when glimpsed, evokes a nameless terror, a horror that cannot be dispelled by reason: “He felt very nervous, drowsily nervous, with prickling dark borders on his sight. A glass bell was ringing somewhere deep, deep in the forest. An icy green glass bell ridged with frost, trembling on a green willow branch.” Time is growing short; the two friends begin their adventure by shrinking themselves and sailing a model ship down an underground stream that leads from Prospero’s root cellar. In the ensuing chapters, the magicians defeat a troll, make use of a prophetic mirror (a looking-glass), ride in a pumpkin (squash) coach, fight off the spells cast by an enchanted forest, and climb a magical vine (beanstalk) to reach the fairy tale-like cottage once shared by Prospero and Melichus in happier days. These images from common folk myths and childhood fairy tales weave a rich but dark tapestry of allusion and double entendre throughout Bellairs’s tale.

At the cottage, Prospero retrieves the green glass paperweight that contains the magical powers of Prospero and Melichus combined. Like Zed in John Boorman’s acclaimed motion picture
Zardoz,
Prospero enters the world of the prism, a strange place in which technology has prevailed, filled with electric lights, lawnmowers, and the accoutrements of modern civilization. Zed’s crystal had contained all of man’s knowledge; with it, and with the knowledge he gained of himself, Zed was able to destroy the prism itself, thus freeing man from the bonds of self-imposed technological shackles. In Bellairs’s prism, Prospero encounters M. Millhorn, a true believer in the occult, a man who has been waiting all of his life for this moment. In exchange for the paperweight, Millhorn uses his knowledge of the
Kabala
to save Prospero from the pursuing Melichus; Prospero is returned to his own world, where he finally remembers the spell he must use to destroy Melichus and his evil book, thereby restoring reality. In the end, Prospero’s world returns to normal, and he and Bacon celebrate their triumph with a party for their friends.

The Face in the Frost
was published originally as a children’s book, although it has been reprinted in paperback as an adult novel; it can be read on many different levels. What appears on the surface to be the rather lighthearted adventures of two bumbling wizards on a quest becomes, on rereading, a darkly streaked tale of moral courage, tragedy, and the ultimate doom of the world. Everything in the book is seen through the two-sided mirror, a glass which, when held up to “reality,” reflects fantasy and real life, the past and the present, humor and sorrow, the pursuit of power and a devotion to duty, in equal measures. The reader sees “through a glass darkly” to reach the truth on the other side. Prospero must pass out of his world through the glass before he can defeat Melichus; he must see his world—and see evil—for what it is before he can remember the spell. He must recognize that good and evil are the only true constants.

Bellairs’s powers of description bring this book alive; every leaf on every branch of every tree is limned in exquisite detail. His ability to make his readers see, smell, hear, taste, even touch the outlines of his fantasy creation makes it real for them. In the context of his story, this must surely be the ultimate paradox.