The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick: A
The Story of the Stone by Barry Hughart: A
The King Must Die by Mary Renault: B

Here are three novels that satisfied, more or less, this month’s eagerness for re-imagined myths. The settings range from creepily realistic version of a human trapped in a fairy world to a vibrant and superstitious ancient China to a retelling of classic Greek stories. In addition, these selections all were based on my impressions of on-line personalities. Find out who.

If you think about it, the old tales were always scary. They were, if not ostensibly, always morality fables, trying to pin the caprice of nature onto a human ethical map. If the fairy stories lost their puissance over the last couple hundred years, it’s because people found modern things to fear, things of their humanity’s own making. At its core, Swanwick’s novel uses the lessons and characters of the old tales to capture the horrors of a contemporary setting, and finds that the fit is, um, fantastic. I love this book.

The Iron Dragon’s Daughter concerns the early life of Jane, a human girl, trapped in a fey world. She starts off indentured to a factory that would do Dickens proud, filled with sprites and trolls and elves in the roles of workers, supervisors, and plant engineers. It is, of course, a formative story, and as Jane escapes from one setting to the next (high school, college, high society, false hierarchies all) the evil and the drama and the love is captured in startling hyperbole. I’ve said it before, if you’re going to use a supernatural setting, everything is what you do with it. Swanwick uses the hyper-human personae of the supernatural for satire. I mean, if you’re a certain sort of reader you’ve seen factory trolls and the like a hundred times, but in the real world, the scarier goblins are in the bureaucracy, and some of the Swanwick’s vignettes with these creatures are classic (failed engineers mutilated for shame, a bibliophile bookseller who can’t part with his stock, an ancient professor decanted once a year for a lecture). I can’t say that Swanwick’s prose is across-the-board fabulous, but when he gets rolling with his synthesis of supernatural and mundane language, he is outstanding. I especially loved the chemistry.

I’m impressed with the structure of this story too. As it develops, it grows a feeling that the world’s coming apart at the seams, even while the story retains an overall coherence. Jane graduates from one society to another, escapes each really, and in each setting, the stakes get higher, ultimately threatening the consensus reality itself. She goes through several iterations of a life’s drama (without losing the overall dramatic arc), and the drama is exaggerated to frightening proportions. She’s a heroine (a self-made chemist!) with tragic flaws (a thief, a floozy). The situations are at times shocking–sexual, violent–but I found myself biting my lip as Jane struggles to find her destiny each time, all the while losing to a growing and nearly unavoidable temptation. She breaks through each wall, bodies (literally) in her wake, to find herself living the same story in a new setting. It would spoil the book, perhaps, to reveal what the established reality is (or isn’t), but even the ending is not conclusive. [If you want a fun exercise, map this novel onto the Yeats' fabulous poem, Second Coming. Talk about your widening gyres and your centers not holding.]

There is a Goddess in this book, something like a prime mover or a demiurge, who favors the human girl stuck in fairy world. The final loop takes us through a double thick layer of metaphors for hope and fatalism–does the universe give a shit or not?–and it’s favorite source of quotes for me. Where has Jane been? Is she really free? What’s it all mean for any of us? Read it. I’ve seen this done before, but rarely this well.

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Chinese Daoism, rather than Celtic myth, informs Hughart’s The Story of the Stone. [You can an excellent series of posts on Daoism here. This blogger could certainly do a better job than I at picking apart all of the cheerful and quite intentional anachronisms and historical deviations that Hughart presents.]

The Story of the Stone is its own sort of hybrid of detective fiction, ghost story, love story, and mythic parable, set against the worst sorts of historical horrors–tyrants, murderers, genocidal madmen, endemic corruption. Hughart handles it all with an irresistable light heart. He has a soft spot for the oppressed, for the lonely genius, for doomed lovers, and the prose is a masterpiece of understated humor (which doesn’t preclude laughing out loud in parts). The Story of the Stone, like his other novels, concerns the adventures of Master Li Kao, an impossibly aged and knowledgable scholar with a slight flaw in his character, and his assistant, Number Ten Ox (the narrator), a peasant with immense brawn, heart, and humility. Together, they traipse about the empire–from imperial and barbarian courts to the tombs of tyrants and boys’ hideouts…to the Ten Hells even–solving supernatural mysteries like a debased, crafty Holmes on the back of a gigantic, charming Watson. Part of Hughart’s genius is to let real pathos sneak past the tender narration and the fabulation now and again, catching a genuine and sometimes heartbreaking glimpse of the rot of power and the nobility of the honest heart.

If there’s a fault with The Story of the Stone, it’s that it has the misfortune of following Hughart’s first novel, which was in many ways a singular work. It had to succeed a story of an ancient China that never was with an ancient China that sort of was, and as such, it takes a couple dozen pages to get its groove back. Like a lot of mysteries (not that I read many) there are a lot of plot points in the air at any time with little help of authorial emphasis, and after a while I stopped trying very hard to follow the twists in the labyrinth, and just let Hughart walk me through it, and show me the sights. It’s find, it’s a great ride.

[Story as a standalone novel is twenty years out of print. An omnibus edition, ten years out of print, was released to popular demand, but it appears to be even harder to find. Bridge of Birds is still quite easy to get your hands on, however. You should go and read it. Hughart was evidently quite upset with his publishers, and unable to support himself writing for a living, quit sometime after the release of his third novel.]

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Mary Renault, shouldering an “unattractive” typecast, was drawn into archeology and writing. Composing hero stories in the 1950s, she was very much a woman working in a man’s world. She wrote (with admirable effort) to “solve” mythology, letting the history behind the stories inspire her. The King Must Die is a retelling of the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

What Renault is most deeply concerned with here is creating a plausible historical interpretation for the myth. She does a good job of toning down the more extravagant aspects (the story of the Minotaur is presented as a political upheaval), and of adding a convincing verisimilitude. She places Theseus in bronze age Greece, roughly 1400 B.C., as the Mycenaean (she uses the word “Hellene” with an apology) cultures edged the Minoan (and Minoan-influenced) civilization out of the Aegean, and as the city of Athens grew prominent among its neighbors. It was a time of religious and political change, drifting from fertility cults and a matriarchal society to the more familiar Greek pantheon and male-dominated autocracies. Renault’s version of mother-worship is a conflation of the Demeter/Persephone myth and the goddess worship of the older Aegean societies; the male gods are growing in influence, but in her version, they remain close to their more modern personalities.

[I will add that one goddess is conspicuously absent. Even if Theseus was favored by male gods, Poseidon particularly, the city of Athens had its own special goddess cult too, much as the Athenians had their own special patron hero. (What a bunch of smug exceptionalists they were.) Athena should have been a factor by this time, and if Zeus and Poseidon can grab some more modern aspects, then what the hell? One site I read mentioned some theories in which Athena evolved from an earlier mother-goddess religion. In this book, Theseus promises a shrine to the minor sea goddess Peleia upon his return to Athens. Maybe Renault is getting at it.]

Theseus, of course, is an agent of this religious and political upheaval, and while Renault (as she notes) tries to write a feasible character portrait of the man (Napoleonic prick), it doesn’t really take. It’s too easy to take his impulsiveness and lust in stride with the times, and the author does not manage to get around his essential hero stature. To become the patriarch, he has to reject his role as a sacrifice to the Mother, which custom Renault paints at various times as barbaric and horrible. As though an absolute monarch is less so. Moreover, she portrays Theseus’s piety as superior to the decadent and increasingly secular nobility of goddess-worshipping Crete. I’d have enjoyed the book more if there were a more honest–an angrier–conflict between the systems. I’m biased: if one must consent to an authoritative state ornament, then caging and periodic sacrifice seems just the thing for him.

Although Renault’s historical portrait is very good, I found her writing less so. A stronger voice might have gotten more out of that theme, might have found deeper levels of character. I stalled frequently on the prose too, whose clumsy archaisms recalled more boys knights’ stories than they did Homer, lacking only (and thankfully) the thees and the dosts. I’m still rating it above average though. The author gets some real points for innovating here, for avoiding the subsequent 50 years of derivative and inferior takes on old myths.

[Up next, a couple of classic satires.]

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