fantasy, page 1 of 80

Published in 1965, The Cloud Forest wasn’t North’s first book — that was the now impossible-to-find-anywhere Emperor of the Moon, from nine years before — but it’s the start of her short run of three gently mystical fantasies for pre-teens (the others being The Whirling Shapes and The Light Maze). The “Cloud Forest” of the title is a purely white otherworld one of the two protagonists, twelve year old Andrew Badger, slips into on occasion, and which he comes to learn exists inside the white gemstone of the Annerlie Ring, which he’s guided to find one night. Andrew is an orphan, currently living with his Aunt Badger, the matron of a girl’s school. She’s a somewhat Dickensian guardian, who discourages the boy from making friends with any of the pupils of the school he lives in, thwarts his attempts to have a night-light to stave off nightmares, and generally does her best to show him as little care as she can (“Most illness is pure self-indulgence. If you want to be well, you are well,” she says, in response to his being bed-bound with flu).

Andrew does find a friend, though, in the unconventional Ronnie Peters, an only child who “had always been so heavily wrapped up and protected from the cruel world (which she longed passionately to get at)” that she’s developed a no-nonsense approach to simply doing whatever she wants. As the book opens, she’s decided to bury a treasure map somewhere in the school grounds (even though she doesn’t have any actual treasure — the map itself will become the treasure to another map she’s then going to draw up), and so is present when Andrew finds the Annerlie Ring.

The current members of the Annerlie family live nearby at Annerlie Hall: Raymond Annerlie, virtually comatose since the death of his brother, brother’s wife and baby when their car went into a river, and Sir Rachet Annerlie, a neuro-psychologist who runs the expensive Annerlie Clinic. Researching their history, Ronnie finds mention of the mystical ring, which gives “creative authority to the imagination, if the imagining be sufficiently disinterested and freed from all attachment to results,” and “in its presence even the counterfeit may become real.” (When the normally timid Andrew pretends to be brave, for instance, he finds he actually is brave.) Even so, the ring’s power is “but the Symbol and Shadow of a greater truth.”

It turns out that Sir Rachet Annerlie desperately wants the ring. He’s interested in “the creating of True Power and the Knowledge of How to Use it”, and believes that, with the ring, “I can go to the heart of reality.” To this end, he hosts a series of self-improvement classes of a kind with vague but supposedly empowering beliefs. Andrew is dragged along to one by his aunt, and:

“He was urged to take an Active, Positive Attitude to Life, not to shrink from Having Opinions and expressing them as forcibly as he could, to beware of idleness and an empty mind; not to indulge in doubts and self-questionings and, above all, to realise the great power of DESIRE.”

Their outward message is: “You can all have what you want, if you want it deeply enough, and if you will it with all your heart.” But in fact the classes are simply a way of recruiting people whose will is weak enough that they can be hypnotised into providing a power source for Sir Rachet’s rather more Black Magical practices, focused on the recovery and ownership of the Annerlie Ring.

Aside from the fun adventure and light comedy, the thing I find most interesting about North’s books is her religious attitude. As in the other book of hers I reviewed (The Light Maze), she presents us with a mystical realm where various truths are made plain — here, that we have a True Self that may be lost to the domination of others, and that although imagination may have a magical power, it requires a certain disinterestedness in worldly gains to use it — meanwhile satirising a group of supposedly mystical-minded people who in fact have a power-centred or gains-oriented approach to the supernatural. The fact that Ronnie and Andrew’s main adult helper in The Cloud Forest is the Reverend Arbuthnot says something, perhaps, about where North’s own beliefs lie, but hers is not an entirely traditional Christianity: Arbuthnot, who accepts the children’s stories about the powers of the Annerlie Ring, admits it might be best not to inform the Bishop about such things. His own attitude to Sir Rachet’s classes implies that his — like North’s, I assume — is a somewhat Buddhistic or Eastern-tinged version of Christianity, that nevertheless manages to sound all the more English for it:

“All this constant wishing and desiring—this refusal to let the mind be at rest! It’s in the stillness and quietness that the true creative things happen.”

Mind you, as I’ve said before in this blog, fantasies are often about power, and in so many of them the answer is not learning to use power but deciding to renounce it (as with, most notably, that rather more famous Ring of Power, from Tolkien).

North’s adventures inevitably feel a bit light in contrast with the sort of teen-aimed YA fiction I like, which came only five or so years later, in the works of Alan Garner, John Gordon, William Rayner, Penelope Lively, and others, but the Jungian/Buddhist/lightly Christian form of mysticism that informs her fantasies feels very much both of its time (a 1960s moving towards New Age beliefs), and a matter of conviction on the author’s part.

Between 1981 and 1982, J G Ballard wrote what David Pringle, in his Ballard Chronology (published in the Deep Ends anthologies), has referred to as a “time trilogy of long short stories”: News from the Sun, Myths of the Near Future, and Memories of the Space Age. Ballard himself lumped these together in a 1984 interview, saying his recent work included “three long stories all about the same theme, really — … Light and time.” Not a trilogy in any conventional sense (they have different characters, and the nature of the “space sickness” in each story’s world is slightly different) they nevertheless share so many elements that they belong together in the same way the stories in The Atrocity Exhibition do. They could even be seen as a later, more thoroughly digested (and conventionally narrated) treatment of the same Atrocity Exhibition material, with their gone-rogue doctors/architects/pilots engaging in highly conceptual (not to say insane) artistic projects intended to solve some combination of personal trauma and cultural/global malaise.

All three of these early 80s stories are set in the now-unpopulated areas around an abandoned Cape Kennedy, years after the cessation of the US Space Programme. In all three a space-sickness, identified in some way with our venturing outside the Earth’s atmosphere, has taken grip on the world’s population, its symptoms consisting of an ever-increasing retreat from the world and an altered perception of time, which are in many ways reminiscent of the “supersaturation of time” portrayed in Ballard’s most hallucinogenic disaster novel, The Crystal World.

In News from the Sun (first published in Ambit #87 in Autumn 1981), people are falling into a series of ever-lengthening “fugues”, mental absences during which they simply stop mid-action, coming back to consciousness minutes or hours later. Once started, these fugues increase daily to the point of total retreat from waking life. The protagonist, Robert Franklin, is a former NASA physician now caring for space-sickness patients in the environs of a derelict Cape Kennedy, while staving off his own increasing fugues. One of his patients is Trippett, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, whose daughter visits every day, urging Franklin to drive her father around at dangerous speeds (and anything over 10mph is dangerous, given that Franklin could fugue at any moment), in the belief it will counter the sickness. Trippet, on the verge of a fugue, seems to see the desert landscape around the space station full of lush vegetation.

The one man who’s managed to stave off the sickness is Slade, a former air-pilot. Frustrated in his desire to walk on the moon by having been declared (by Franklin) unfit for space travel, Slade engages in a whirlwind of semi-artistic activity including the assembly of “shrines” of seemingly unrelated objects, the building of an airport made of wood, and flying a man-powered aircraft rather too low over Franklin, while wearing nothing but a pair of aviator’s goggles. All this, Slade claims, is part of his own “space programme” (in the same way the Atrocity Exhibition protagonists were all trying to enact their own version of World War III, or some other disaster).

In Memories of the Space Age (first published in Interzone #2 in Summer 1982), the space-sickness is a subjective slowing of time, leaving people paused in (as they perceive it) a single moment, only to emerge hours later back into the consensus timeline. The protagonist is, again, an ex-NASA physician, Edward Mallory, who has returned with his wife to live in an empty hotel near the now-abandoned Cape Kennedy. This time, there are two characters flying their self-powered aircraft dangerously low over the protagonist’s head. The first is Gale Shepley, who calls herself Nightingale — “a punk madonna of the airways”, as Ballard puts it — the daughter of the first astronaut to be murdered in space. The other is Hinton, her father’s murderer, whose pet impossible/conceptual project is to achieve wingless flight, which he’s attempting to do by piloting a series of ever more primitive flying machines.

In Myths of the Near Future (published in F&SF in October 1982), the space-sickness is less well defined, starting with a vague reluctance to go out of doors and an increasing sensitivity to sunlight, followed by a “taste for wayward and compulsive hobbies”, until finally — almost comically, in all but Ballard’s hands — “the victims became convinced they had once been astronauts”. (This detail underlines how so many aspects of these three stories are interchangeable, including the titles. With its false-astronaut memories, Myths could so easily have been called Memories of the Space Age; equally, with a line like “he felt that the entire human race was beginning its embarkation, preparing to repatriate itself to the sun”, it could just as appropriately have been called News from the Sun — and vice versa with the other two stories.)

The protagonist this time is Roger Sheppard, an “outwardly cool architect who concealed what was in fact a powerful empathy for other people’s psychological ills”. He has come to an overgrown and abandoned Cape Kennedy to find out if his ex-wife, a sufferer of the space-sickness, is dead. This time, though, it’s Sheppard who does the buzzing with a low-flying aircraft, and his victim is a young neurosurgeon, Philip Martinsen, who was/is caring for Sheppard’s ex-wife.

Summing up the similarities between these three stories — even worse, listing all the resonances they set up with Ballard’s previous fiction — would be the work of a not insubstantial thesis. For me, the standouts, as already mentioned, are The Atrocity Exhibition and The Crystal World, whose crystal-forming time-dilation effect these three stories seem to be moving towards, particularly the third, Myths, where Cape Kennedy, rather than being a desert as in the first two stories, is overgrown with lush forest, and Ballard’s descriptions of various light effects approach the hallucinogenic vibrancy of that earlier novel’s prose. (And produce similar images. For instance, in Myths we have: “a large alligator basked contentedly in a glow of self-generated light, smiling to itself as its golden jaws nuzzled its past and future selves.” While in The Crystal World, there’s: “Invested by the glittering light that poured from its body, the crocodile resembled a fabulous armorial beast. Its blind eyes had been transformed into immense crystalline rubies…”)

(As another aside, I did find myself wondering, having since finally read Ballard’s keystone work Empire of the Sun, how much his more visionary and hallucinogenic passages evoke young Jim’s hunger- and fever-driven fugues as he wanders war-torn Shanghai, rather than LSD, as everyone assumed when The Crystal World came out. Certainly, these three stories are full of the sort of Ballardian imagery that would come together in Empire — drained swimming pools, abandoned motels, low-flying aircraft, not to mention the frequently emaciated and hallucinating protagonists. A particularly resonant quote, from Memories: “Cape Kennedy was even more sinister than he had expected, like some ancient death camp.”)

The most significant Ballardian trope in these three stories, for me, is the presence in each of what I might call a Vaughan-like character (to use the name of the instigator of Crash’s car-crash re-enactments). Here, he’s an ex-aviator or ex-astronaut, driven to create his own conceptual version of the space-programme, often trying to enlist the protagonist in some way as a means of saving him from the space-sickness while, all too frequently, also attempting to kill him. (Again, echoes of Empire of the Sun, in young Jim’s uneasy relationship with the American Basie, who takes the boy under his wing, but is just as ready to hand him over to the occupying forces or leave him to die, at a moment’s notice. Ballard is an authentic creator of rogues in the literary tradition of Long John Silver.) This Vaughan-like character always has some unspecified link to the protagonist’s wife, or she’s in some way drawn to him. It might be a former affair, or it might be pure fascination. Either way, the wife abandons the protagonist for this rival: the muse belongs to the artist, however crack-brained he is.

Reading these three so similar tales together, I got the feeling Ballard was fine-tuning his imaginative engine, delicately adjusting the weighting of each of his stock characters, images, and situations, finding the balance point that would allow the whole thing, as it were, to fly.

And something does seem to have clicked. News from the Sun and Memories of the Space Age both spend more time establishing the space-sickness as a real-feeling (even if magical-realist) phenomenon, and end with their protagonist sinking into a final fugue, with the stated hope that this would lead, in some way, to a new sense of inner fulfilment. (Though, to me, it always sounded far more like a euphemism for death.) But in the third story, Myths of the Near Future, it feels we’re dealing with a more developed form of this mutating narrative. For a start, Ballard seems impatient to get the establishment of the space-sickness over with, and is less interested in making it seem like a real thing (however weird), than just having it there, in place, ready for the next stage of this particular myth to play out. Significantly, he shifts the balance between his protagonist and the Vaughan-like rival. Now it’s the protagonist, Sheppard, who’s doing the menacing low-flying, while the rival figure is no longer an elder or peer, but a young neurosurgeon. It’s like we’re now seeing the same story from another perspective — a madder, but also perhaps more vital and artistic one. Whereas the first two stories move towards the protagonist’s loss of his wife both to the space-sickness and to the Vaughan-like character, Myths starts with the protagonist already having lost his wife — both to divorce and the space sickness — and setting out to recover her.

Myths ends with a far more genuine sense of fulfilment, however otherworldly it must be when combined with the ongoing symptoms of the space-sickness. By the end, the four main Ballardian archetypes that populate this loose trilogy fall into a sort of unity, as though about to adopt a peculiar four-way marriage: the now Vaughan-like protagonist, the young neurosurgeon, the protagonist’s no-longer-dead wife, and the young woman psychologist Anne Godwin (whose role was played by the astronauts’ daughters Ursula in News and the “Nightingale” from Memories). What’s more, Myths’ landscape isn’t the arid desert of the earlier two tales, but a place of lush, often glowing forest — “a world nourished by time”, as Ballard has it.

Of course, the fulfilment is of a distinctly Ballardian type, filled with strange light and a new relationship with time, but at least it doesn’t, this third time, feel so much like a hand-waving euphemism for death.

What’s going on here? What space-sickness is Ballard himself afflicted by? It’s tempting to take his own advice from Myths of the Near Future: “It was always best to take the mad on their own terms.” In the same tale, regarding his suitcase containing a Terminal Documents-like collection of oddly-assorted objects (“film strips, chronograms and pornographic photos, the Magritte reproduction”), Sheppard says: “I’m trying to construct a metaphor to bring my wife back to life.” Which has a raw biographical resonance in the confrontation with Ballard’s own wife’s death that lay behind so much of The Atrocity Exhibition. Though, it can be hard to tell, with Ballard. Grief and loss aren’t emotions that ever seem to be foregrounded in his fiction — perhaps, however, that’s because they’re so much part of his world at an almost molecular level, they can’t be felt as something separable. Myths, or either of the other two stories, could be read as a post-grief phantasmagoria from start to finish.

Another thing these stories address is Ballard’s feelings about the Space Programme. The space-sickness is at first presented as a punishment for daring to fly so high: “By leaving his planet and setting off into outer space man had committed an evolutionary crime.” — which, to me, recalls C S Lewis’s idea in his Space Trilogy that man shouldn’t leave Earth because his Creator said so, something I can’t imagine the futurophilic (and atheistic) Ballard would chime with. Another take on the cause for the space sickness, from Memories, is that “by travelling into space… [mankind] was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness.” So, is Ballard saying we just don’t have the psychological resources to deal with the vast void of the heavens, and the disappointing barrenness of its heavenly bodies?

In Myths, though, there’s a slightly more positive idea: it isn’t that we’re not meant to go into space, rather that it needs to be appreciated for the immense leap it is, analogous to the moment our fish-like ancestors crawled out of the sea onto the land, and not simply a moment of media spectacle:

“Could it be that travelling into outer space, even thinking about and watching it on television, was a forced evolutionary step with unforeseen consequences, the eating of a very special kind of forbidden fruit?”

(To which I just have to add this far more eloquent image of our psychological and technological poverty when it comes to facing up to the challenge of entering the void, in News from the Sun: “the rusting dish of a radio-telescope on a nearby peak, a poor man’s begging bowl held up to the banquet of the universe.”)

In a 1979 interview (in fact, a chat with his friend, the psychologist and computer scientist Dr Chris Evans), Ballard had this to say:

“…we’re at the climactic end of one huge age of technology which began with the Industrial Revolution and which lasted for about two hundred years. We’re also at the beginning of a second, possibly even greater revolution, brought about by advances in computers and by the development of information-processing devices of incredible sophistication. It will be the era of artificial brains as opposed to artificial muscles… Now it’s my belief that people, unconsciously perhaps, recognise… that the space programme and the conflict between NASA and the Soviet space effort belonged to the first of these systems of technological exploration, and was therefore tied to the past instead of the future. Don’t misunderstand me — it was a magnificent achievement to put man on the moon, but it was essentially nuts-and-bolts technology…”

I can’t help feeling that these three longish stories somehow resolved — or began to — the fragmented trauma captured in The Atrocity Exhibition over a decade before, and by doing so, perhaps, opened the way for Ballard to more clearly address the true root of it all, his formative childhood experiences in wartime Shanghai that in so many ways provide the skeleton key for understanding where the many obsessive images in his fiction come from. Despite being utterly magical-realist and surreal in imagery, these three stories are some of the purest pre-echoes of the world presented in Ballard’s most-read novel; and they could be seen as a summing up, and tying together, of so many Ballardian obsessions before he moved on to addressing a deeper, perhaps purer, version of the same thing in Empire of the Sun.

I first read Tigana when it came out in 1990, and I remember immediately thinking this was something a bit different from the standard fantasy of the day. For a start, it wasn’t part of a trilogy/quartet/quintet but a (fat) standalone book. (It has even done the polite thing and remained so.) Its world was different in feel, too, with fewer explicitly fantastical elements and a more realistic-seeming politics. (A trend that would continue with the likes of George R R Martin and Robin Hobb.) I didn’t realise it on that first read but its setting, a collection of eight former principalities known collectively as the Peninsula of the Palm, was based on Renaissance Italy, which Kay had heavily researched before starting this novel. (Kay had written his version of the standard fantasy trilogy of those days in The Fionavar Tapestry. I started its first volume, The Summer Tree, a few months before this recent re-read of Tigana but couldn’t get gripped by it. In comparison, Tigana feels like a major step forward in its author’s craft.)

Eighteen years before Tigana (bar its prologue) opens, the Peninsula of the Palm was invaded by two major forces from the north, and is now split in two, with its west half ruled by Brandin of Ygrath, its east by Alberico of the Empire of Barbadior, in an uneasy truce. Both are tyrants and powerful sorcerers. The last province to fall in that invasion was Tigana, whose name is now forgotten — not because it was a particularly minor state, but because its conqueror, Brandin of Ygrath, lost his son in what he assumed would be an easy battle, and his consequent revenge, enhanced by sorcery, was typically excessive. After thoroughly suppressing and ravaging the land of Tigana,

“He… tore its name away. He stripped that name from the minds of every man and woman who had not been born in that province. It was his deepest curse, his ultimate revenge.”

Eighteen years later, those not born in Tigana — and there are increasingly few survivors — cannot hear, read or remember its name, instead calling it Lower Corte, as though it were just an annexe to another province. (And names are often important in fantasy — think of the magical power of a true name in Le Guin’s Earthsea, or the way the word “name” equates with destiny and identity at its deepest level in McKillip’s Riddlemaster.)

The novel follows Alessan, the last Prince of Tigana, currently travelling the Peninsula in the guise of an itinerant player of shepherd pipes, as he gathers a band around him to fight for the freedom of the Peninsula, and the ability to speak the name of his principality once more — a task made more difficult by knowing that the only way to truly free the Palm of tyranny is to get rid of both foreign sorcerers at the same time, otherwise the remaining one would simply expand his rulership, and no doubt become even more unreservedly cruel as a result. (And both are cruel. Alberico loves torture, and is quite happy to wipe out entire families in response to any attempt to oust his power. Brandin, who we see more closely, is perhaps tempting to believe less cruel, but his revenge on the Tiganans, both as a nation and individually, is deeply inhuman.)

Though Tigana has its heroic-fantasy aspects — and one of the best elements of the book is the way the narrative builds to some seriously intense dramatic highs — it doesn’t have the typically heroic type of central character. Alessan, Prince of Tigana might have been that character, but he’s not really a focus of the narrative. Instead it follows the likes of Devin d’Asoli, a wandering singer reawoken to the true name of his homeland, who finds himself one of Alessan’s band, and Dianora, whose plan to free Tigana has led to her winning her way into the seraglio of the tyrant Brandin. Both have minor heroic moments — major in their lives, but lesser in the main story — but mostly act as observers of the overall unfolding tale.

But I have a theory that, even in the extremes of gritty fantasy, as with Game of Thrones, fantasy writers will have to seriously fight their instincts to truly remove the fairy-tale element from fantasy. And if Tigana has an echo of the fairy-tale style of hero, it’s in the titular land itself. Like your traditional farm boy who’s really a king-in-hiding, the land of Tigana starts the novel sorcerously repressed and all-but forgotten, but through Alessan and his band fights its way back to recovering its true name, and eventually, it’s hinted, becoming a unifying force in the Peninsula of the Palm as a whole, the centre of a greater strength that will see off future incursions of foreign invaders.

I bought Kay’s next novel, A Song for Arbonne, when it came out. It, too, is a historically-based fantasy, though one, I seem to recall, that dialled back the fantasy elements even more, and I don’t remember if I finished it or not. I suspect I have a sweet spot — or, more likely, a zone — between the extremes of fairy-tale, full-on magical fantasy (The Belgariad, Zothique) and the darker, grittier, more cynical kind (Conan, perhaps, and of course Game of Thrones), and while Tigana fell within that zone, A Song for Arbonne didn’t.

Or, who knows, perhaps it all just comes down to how cynical I’m feeling at the time.