Jane Gaskell

I was reminded of Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga — another series I remember being in plenty of bookshops at the height of my fantasy-reading phase, in the mid-80s — when I came across a 20-minute filmed interview with her at the BFI’s site, in which she’s asked about late-1960s youth, which she was young enough to have insight into, but just that little bit older than, so presumably had some objectivity about. Looking her up on the British Newspaper Archive, I was surprised to see how much of an accepted, even happening author she was in the 60s — I’d assumed her first novel (written at the age of 16), the highly individualistic fantasy Strange Evil, would have made her a bit of an outsider in the literary market of the day, but no, she was busy publishing books, some fantasy (King’s Daughter in 1958, set in the lost continent of Mu, and so perhaps in the same world as the Atlan books, but called “her only truly bad book” in an excellent LA Review of Books article on Gaskell), some realistic/comic tales of young women’s travails in Swinging London (what the LA Review of Books calls “the novel of countercultural manners”), and even some that mixed the two (the very-hard-to-find contemporary vampire novel Shiny Narrow Grin, from 1964). The second book of the Atlan series — Atlan (1965) — even came out on the same day as one of her realistic novels, The Fabulous Heroine. What’s more, both her fantastic and realistic books were reviewed by the general press of the day.

Which makes the Atlan series a bit of an outlier, as far as fantasy novels are concerned. Atlan would have completely fit in with the early 1970s fantasy boom, when sword-and-sorcery-flavoured action started to blend with Tolkienesque trilogies — and, indeed, they were republished then, as they were again in the 1980s, when the more High Fantasy feel of that decade held sway. But she was producing these books in the early 60s, and in the UK — who else was doing that? (Okay, Michael Moorcock. But who else?) It’s almost comical to read a review of the first book, in The Westminster and Pimlico News (4 Oct 1963), which concludes:

“It would be interesting to study readers’ reactions to The Serpent. It could easily start a new vogue in books which the public demand.”

Yeah. Maybe it will. The earliest paperback cover I can find (Sphere 1967) looks so utterly un-fantasy, it’s obvious she was doing something UK publishers, at least, had no idea how to market. Gaskell was something of a pioneer, then (which makes finding her other books all the more frustrating — none of them had the afterlife of Atlan, and that isn’t in print, even in these Romantasy-loving days).

The first book in the series, The Serpent (1963), was later split into two for paperback publication (the two volumes being called, confusingly, The Serpent and The Dragon). I was going to review just the first paperback, initially, but it ended in a rather unsatisfying fashion, so I went on to read The Dragon immediately afterwards, which both perked up the narrative and provided a proper ending, so it makes sense to read The Serpent and The Dragon as a single (though long) book, as they were originally written.

The setting is prehistoric Earth in the days when the continent of Mu was “at the world’s foot”, and Atlan, once the most potent power in the world, has for centuries cloaked itself behind an invisible wall of mile-wide vacuum, leading to it enjoying “an era of utter peace… [with] no trade, no communication between them and any of the other continents”. At this time, the moon has fallen from the sky — another one will soon replace it — and the world is inhabited by both human beings and a “brutish race” of presumably Neanderthals, or something similar. People ride horses and giant warrior-birds. Gaskell ends her novel with a brief bibliography, with a note saying almost every detail of the world she’s created has “some basis in prehistory”, though the books she mentions are mostly of the “Atlantis was real” type, so “basis” may not be the right word.

The narrator of the novel is Cija (pronounced Keeya), daughter of “the Dictatress”, living in seclusion in a crumbling corner of her mother’s massive and ancient palace, because of a prophecy made at the time of her birth. She is, she’s told by her nursemaids:

“…one whom it would be hard to prevent from bringing disaster—that unless every precaution were taken, before maturity you would have fallen in love and by that love you would bring the fulfilment of an older prophecy… [to] throw our country into absolute degradation and ruin—let our country fall under stranger-rule—foreign rule.”

Cija has been brought up to believe men are extinct. All her knowledge about the world comes from the trashy novels in her private library. Then, one day, at the age of 17, she’s taken out of her rooms and told, first of all, that men still exist, and second, that one particularly egregious version has conquered the country and been in charge for some time. Now this General Zerd is moving onto another conquest and needs to take hostages to ensure the Dictatress and her people keep in line. Cija is to be one of the hostages. Her mother, however, has a special mission for her: get close to Zerd, by any means possible, and kill him, thus freeing their land, and disproving the prophecy.

Zerd, though, isn’t just any man. He’s not even properly human. The details are not clear — Cija, in her diary, doesn’t provide the sort of world-building a modern fantasy reader would expect, but is tantalising light in terms of explanations about the world she inhabits. Zerd, she jokes, is half crocodile. He has a scaled black and red skin:

“Except in strong light, one can mistake him for a man, but now he stood, clearly seen, a monster — and, my God, he was beautiful! I found him beautiful, in his arrogance and his evil, shining like a mighty dragon that fears nothing.”

And so begins the first of her many adventures. Cija, along with several other pampered hostages, is taken along with Zerd’s army. Well-treated at first, they spend their time gossiping and idling. As the army gets farther from Cija’s native land, though, the hostages have less and less value, and eventually someone tells her that, at some point, they’ll have no value at all, and will be discarded, killed, or made some other use of, if they prove to have any.

Here it’s worth pausing to mention something lacking in Gaskell’s world-building. She doesn’t name any of the lands she’s talking about. Zerd comes from the Northern Kingdom; he’s heading for the Southern Kingdom. Cija’s homeland — never named — is between the two, and at one point Gaskell/Cija ties herself in knots explaining it as “the land south of the Northern Kingdom”. Other places aren’t named, either. The capital of the Southern Kingdom is either “the Southern Capital” or just “the City”, from which flows “the River”. The only named land is Atlan itself — which is, it turns out, the General’s ultimate aim of conquest, for he knows a secret that will get him through the vacuum-wall. Either Gaskell is making a point that only Atlan is worth naming, and everywhere else can be treated as generic and archetypal, or she couldn’t be bothered to name the lands and cities and towns, and did her best to tiptoe over those awkward moments (“the land south of the Northern Kingdom”) were it would have been best if she had named them. Elsewhere, Gaskell’s naming of characters can be a bit slapdash: there’s an Ow, and a man called Blob. (On the other hand, she does drop some subtle hints that this world is different to ours — at one point, for instance, Cija refers to her “six senses”, and a nice moment of cultural difference occurs when Zerd and others are amazed at Cija’s effortless ability to run upstairs: stairs, to them, are just alien enough that they can only walk up them.)

For most of The Serpent, Cija is carried on by the action, rather than taking any active role. Although she is (she knows) a goddess, being descended from “ancient alien spirits which fell from the Moon”, she finds herself demoted to being a servant to the General’s current paramour, known only as the Beauty. They pass through extensive jungles, and get to see some of the sort of scenery that really makes a fantasy novel, include a truly massive waterfall (where the army are attacked by undescribed beings known as Fouls), and a section of the jungle where hibernating giant snails entirely cover the trees. (The soldiers, in passing, mindlessly smash the snails.) Cija has, up to this point, mostly been in at worst mild peril, but the tone suddenly changes when she decides to leave the army. Captured by a minor local official, she’s held captive and raped until the official tires of her. She escapes into the wild, then lives for a while in a village (befriending a boy who dresses in her clothes in secret). She enters the Southern Capital dressed as a boy, and finds work for a while as General Zerd’s wife’s stew-chef. (“When I was a self-important little girl with a knife hanging round my neck I thought I could change the fates of the world. Now I use the knife to slice onions.”) She then spends time as the “doxy” of one of her fellow hostages, who has now joined the army — and eventually turns out to be her half-brother. (The tone in this section is almost squalid kitchen sink drama.) Escaping once more, she ends up in “a Court of polished sex-addicts”, attached to the pope-like Superlativity, who is attempting to eradicate the worship of all gods but his own. Fleeing once more, she’s taken up by bandits, then returns to the Southern Capital just as it’s hit by a combination of the Northern army, earthquakes, and a volcanic eruption. Finally, at this late stage of the novel, she’s given a purpose: to redeem herself for all her idle sinning, she’s told to travel to Atlan and warn it of the General’s impending invasion. And so, finally, she enters that fabled land, to find it a sort of beautiful Eden. But the Serpent has found its way in, all the same…

As Moorcock & Cawthorn say in their Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, The Serpent is “stuffed with battle, rape, gossip and wild coincidence.” (L. Sprague de Camp, in Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme, says: “Miss Gaskell certainly tells a whale of a story, with keen humour and some wonderful orgies and chases.”)

The most obvious difference between The Serpent and the sort of thing you find in more standard genre fantasies is the tone. Written as a translated diary, Gaskell says in her Foreword that she has used modern language to indicate Cija’s own slangy tone, and this is one of the things picked up by critics at the time (the New Statesman said it was written in “the flat-heeled language of a teenager”), and later (Lin Carter, in Imaginary Worlds, called her writing “klutzy” with “the most blatant anachronisms”). I wasn’t sure if the very teenage-diary tone — sometimes poetic, sometimes flighty and frivolous, but also at times succinct and brutal — was a refreshingly light take, or one that didn’t quite work. The decider, for me, wasn’t so much the language as the use of concepts which felt too modern: terms like “safety valve” or “guilt complex”, even “sublimation” used in the strictly Freudian sense. The killer was when someone described Cija’s diary as being written in a “No. 8 High Quality Paper Account Book”.

That LA Review of Books article mentioned above describes Gaskell’s protagonists as being almost always “a youthful heroine who is brave but alert to her vulnerability, inquisitive yet vaguely lazy, intelligent and personable but also a bit of a brat”, and Cija is no exception. She comes across, generally, as rather self-involved, and makes few genuine connections with anyone else in her world. It’s obvious the main relationship is between her and Zerd, but she’s so sure, for most of the novel, that Zerd is evil, and that he must hate her, that it’s not really a relationship. (The most sustained relationship she has with a man is with Smahil — “we are violently young together” — who turns out to be her half-brother, and who “is never particularly gentle. He really dislikes me, I’m sure.”) The one loyalty she has, in the end, is to her riding-bird Ums — or, rather, it has a loyalty to her, but her own feelings to it are sometimes ambiguous.

The closest thing to a declaration of a philosophy, towards the end of the book, sounds good, but doesn’t really feel as though it has been demonstrated by Cija herself:

“If one loves everything, saving only war and cruelty and inside-out mockeries of realities, one is right from heaven’s point of view; love everything, as I incline to do, having come from the tower where I had nothing to love except the sky — love everything (but it must be love) and one is right for the spinning, dark, self-sufficient Earth.”

The tale itself is full of wild coincidences. Making her way through a crowded city where people are fleeing a volcanic eruption, she happens to ask help of the one person in the entire continent who really can help her. Wherever she goes — usually after fleeing Zerd — she finds she’s ended up where Zerd was going anyway. For an adventure that takes place over an entire continent, the cast of characters is small, and always popping up. But, I have to say, that doesn’t seem to matter. This doesn’t feel like the sort of realistic (if that’s the right word) fantasy you’d get nowadays. The torrid, wild improbability is part of the point. Moorcock & Cawthorn sum it up best, when they say that Gaskell “possesses to an outstanding degree… the ability to daydream constructively.” That’s what this is, a wild daydream, and best taken as such.

Aside from adventure, does the novel have a meaning? Cija’s journey takes her from believing men to be extinct, even mythical, to finding herself in a world full of them:

“I’ve lived with an army, off and on, for two years—I’ve even masqueraded as a boy for months—but I can’t lose a kind of shock at them, especially if there are a sudden lot of them… They are a bit overpowering in the mass, surely anyone would admit that.”

Among these men, General Zerd is “elemental man” — something, to Cija’s eyes, both beautiful and evil, alluring and not-quite human.

Male-female relations, then, are a key part of the story: “Suddenly I realised a fact quite new to me. I realised that most women in the world are used by most men in the world.” But Cija’s thinking about the men she encounters is more like the sort of thing you find in Angela Carter (Heroes & Villains, say), a push-pull to both the “beautiful” and the “brutal”, even more so when they’re combined, a love or desire that’s constantly tipping into hate. In this, then, she perhaps is demonstrating a little of that “love everything” ethos: she doesn’t seem to hate or resent the men for what they are, but comes to her own sense of how to relate to them.

Her initial, brutal abuse by the minor official becomes, in a way, the larger theme of the book. The Superlativity talks about the coming invasion of that self-sequestered continent as “the Pious Rape of the Introvert Soil of Atlan”. And Cija, uncomfortably, sees herself as part of that “rape”. When she arrives, Atlan seems to be idyllic. She encounters a scene where a (perhaps fairy) musician is leading a mass of animals, both predators and prey, in a harmonious dance. That ends when Cija’s warrior-bird, unaffected by the music, wades in, intent on mating, and with no qualms about casually killing the other animals in his way. Cija is at first mildly embarrassed, like a dog owner whose pet is doing something impolite; then she realises how alien to Atlan this brutality, that she’s come to accept as normal, is. A little while later, the Dragon himself, General Zerd, rides into Atlan, its new Emperor. The innocence has gone — but was she the Eve that brought this particular Serpent into Eden?

The adventure continues in Atlan…

Strange Evil was written in 1955, by the fourteen year old Jane Gaskell, and published in 1957. It belongs to that small class of genuinely unique sports of imaginative fiction from the time before fantasy was a commercial genre. In a sense, it was published in another age. As the publisher’s preface states (after basically apologising for the fact that the book was written by a “prodigy”), the manuscript was submitted in “eight little blue exercise books”, something which wouldn’t even get a cursory glance nowadays. But they published it “not because it is remarkable to have written a novel at all at fourteen, but because we think Strange Evil is, in itself, a strange, arresting and beautiful book.”

The question is, is it still worth reading today? In the preface, the publishers go on to say: “That it has faults and immaturities we know; revision has deliberately been kept to a minimum and has been carried out by the author herself, for we felt that the youthful sparkle of her writing should at all costs be preserved.” One of the things that makes the book still worth reading is its style. And the point about Strange Evil‘s style isn’t its maturity, or lack of it (though I don’t see much of the lack of it myself), but its originality.

As an example:

“Flowers thanked the blue sky with perfume. Perfume was wafted down to her — not only from the great beds on the sunlit terraces, but from those bright assemblages of flowers far away on the mountainside. At the top of the slope trees were massed in shades of jewel-green. White blossoms peered and peeped among them, blurry pearls in the midst of the hard vividity of the rest of the colours of the day. A blue sky rose above them and arched its back as though it, too, were alive and vital. It was certainly sun-soaked. It was blue as though it depended on its living for it.”

“It was certainly sun-soaked” might be immature, but you’d have to have no poetry in your soul not to immediately forgive it for the sentence that follows it, which is just one of the many little sparks of surprise dotted throughout the book. Here’s another:

“A red butterfly perched on her shoulder, and, frightened by the texture of her blouse, darted off again. She followed it until she lost it in its gay philanderage among the flowers.”

Has a butterfly’s flight ever been better described than as a “gay philanderage”? (Taking both words in the 1950s sense, of course!) But the poetry of Gaskell’s style isn’t only reserved for the beauties of her world — though it is far more colourful than most writers’ worlds — as this example from a long and bloody battle at the end shows:

“Once, as she fled and slipped again, it was upon five separate fingers in the pool — they were like five little sticks which clutched at her feet.”

The thing about these examples is they’re so vivid and unique. I’ve read enough fantasy novels by full-fledged adults to know that you don’t find images as arresting as those “five separate fingers” often, however violent things get. One thing you can say about Gaskell’s writing that sets it apart from the “immature” is that it is unclichéd. Most fourteen-year-old writers would simply be rehashing what they’d read before, and in a similar style. It takes a certain maturity to break free of other writers, and Gaskell certainly has that.

The basic plot of the book isn’t so original, as fantasies go, but is so full of weird invention that you either won’t notice it, or won’t care. Judith, our heroine, receives a last minute note telling her that a cousin she has never met is coming to stay. It turns out this cousin, Dorinda, and her fiancé Zameis, aren’t human, but are what could best be called fairies, as Judith realises when their golden antenna become visible in a particularly sunny London restaurant. For some reason, knowing their true nature means Judith can’t be left in our world, but must go with them to theirs, though this is something she seems happy enough to do. They travel to Paris, to jump off the roof of Notre Dames, which happens to be one of the places where our world touches theirs. Judith and her two companions find themselves on a moving silver road, which takes them across the many disparate regions of fairyland.

They are making for a mountain, which Dorinda, Zameis, and other “Internals” live inside. But before they can reach it, they’re kidnapped by “Externals” — a mix of exiled Internals and conscripted satyrs, who grow food for the Internals in exchange for brief returns to the inside of the mountain (which the Externals need to do regularly in order to survive). But it turns out that the Internals have finally denied the Externals any entry to the life-giving interior of the mountain, and the Externals, driven to desperation, are ready for war.

Judith, neither an Internal nor an External, at first finds herself free to move about, but soon comes to the attention of one of the Internal nobles, who thinks she is an agent of Death come to kill him. War breaks out. Judith, finding the decadence and pleasure-loving perversity of the Internals not to her taste, sides with the Externals, and finally confronts the Baby — a monstrous giant god in the shape of a vastly overgrown human baby who represents the selfish, sybaritic nature of the Internals’ religion, “just sheer, puffed-up, spoilt, colossal selfishness”. (This, I suppose, is what China Mieville was referring to when he said Strange Evil had “the most extraordinary baddy in fiction”.)

The book is sprinkled with weird moments that go way beyond the imaginations of most generic fantasists. At one point, heading for the final battle, Judith witnesses the passing of a “colossal black woman”, so big that:

“She stepped over the mountain as though it were flat grass on a plain, and Judith knew her to be one who cared nothing for the little ways of men. Truly there were dreadful things in this world.”

It’s a brief pause that adds nothing to the plot, but does everything to open up the sense of being in another, totally alien world, where potentially vast forces might at any moment come into play. (It may have been inspired by Goya’s “The Colossus“. The back flap of Strange Evil says Gaskell “derives the inspiration for some of her descriptive passages from studying paintings”.)

So, I think Strange Evil is still worth reading, not for the fact it was written by a fourteen-year-old, but because it is the product of a unique imagination. I’d even say there’s an air of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus in the home-grown, one-offness of its fantastic invention, and the authenticity of its intent. This is something that’s still rare today, when it’s so easy to fall into the wheel ruts of genre fiction and follow them through the usual standard plots, standard styles, and standard fantastic images, for the standard reasons.

Jane Gaskell went on to write the Atlan fantasy series, which I haven’t read, but I will certainly be on the look out for.