Review of The Phoenix and the Mirror by Joanna Russ |
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Avram Davidson's THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR
(Doubleday, $4.95) is an oddly dragging, sometimes fascinating book that
ought to be a classic romance and is not. Mr. Davidson has created an
entirely new never-world, that of Vergilian Rome as seen in medieval legends,
a "backward projection of medievalism" in which the ancient world becomes
half Dark Ages and wholly strange, and Vergil not a poet but a sorcerer.
The background is extremely well realized, so much so that I doubt whether
one reader in twenty will recognize the amount of research that has gone
into it — I doubt if I recognize this myself. The novel
is not simply an all-out fantasy world or an excuse for adventures; the
magic in it is developed with awesome logic, and one of the climaxes of
the book concerns the making of a mirror — constructing
a furnace, crushing the ore, making the crucibles, and so on. Either you
follow this patiently or you deserve to be shut up in a television set
and forced to read Marvel comics until your brain turns to oatmeal. There
are wonderful details: the mineral kingdom alone includes the terebolim,
the male and female firestones whose mating produces an unquenchable conflagration,
and the petromorphs, whose stony and venomous jaws love to crunch the
coals of fires. Except for one hunting scene, which seems to have been
introduced merely to show off too much medieval lore, none of this stuff
is dull and most of it is first-rate. But something has gone wrong.
I thought at first to look for the difficulty in the characters, and
these are indeed types — the Beautiful Maiden, the Bluff
Friend, the Ambitious Bitch, the Gentle Monster, the Loyal Gutter Urchin — but
typing has never been a bad thing in itself. In fact, the characters in
the novel are not only vividly conceived, but almost always there is an
extra twist — realistic or paradoxical or suddenly matter-of-fact — that
makes them real people. It is all the more distressing to see these real
people somehow forced into the role of puppets and made to populate a
book that drags in spite of its splendid exoticism and the solidity of
its background.
Perhaps the problem is in the plot. The book does not really have a
plot, that is, an action in which self-motivated characters come into
conflict with each other or something else through the pursuit of things
they really want. What it has instead is an intrigue that never
quite comes off (sometimes developments are too slow, sometimes too fast,
often just arbitrary) and an intrigue needs a diabolus ex machina.
One of the characters is pressed into service for this and is promptly
ruined, although she has all sorts of potential (as do the others) for
doing other things, if only it weren't for that damned plot. Mr. Davidson
gives glimpses of the characters, looking remarkably lifelike; and then
episodes of exotic action or description; and then the characters again,
still looking lifelike but now subtly out of place; and each time the
characters reappear they are more out of place. The denouement is like
one of Dickens' worst novels, where you find out at the end that people
have all sorts of complicated relationships with each other and wonder
why you should care or bother. The logical solution is not a dramatic
solution, and what ought to have prepared for it not only looked
like an excrescence before; it still is one.
Perhaps Mr. Davidson is trying to imitate the stylization-cum- actuality
of medieval romances, but his characters are much too real for this arbitrary
playing around with their emotions. For example (the worst), the hero,
having gotten half-way into a mystery — through a gimmick — must
now have a motive to get all the way in. So he falls in love at first
sight with the Beautiful Maiden, glimpsed in the magic mirror. A Vergil
who got into his adventure through curiosity, or professional pride, or
desire for money, would be much easier to take. The realism of the book
does not jibe with many of the plot machinations. For one thing, there
is some very modern Monday-morning quarterbacking about science (sort
of), music, and poetry. There is also an intelligence at work here, a
modern, skeptical, cool, rather tired mind which is far more interesting
than the ostensible romance of the main action.
The novel appeared in serial form, badly shredded, several years ago.
Those who were puzzled by it then certainly ought to read it now. If it
were a worse book, it would be more unified, but it would also be a worse
book, and a half a loaf can be very welcome, even when it's frustrating,
as this is.
Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
August 1969, pp. 25-27. |