‘Wonka’ (2023; directed by Paul King)

Wonka was OK, fine, funny, though the plot didn’t make any sense. But then the film coasted along on the understanding that the plot didn’t have to make sense—it’s a whacky, whimsical world of *sings* pure imagination, so there's no need for its story to parse logically. And talking of singing: the new songs were weak-beer, and rather shown-up by the fact that, in addition to commissioning the new pieces, the production had also cleared the rights for three of the songs from the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory movie (directed by Mel Stuart, with Gene Wlder as Wonka): the trilling ‘Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka We Love You’, the aforementioned ‘Pure Imagination’, and the choric song:

Oompa loompa doompety doo
I've got a perfect puzzle for you
Oompa loompa doompety dee
If you are wise you'll listen to me

What do you get when you reboot a film
Is there a chance that it will underwhelm?
Flogging your franchise just like a dead nag
Hoping to fill your moneybag.

... which rather showed-up the new songs as the unmemorable noodling they were.

Instead of coherent storytelling and character development, we get a jumble of CGI-heavy (rather gloopy CGI, much of it) set-pieces and song-and-dance numbers, strung together with the winsome charm of Chalamet—the film leaned a little too heavily on this, really—and a range of stalwart British comic actors gurning and looning, plus various globs of glucouse-sentimentality.

We learn Wonka’s backstory. His mother (Sally Hawkins) raises him on a longboat—her accent informs us that she is Irish, which means that she must have gone out of her way to adopt an American accent during her son’s formative years, such that he might grow up speaking like a Yank. Why she would undertake something so laborious and pointless is a little hard to fathom, but there you go. Anyway, she makes chocolate on the boat, and it’s the best chocolate in the world because of its secret ingredient, though she won’t tell young Willy what the secret ingredient is. Obviously secret ingredient is ‘love’ (the secret is flourished on a golden ticket at the movie’s end: ‘it’s not the chocolate, its sharing it with the people you love’). But we know that as soon as the matter is mentioned. Everybody knows. Everyone except young Willy, who presumably has an unusually literalist-materialist mind, and searches the world for an actual food-ingredient secret. At any rate, Ma dies, Willy spends seven years as a ship’s cook, and then lands at the coastal city—someplace European, Parisian maybe, Rome, Barcelona (the movie was filmed in that famously coastal metropolis Oxford and foregrounds all the famous Oxford tourist landmarks)—where he plans to establish a chocolate emporium. But, foolish ingénu that he is, he signs a contract for a single night’s lodging with wicked Mrs. Scrubitt (Olivia Coleman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis). Not having read the small print, he finds himself thrust into indentured servitude in their laundry business for a thousand years (or something), washing and cleaning, along with a clutch of other similar dupes: an accountant, a telephonist, a comedian, a cook. These four become his friends.

This abject slavery is a Dahl-y sort of touch, although it doesn’t hold Wonka. With the help of a fellow prisoner, a young orphan called Noodle (Calah Lane) he escapes daily, returning in time for roll-call every evening. In the days he somehow concocts and sells extraordinary and delicious chocolates, accumulating the money to pay off his and the others’ indentures. In this, and because his chocolates are so amazing, he falls foul of the ‘chocolate cartel’: Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Gerald Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Felix Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton). They, with the help of the corrupt, chocolate-addicted chief of police (Keegan-Michael Key), persecute Wonka: chase him off the streets, poison his chocolate, and, escalating matters, try repeatedly to kill him. But, with the help of his new friends, and a single Oompa-Loompa (Hugh Grant—playing the role as an orange-faced, super-posh Englishman), Wonka prevails.

There’s a lot to like in all this: I enjoyed it, laughed quite a bit, and came out thinking ‘yes, I can see why this film has been so well-received.’ The team behind Paddington have worked to generate a Paddington-ness of charm and warmth and humour. Wonka is not quite Paddington but it’s close enough for government work. I mean, as I say, the story doesn't make a lot of sense. Mrs Scrubitt’s enslavement is too easily escaped-from, and presents no impediment to Wonka doing whatever he wants, which renders it rather pointless. The police have to be simultaneously corrupt, in the pocket of Big Chocolate, and impartial upholders of the law, such that by presenting them with the ledger that records all the Chocolate Cartel’s delinquencies Wonka can ensure justice is served, the three rivals locked up, which is somewhat contradictory. Willy himself is both penniless and yet able to refit and stock a huge chocolate emporium with the sort of fixtures and displays and quantities of materiel that would cost millions. And the film ends in a sugary rush, so hurriedly that it doesn’t finish several of its storylines, and Hugh Grant must oompa-limp into the scrolling credits to inform us what happened to the various other characters. But it is bootless to object to these contradictions, as I say.

It's a film more in dialogue with the 1971 movie than Dahl’s original novel: and as is the way with prequels it somewhat lumpishly tips forward to what we know the character will become—Wonka leaving his walking stick standing on the ground, ‘strike that, reverse it’, him unwrapping his mother’s last gift to him, a home-made chocolate bar, and finding a message from her inside written upon a golden ticket.

Chocolate, in this movie, is pleasure; it is sustenance and it is community—friendship, love, ‘what matters is not the chocolate but the people you share it with.’ But it is also money, in some places literally so: customers at Wonka’s shop pay for what they buy with banknotes, and are offered the choice of taking their change as money or as chocolate, opting for the latter. Chocolate makes Willy rich. But chocolate is also temptation—Rowan Atkinsons’ venal priest, unable to resist the treats with which the Chocolate Cartel bribe him, moaning that he is a miserable sinner but helpless. Chocolate is corruption. This is also a way of talking about money, of course; and that Slugworth, Prodnose and Fickelgruber operate their cartel in the crypt of the cathedral links pleasure, money, corruption and religion. The cartel stores all its chocolate (a billion tonnes, or something) in a huge shared vat under the church, which, like the redemptive-baptismal moment at the end of Manon de Source, Wonka redirects to a giant public fountain, so that everybody can enjoy the somehow heated-and-liquidised stuff, delicious mugs of hot-chocolate in the snow.

Chocolate is also a commodity, and it comes from elsewhere than Oxford (or Paris, or Rome, or wherever this movie is set). Its history is bound-up with imperialism, colonialism. In a gesture towards this, we learn that Willy Wonka, presumably during his time as a ship’s cook, rowed himself ashore at the island where the Oompa Loompa’s live and stole their three cocoa beans. Hugh Grant’s Loompa is sent away by his fellows to pursue Wonka and revenge this theft: for when you steal from an Oompa Loompa they repay you a thousand times. This means that Grant’s little chap keeps stealing Wonka’s chocolate and will continue so to do until he has brought a thousand times the initial loss back to his people. Or something: this is a little obscure actually—how did Willy turn three raw beans into his entire chocolate supply? How is Grant's Oompa going to repair the loss to his island nation if he keeps eating the Wonka chocolate he steals? But there is something interesting going on here, to do with the depredations and theft of colonialism, and the logic of reparation.

This in turn foregrounds questions of race. The world of the movie is ostentatiously multi-racial, a place beyond racism, in which good and bad are judged by the content of their characters rather than the colour of their skin. But the historical structures of racism lurk behind the whole conceit.

Take the representation of the Oompa Loompas in this movie. Hugh Grant, digitally reduced, is as poshly English as all get-out. But there's a history to the representation of the Oompa Loompas that contextualises the film-makers decision to write Grant's character, and cast Grant.

In the first edition of Dahl's novel (published in 1964 in the US, and a year later in the UK) the Oompa-Loompas are pygmy Black Africans:

They live in the jungle with only squashed insects and caterpillars for food; Wonka visits them, promises to give them all the chocolate they can eat if they agree to come and work for him. So they do: they travel to wherever the chocolate factory is located (England, America—the book doesn't specify). They live and work in the factory; they are never allowed to leave; they get no money for their labour; Wonka insists they are happy. That is to say, they are, straightforwardly, African slaves working for a white overlord. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a hidden-in-plain-view celebration of Western colonial exploitation.

In one sense I'm being, I know, deliberately over-literal. Wonka's chocolate factory is a fantasy realm, more like Alice's wonderland than any real factory. Fine. But the racial problematic of these Black African Oompa-loompas was sensitive enough, even in the 1960s, to mean that they couldn't stand. ‘It didn’t occur to me that my depiction of the Oompa-Loompas was racist,’ Dahl later claimed; ‘but it did occur to the NAACP and others ... which is why I revised the book.’ So in later editions they became miniature white hippies from Loompaland, although still dressed in the sort of rags more often associated with ‘savages’:

Then came 1971, and the movie (which Dahl himself hated, although it made him a ton of money and boosted his sales considerably) Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, in which the Oompa Loompa's are reimagined again:

This is surely the most famous visual iteration, and it's the one 2023's Wonka copies, although it is, when you look at it, pretty damn peculiar. I suppose the idea was to remove the Oompas from racial representations altogether and reposition them as creatures of pure fantasy. But of course the repressed—here, 'race'—always returns, and with a vengeance, as Freud says it always must. Because these improbable-looking individuals are so emphatically Irish-flag in their coloration, so green, white and orange, that they shoot straight past 'vaguely leprechaun in provenance' (which, one presumes, is what the director was aiming at) and land on race again: another ethnic group, driven from their land by famine, working mostly as laborers, subaltern, subject to discrimination and so on. Irish-Americans do not have the same depths of malignity in their historical backstory as African-Americans, of course; but there's certainly been no shortage of anti-Irish racism in the West. Burton's more recent movie adaptation split the difference, racially, by using CGI to create a whole army of Oompa Loompas all played by one man, Kenyan-born British-Indian actor Deep Roy.

At least this is a mode of representation that acknowledges ‘race’ to be a salient. Quentin Blake's decision to re-imagine the baseline Oompa Loompa as, basically, an over-hair-gelled Sting looks like its trying too hard to avoid the issue of the otherness of White Western racial representation:

On the manifest level (as it were) this is a comic fantasia about how wonderful it would be to be plucked from childish poverty by an eccentric billionaire and given the keys to a chocolate factory; but we can also read it on, as it were, the latent level precisely as a fantasy of imperial domination: the sweetness (the wealth) extracted from Africa by imperial appropriation. After all, as a young man Dahl had been an agent of Empire, working for the Shell Oil company in Tanganyika (modern-day, Tanzania), living in luxury with many Black servants to cook, clean and attend him, in a large house outside Dar-es Salaam. His account of this period in his life in Going Solo (1986), though entertaining, is marinated in unconsidered racism to such a degree it makes genuinely uncomfortable reading today. The Black Africans Dahl describes are simple-hearted, loyal, bright-eyed servants to a man. When war breaks out, Dahl organises some of them against the anticipated German invasion of Tanganyika, and they reveal reserves of savagery. They could not be more representative of a particular Western imperial stereotype.

It all makes me wonder if the ‘latent’ meaning of these kids and their visit to the chocolate factory, in Dahl's novel and the 1971 film, is less hidden than we might think. Chocolate is one of the sweet fruits of colonial exploitation of Africa. The old coloniser (let's call him, ‘Willy Won-Kurtz’) must pass over his imperial possessions to a worthy heir: the material wealth, the means of production, the black slaves who labour for him, the whole kit-and-kaboodle. So, from the point of view of a dedicated British imperialist: who are the rivals for this possession?

Germany, for one: Dahl literally took up arms to prevent German expansion in East Africa. No, the Germans are not (so far as Dahl is concerned) worthy of this prize. And so it is that Augustus Gloop, the greedy ‘Bavarian Beefcake’, is the first to go, plunging into the chocolate river, and thereby choking on his own imperial ambition.

Who else's rival colonial-African ambitions might interfere with British manifest destiny in the continent? The Belgians? The French? Violet Beauregarde, with her egregiously Francophone surname, is next to go. Who else? Well there's ‘Capitalism’, wealthy but vacuous, owing allegience to no one nation but willing to despoil all for profit, and represented here by the spoiled brat Veruca Salt and her billionaire father. Mere money, without even the fig-leaf of imperial ideology, is mere rubbish, and down the rubbish chute it goes. That leaves only one global power: America, here represented by the television- obsessed shallowness of Mike Teevee, more concerned with his narcissistic desire to be on the gogglebox than anything else. One by one Dahl shoves them out of the frame, leaving only good honest Charlie Bucket: salt of the earth, incorruptible, neither too wealthy nor too foreign, the proper heir to take over all these imperial holdings when the time comes to poke our head round the door and announce ‘Mr Won-Kurz—he dead’. A-choc-alypse Now.

That was 1964/1971. What about now? This colourblind diverse metropolis, elegant and beautiful; this frolicsome, light-hearted, sentimental comedy and singalong story; this celebration of sweetness and chocolate-ness—what is unerneath it? What is stored in the cache beneath religion, beneath civilisation, the logic of money, or power: a vast choking reservoir of dark stuff. ‘When you steal from an us,’ says Hugh Grant's upper-class English character, ‘we revenge ourselves a thousand fold.’ Who is stealing from whom?

Best SFF Books of 2023

I stand by my choices for The Guardian regarding the five best SFF novels I read in 2023, with one exception. I did not, after some discussion with the Books editor, include Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz (Faber). Francis is a friend; I read the book in manuscript and am thanked in the acknowledgements. This compromises the disinterestedness of me choosing it (I talk, here, about the process of how I make my selection for this particular end-of-year list). But it really is an excellent novel, and Francis is one of the best writers working today, so I note it here, in the decent obscurity of my blog. Cahokia Jazz is a tour-de-force alternate history, taking as jonbar point a less deadly variety of smallpox than the strain Europeans actually brought with them to America. As such a large Native American population subsists, nations across the US South and Southwest largely unified by the Mobilian jargon. In the 1922 of the novel St Louis is a small village, Cahokia the site of a huge metropolis, splendidly evoked: Native, White and Black populations co-exist (identified in the novel by the local names takouma, takata and taklousa). The alt Jazz Age worldbuilding is immersive, the writing exquisite, the Noir cop-investigating-murders storytelling brilliantly absorbing, building to a shattering conclusion. 

The best non-fiction SFF book of the year is, easily, Niall Harrison's collection All These Worlds (Briardeme Books). Assembling reviews and essays from 2005 to 2014, covering a range of SF and some Fantasy, this book showcases Harrison's fluency and insight. He has a brilliant critical intelligence, attentive both to the particularities of the books he discusses and to larger questions of the evolving nature of the genre across the twenty-first century. And he balances the disinterestness and rigour of the literary critic with the engagement and energy of the fan. Really excellent critical writing. I would hope to see this book winning prizes in the coming year.

Thoughts on Grimdark

I’ve been trying to wrestle some minimal cogency into an account of Joe Abercrombie’s writing, but am finding it tricky. I know Joe: he’s a smart and charming man, and when he writes Fantasy he does so smartly, with great charm, although his mode of Fantasy is Grimdark: violence, torture, a Machiavellian sense of power-plays behind the façade of society and civilization: homo homini lupus, the randomness of fate, ‘good’ characters as liable to end badly and the bad to triumph as vice versa—though there aren’t really any ‘good’ characters in Abercrombie’s books: even the most likeable are conflicted, have darkness in their past, murder on their conscience. This, Grimdark more broadly, is, we might say, part of that reaction against the heroic, idealised Fantasy world of the Tolkienian or Lewisian tradition—war as chivalry, medieval life as an enchanted, beautiful realm, evil an externalized quantity that can be valiantly combatted. A very different weltanschauung. Here’s Dorothy L Sayers, talking of the Song of Roland, which she translated:

And so Roland rides out, into that new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown summer of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth. It is also a world full of blood and grief and death and naked brutality, but also of frank emotions, innocent simplicities and abounding self-confidence—and world with which we have so utterly lost touch that we have fallen into using the words “feudal” and “medieval” as mere epithets for outer darkness. Anyone who sees gleams of brightness in that world is accused of romantic nostalgia for a Golden Age that never existed, But the figure of Roland stands there to give us the lie: he is the Young Age as that age saw itself. Compared with him, the space-adventurers and glamour-boys of our times, no less than the hardened toughs of Renaissance epic, seem to have been born middle-aged. [Dorothy L Sayers, ‘Introduction’, The Song of Roland (Penguin 1957), 17]

Grimdark is not having this. The ‘real’ middle ages were, it says, shitty, ghastly, horrible, violent, debasing, and Fantasy set in an imaginary version of the middle ages ought to rub the reader’s face in that. Mention no ideal except to undermine it; talk of honour only as hypocrisy, of generosity and loyalty as null categories. The only currency is power, and power licenses all. Grimdark will contain young characters, but itself it is old: battle-scarred, weary, cynical, ‘middle aged’ in the sense Sayers uses.

One of the arguments I am developing in my ongoing ‘History of Fantasy’ is that the genre first properly coalesced in the 1920s, when a number of writers worked traditions of 19th-century Arthuriana, stories of fairyland and the neo-Romance inventions of William Morris into a distinctive form: adventure tales set in imaginary lands, bourgeois disenchanted ‘moderns’ move into realms of wonder and magic, perilous and beautiful places. This is to develop Alan Jacobs’ persuasive argument that Fantasy mediates a ‘safe’ form of de-buffering of the self, a re-enchantment. Jacobs quotes Charles Taylor, from his huge 2007 book A Secular Age (‘one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world ... in which these [magical] forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed’), adding:

As Taylor makes clear, the shift from a porous to a buffered self involves a complex series of exchanges. But to put that shift in simple terms, a person accepts a buffered condition as a means of being protected from the demonic or otherwise ominous forces that in pre-modern times generated a quavering network of terrors. To be a pre-modern person, in Taylor’s account, is to be constantly in danger of being invaded or overcome by demons or fairies or nameless terrors of the dark — of being possessed and transformed, or spirited away and never returned to home and family. Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) specifies many of these dangers, along with the whole panoply of prayers, rites, amulets, potions, chants, spells, and the like, by which a person might seek protection from the otherwise irresistible. It is easy, then, to imagine why a person — or a whole culture — might, if it could, exchange this model of a self with highly permeable boundaries for one in which the self feels better protected, defended — impermeable, or nearly so.

The problem with this apparently straightforward transaction is that the porous self is open to the divine as well as to the demonic, while the buffered self is closed to both alike. Those who must guard against capture by fairies are necessarily and by the same token receptive to mystical experiences. The “showings” manifested to Julian of Norwich depend upon exceptional sensitivity, which is to say porosity — vulnerability to incursions of the supernatural. The portals of the self cannot be closed on one side only. But the achievement of a safely buffered personhood — closed off from both the divine and the demonic — is soon enough accompanied by a deeply felt change in the very cosmos. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Discarded Image (1964), the medieval person who found himself “looking up at a world lighted, warmed, and resonant with music” gives way to the modern person who perceives only emptiness and silence. Safety is purchased at the high price of isolation, as we see as early as Pascal, who famously wrote of the night sky, “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”).

In these circumstances, one might expect people to ask whether so difficult and costly an exchange is in fact necessary. Might it not be possible to experience the benefits, while avoiding the costs, of both the porous and the buffered self? I want to argue here that it is precisely this desire that accounts for the rise to cultural prominence, in late modernity, of the artistic genre of fantasy. Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.

Jacobs is talking about ‘Fantasy’ in the contemporary generic sense, not the older sense in which Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Beowulf are fantastical. I find his account very helpful.

We are talking about stories in which magic is real, glamour in the old sense prevails, adventure beckons to restore us to wholeness, and war is chivalric splendour, an honourable and marvellous. It is not surprising that so many people who experienced the mechanised unglamour of World War One, depersonalised mass-slaughter, the crush and horror of modernity intersecting with warfare, wrote stories that retreated into an idealised historical fantasy of what war might be. Tolkien and C S Lewis both fought on the Western Front (though Lord of the Rings, due to its long gestation, wasn’t published until 1954-55, overlapping with the issue of Lewis’s seven Narnia books, 1950-56) as did Lord Dunsany, and Robert Graves (whose The White Goddess is a mode of Fantasy, a mythopoeic work that seeks to locate the world’s re-enchantment in its titular figure) and David Jones, who reworked the terrible personal experience of the Somme by recasting it as a confluence of Arthurian and Greek-Heroic war in In Parenthensis. Others who  didn’t see active service were still effected by the war, and reacted against it: as with E R Eddison whose stylised archaic romance The Worm Ouroboros (1922) takes a romanticised, heroized view of the war its two conflicting races fight across its Fantasy realm, battle as a glorious chivalric game; or Hope Mirrlees’ wonderful Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

Now, one question my History must address—though I’m not sure I have the answer—is why these texts, moderately successful (or, as with Tolkien and Lewis, nascent) in the 1920s, had to wait until the late 1960s and 1970s to achieve global fame and kick off the boom in Fantasy writing in which we still find ourselves today. The specific triggers for the reflorescence was Tolkien as a campus hit in the 1960s turning into an international bestseller, and the Ballantine ‘Adult Fantasy List’ (1969-74), which reprinted all these earlier Fantasy novels, many others of a similar vintage, and disseminated them to a eager new audience, creating the market conditions for new books written in that mode to emerge. But why did it take four decades for this to happen? (I have a tentative answer, but I’m not sure of it—to do with WW2, and the generation that followed it, and then Vietnam and 1960s counter-culture—but there isn’t space to get into all that here.)

So here's another question. Tolkien's 1954-55 title enjoyed its global boost in the 1960s, and by the 1970s and 1980s a million reprints and imitation-Tolkien novels were appearing. In the first instance, Grimdark was a reaction against this, as per Moorcock’s sneering dismissal of Lord of the Rings (‘Winnie the Pooh for grown-ups’—though I must say, actually, that’s never struck me as the withering put-down it’s taken as being: Winnie the Pooh is a masterpiece and ‘Winnie the Pooh for grown-ups’ a great thing). Moorcock trashes not just Tolkien but the whole new world of Tolkienian Fantasy as cosy, bourgeois escapism, naif and childish. The thrust of Moorcock’s attack is: fantasy ought to be more mature, more ‘realistic’, more attuned to the actualities of medieval or Early Modern politics, warfare and society.

We might ask: but why? We might demur from a logic that equates ‘childhood’ with worthlessness, and ‘adulthood’ with value. We might, moreover, simply point out that this hyper-violent, sexually explicit horrorshow vision of the world is just as generic, as bound by its conventions, as the other. It misnames this to call it ‘more realistic’. Here’s what I wrote in another place about the shift to what we might call ‘Grimdark Spy Fiction’.

There's an interesting essay to be written, I think, about the way our age likes to take any given idealised fantasy of elegance, or empowerment, or escape, or supercompetence and rub its nose in the dirt. I'm talking about the shift away from stories of Tolkienesque pre-raphaelite grace and beauty towards stories of G R R Martin grimness, darkness, cynicism and horror. Or the way Batman no longer 'works' as primary-coloured larking about and must instead be darkly knighted. Or, to come closer to the matter of the book under discussion [Anthony Burgess’s Tremor of Intent], the way spy stories no longer 'work' as Roger Moore in a polyester whistle, exotic holidays with a bit of artfully rendered nookie on the side, interspersed with some balletically choreographed fisticuffs and running-around. Now the reboot is on the other refit: Daniel Craig, tied to a chair, must scowl toughly whilst heavies thwack him in the testicles with a lead weight. Now the audience must be made to feel as if every punch is connecting with bone, must see blood and torment and the misery of the beaten. We can't say that what was once 'mere escapism' is now 'dark and realistic', because there's nothing realistic about new Bond, Bourne, Dark Knight or any of them. They are all still exercises in aesthetic convention, not pure mimesis; still predicated on the mendacity that violence is thrilling and 'gets results', rather than the much more dramatically inert truth that violence is distressing and destructive, as damaging to the perpetrator's psyche as to the victim's body and mind. The mendacity that spying is an adventure, rather than a boring dayjob, 50% admin, 30% sitting tediously around, 5% meetings with line managers and the rest drink. I don't want to labour this point. If you watch Octopussy and haughtily comment that ‘real spywork is nothing like this’ your interlocutor will of course agree. If you watch Skyfall and say the same thing, you're more likely to be deprecated for spoiling everyone's fun. Yet Skyfall is precisely as far removed from actual spying as the earlier movie, the one in which Swedish supermodel Maud Adams plays an Indian begum and MI6 has bugged the world's supply of Fabergé eggs. Indeed, since people in real life laugh a lot, and since the Octopussy at least achieves a degree of humour, it is arguably more ‘life-like’ than the ponderously earnest Daniel Craig film. The point being, real is not the deal these texts offer us, not what we go to them for. Real is a salient only insofar as we want these texts not to flaunt too openly that there's nothing real about them.

In the aftermath of first great vogue for Lord of the Rings, and the Ballantine’s List, much Fantasy was published (Brook’s Shannara series for instance) replicating the older, idealized logic; but the Grimdark reaction set-in early. The setting of Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books (the first three were 1977-79), ‘the Land’, is exactly as beautiful and enchanted and wondrous as any classic Fantasyland, but Donaldson sets it up in order to introduce a character from our world, the leprous Covenant, whose first action is to rape the young woman who heals him with her magic. The actual term ‘Grimdark’ comes from the Warhammer table-top miniature wargame franchise (1983), or specifically from the science-fictional spin-off, Warhammer 40,000 (1987) that elaborates a violent, gloomy cosmos in which progress has ceased, and human civilisation is in a state of total war with hostile alien races and occult forces. To quote the game's slogan: ‘in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.’ The gaming origin of the term is significant: a wargame needs a war environment in which to operate; writing novels in such a franchise means that plot becomes determined by war, violence and pessimism. This spread by degrees through Fantasy writing across the decade. David Gemmell’s much-loved Legend (1984) is darkling, though not entirely grim—honour, courage and duty still have some meaning in this violent, bellicose world. Glen Cook’s Black Company books (1984-5) are grimmer, and by the 1990s the dark had fully engrimmened: Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God appeared in 1995, Martin’s first Westeros novel Game of Thrones in 1996, Stan Nicholl’s Orcs: First Blood in 1999, and so through to the present century: Mark Lawrence, Richard Morgan’s elvish books, M D Lachlan's wolfish trilogy and Lord Grimdark himself, Abercrombie.

The question, then, is what these kinds of texts offer us, why so many are drawn to them; and the more particular question what they do for Fantasy as a mode. If my ‘History of Fantasy’ thesis is that we go to this kind of writing to re-enchant our disenchanted, constrained, bourgeois modernity, to put us in touch with something transcendent, wondrous, transporting, marvelous, then what is the appeal of Grimdark Fantasy? One might wish to escape the dreariness of modernity and live in Middle Earth; what kind of a person would want to live in Westeros? This Hobbesian nightmare, life nasty brutish and short, as escapism? Really?

One answer might be that what constrains us, under the logic of modernity, is Freud’s ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’, and that the point of Westeros is that it is an imaginative space in which we can shuck off those superego restrictions, can kill, rape, monster, light-out unconstrainedly. But I don’t think that’s right. In Song of Ice and Fire that is indeed what the bad characters do, but the heart of the novels are characters trying to live according to a code, and struggling in a brutal world; characters moved by love and loyalty, by hope and ideals, however battered-about and betrayed and compromised. Ultimately, the story is a story of peoples overcoming their intertribal hostility and fighting to unite against a common enemy that is the literal embodiment of death. It’s just that the world in which these people move is one of incessant friction, of suffering and death. We could say that this is a way of making the story more dramatically interesting—greater conflict leading to greater storytelling excitement. Martin is famous for writing characters upon whom people focus, follow, believe to be central to the developing story only to kill them off abruptly and unexpectedly. It’s a kind of focus pull: you thought this story was about him? Wrong! He’s gone! Look again. It’s dramatically very effective, and Martin does it well, although he perhaps pulls on this particular storytelling lever a little too often. Abecrombie isn’t as interested in this pull-the-rug-from under-the-reader’s-feet game, although he is expert at generating narrative momentum, and good at creating core characters with whom his readers identify and love. But those characters have hardly shuffled off the chains of civilisations discontents. They are, on the contrary, mostly deeply discontented, conscience-stricken, troubled by their past and present actions.

Violence is an intensity, and perhaps it is as simple as that: that Grimdark offers us these crude, pseudo-somatic intensities in place of the sublimities and enchantments of classic Fantasy—transport and magic are also intensities, but ones we are no longer able to access or apprehend. I don’t know if that’s true though.

The medieval-esque world of Abercrombie’s ‘First Law’ trilogy [The Blade Itself (2006), Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Last Argument of Kings (2008)] was once inhabited by demons and human beings both, until a great wizard called Euz expelled all demons to a dimension on ‘the other side’. Connections with this dimension exist, and it powers such magic as still operates in the human world, but the ‘first law’ of the series title was laid-down by Euz himself: ‘It is forbidden to touch the Other Side direct.’ Naturally this law is not scrupulously observed.

The trilogy brings together a clutch of characters. Logen Ninefingers is a hard-bitten northland barbarian, worn-out and wary. Then there is brattish, selfish, young aristocrat Captain Jezal dan Luthar, proud of his fencing skills but vain and inexperienced, and the crippled torturer Inquisitor Glokta. Glotka serves ‘the Union’, centred on the decadent city of Ardua, a version of Early Modern Europe. The Union is threatened by war from the barbarian North and, to the south, in the quasi-oriental Gurkish Empire. During the trilogy, as war breaks out all over, a wizard called Bayaz—more powerful than his shlubby outward appearance implies—attempts to use the situation to his own purposes. His plan is to vanquishing the dark mage who founded Adua in the distant past. Ninefingers takes Falstaff’s view of war, not Harry Hotspur:

“What’s a battle like?” [Jezal] asked.

“Battles are like men. No two are ever quite the same.”

“How do you mean?”

“Imagine waking up at night to hear a crashing and a shouting, scrambling out of your tent into the snow with your trousers falling down, to see men all around you killing one another. Nothing but moonlight to see by, no clue who’re enemies and who’re friends, no weapon to fight with.’

“Confusing,” said Jezal.

“No doubt. Or imagine crawling in the mid between the stomping boots, trying to get away but not knowing where to go with an arrow in your back and a sword cut across your arse, squealing like a pig.”

“Painful,” agreed Jezal.

“Very. Or imagine standing in a circle of shield no more than ten strides across, all held my men roaring their loudest …”

“Hmm,” murmured Jezal. Ninefingers smiled. [Before They Are Hanged, 211]

Abercrombie paces exceptionally well, does not overladen his text with worldbuilding specifics or lore. He is moreover a very witty writer, whose humour leavens the lumpishness of standard Fantasy seriousness. There is a good deal of violence, swearing and sex in these stories, but also a winning panache. A mixture of wormwood and verdigris, as Shelley described Byron's Don Juan.

Abercrombie’s approach to his world is as a lens on genre as much as on socio-cultural difference, and he is not a slave to worldbuilding consistency or hobgoblin-of-little-mindishness. Best Served Cold (2009) is set in the same imagined Fantasyland as the ‘First Law’ trilogy, but in a different corner that essays not medieval Europre but Renaissance Italy, elegance and cruelty, plots and (as the title suggests) revenge. Red Country (2012) another follow-up in the same world, is actually a kind of Western, owing much to the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven. And the most recent ‘Age of Madness’ trilogy [A Little Hatred (2019), The Trouble With Peace (2020) and The Wisdom of Crowds (2021)] takes us into the Union’s future via an ongoing industrial revolution. Abercrombie, here, is knocking on the door of the divide between our modern world and the pre-modern past that is the structuring logic of Fantasy as such. The ‘Madness’ books pick up the next generation, the children of the characters from ‘First Law’, though the pace of technological change seems improbably concertinaed (the original trilogy doesn’t even possess cannons; yet here are manufactories and ironworks, steam engines, chimneys everywhere). When an equivalent to the French Revolution sweeps the continent it seems strange that the immensely powerful wizard Bayaz does not use his magic to avert it. But magic and demons, still notionally part of the storyworld, are diminishments in these later books, and that may be the point. The logic of Grimdark is that of redisenchantment, and these books follow that through. They do seem to me lesser works, compared with Abercrombie's ‘First Law’ throuple of books and especally the standalone follow-up The Heroes (2011). But there's no question that Abercombie is a major figure in contemporary Fantasy, which in turn restages the question.

Moorcock's considers Tolkien not only ideologically noisome but childish. And there is, I suppose, a sense underlying Grimdark that it takes a less infantile, less illusioned version of its matter. As if to say: kids might be satisfied with these stories of wonder and grace, these happy endings, but we know better. That's not actually how things are. The reality is that the world is a horrible place, and we pride ourselves in our grown-up acceptance of that fact. We are tough; we can take it; we can, indeed, revel in the cruelty and violence and misery. But this is delusive. The ‘maturity’ shibboleth is an empty signifier. The child, as Wordsworth says, is father to the man: children have access to the world apparelled in celestial light, trailing clouds of glory—until, to continue the drift of his great ode, shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy (or girl) and at length we perceive it die away,/And fade into the light of common day. To celebrate this latter eventuality, to take a kind of perverse pride in it, is a crazy thing. It's like the story Vladimir Nabokov tells about the inspiration for his novel Lolita: a newspaper story he read ‘about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.’ Grimdark is that literature that draws the cage-bars: a strange kind of escapism.

It sometimes adopts the posture of satire, but that only deepens the conundrum. What, after all, is being satirised? Life in some general sense? This muddles the picture, since the world of the novel is by virtue of the estrangement of Fantasy as a mode, not life. Expressions of cynicism and worldliness impair rather than distil the thrust of the whole. ‘When one man knowingly kills another, they call it murder! When society causes the deaths of thousands, they shrug and call it a fact of life.’ [A Little Hatred, 202]. Abercrombie's novels are at their weakest when they rehearse such bromides. Luckily, the books also include a saving wit and comedy; and are sometimes self-reflexive of the mode that construes them. Here two characters admire a heroic statue.

“Stolicus was the inspiration, I understand, ordering the famous charge at the Battle of Darmium.”

Monza raised an eyebrow. “Leading a charge, eh? You'd have thought he'd have put some trousers on for work like that.”

“It's called artistic licence,” snapped Salier. “It's a fantasy, one can do as one pleases.”

Cosca frowned. “Really? I always felt a man makes more points worth making if he steers always close to the truth.” [Best Served Cold, 252]

This is funny, and to the point. But the truth mentioned at the end is jesting-Pilate nomenclature. Whose truth? The cynical adult, cathecting his (to gender it) sadism into a worldview that justifies his own bitterness? The Wordsworthian child, who can still apprehend the sublime glory in the world? Niall Harrison's account of this novel is good.

No matter how vivid and scrupulous, the worlds of fantasy fiction are not real worlds, and not representations of our past; they are always conceits, and I'd suggest that one possible measure of the success of a secondary-world fantasy—or at least, one measure of its potential for success at being more than mere analgesic—is the extent to which its author appears to remember this fact. Best Served Cold gives every impression that its author never forgets it; indeed, more than with any of the other writers I've just mentioned, there is a sense that Abercrombie is eagerly embracing the artificiality of his creation. Everything—the tonal see-sawing, the awareness of formula plotting, the mismatch of language, psychology and setting—can be read as supporting this, but there is more. Even when Abercrombie's description is not being self-aware—‘they could've had lamps,’ the narrator observes at one point, ‘but torches are that bit more sinister’ [p. 241]—it has a dutifully reductive feel, breaking each vista down into tidy lists of its component parts; or, less charitably, throwing detail at the wall in the hope that some of it sticks.

The novel, Harrison notes, is full of moments that remind you that this tale is constructed. He is right that ‘what grounds the book, in the main, is character: Abercrombie's crop of gentlemen-and-women bastards are satisfyingly hard to love’ and I forgive him his split-infinitive when he points out that ‘Best Served Cold is a novel that can be understood to deliberately deny the higher heroic possibilities of its imaginative premise, because it refuses to believe there are any. It believes the world is what it is; it believes in change, but no progress except the personal. It's a kind of artistic licence, but it's not in search of beauty, and I don't know how close it steers to the truth.’

Perhaps the truth I am missing the point. Escapism is a more complex phenomenon than it might seem. We paint the bars of our cage in order to frame, and so in a way to access, the golden lands outside. Adam Phillips ends his book on Houdini, that tricksy performer of the grand, impossible escape, with an account of Emily Dickinson.

When the poet Emily Dickinson died in 1886 at the age of fifty-five most of her neighbours hadn't seen her for well over twenty years. Withdrawing into her room in the family house in Amherst in the 1860s—‘friend, you thought/No life so sweet and fair as hiding brought’ a friend Emily Ford wrote in a commemorative poem—she was seen again only by her immediate family. [Phillips, Houdini's Box (2001), 147]

This was considered ‘rather strange’ then, as it would be now; but Phillips is interested in how many of the poem Dickinson wrote during those years of self-confinement are about, precisely, escape.

I never hear the word “Escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation—
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!

Phillips:

In the first verse there is an exhilaration and a readiness in the word escape; but it is notably when she hears it from somewhere else that her anticipation starts up. And now we, the readers, have heard it from her we too are expecting something. But once the poet is inspired by the world she is diminished by the consequences; the whole idea of escape merely reinforces her sense of helpless imprisonment (children, of course, unlike adults, are the people who can't choose to leave). The idea of escape, however enlivening as a prospect, merely convinces her of her limitations. There is, she seems to say, no freedom in the notion of escape; it merely reveals what the prison is really like.

It's an expressive paradox, and one that illuminates the whole sneerful ‘Tolkien is for kids; Grimdark is proper grown-up Fantasy’ angle. In a physical sense, as Phillips notes, children are the ones who cannot leave, as adults can; and yet children are the Wordsworthian ones who have not yet lost their true sight, as yet unobscured by the growing cage-bars, of meadow, grove, and stream, the earth, and every common sight apparelled in celestial light. They are freer than we adults. We are not obliged to love the bars of our prison-house. Phillips thinks, in Dickinson's case that ‘it is the idea of escape—the mere word itself—that releases us from something’: language, writing, Fantasy as such.

Romantasy

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, ‘A Memory of Light’ (2013)

 

Some time ago, I read the whole of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. You can, should you be interested, see what I wrote in reaction to those many, many books in this volume (a mere £3.51 in paperback, it seems). Long story short: I was not a fan, and said a number of disobliging things about how derivative, badly-written and increasingly madly plotted, or non-plotted, these eleven fat tomes are. As the series proceeds each 800+-page instalment covers less and less ground in terms of narrative. It seems The Eye of the World (1990) was originally planned as the first portion of a Fantasy trilogy, but as Jordan went on commercial success and his ego extended the work according to a hyperbolic-curve Achilles-and-the-Tortoise logic.

Jordan’s fantasyland is a retread of Middle Earth: the ‘third age’ of a quasi-European landscape divided between bourgeois societies and older pre-modern ones, a great city ‘of the White Tower’ instead of Minas Tirith and a Volcanic ‘Mount Dhoom’. There are humble folk living in small villages menaced by sinister dark riders and trollish orcs, here called ‘trollocs’. There are colour-coded wizard castes, blue, white, brown, grey and so on, including ‘Black Ajahs’ who serve the dark lord. As in Tolkien the world is the staging place for a great war between the forces of evil, led by ‘the Dark One’, and the forces of good. For the sake of variation, Jordan rings superficial changes on his template: for instance, his wizards are exclusively women, the ‘Aes Sedai’ (aes aes baby—said I). Magic in this world is a kind of standing-reserve, an aquifer that can be tapped by various people, deriving ultimately from the One Power that turns the mighty wheel of existence from which the series takes its title—but with this hitch, that although women (or: some women) can use this magic for good, when men do so it inevitably drives them mad and turns them to evil.

In The Eye of the World the novel’s gender-swapped Gandalf, Moiraine, and her Strider-like warrior companion al'Lan Mandragoran come to the distant village of Edmond’s Field. Here the main characters are living their humble lives: young Rand al-Thor, a sheep farmer, and his friend Thom (not Sam) and their friends Merry and Pippin—by which I mean to say Mat and Perrin. But the village is attacked by trollocs and dark riders. Moraine, who believes one of this group to be the prophesied ‘dragon reborn’, the hero who will lead the battle against the Dark Lord, hurries them away to safety, along with a young girl with healing powers called Nynaeve and a couple of others. From here the adventures spool out at immense length, characters travel all over the map (with which each volume is furnished), they separate, they reunite. Some narrative tension is provided in the first volume by a studied uncertainty as to which of the various friends actually is ‘the dragon reborn’, although this is resolved by the end of the book: it's Rand.

The first book, whilst nothing special, is pretty readable. But by volume 4, The Shadow Rising (1992), the momentum of the series begins a pronounced deceleration. As individual volumes grow longer (1993’s The Fires of Heaven is over a thousand pages) less and less actually happens. Instead characters are shuffled about, fixtures, fittings and costumes are described at enormous length, women tug on their braids and adjust their skirts, people drink tea and drink more tea. From time to time, Jordan stages his particular sexual kink, and women are tied up and briskly spanked. But in terms of advancing the story: nothing, again nothing, the inevitably impending final battle between the Dark Lord and the Dragon Reborn is deferred, and endlessly deferred. In the seventh volume A Crown of Swords (1996) a parching drought afflicts the world, which can only be ameliorated with a magic bowl. Nynaeve, Elayne and Mat go looking for this bowl, which they finally find at the end of volume 8, The Path of Daggers (1998); otherwise the story treads water for one and a half thousand pages. In volume 9 Winter’s Heart (1994) the story freezes altogether, as its title might imply: a winter grips the land, and nothing happens. And then, after volume 11, Knife of Dreams (2005), Jordan himself shuffled off his mortal coil, tugged down the braid and joined the choir invisible, and it looked as though the deferral would be eternal.

This is how I summed-up the whole series, in the above-linked Sibilant Fricative book.

Mostly I was reminded of a line from Tibor Fischer's celebrated, or notorious, Daily Telegraph review of Martin Amis's Yellow Dog: “the way publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.” I can't think of a clearer illustration of that baleful truth than these novels. The first is pretty good; the last are staggeringly, stupefyingly bad.

But the series was, and continues to be, hugely successful; selling millions of copies annually, adapted into an ongoing Amazon TV show with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. Go figure. At any rate, Jordan's publishers commissioned Brandon Sanderson, not a master of laconic concision, to complete the sequence and write the final, twelfth installment. This he did at characteristic length, over three enormous, puddingy books: The Gathering Storm (2009), Towers of Midnight (2010) and A Memory of Light (2013).

So here we are. Should (I asked myself) I read these three books? I'm wrapping-up a History of Fantasy at the moment, and Wheel of Time, for all its profound and prolonged rubbishness, is a notable work in the mode just in terms of its popularity. Then again, I thought, I could perhaps invest that time in something less unpleasant, like sticking pins in my eyes or striking myself on the head with a hammer. In the end I compromised: I skimmed The Gathering Storm, omitted Towers of Midnight altogether and went through A Memory of Light. Surely in this final volume, I told myself, something must happen! And something does: the Dragon Reborn and the Dark Lord finally get to have their big battle, the forces of light winning (spoiler, but ... come on). At the same time Sanderson stays true to Jordan's distinctiveness, and his own muse, and piddles around at enormous, draining, rubbishing length.

This is not a well-written book. The characters all speak with the same voice (if you took away the names and just had the dialogue you wouldn't be able to tell who was speaking at any given moment),  description is bland and unvivid, pacing is sluggish, tension is nonexistent. Sanderson has carried-over one of Jordan's quirks as a stylist: that of a writer who jots down the first thing that occurs to him and thereafter never revises or polishes it. What do we have?

Jarid wiped his brow with his trembling palm, then slammed it on his map. [14]

All the best military leaders headbutt their strategy maps before battle. Didn't you know?

Karam began to tie a coin pouch at his waist: the gold coins inside had melted into a single lump, like pigs’ ears in a jar. [15]

The coins were like ... wait, what?

“Unsurprisingly,” he mumbled around her lips, “this is much more fun.” [184]

As I said to my beautiful wife only the other day: “mmMM mmbbMMMM nnmMMMbbb”.

Perrin glanced at Rand, then noticed the smile on Egwene’s lips. He caught the scent of her satisfaction. [215]

What does satisfaction smell like? I was going to check by obtaining a bottle of Chanel's Eau de Satisfaction, but when I got to the shop they had sold out. It's like that Rolling Stones song.

Mat thought eating a meal these days was like going to a dance where there were only ugly girls [326]

Mat should stop eating in the Sexism Restaurant.

Perrin had grown accustomed to—though not fond of—women who looked not a year or two older than he addressing him. [348]

Perrin should do likewise.

Sweat crept down Mat’s brow like ants. [390]

This is such a gloriously bad simile it's actually quite endearing. It's like a small kid trying to write English prose.

He climbed to the fourth level. He could smell the sea on the breeze. Things always smelled better when one was up high. Perhaps that was because heads smelled better than feet did. [391]

I scratch my head at the logic of that because.

Selucia looked out. Her skin was the color of cream, but any man who thought her soft would soon learn otherwise. Selucia could teach sandpaper a thing or two about being tough. [392]

Selucia appears to have some revolting skin condition. She should get hold of some Chanel's Crème Hydration de Satisfaction.

A middle-aged woman entered with her dark hair in a bun. She was squat, shaped kind of like a bell. [483]

On the downside, no arms or legs; but on the upside think of the resonant chiming noise she is able to make! (Seriously though: that kind of is a real tell. No self-respecting writer would leave that in their final draft).

He almost did not notice that the servants were undressing him. [483]

Happens to me all the time, that.

Uno took a deep breath and continued. “I can’t understand it, Mother. Some goat-headed messenger told us that the Aes Sedai on the hills were in trouble and we needed to go up the flaming backsides of the Trollocs attacking them.” [700]

They're not going to win ‘Rear of the Year’ like that.

Rand faced the emptiness. “So,” he said, “this is where it will really happen. Moridin would have had me believe a simple sword fight would decide this.”

HE IS OF ME. BUT HIS EYES ARE SMALL.

“Yes,” Rand said. “I have noticed.” [769]

I have nothing to add to this exchange.

The dragons probably looked busted up something good. [847]

That's an actual sentence, actually in this book. Can you imagine Tolkien writing that? Or Ursula Le Guin? Sheesh.

Honestly. Women. She did have a nice backside, but Mat had only mentioned it to be friendly. He was a married man. [848]

Doesn't Mary have a lovely bottom! Of course they all have lovely bottoms.

[Gawyn’s] eyes clouded with cold perspiration. [876]

Sweating eyeballs would be out of place in a realist novel, of course; but this is Fantasy, and all sorts of magical things are possible.

She was beautiful, with perfect ears and wonderful eyebrows. [1062]

The two things all men look for in an attractive woman.

So, yes: this is not a good novel. On the upside, Sanderson avoids all the creepy spanky-spanky with which Jordan littered his instalments. Indeed, Sanderson's rare gestures at ‘grown-up’ sexiness or swearing are sweetly unconvincing. As with this real, salty, macho-man cussing: ‘“the Amyrlin,” he said. “She flaming wanted a messenger, and I was bloody chosen. Gave Egwene’s bloody report to your commanders, for all the bloody good it will do. We’ve set up our flaming battle positions and the place is a bloody mess.”’ [298] Oooh! Cover the children's ears! It's LDS propriety and conservatism throughout (‘a woman in trousers picked through documents on a table’ [534]—in trousers, do you say?—) coupled to a technical immaturity and clumsiness. I do not recommend.

A Tumultuary Time Beneath the Drugget

The Tritonian Ring (published as short stories from 1951 onward, the whole published as a stand-alone novel in 1968) tells of the quest of Prince Vakar to save his sinking continent, Poseidonia, from the wrath of antagonistic gods: a peripatetic series of adventures fighting headless zombies, gorgons, giant crabs and octopus-headed creatures. The violence is gruesome (‘he struck right and left, slicing open torsos and reaching arms, spraying blood … looking across the shambles, Vakar saw the king lying with his head staved in’ [154]), the misogynistic sexual-objectification of women more so:—at the court of Queen Porfia, Vakar ‘felt an urge to leap up and seize’ his hostess, since ‘she had a form that practically demanded rape of any passing male’ [56]. As the story proceeds Vakar is accosted by the erotic importuning of naked amazon queens, naked satyr-women (‘quite human except for the horse-tail and pointed ears’) and even naked puritans—although the latter start-off clothed: ‘she blinked her large dark eyes at him. “I cannot endure these fanatical notions of order, and I burned with passion for you from the moment I saw you—oh, take me! You shall never regret it!’ [151]. He does, and with various others too, although in the end he marries Queen Porfia, having resisted his, as de Camp believes, perfectly natural rapacious urges. Indeed she extracts a promise from him that he will stick with her in the longer term:

‘I speak of other kinds of love, not merely carnal love, which for all its delights both of us know for a sly deceiver. Oh, I know you would give me a tumultuary time beneath the drugget; but how about the long pull?’ [de Camp, The Tritonian Ring 202]

They don’t write ’em like this any more. Thank heavens.

‘A Baum? What are you giving him a Baum for? It might bite him.’ Thoughts on Oz

One might almost think, from my title up there, that I'm not taking this topic seriously. But I am! I recently blogged, at some length and involution, about the 1939 movie version of L Frank Baum's story; and from there I have revisited, or in many cases read for the first time, the original novels.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is what Farah Mendelsohn calls a ‘portal fantasy’, a phrase she coins to distinguish it and its sort (Narnia, Cherryh’s gates of Ivriel, Mr Benn’s changing room, Gene Wolfe’s There Are Doors and the like) from ‘immersive fantasy’ such as Lord of the Rings or Westeros, which posits its own separated imaginative space. In a ‘portal fantasy’ characters from our world pass into the magical fantasyland and back again.

The portal that links our world and Oz is: the air. Which is to say distance. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Dorothy Gale, a young girl living on a farm in Kansas, is carried through the air by a tornado, and deposited in the fantasyland of Oz. The story is too well-known to need summary here: Dorothy experiences a series of adventures in Oz making friends with various people—a talking lion, an ur-robotic tin man and a living straw-filled scarecrow as she processes towards the titular wizard, whom she believes can magic her back home to Kansas. Her antagonist is a wicked witch, whose sister Dorothy has inadvertently killed, and who places various obstacles in her way. The titular wizard turns out not to possess magical powers, and is in fact a con-man from Nebraska masquerading as a mighty sorcerer in order to rule over Oz. Dorothy eventually makes her way home, but in subsequent novels she returns to Oz and settles there permanently.

The sequels The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and Ozma of Oz (1907) introduce the ruler who succeeds the Wizard, princess Ozma. I'll come back to her. In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) Dorothy, shaken out of her mundane world by an earthquake, passes through an underground adventure—Ozma eventually rescues her by means of a magic emerald belt that teleports her and her companions to Oz. The Road to Oz (1909) follows broadly the same narrative pattern: Dorothy trekking from our world to Oz, this time along a magic road that passes through a dimension of talking animals, rainbow beings, Scoodlers (who fight by pulling off their own heads and throwing them at others) and other things. Passage from here into Oz requires crossing the ‘Deadly Desert’, which journey in this novel is effected by a ‘sand-boat’.

At the end of the next volume, The Emerald City of Oz (1910) the portal is, in effect, shut down. An army of ‘Nomes’ attempts to invade Oz, and though they are repelled a magic spell is cast to prevent any future invasion, making Oz unreachable to everyone except those within the land itself. ‘We must not hesitate to separate ourselves forever from all the rest of the world,’ declares the good witch Glinda. The spell she casts ‘won't affect us at all’ but ‘those who fly through the air over our country will look down and see nothing at all. Those who come to the edge of the desert, or try to cross it, will catch no glimpse of Oz, or know in what direction it lies.’ The novel’s last chapter includes a ‘note’ from Dorothy Gale, ‘written on a broad, white feather from a stork's wing’:

YOU WILL NEVER HEAR ANYTHING MORE ABOUT OZ, BECAUSE WE ARE NOW CUT OFF FOREVER FROM ALL THE REST OF THE WORLD. BUT TOTO AND I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU AND ALL THE OTHER CHILDREN WHO LOVE US. DOROTHY GALE. [Baum, Emerald City of Oz, ch 30]

Baum, tired of writing Oz books and wanting to concentrate on other things, planned to make Emerald City the last; but demand and financial exigency soon brought him back to the series. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) opens with a prologue in which Baum explains how he was able to write the story despite Oz’s magical isolation: wireless telegraphy (the novel, Baum says in a prologue, ‘would not have been possible had not some clever man invented the “wireless” and an equally clever child suggested the idea of reaching the mysterious Land of Oz by its means’). The story itself is set entirely within Oz, although what was, in 1913, high tech replicates the original portal: rapid passage through the air, now of radio waves rather than storm-tossed houses and balloons.

Seven further novels followed (seven! so much for quitting the series in 1910): Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Rinkitink in Oz (1916), The Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919) and Glinda of Oz (1920). In some of these the ‘portal’, as it were, reopens: for instance, in Scarecrow of Oz the Scarecrow travels from Oz to help two Californians who have gotten themselves in trouble, and in The Magic of Oz two characters are able to slip past Glinda’s magic embargo by transforming themselves into animals, the implication being that Oz is only forbidden to human beings. But the later novels suffer from an increasing sense of imaginative exhaustion, repeating story-shapes, characters and moments from the earlier books.

In the early novels Oz is reachable from the mid-west USA, but is, presumably, too far away to walk. Passage is facilitated by aerial speed of the tornado that whisks Dorothy from Kansas, and the hot air balloon that carries the ‘wizard’ himself (whose actual name is Oscar Diggs) from Omaha, Nebraska: moved, we can intuit, in an austral direction—hence ‘Oz’—across a wide desert and to this fantastical land. An exchange between the Wizard and Dorothy in chapter 15 of the original novel tells us that Nebraska is further north of Oz than Kansas: “I was born in Omaha—” “Why, that isn’t very far from Kansas!” cried Dorothy. “No, but it’s farther from here”’). It is not usual to identify Oz with Mexico—a country like and unlike the USA, exotic and familiar—although it may be relevant that the Mexican national name derives from the Nahuatl mētztli, ‘moon’. A human carried through the air in a storm, or travelling by balloon, and ending up in a fantastical-satirical version of the moon is one of the oldest premises in fantastika. Lucian’s 2nd century AD novel Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα (‘A True Story’) sweeps up its protagonists in a whirlwind and deposits them on the moon—where a variety of fantastical exaggerations and inventions, peoples and creatures refract satirically back upon Lucian’s own society. Edgar Allan Poe’s satire ‘The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall’ (1835) carries its hero to the moon in a balloon.

In terms of in-story logic, Oz is so named its ruler, the fairy princess Ozma, first introduced in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). That novel starts with a boy called ‘Tip’, but we discover that the wicked witch of the North, Mombi, has swapped Ozma’s gender and wiped her memory to stop her claiming her inheritance. Turned back into a girl by Glinda the Good Sorceress, Ozma takes the Throne of Oz. In later Oz books Baum specifies that Ozma is an immortal fairy, who will forever remain a beautiful fourteen-year-old and so will always rule Oz: ‘born of a long line of Fairy Queens, as nearly perfect as any fairy may be’ [The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), ch 21].

But in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908) we get a different story. Here the ‘Wizard’ reveals his name to be Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, an ungainly set of monikers chosen by his scornful father to spell out Oz-PINHEAD—that is, Oscar ‘stupidhead’—which Diggs, as an adult, shortened. He explains

“Surely no one could blame you for cutting your name short,” said Ozma, sympathetically. “But didn't you cut it almost too short?”

“Perhaps so,” replied the Wizard. “When a young man I ran away from home and joined a circus. I used to call myself a Wizard, and do tricks of ventriloquism … Also I began to make balloon ascensions. On my balloon and on all the other articles I used in the circus I painted the two initials: ‘O. Z.’, to show that those things belonged to me. One day my balloon ran away with me and brought me across the deserts to this beautiful country. When the people saw me come from the sky they naturally thought me some superior creature, and bowed down before me. I told them I was a Wizard, and showed them some easy tricks that amazed them; and when they saw the initials painted on the balloon they called me Oz.” [Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, ch 15]

He unites the four separate realms, previously ruled-over by four witches (‘the people thought my power was greater than that of the Witches; and perhaps the Witches thought so too, for they never dared oppose me’) and builds the Emerald City ‘just where the four countries cornered together, and when it was completed I announced myself the Ruler of the Land of Oz.’ This may make us think of the four provinces of Ireland, the ‘emerald isle’, with the land of the Munchkins approximating Munster, the Gillikins Connacht, the Winkies Ulster and the Quadlings Leinster. ‘Oscar’ is an Irish name, or at least a Celtic one—it came into currency with James McPherson’s gallimaufry of Celtic myth and individual forgery, The Works of Ossian (1765)—and Diggs’s third name, in Baum’s idiosyncratic spelling of Pádraig, points in the same direction. At the same time the ‘Z-for-Zoroaster’ is clearly not Irish, but oriental: something mystic, transcendent. But if ‘Oz’, as the sounded-out first syllable of ‘Oscar’, or as ‘O.Z.’, is why Oz is called Oz, then Ozmar (‘the mother of Oz’, one presumes) must similarly be a reference to Diggs.

I mean, I'm straying into some abstruse and unlikely interpretation here, I'm well aware. But there's a long critical tradition of that.

In his 1964 classic article in American Quarterly, Henry Littlefield's finds that The Wonderful Wizard of 0z contains a ‘symbolic allegory’ which ‘delineated a Midwesterner's fibrant and ironic portrait of this country as it entered the twentieth century.’ In Littlefield's reading, Baum's Scarecrow was a farmer, the Tin Woodman was a dehumanized industrial worker, and the Cowardly Lion represented ‘William Jennings, Bryan himself.’ According to this view, the story was made from the political materials of the 1890s and authored by a social observer sympathetic to the Populists. Yet, in a more recent analysis, William Leach argues that politics and social criticism are not apparent in L. Frank Baum's work. Rather, Leach contends that Baum did not ‘express much concern for poor farmers or for any mistreated Americans. All evidence points the other way - that he preferred to identify with the “best people,” with the winners in American society, not with the losers.’ While, for Littlefield, Baum's tale reflects a nineteenth-century political culture that valued producerism and agrarianism, for Leach, Baum was a twentieth-century proclaimer of the glories of consumption and industrial capitalism. [Gretchen Ritter, ‘Silver Slippers and a Golden Cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Historical Memory in American Politics’, Journal of American Studies 31:2 (1997), 172]

This is the least of it. It used to be argued that the Oz books were actually all about, I kid you not, the bimetallism debate in the States, with Henry Littlefield making the case for the book as an allegory for this issue, and Richard J. Jensen proposing that ‘Oz’ was derived from the common abbreviation for ‘ounce’, used for denoting quantities of gold and silver. My humble speculations seem almost common-sense by comparison. 

Folding Mexico (Old and New) and Texaco-Arizonico together, it does make a kind of sense to see Oz as American, in provenance and orientation. The Emerald City stands at the junction of the four states that comprise Oz. There is one place, and one place only, where that is true of the US: the point at which Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico connect, known as ‘Four Corners’:

Baum's own map of his fantasyland was originally painted on glass and projected onto a screen (Baum created it for a tour in which he read from his stories and gave a lecture on Oz). When it was copied onto paper to be printed the inversion of up down west east was copied over too, or so the story goes. At any rate, given the Carrollian logic of Baum's fantastical worldbuilding (inversion, parody and so on), we can treat this map as a looking-glass image of the world, such that the 'Nonestic' ocean (the non-east, that is the western or Pacific, ocean: but also of course the non-existent ocean) lies to the west, California becomes the Rose kingdom, and Oz maps more or less onto the Four Corners. 

Of the surrounding ‘shifting sands’ of the ‘great sandy waste’, Baum's last words, on his death bed, were allegedly ‘now we can cross the shfting sands’. Then again, in Ozma of Oz, Oz is surrounded on all sides by ocean, so absolute consistency is not the point here. Then there's this:

In 1905, Baum declared plans for an Oz amusement park. In an interview, he mentioned buying “Pedloe Island” off the coast of California to turn it into an Oz park. However, there is no evidence that he purchased such an island, and no one has ever been able to find any island whose name even resembles Pedloe in that area. Nevertheless, Baum stated to the press that he had discovered a Pedloe Island off the coast of California and that he had purchased it to be ‘the Marvelous Land of Oz’ intending it to be ‘a fairy paradise for children.’ Eleven year old Dorothy Talbot of San Francisco was reported to be ascendant to the throne on March 1, 1906, when the Palace of Oz was expected to be completed. Baum planned to live on the island, with administrative duties handled by the princess and her all-child advisers. Plans included statues of the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, Jack Pumpkinhead, and H.M. Woggle-Bug, T.E. Baum abandoned his Oz park project after the failure of The Woggle-Bug, which was playing at the Garrick Theatre in 1905.

So far as I can see this was all just marketing, whipping up interest up to and including auditioning young girls to act as princess: publicity for his novels and the Woggle-Bug play and never intended more seriously. That said, writer-me finds this idea quite intriguing: it would be a thing to do, to work out a sort of Lord of the Flies (Lord of the Fl-Oz) tale in which the entire population of a private island off California is prepubescent children and L Frank Baum living a solitary life in a big house in the middle, like the pig's head on a stick. [I did wonder if Baum's naming was supposed to imply that ‘Pedloe’ island was close to the shore, easily reached by somebody in a pedalo, but OED tells me that latter word isn't coined until the 1940s.]

But this brings in another dimension. Lewis Carroll was a manifest influence upon Baum's imagination, and in many ways the Oz books approximate to ‘nonsense’ better than they do to Fantasy of the Narnian or Wolfean portal mode. But a shadow lies across Carroll's reputation (as it does across J M Barrie's Peter Pan). Some critics argue that there is something morbid about the way the pre-pubescent child is fetishized in their works, or worse something paedophilic. No such reputation adheres to Baum I think, although one might think it could: there is, as with Carroll, an intense focus on specific beautiful young girls (Dorothy, Ozma) who are forever fixed in their prepubescence. ‘The justification of secular art is the responsibility it bears for the enrichment of human awareness,’ says Peter Coveney. ‘The cult of the child in certain authors at the end of the nineteenth century is a denial of this responsibility.’ He is talking of Carroll and Barrie, but could easily have folded-in Baum.

Their awareness of childhood is no longer an interest in growth and integration, such as we found in The Prelude, but a means of detachment and retreat from the adult world. One feels their morbid withdrawal towards psychic death. The misery on the face of Carroll and Barrie was there because their response towards life had been subtly but irrevocably negated. Their photographs seem to look out at us from the nostalgic prisons they had created for themselves in the cult of Alice Liddell and Peter Pan. [Coveney, The Image of Childhood: the Individual and Society (1957; 2nd ed 1967), 241]

Baum looks somewhat jollier in his photographs than those other two, and there was a public construction (in which he took part) of him as the avuncular ‘wizard’-esque jolly old man. MGM put it about that the jacket Frank Morgan wears in the 1939 movie version was the very same jacket Baum himself had worn. It seems this wasn't true, but it feeds into the ‘persona’ of Baum-as-author. Shy, retiring Carroll, and strange, disconnected Barrie didn't do anything so hucksterish.

I've never found anything paedophilic in the Alice books, I must say. Here's what I said in another place.

There are several ways of addressing the ‘paedophilia’ angle as far as Carroll was concerned. One way, of course, would be simply to sweep him into the box marked Monster and refuse to engage with his tainted art. I think that would be a pity, not because I’m certain that his heart was perfectly pure when he took his photographs of naked nine-year-old girls, but because the art itself doesn’t seem to me tainted. The paedophile’s fantasy (I assume) is that of the sexually available child; but the striking thing about Alice is how unavailable she is, how expertly she resists attempts to assimilate her to our agenda. That she is her own person is the ground of her splendour. Indeed, her curious inviolability is, I think, absolutely integral to the way she works in these stories. I also tend to think that the best reading of the ‘Freudian’ symbolism of the books—all those vaginal doors, tight entrances, all those phallic swellings and shrinkings, swimming through seas of bodily fluids, the oedipal anxieties of the Queen of Heart’s pseudo-castrating cry ‘Off with his head!’—that the best reading of all that stuff is William Empson’s ‘The Child as Swain’ chapter in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson engages enthusiastically with all the ‘Freudian’ symbolism in the books, but does so within the conceptual framework of Some Version’s larger agenda: putting the complex into the simple; the ironies of class; the relationship between heroic and pastoral modes. In fact, recently re-reading 'The Child as Swain' was a revelation to me. It brought home to me how far Empson's account is from being a straightforward Freudian decoding of Carroll's books, despite the fact that he, tricksily, insists that it is (‘the books are so frankly about growing up that there is no great discovery in translating them into Freudian terms’, 253). In fact Empson’s stress is on the way the (sexual) world of adulthood becomes nonsensical when it is, in Empson's rather brilliant phrase, 'seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness.' That’s right, I think.

There's certainly a good deal of ‘off with his/her/their heads!’-ness in the Oz books: The villanous Princess Langwidere in Ozma of Oz keeps a collection of thirty heads in a gem-studded golden dressing room, and regularly swaps her own with any of these exchangeable crania. All are very beautiful (‘no two formed alike but all being of exceeding loveliness ... golden hair, brown hair, rich auburn hair and black hair; but none with gray hair. The heads had eyes of blue, of gray, of hazel, of brown and of black; but there were no red eyes among them, and all were bright and handsome’) and the Princess controls her wardrobe with ‘a curious key carved from a single blood-red ruby’: red like Red Riding Hood's cloak, to signify menses and therefore sexual maturity (in the 1985 Disney movie Return to Oz this character is combined with the witch Mombi). Jack Pumpkinhead, a main character in the novels, is a sentient pumpkin on a timber body who lives in a giant pumpkin house where he grows new pumpkins to replace his head every time it ‘spoils’. He buries the rotten heads in a graveyard beyond his garden, and seems unconcerned by the ship-of-Theseus dilemma of this circumstance:

‘I've a new head, and this is the fourth one I've owned since Ozma first made me and brought me to life by sprinkling me with the Magic Powder.’

‘What became of the other heads, Jack?’ [asked Dorothy]

‘They spoiled and I buried them, for they were not even fit for pies. Each time Ozma has carved me a new head just like the old one, and as my body is by far the largest part of me I am still Jack Pumpkinhead, no matter how often I change my upper end. Once we had a dreadful time to find another pumpkin, as they were out of season, and so I was obliged to wear my old head a little longer than was strictly healthy. But after this sad experience I resolved to raise pumpkins myself, so as never to be caught again without one handy; and now I have this fine field that you see before you.’ [Road to Oz, ch 16]

Then there are the aforementioned Scoodlers, who fight by pulling off their own heads and flinging them at their enemies. There are other examples too, although these various freudian-oedipal decapitations are only one aspect of the novels' repeating figures of (playful) dismemberment, bodily disintegration and reintegration. Not that Baum quite has Carroll's savagery. In Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) Baum originally wrote a chapter in which Ojo the Unlucky and the titular Patchwork Girl encounter a species of vegetable people who grow ‘meat folk’ in their gardens to eat. Baum later thought better and deleted this chapter, though we still have some of Neill's illustrations and their captions for the episode, which show the heads of human children growing out of the ground and being watered by their vegetable gardeners. Carroll, I think, would have kept that scene in.

Still, my notional novel set in Baum's proposed Oz-themepark ‘Pedloe’ island could hardly avoid the fundamentally creepy, unpleasant vibe of the premise: the one adult man, the many pre-pubescent and cusp-of-pubescence girls (Ozma is fourteen forever), sealed away from the normal world. Like old Tiberius at Capri. Baum might indeed bite them, and do worse to them than that. A difference between Carroll's Alice and Baum's Dorothy is that the former seems more self-sufficient: she cries, from time to time, but otherwise passes through the dangers and anxieties of wonderland and looking-glass land with a kind of serene inviolability, untouchable even in a court convened to prosecute and execute her. Dorothy is altogether more anxious, uncertain, scared, especially in the earlier novels (a fact sealed by the fact that Judy Garland's performance has ‘fixed’ how Dorothy in a way no actor's performance of Alice has. Geoff Ryman's Was (1992), discussed in this post, though you have to scroll a way down, imagines Dorothy as victimised and violated, her Oz nothing more than a fantasy projection in her head into which she can escape her dolorous reality, and who ends up a whore, a destitute and eventually in a lunatic asylum. Hard to think of Alice being reimagined the same way.