Paul Boccaccio

The writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. In his youth, he was imprisoned for eight years in Stalin’s gulag–prison camps, about which he wrote extensively and beautifully, with dry and subtle humor–for writing some “disrespectful remarks about Stalin” in personal letters to a friend. The magnitude of this injustice leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Solzhenitsyn wrote some of the enlightening books on prison and oppression–in secret, for most of life.  He wrote the Cancer Ward, Right Hand, Matryona’s Farm, The Gulag Archipelago, a treatise on the forced labor camp system, and, my favorite by him, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  He won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1970. And he had to smuggle most of his work out of the Soviet Union to see any word in print.

His work, like George Orwell’s, reminds me of our collective nature. We’re never far from the casual brutality they described. When we abdicate personal responsibility in favor of convenience, or out of fear, we give absolute power to those who crave it. Stalin was heinous, and a terrible person, but he wasn’t an alien–he was human, and merely unrestrained. Given the right circumstances, any country could have her Stalin.

This collection of eight short stories by Susanna Clarke reads in much the same vein as her novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which one might expect, since all but one of the stories are set in that world. The odd one out, called The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse, is part of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust universe, but has the same dry, Victorian flavor as her other work.

I love her casual references to the established mythos of their parallel culture, and the removed scholarly commentator tone. The story of the Charcoal Burner–alluded to in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell–of the frailer side of John Uskglass, the Raven king, is my particular favorite. You may read an excerpt on her site.

A huge fixture in the world is magic, especially fairie magic. Her treatment of the magic and apparent madness of fairies is subtle, and made me think hard.  Faeries are capricious, and, by our rationalist measure, mad, in the same imaginitive way children are mad.  A child’s reasoning is insane, by adult standards, and we recognize any adult truly thinking like a child to be sick.  Fairies treat inanimate objects like people, because to them, and in their system of magic, objects are the same as people; as she says, “the distinction is quite unintelligible.” So, they’re not crazy; they actually have a universe which answers to different laws.

She illustrates the fairies’ seemingly mad perception in one of her brilliant footnote asides by telling the story of a faerie assassin who tried to use a pistol and some shot, instead of magic, to kill a fairie prince, the Old Man of the White Tower. He failed, was captured, and imprisoned. The pistol and the shot were also imprisoned, each in a separate cell. After a few centuries, the would-be assassin died in prison.  But, she continues,

[t]he pistol and the shot, on the other hand, are still [imprisoned], still considered by the Old Man as equally culpable, still deserving punishment for their wickedness. Several other fairies who wished to kill the Old Man of the White Tower have begun by devising elaborate plans to steal the pistol and the shot, which have attained a strange significance in the minds of the Old Man’s enemies. It is well known to fairies that metal, stone and wood have stubborn natures; the gun and shot were set upon killing the Old Man in 1697 and it is quite inconceivable to the fairy mind that they could have wavered in the intervening centuries.

Taken in entirety, the book reads as an apocryphal addition to JS&N.  I enjoyed Tom Brightwind and John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner the most, Mrs Mabb the least, but the whole collection was a pleasant read, and I very much enjoyed this return to the world of JS&N. Her prose is a constant pleasure, and the elliptical way she treats the subject matter always leaves me wanting another story.

Thomas M. Disch committed suicide a few days ago, and I watched all the writer and artist bloggers to whom I subscribe mourn his passing. I hadn’t read anything by Disch until today and, honestly, hadn’t heard of him either.

He was a poet, a short story and novel writer, and critic; he won several major awards, and was nominated for many others. He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, on which the movie of the same name was based.

I was walking by my bookcase and I’m not sure why this particular book caught my eye, but it did. I have a few hundred books in stacks and piles and domino lines across my room, most of them double-stacked in my tallest bookcase, so for any one book to jump out, and for me to pick it out and look at it is fairly odd, especially since my to-read stack of library and friend-borrowed books is 25 high. I rarely browse anymore.  But I noticed quark/#1, a quarterly of short speculative fiction edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, picked it up, saw Disch’s name alongside Le Guin and Lafferty, and, because his name has been floating around lately, read the story.

My first thought was, This is the only story I’ve read by Disch, and it’s set in a cemetery.

Let Us Quickly Hasten to the Gate of Ivory is well-crafted; Disch’s characterization is full-orbed, and his description serves its purpose, though it’s fairly mundane and staid for sf.  I think the sedate feel fits well with the sleepy golf course ambiance of the cemetery, and makes the ensuing struggle to find a way out of the graveyard menacing. But it’s not primarily about death or labyrinthine menace; it’s about family, and love, and the fragile, complicated relationships we weave around ourselves like clothing.

It’s a comforting story, in a way.  His characters love each other in deep, complex ways, the way real people do, and we see hints of full relationships throughout. I didn’t get a sense of a malign universe, just an uncaring, complex one that makes us huddle together, our backs against the dark. We have solace in each other when the universe around us is twists into dark shapes or simply exists beyond our ken, as it does here.

And I’m sad a man who wrote a story like this would kill himself in the end.