Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (32 page)

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon

Ballantine Del Rey, 340 pages, hardback, 2003

Every now and then – and it's extremely rare – a book comes along that is so very, very good that I'm actually slightly nervous of reviewing it, in case, crazily, the clumsiness of my review will somehow mar the integrity of the novel itself.

The Speed of Dark
is one such book.

At some point in the near future Lou Arrendale is an autism sufferer working for a nameless corporation that employs a whole division of autists in order to exploit their highly developed pattern-recognition skills. Arrendale and his fellows know that they are among the last of their kind, for since their childhood a technique has been developed of curing autism in infancy. Their division is the most effective and productive within the corporation, a status it achieves in part because the corporation has provided for it certain special extras that enable the autists to calm their minds in times of stress, to focus their thoughts, and so on – extras like a private gym with a trampoline and a decent music system. These special extras naturally attract the attention of a freshly imported hard-nosed self-ordained management-efficiency expert, Crenshaw, as the autists' boss; he can see the autists only as sick people, and the extras that they require for their efficient working only as an erosion of profits.

Arrendale is, thanks to education and encouragement, capable of functioning reasonably well in "normal" human society; he has learned appropriate interpretations and responses that we would take for granted. He regularly attends fencing classes, and has become a very good fencer because of his ability to detect the patterns in his opponents' strategies. Also at the fencing classes he has fallen in love with fellow-student Marjory, who has in turn clearly fallen in love with him, although he is too unsure of his interpretations of her behaviour – and too incredulous that an attractive woman might herself be attracted to the mental cripple society tells him he is – rightly to be able to acknowledge this. He has to cope with the revenge tactics employed by his unsuccessful rival for Marjory's affections, something he is as ill equipped to do as he is ill equipped to recognize that others around him are friends who value his friendship.

Crenshaw, as noted, is one of those who regards the autists as crippled; despite all the statistics about their division's high profitability, he chooses to regard the corporation's employment of them as an act of charity – one whose limits should be far constrained from the current ones, with that expensive gym an' all. Employment laws inhibit him from simply firing them or abolishing their privileges – which are part of their conditions of employment – but he has come across an experimental cure that another wing of the corporation has been developing for adult autists. It works on chimps, so, despite the fact that its effects on humans are as yet unknown, he attempts to coerce Arrendale and his co-workers into becoming experimental subjects.

This presents Arrendale with a quandary. If he accepts the purported cure, and if it works, he will stop being himself. Although he will start to enjoy lots of things he currently doesn't enjoy or even finds frightening and repulsive, he will probably make these gains at the expense of some of the things he currently does enjoy. Will he still receive pleasure from pattern and (it's to a great extent the same thing) music? Will he lose his prowess as a fencer, and all the pleasure he gains from that? Most important of all, if he is a different person will he still love Marjory, and will she still at least like (for he dare not conceive that she loves) him?

There is, I suppose, quite a lot of plot in
The Speed of Dark
– and the above represents only part of it – but I have to say "I suppose" because that's an observation born from hindsight. While I was actually reading the book the plot elements became almost irrelevant, for here is a tale whose quite extraordinary strength of telling reduces all else to insignificance.

Aside from a few brief interpolated passages, Arrendale is our sole narrator, so we see his world as filtered through the mind of an autist. (The author has a teenage child who's autistic, so one assumes the depicted perception is as valid as it can be. I persuaded a good friend who suffers a form of autism to read the novel to see if my impression of this was correct, and he confirmed that it was – "so accurate as to be painful to me" was the gist of his remarks.) This might seem a daunting prospect, for Arrendale has painstakingly to work out situations that would be thunderingly obvious to the rest of us – nothing more tedious than having someone laboriously spell out the mechanics of something you already know – but in fact quite the contrary proves to be the case. Arrendale's narrative is utterly involving, engrossing to the point that his way of thinking takes over one's own, so that whenever I had (reluctantly) to put the book down I found I was shaking my head a few times before I was able to regain my own customary mode of thought.

Again, this statement might lead to a false expectation of what it's like reading this novel. It might seem from what I've said that it depicts the world as if through alien eyes. Yet this doesn't prove to be the case. Instead, I was struck by how very similar Arrendale's perceptions are to my own, how very like myself he actually is, how much
better
his thinking processes are in so many respects than my own. I never in my life thought I'd want to be an autist, but by the time I got to the last page – and of course it was a huge and infuriating disappointment that this had to
have
a last page, that the book couldn't just keep going indefinitely – I found myself at least halfway towards the formulation of that wish.

And that, of course, is precisely as Moon has planned it should be – for Arrendale's dilemma, faced with the prospect of a cure for his condition, is not one of giving up something paltry for the promise of emotional riches; these are riches that he's going to be giving up, and there's no guarantee at all that the rewards of a "normal" life will come close to compensating for their loss. As Arrendale approaches his momentous decision – to take the cure or refuse it – we're actually rooting for him to refuse it, because
we
know that his "curse" is really something treasurable.

The book's blurb makes comparisons with such works as Daniel Keyes's
Flowers for Algernon
in an attempt to lure us into
The Speed of Dark
. One can understand entirely why the publisher felt moved to do this, but at the same time it has to be said that the comparisons do
The Speed of Dark
a great disservice. One can empathize with or have strong fellow-feeling for characters like Forrest Gump or Keyes's Charly, but all of those emotions are experienced from the
outside
; for example, we feel almost painfully sorry for Charly as he struggles from moronism to intelligence and then loses it all again, but still we're only a spectator to the tragedy being played out on stage. Moon's triumph is that, by contrast, we
become
her protagonist Arrendale; we experience his drama from within him. The potential failure of Crenshaw's fuckwitted "cure" is not something disastrous that might happen to someone else – a close friend, perhaps. It's a threat to
us
, ourselves.

Because Moon's track record has been in science fiction (mainly military sf, so I confess I've never been induced to read it), and because the tale is set in the near future with one or two extrapolated items of medical science,
The Speed of Dark
will probably be marketed as sf. (I've been reading an ARC in advance of publication, so I can't tell for sure.) This is a great pity, if so, because it will unnecessarily restrict the readership of this fine work of mainstream literature; to epitomize, it's a book that by all rights will carry off a Hugo, but really it should be at the very least a strong contender for something like the National Book Award.

The title, by the way, concerns a conceit of the book. Arrendale is of course perfectly aware – he is extremely intelligent, something else the Crenshaws of this world fail to perceive, blinded as they are by his status as an autist – that the velocity of light in free space is a known, established quantity. But what of the velocity of dark? Dark, after all, forever retreats in the face of the invasion of light, so perhaps its velocity is actually slightly greater than that of light? This speculation of Arrendale's is carried through metaphorically by Moon, with darkness being the self-imposed ignorance displayed by Crenshaw and so prevalent throughout our culture: as a single exemplification of this force of unknowing – the exemplification presented in
The Speed of Dark
in the guise of Crenshaw and others – far too many people don't
want
to understand their fellow humans, but would rather remain ignorant of their worlds by banishing them into convenient categories that are always characterized by inferiority to the categorizers themselves.

In sum,
The Speed of Dark
is one of those exceptionally rare novels that has the power to alter one's entire worldview, and reading it is a profoundly rewarding and enriching experience. It is impossible to avoid superlatives when speaking of it, even though I'm all too aware I may be perceived as perpetrating hyperbole. Well ... tough. I can't remember when last I enjoyed a novel this much, but it must have been a very long time ago.

—Infinity Plus

The Dreamthief's Daughter

by Michael Moorcock

Earthlight, 342 pages, hardback, 2001

In pre-WWII Germany, with the Nazis on the ascendant, Count Ulric von Bek is one of the many who look upon developments with dismay – but a largely passive dismay, for fear of the bully-boys. He is not allowed to continue thus, however, for the Nazis, in the person of his cousin Prince Gaynor von Minct, seek the ancestral sword of the von Bek family, Ravenbrand, as well as the Holy Grail, also entrusted to the family but reputedly lost by von Bek's mad father. Von Bek contacts the Resistance, and, with the enigmatic Herr El and the lovely wildling Oona, who is like himself an albino, makes plans to retain the status quo. Another albino appears frequently to von Bek in dreams and visions – a berserk-seeming figure who has a savage cast to him.

Before much can come of any Resistance schemes, Gaynor has von Bek thrown into a concentration camp where, despite physical torture, he declines to reveal the location of Ravenbrand. At length, as he nears death, the albino of his dreams appears magically with Oona and an enigmatic British agent, Oswald Bastable, to free him. They flee to Hameln where,
à la
Pied Piper, von Bek splits open a rock using the regained Ravenbrand and they enter a subterranean realm, Mu-Ooria, populated by the mentally superhuman Off-Moo. Here they are pursued by Gaynor and his Nazi demon sidekick Klosterheim.

And here, too, the mysterious dream albino – who is of course Elric of Melniboné – gains a greater reality, in due course managing to combine himself with von Bek so that the two become one. The dual entity returns to Tanelorn, where as Elric it discovers that Gaynor has ambitions far beyond the mundane ones of the Nazis: through forming a duplicitous alliance with the Goddess of Law, Miggea, Gaynor hopes to overthrow Chaos and gain the rule of all the multiverse. Elric, as an arch-prince of Chaos, must resist him.

The remainder of this tale twines its way absorbingly through various aspects of the multiverse – Moorcock's great conceptual creation, the myriad related worlds in which stories are eternally played and replayed, with archetypes as the puppets of unknown puppeteers. In the end, of course, the balance between Chaos and Law is restored, at least for now.

The novel (although divided into three) has essentially four parts: von Bek's time in pre-War Germany; his and Oona's adventures in Mu-Ooria; the adventures of Elric and of the dual Elric/von Bek entity in and around Tanelorn; and the long, complex final section in which Elric, von Bek and the ever-resourceful Oona – who is Elric's daughter by the dreamthief Oone, and with whom von Bek, despite an uneasy sensation of incest (for he and Elric are alter egos), falls in love – journey between the worlds and bring a resolution to the main conflict while also, in the conflict of this world, bringing a resolution of sorts by turning the tide of the Battle of Britain back against the Luftwaffe.

The four sections succeed to greater and lesser (mostly greater) extents. The Mu-Ooria sequences, with their Edgar Rice Burroughsian ambience, in the telling hark back even further, to the sort of 19th- or even 18th-century otherworld fantasy in which the otherworld itself is deemed to be of such marvel that the reader is intended to be entertained by somewhat painstaking, plodding accounts of the geography and populace rather than any plot advancement. There are longueurs here and also a sense of alienation on the writer's part, as if Moorcock recognized while writing them that the sequences were failing to lift off the ground but could not abandon them because this section of the book is integral to the rest.

That rest, by contrast, in general sings. Von Bek's experiences in Nazi Germany, and his growing knowledge that he is part of a greater mystery, are as gripping as any World War II adventure story. The sequences where Elric and later the dual entity must quest, with Moonglum, through the bleak and alien world into which the goddess Miggea has transplanted Tanelorn, like an orchid into a desert, are superbly conceived High Fantasy and eerily evoke the dream-sense; while the long concluding section – with the small exception of the clumsily handled, contrived-seeming sequence in which a dragon-mounted Elric and von Bek attack the advancing waves of the Luftwaffe, thereby giving rise to the legend of the Dragons of Wessex – demonstrates why Moorcock possesses the towering status he does in any consideration of the history of fantasy. In this final section he is creating new structures of fantasy, rather than recrudescing the old – a rare achievement, alas, in the modern genre.

Of great interest throughout is the question of
identity
and the workings, through the nature of the multiverse, of not just the multiplicity of a single identity but the coalescing into a single identity of a multiplicity; one has the sensation, reading this book, of this going on all the time in a kind of endless flow, as reality itself shifts and twists – rather like an analogy of the impermanent alliances the villain Gaynor forges with the different gods. Von Bek is at one and the same time both Elric and not-Elric, and that duality persists even once their two identities have fused. (The same obviously is true of Elric, who is both von Bek and not-von Bek.) Elric's sword Stormbringer and the von Bek family's sword Ravenbrand have a single identity, even though they are physically twain and remain so, even when in proximity. Oona is both a daughter and a lover to the double identity that is Elric-von Bek. Gaynor is at one and the same time a human being and an eternal Evil Principle. There are other examples.

That this is in fact a true nature of reality is plausible in a post-Heisenberg frame of reference (whose analogue might be Chaos, by contrast with Newtonian-style Law), which sees identity as a transient property, dependent upon, among other factors, the act of perception. It is pleasing to see such notions worked out in a novel of, ostensibly, High Fantasy – not a subgenre noted for its deployment of scientific thinking, and indeed generally marked by antiscientism.

This is also an intensely political novel. Time and again Moorcock explores the motivations behind the parasitic quest of tyrants for power and their obsessional need to stamp order (Law) on that which
should not be ordered
– to wit, humanity. The relevance of this is obvious when Nazism is the despotism under consideration; but there are not so subtly encoded references to other, more recent, "democratic despots" of the Right. The name of the Goddess of Law, Miggea, seems a clear anagrammatic reference to Maggie/Margaret Thatcher, a political figure who while in power earned the public hatred (or fear) of many surprisingly disparate creators. Here, for example, is Moorcock's description of the world Miggea and her rule of Law have created:

Miggea's was no ordinary desert. It was all that remained of a world destroyed by Law. Barren. No hawks soared in the pale blue sky. Not an insect. Not a reptile. No water. No lichen. No plants of any kind. Just tall spikes of crystallized ash and limestone, crumbling and turned into crazy shapes by the wind, like so many grotesque gravestones.

Later Herr El (aka Prince Lobkowitz), in talking of the rise of the Nazis but also of any regime of obdurate Law, however convivial its veneer – any regime that pretends the solutions to complex problems are simple, and then imposes through the use of power or force those simple, but (or hence) profoundly
wrong
solutions on the world – is the mouthpiece for a sideswipe at Thatcher's American counterpart:

They are the worst kind of self-deceiving cowards and everything they build is a ramshackle sham. They have the taste of the worst Hollywood producers and the egos of the worst Hollywood actors. We have come to an ironic moment in history, I think, when actors and entertainers determine the fate of the real world.

Moorcock's contempt for the politicians of Law is of course allowed to be seen more naked when the subjects under consideration are safely distant in history, like the Nazis and (in brief references) the Stalinist despots of Soviet Russia. Late in the book there is a long and hilariously – though darkly, bitterly – satirical scene in which a disguised von Bek, inadvertently thrust into a car with Rudolf Hess, must listen to an interminable outflow of arrant, antiscientific, credulously ignorant nonsense from the Deputy Fuehrer. Hess and by implication his colleagues in the Nazi hierarchy are portrayed as what Brian Stableford has termed "lifestyle fantasists", the attempted reification of their particular brand of insane and
simplifying
fantasies involving, of course, untold human suffering. Hence Elric's – and one presumes Moorcock's – detestation of Law and adherence to Chaos.

As mentioned, there are some doldrums in this book, but they are in a relatively early part of it and easily ploughed through. Overall,
The Dreamthief's Daughter
is mightily impressive not just as a demonstration of the fantasticating imagination in full flight but because of all the different aspects of meaning which it embodies – analogues, in a way, of the myriad diversely aspected worlds of the multiverse. It is one of those rare fantasies that merits repeated reading with, each time, a different facet of its full meaning to be derived.

—Infinity Plus