Not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come

Books read this week: The Cold Commands 8/10 (Richard Morgan), Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti 7/10

The Cold Commands is the latest entry in Morgan's fantasy trilogy, and follows on directly from The Steel Remains. It's not quite a good as his debut, Altered Carbon, but as this is Richard Morgan we're talking about, that's a bit like saying A Midsummer Night's Dream isn't as good as Julius Caesar: I think Altered Carbon is the best science fiction novel, if not the best novel full stop, of the last decade.

It may be that I like The Cold Commands less than Altered Carbon because I like science fiction more than fantasy: not that I don't read both (as regular readers will know) but I generally find I only enjoy very good fantasy, whilst I can get a quite a lot of entertainment out of even quite bad sci-fi (David Weber, I'm looking at everything you've ever written). Partly this is because science fiction is, by it's very nature, a forward looking genre (apart, of course, for the small but significant Frankenstein inspired Things Man Was Not Meant To Know stories, like most of Michael Crichton's stuff), whilst fantasy tends to be backward looking at best, and positively reactionary at worst. Some of this can be put down to Tolkien's immense influence on the genre - science fiction doesn't really have a similar colossus in it's early history (HG Wells is influential, but you have the equally influential Jules Verne at the same time, whilst Tolkien doesn't really have any peers). I like the Lord of the Rings as a book, but the wholesale contempt for the modern world is a little hard to take, even if you ignore the comically unsubtle attacks on the Attlee government in the Scouring of the Shire. Why do we never hear about how Saruman's plumbing has eradicate dysentary in Isengard?

However, I think a larger contributing factor is the escapism many fantasy fans are looking for: they want to imagine that they are barbarian heroes, or princesses, and don't want to be reminded that for every princess there are a thousand peasants grubbing around in the mud. It's a bit like Marie Antoniette playing at being a shepherdess - it's the fantasy of a bucolic rural idyll without the inconvenience of actually having to be a subsistence farmer. Because the truth is that life in a European* pre-industrial agrarian society is shit. It's shit if you're the king. It's even more shit if you're not. It's yet more shit if you're a woman, or if you're gay. If you're both, it's even more shit than that. And if you're a member of a religious or ethnic minority, well.... you get the idea. Now, we can argue about why that is, we can argue about whether it's an inevitable consequence of the religion, or the climate, of the shape of society or the type of agriculture but the fundamental fact remains that the life expectancy was thirty if you didn't happen to live through a historically important and interesting famine or plague: there's a reason why all the characters in fairy tales have stepmothers. And it's fundamentally dishonest to write about a medieval European society (which is what most fantasy is about) and ignore that. To his credit, this is one of Martin's main targets in the Song of Ice and Fire (the other is the whole concept of hereditary rule, but that's something for another day), but even he is so far tied into the typical fantasy world view that he can't give us a viewpoint character outside of the aristocracy. I've even seen complaints that basically boil down to: how dare the Song of Ice and Fire dispel my cosy medieval fantasy with it's inconvenient use of actual history and real facts.

This is why I enjoyed the Cold Commands so much: it takes a large number of irritating fantasy conventions and drop kicks them out of the window. We have three protagonists: two are gay, and one is also a black woman (although not disabled, thus cleverly side stepping all those stupid jokes about diversity). We have an interesting examination of sexuality within an oppressive almost theocratic society, and how people can bend the rules if they are sufficiently useful to those in authority. We have 'elves' who are  (probably - I'm pretty sure that the helmsmen are in fact AIs) using technology, not magic, and who are black. It's not a big thing in the novel, but I don't think I've ever come across a work of fantasy where elves (or their analogue - the wise, calm, ageless and magical people who are better than ordinary humans) are assumed to have anything other than white caucasian features: I'm hard pressed to think of a work where they don't look like Nazi poster boys. And we have a society based quite heavily on the Mongol khanate and Yuan China, rather than medieval England.

Of course, this is all coupled with Morgan's trademark bleakness, cynicism, sex and ultraviolence, as well as his flair for memorable phrases. There's nothing here that quite matches the extracts from "Things I Should Have Learnt By Now, Vol. II" in Altered Carbon, the Patchwork Man rhyme or Kovacs' resolution that ends with "For all these, and more, someone was going to pay.", but there's some pretty good stuff nevertheless. A personal favourite of mine is the full name of the sword Ravensfriend:

I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors. I am Friend to Carrions Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.


So, thoroughly recommended, although I should put in a word of warning: when I say sex and ultraviolence, I'm not kidding. It's not for the easily upset, not really for those who like happy, shiny endings, and some of the protagonists walk so close to the line between anti-hero and villain that it's hard to tell when they've skipped over it (we're told that "A Dark Lord Will Rise". It's entirely possible, indeed probable, that it refers to the main character.)

My other book this week was a Wordsworth Poetry Library Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti. I've always enjoyed Pre-Raphaelite art, and so I guess it's not really surprising that I found Rossetti's poems to be so enjoyable (the earlier work at least, I've never really enjoyed religious poetry). I was particularly struck by the influence of traditional ballads on her work: Maude Clare is effectively a retelling of the Nut Brown Maid from the nut brown maid's perspective (and also less death, in the time frame covered by the poem at least) whilst The Poor Ghost is a retelling of another common ballad where the ghost cannot rest until his lover ceases to mourn and the escalating question and response format of the Noble Sisters is strongly reminiscent of the ballad Edward, and fairly similar to a couple of other ballads. A lot of the language is also of the ballad type (probably one reason why I enjoyed it so much). And of course the Goblin Market is using the traditional, malevolent image of fairies, rather than Shakespeare's mischievous elves. Of course the Goblin Market also has a homoerotic subtext so blatant that frankly it's text: we have the repeated references to the evil goblin-men, rather than to just plain goblins, and the dramatic climax of the poem where Lizzie entreats her sister to "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew / Eat me, drink me, love me". Of course, one could argue (a la Lewis Carroll) that Victorian standards for this sort of thing were different from our own, but I'm unconvinced.

I was also struck by the bleakness and cynicism on display in Rossetti's work, especially when compared with her contemporaries: contrast the fate of the protagonists in Cousin Kate, Maggie a Lady and The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children with that of Tennyson's Lady Clare: I have to say, I think Rossetti is rather more realistic (not that one necessarily looks for realism in poetry).

* Non-European pre-industrial agrarian societies may have had less inequitable distributions of power between genders and across classes: the same amount of shit, but more equally spread, if you will.