Black Gate

In some ways Salman Rushdie’s 2008 novel The Enchantress of Florence feels like a classic pulp fantasy entertainment. A bit less than a hundred years ago you could find a lot of pulp set in India, central Asia, and the Middle East: Harold Lamb recounting colourful histories of the great Mongol conquerors and Timur-Leng; Fritz Leiber imagining a pair of sword-wielding comrades he’d later recast as heroes of no-when; Arthur D. Howden Smith telling of the adventures of the Grey Maiden, the first sword made of iron; Talbot Mundy presenting theosophy-inflected occult sagas; Robert E. Howard, perhaps inspired by Lamb, writing grim war tales of battles against Genghis Khan and his great general Subotai. It’s interesting that when Michael Chabon tried his hand at a pulp-style adventure novel, he set it in Khazaria.

Naturally there are an awful lot of differences between The Enchantress of Florence and the pulp tales. Rushdie’s prose is more baroque even than Leiber’s. The structure of the book’s vastly more intricate, a narrative maze of stories and stories-within-stories. And, of course, The Enchantress of Florence is written as it were from the east looking west, rather than the reverse.

Still: it is a story set in a time of swordsmanship and adventure — the late sixteenth century, to be precise — and it glories in the lurid and the larger-than-life. It’s a tale of emperors and kings and generals, of subtle enchantresses and the brutality of war. It’s a book fascinated by what used to be called romance, by action and magic. And if its style and structure are more elaborate than anything in the pulps, that’s a sign that Rushdie’s book is actually even more charged with storytelling energy: with humour and grotesques and sex and politics and death and all kinds of things, one following fast upon another.

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In 2007 Annick Press published a Young Adult tale called The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel by Drew Hayden Taylor, a veteran playwright, journalist, and essayist (as well as stand-up comic, TV writer, and documentary film-maker). The book follows a mysterious stranger who returns from Europe to the fictional Anishinabe (or Ojibway) Otter Lake Reserve in what is now Ontario, and a teenage girl whose life he ends up affecting. Taylor mentions in an afterword that the story began existence as a play which never quite satisfied him, until fifteen years later, while working with Annick Press on another project, he rewrote it as a prose novel. It’s since been adapted by Alison Kooistra into a graphic novel with art by Mike Wyatt.

In 2010 Taylor returned to Otter Lake with another novel, Motorcycles & Sweetgrass, published by Knopf Canada. In this story, an ancient trickster spirit comes to Otter Lake and becomes involved with the woman who’s currently the chief of the community. It’s longer and more complex than The Night Wanderer, and perhaps more fully exploits the freedoms of the novel form. Point-of-view is varied, and sub-plots more complex.

Both are charming books. Taylor’s prose is light, quick, and direct. His stories marry an earthy sense of reality with superhuman and supernatural figures who upend that reality by their basic nature. And his characters are well-drawn, sometimes broad but always interesting. Even when they’re confused about what they want, at least they want something at any given moment. As you’d expect from a playwright, the scenes move.

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Yangsze Choo’s 2013 book The Ghost Bride starts out very much like a gothic novel. Li Lan, the beautiful young daughter of an impoverished scholar in the Chinese community of Malacca in the year 1893, draws a sinister marriage proposal from the rich and powerful Lim family: a ceremonial spirit marriage to Lim Tian Ching, the recently-deceased heir to the Lim wealth. But Li Lan finds herself drawn to Tian Ching’s cousin, Lim Tian Bai — and then Tian Ching begins to appear in her dreams, eager for their upcoming nuptials. She tries to exorcise him, and then what started as a gothic becomes broader and stranger. Li Lan enters a world of ghosts where she uncovers hints of corruption among the judges of hell, and then must undertake a quest into a further and yet more fantastical world, a Campbellian hero(ine)’s journey of dangers and guardian allies and magic items.

The Ghost Bride is a highly entertaining book, wonderful in the most literal sense. It’s the first novel by Choo, a Malaysian writer of Chinese descent living — at least as of 2013 — in California. She builds a remarkable setting, selecting the right details to create a sense of Malacca as a place without (at least to me, who knows nothing of Malaysia) over-exoticising her subject. It’s a tricky balance for a fantasy story. Choo’s highly conscious of the multiple cultures and overlapping histories of her city, and the way religions and magical beliefs accrete. But there’s always a sense of human reality behind the magic, a complex and living reality.

Choo adroitly describes the beliefs and ghosts at play without slowing her story down. Just as everyday things like food and clothing are described as needed, so holidays and folk practices are explained swiftly, naturally, and evocatively. Plot’s thus foreshadowed without being obvious, and the fantasy aspects of the book are set up, but in such a way that character’s deepened at the same time: the vivid setting informs the people in the book, and their choices, and their desires. And we see how different beliefs interact and come to inform each other.

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Early in 2013 I wrote a post about The Vorrh, a novel by sculptor, artist, and poet Brian Catling. I thought it was a powerful, fascinating book that defied easy categorisation; epic fantasy or epic horror, magic realism or magic surrealism, it seemed bigger and stranger than whatever one might think to call it. Set mostly in Africa and mostly in the years after World War I, it deals with a forest called the Vorrh, where reality and time and logic become confused. A hunter tries to cross the forest, another man tries to stop him, yet another man tries to stop the second. Meanwhile, in a colonial German city that exists inside the forest, a young cyclops is educated by peculiar automata. Alternating with these plot strands we follow the fictionalised life of the actual Victorian photographer Eadweard Muybridge, as well as the unreal experiences of the quite real French surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, whose equally real 1910 novel Impressions d’Afrique first introduced the Vorrh.

Catling’s novel first came out in late 2012. Now, almost three years later, it’s being republished (as reported here by Black Gate supreme overlord John O’Neil). Catling’s edited the book extensively, slimming it down and moving sections around. He’s also found a new publisher. The original version of the book came from UK small press Honest Publishing; the new one’s published by Vintage.

The edits make a more direct narrative. The maze-like interleaving of scenes and moments has been reworked into an armature of chapters. Crucially, though, much of the original’s tonal strangeness remains. The prose has been pruned of some detail, some paradox, and some side reflections, and this tends to make the story clearer. Many of the losses were fascinating bits of writing in and of themselves, but also complicated sentences, paragraphs, or concepts. Sometimes those complications were worthwhile. But if the new Vorrh is a little less rich, it’s also much more vivid.

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Last week, I wrote here about the Avram Davidson–edited 1983 anthology Magic For Sale. I looked at the book’s fifteen stories, and tried to think about the nature of tales about magic stores. I thought I saw a few patterns. And then my girlfriend pointed out that she owned another anthology about magic stores: 2004’s The Magic Shop, edited by Denise Little. Having now read that book, I think it makes for an interesting contrast with Davidson’s collection.

The two anthologies have some very obvious differences. Davidson’s was published in 1983 and drew on stories from across 85 years, meaning he could select from a murderer’s row of classic sf and fantasy writers: Sturgeon, Leiber, Ellison, Yolen, Bester, Wells, Davidson himself, and many others. Little’s collection was published in 2004, and the stories were all written for that book. And you can’t help but notice that while Magic For Sale had only one woman contributor (and one female lead), 11 out of 15 writers in The Magic Shop are women.

I didn’t think there was much to choose from between the two books, on the whole, though I thought more of the humour in The Magic Shop worked. But for the moment I’m less interested in quality and more in characteristics. How did things change over time? Or did they? I thought some things are very different from book to book, some much the same, and — this was the surprising bit to me — some things only became obvious to me when I read the two books together.

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