Teleidoscope

Sun, Mar 09, 2008

Promethean Age

Posted at 6:00 pm MDT to Media

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I seemed to be in a phase of aversion to long narrative. It seems that if the narrative is good enough I can still hack it...

Friday evening and yesterday I blew through the first two novels in Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age series, Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water. They are excellent stories and the prose is lovely.

These are stories containing modern wizards, old secret societies, swans, werewolves, one and every dragon, a variety of the Devil, and Faerie (and its inhabitants) out of the old tales and legends from before Tolkien gave elves souls and Disney, Inc. whitewashed and neutered most of what was left.

These stories, like some of their Fae, have sharp pointy teeth: I was reminded a little of Njal's Saga or Poul Anderson in some of his grimmer modes. We are shown mostly the nicer parts of the world but I have no doubt there are valkyries singing at looms strung with men's guts off in the distance over that way.

They are very 21st century narratives in their post-Copenhagen view of the complexity of truth, and also in the way that the characters are aware of the narrative structures in which they are immersed and try to work with or against the patterns. It is important that one of the most magically powerful of the human characters teaches Geology 102 at a University and travels to Faerie and back at will, and another teaches English Literature at a College, and uses stone lions at the NYPL as oracles. It is not a world of simplistic either/or reality.

What the stories are about is choices, free will and the lack of it, consequences, the meaning of sacrifice, fate, hope, duty, betrayal, payments, the nature of damnation, families, and the possibility of redemption. There is also a lot of talk about love and loyalty, but rather in the mode of "I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Also an evil sorceress named Jane. There was a book I read many years ago called Taash and the Jesters, by Ellen Kindt McKenzie. At one point the wise old woman character comments that the evil sorceress is correct the sacrificing someone's liver will bring power, but the evil ones never want to recognize that, for true power, the liver you sacrifice needs to be your own. Jane has her reasons for what she does, but she is very, very good at seeing to it that it is others who pay the price for her decisions and actions. And her 'reasons' are excuses for punishing what will not submit to her control.

By comparison, the other characters, even the soulless and the damned-by-definition, acknowledge the validity of prices and consequences in a way that Jane never does. There is a strong pattern of defining loved ones as the ones you accept the awful stuff instead of. (Sort of anti-1984, there.)

One notable anti-Jane in the story is Whiskey, the Kelpie, who properly is as amoral as the sea and as predatory as a wolf, but is stuck carrying someone's soul and effectively cripples himself because he will not allow the consequences of his actions to accrue to it. Even though the proper owner of the soul is the one who stuck him with it.

One nice thing about coming late to this series is that I have only a few months to wait for the next installment: Ink and Steel Part 1 of The Stratford Man, which should be available at the beginning of July (just in time for my birthday), to be followed by Part Two, Hell and Earth, a month later. Elizabethan poets and playwrights (especially Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe) and Faerie (and possibly an occasional devil). Something to look forward to.

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