What Makes This Book So Great

by Jo Walton

  Gaudy Night is one of Sayers’s series of novels about Lord Peter Wimsey, and it’s a courageous book because all the previous books have been clever mystery puzzles rather like crossword puzzles, but this is a real novel about psychologically real people. The series starts out as shallow fun, gets better and deeper and develops continuing characters and events, and then, with Gaudy Night, becomes as good as books get. If you like classic cosy detective stories with timetables and letters of confession, I recommend starting at the beginning and coming at Gaudy Night with the full backstory. If you don’t especially care for them, I recommend reading Gaudy Night alone—everything that’s relevant is there, and you might be surprised how good it is.

  I was thoroughly spoiled for Gaudy Night by Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog. I expect Willis thought that a book more than fifty years old would have been read by everyone who wanted to read it, but in fact new people come along all the time. Willis didn’t spoil the mystery plot but the emotional plot—and I do think I might have appreciated it more without that. If you haven’t read it, do consider that re-reading is forever but you can only read something for the first time once, and that after this paragraph I am going to have no hesitation about spoiling everything. (You could go and read it and come back. I’ll still be here next week.)

  George Orwell wrote a review of Gaudy Night in which he comprehensively did not get it, so comprehensively that it astonishes me. Orwell was a perceptive person, but he wrote about Gaudy Night as if it is just another episode in the detecting career of Lord Peter. I don’t know if this was a blind spot of his, or a common reaction among men in 1936, or if possibly he didn’t have time to read it and “reviewed” it on a quick skim. I don’t know which of these is least discreditable. In any case, it is salutary to consider that one intelligent male reader, and one whole magazine, saw it as nothing more than a clever detective potboiler with an exotic setting, and one in which the detective finally gets the girl. The thing that makes me think that Orwell might not have actually read Gaudy Night, while having perhaps read some of the earlier ones, is that he swipes in passing at the way Sayers uses Lord Peter’s title but doesn’t enter into the actual class issues of the book at all.

  There’s no murder in Gaudy Night. The situation is that a women’s college in Oxford, the fictional Shrewsbury College, is being plagued by poison pen letters and mean practical jokes, and Harriet Vane is asked to help capture the culprit, who could be anyone among the senior members or servants of the college. The atmosphere is all of academic women distrusting each other. The actual culprit turns out to be one of the servants, Annie, who has a grudge against one of the dons specifically and all of them generally for, in her eyes, taking jobs that should belong to men. Her husband was an academic who married beneath him, and after his suicide Annie has been reduced to scrubbing floors for a living. The first time I read this I had barely noticed the existence of Annie and was astonished at the revelation—as a servant she seems part of the wallpaper. So in one way Sayers was noticing class and making someone invisible visible, and in another she was reinforcing class prejudices by making the culprit an outsider and uneducated. You’d think Orwell would have found something to say about that, even if he was blind to the wider feminist implications. Annie is motivated by a desire to humiliate Miss de Vine, who revealed Annie’s husband’s plagiarism and made it impossible for him to continue as an academic which led to his suicide and Annie’s subsequent poverty. From that she wants to humiliate all female academics. Annie sees her life ruined by Miss de Vine’s adherence to academic truth—that in fact it was ruined by her husband’s lack of such adherence is beyond her. She’s part of a set of women we see mirroring each other. This is a book about women—culprit, victims and the primary detective are women. Annie’s closest mirror is Mrs. Goodwin, also a widow with a child away at school, who has trained as a secretary. We also see two old students, one whose marriage has ruined her mind, and one who has made a team with her husband and works with him. Then there’s the young don Miss Chilperic, who is engaged to be married, and will therefore leave the college. It was actually illegal for married women to teach in Britain before WWII. Sayers doesn’t say this because she assumes her readers will be utterly aware of it and can’t imagine things being any different, but if ever there was anything that should be footnoted for a modern audience, this is it.

  The other academics might as well be nuns, they are devoted not just to scholarship but to virginity as well. This is said explicitly—and really in 1936 those were the choices. Marriage meant giving up the work, and not marrying, for women, meant maintaining virginity. This leads me to Harriet. Harriet lived with a man in Bloomsbury without marrying him, somebody else murdered him, and she was tried for the murder and acquitted because of Lord Peter. (Strong Poison.) Because of the notoriety of the trial, Harriet’s sexual status is known to everyone—and some people consider her utterly immoral because she had sex without marriage. This attitude—that people would care—is completely dated, gone like the dodo, and I have to work at understanding it. Harriet, in her thirties and unmarried, would be presumed to be a virgin were it not that her cohabitation had been gossip in the newspapers after her lover’s death. Now the fact that she has had sexual experience is public knowledge, and affects people’s behaviour towards her.

  The book’s attitude towards work, scholarship and creative work, is almost religious. I said “nuns” just now, and that applies here too—it is as if the nun’s religious sacrifice of sexuality and family and personal love, on the altar of God’s worship, is replaced by an expectation of that on the altar of scholarship. This is very weird because of the inclusion of sex. Even if you leave that out, these days nobody expects that level of dedication. These days people frame work entirely in terms of money and not at all in terms of vocation. Annie, of course, sees it financially, it’s all about (a man) earning a living to support a family. Work can be either, or any mixture. And of course, coming back to sex, there is the conversation with Miss de Vine in which she says that marriage can be a job for some women, that you can dedicate yourself to a partner the way you would to a fine passage of prose. We do not see any men doing this for their wives in the novel, the best we see is men not expecting their wives to do this for them.

  The emotional heart of the book is Harriet’s re-examination of her life and her work. For five years (and two novels) she has been refusing Lord Peter’s proposals of marriage. Now she begins to consider them, and at last comes to see that they could have a marriage that would be a partnership, not a job. Before that she has to regain her self-respect, to have a place to stand and go on from. Harriet’s conclusion is by no means assured, and the emotional trajectory of the book is extremely well done. The arguments for a marriage of equals, as opposed to the social expectation, have never been done better—we even see the disadvantage from the man’s point of view: “someone who would try to manage me.” Manipulation was the woman’s trick, when the man had all the power, but having all the power and being manipulated wasn’t much fun either.

  There used to be a question of “what are women good for” and Gaudy Night would seem to give the answer that they are good for any number of things, Mrs. Goodwin and Phoebe Tucker as well as Miss Lydgate or Miss Hillyard—and that they are bad for them too, Annie and Miss Hillyard and Miss de Vine’s lack of compassion. Harriet’s choice is her own, and the best thing about it is that it pleases her. (Incidentally, who did Sayers imagine was the audience for this erudite detective story, that could read Latin subjunctives and know all about Religio Medici? It’s about Oxford dons, did she think they were the audience too? Or did she think, quite rightly, that the audience could look things up or let them go over their heads?)

  MARCH 30, 2010

  102. Three short Hainish novels: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions

  Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile were published in 1966, and City of Illusions in 1967. Th
ey’re all available in one volume as Worlds of Exile and Illusion and I wish I owned it because the cover on my ratty old copy of City of Illusions was getting me some odd looks on the metro.

  These books are all early works, all very short, and all set in the same universe—this is also the universe of The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Four Ways to Forgiveness and some other stories. Even when I was younger and had a passion for re-reading things in internal chronological order, I realised that reading the Hainish books this way wasn’t very productive. What all the books have in common is some past history and some technology, there isn’t an evolving arc of events the way there is, for instance, in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union universe. Later books contradict earlier ones, late stories have people from planets that were contacted centuries apart working together and so on. The chronology between books written decades apart is best left unexamined. These three books, however, go together very well.

  Rocannon’s World is a story of an anthropologist stranded on a primitive planet. Planet of Exile is about a human colony abandoned on an alien planet. City of Illusions is about an alien lost on a far-future Earth. They are all about isolation and culture, and the different things people can choose to do when cut off from their own culture and immersed in another. They’re all about exile and identity and coping with being cut off. It’s possible to see them all as dry runs for The Left Hand of Darkness.

  Planet of Exile is far and away my favourite of these three, I read it all the time and know it well. I hadn’t read either of the other two for ages. I found them coming back to me as I read them. It’s a fundamentally different experience of re-reading.

  Rocannon’s World begins with the short story “Semley’s Necklace,” a story that is science fiction and fantasy at the same time. Semley is a beautiful princess questing for a necklace made by and stolen by the dwarves. She goes into their underground kingdom, they take her to a strange place, she returns with the necklace to find that many years have passed, the baby she left is a grown woman, and the husband she hoped to please is dead. At the same time, she’s an alien, the dwarves are another race of aliens, the strange place is on another planet and she lost the years by traveling at light speed. The story gains its power because we can see all this simultaneously as true. It’s amazing and resonant.

  The rest of the novel can’t maintain this double level at the same pitch. We do see Rocannon both as an alien anthropologist and as an Odin figure, but it feels more forced. It’s also hard to like Rocannon, he’s too typical of the SF anthropologist hero, well equipped and resourceful, but too questioning of himself and the world to get away with that. I get the feeling that the story was pushing in the “what these people need is a honky” direction, in which Rocannon becomes a better alien than the aliens while saving their world and his, but Le Guin already right at the beginning of her career was pushing uphill against the weight of story.

  One notably neat thing here is the overt notice of the colonialism of the human colonisers, collecting taxes from the aliens and raising their tech level without trying to understand them. This isn’t the way we see the League of Worlds behaving later, but that Rocannon sees something wrong in it and stops it while he does his survey is something. Talking about not the way we see it later, there are more outright aliens here on Fomalhaut II than in all the rest of Hainish space put together. I seem to remember a mention later that the aliens are actually all genetically engineered humans like the rest of the Hainish variants, but they really don’t feel like it.

  The reason I like Planet of Exile so much is because it gives us the human and the alien points of view, and they’re both given dignity and neither of them is privileged. Like Rocannon’s World it has flashes of mythic resonance, unlike Rocannon’s World they are myths in their own context and not in ours. It’s also the Greenland colony in space—and in all of SF, which has done so many colonial worlds, I can’t think of another example of this. Space colonies in SF are always America, except for Planet of Exile, which is the Vikings in Greenland, waiting for another ship to come from home and slowly losing their tech. The other reason I like it is because I love the long year. The planet has a sixty-year-long year, with children born in cohorts in spring and autumn. I love the society of nomads who build a winter city and the Alterrans clinging to the remnants of their civilization. I like the love story. It’s a stark simple story, beautifully told, barely long enough to be a novel in 1966, hardly a couple of hours’ read. I’d be quite happy if Planet of Exile were a modern novel and four hundred pages long, because while this is the story, the essence, the important bit, I’d love to know more.

  The adaptation of the humans to the alien norm so that they might be able to interbreed may not be biologically realistic, but it’s done very well, and I don’t care anyway. It doesn’t have the problem Butler thought she had with Survivor on intermarriage, because for one thing it took hundreds of years, and for another at the time Le Guin was writing that’s what they thought did happen to the Greenland colony. Also, while it’s potentially a happy ending for Rolery, it isn’t unambiguously positive. Le Guin does have some of the humans horrified at the thought of assimilation—“Jacob Agat’s grandchildren will be banging two rocks together.”

  I had forgotten, before this re-read of City of Illusions, that Falk, the lost alien wandering about on Earth generations after the conquest by the Shing, came from the planet of Exile and was a descendant of Jacob and Rolery. I’d also forgotten that it was called Werel, as that name isn’t used there, and therefore horrified to realise that this is also one of the planets in Four Ways to Forgiveness. I don’t want it to be! Banging rocks together would have been better.*

  City of Illusions is the story of a man questing for himself and his context. Falk is left mindless, without memory, and alone in the forest because the Shing don’t like outright killing people. He comes to a peaceful human settlement where he is cared for and becomes a person, a different person from who he was before. He travels west across what we recognise as a far-future America to come to the alien city of Es Toch and get back his memory and lose his self. Most of the book is about his journey, and is like the journey in Rocannon’s World, one picaresque encounter after another. When he gets his mind back it becomes a much more interesting book, because then he has a dilemma rather than a quest. But it also becomes odd, because when Falk becomes Romarran he isn’t the character you’ve been following across the continent for ages, he’s someone different with Falk at the back of his head. I didn’t like City of Illusions as a teenager—and yet I kept reading it, because I liked the rest of Le Guin so much, I kept thinking there was something I wasn’t getting. Either I’m still not old enough for it, or it’s mistimed somehow.

  With the Shing, with their mindlying and hypocritical reverence for the outward forms of life, we have another take on colonialism. In Rocannon’s World we have a coloniser noticing some problems with the system. In Planet of Exile we have the Greenland colony paradigm. Here we have Earth colonised and ruled for its own good and by arbitrary and alien moral standards and not liking it at all. We also potentially have a colony coming back to free the mother world. These three books are the books of the Enemy. In Rocannon’s World, the League is preparing for the Enemy to arrive, and Rocannon thinks that the preparation itself is shaping the League badly. He also wonders whether the FTL bombers and ansible communications might be as useless as the swords of Hallan against the Enemy when they come. The enemy he faces and defeats are human rebels. But the League is being formed as a League of defence against this nameless, faceless, powerful and inevitable Enemy. In Planet of Exile the Enemy may or may not be the reason why communication has been cut off. The few humans have no idea what is happening in the wider universe. In City of Illusions the Enemy Shing have taken Earth, and possibly the rest of the universe, but we don’t know about that. Romarran/Falk plans to get home before they know where his planet is and organise a force to free Earth.

  In the
later books set in this universe, we don’t hear much about the Enemy. The Dispossessed is set much earlier, when very few worlds have been contacted and the ansible that allows them to be a League is only just being invented. (In a nifty connection, which must have been done backwards, in these books we hear every so often about Cetian mathematics, so much more advanced than Earth mathematics.) The Left Hand of Darkness and most of the other stories are set much later, when the Age of the Enemy is history, and history we don’t hear anything about. I suspect Le Guin thought better of the Enemy and the Cold War mind-set they engender, or perhaps when she thought more about interstellar war she just didn’t want to go there.

  These are very early books—are they worth reading? They’re not where I’d suggest starting with Le Guin—The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed and A Wizard of Earthsea are deservedly classics, up there with the best the field has ever produced. But if you already like Le Guin, then yes. She’s always worth reading. I love Planet of Exile and always have, and the other two are travelogues across alien landscapes lit with flashes of brilliance.

  APRIL 1, 2010

  103. On reflection, not very dangerous: Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions

  I suppose everyone knows the history of this volume. Harlan Ellison edited two brilliant anthologies, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). The Last Dangerous Visions was announced, and came out over budget and ten years late, and only then because Roger Elwood got on board to help Ellison with the heavy lifting. I’m not going to touch the question of whether Elwood’s name should have appeared in the same size print as Ellison’s on the cover—though it’s a question that can still get fans buzzing whenever there’s a new edition.