WAR FEVER
You can tell when writers are
sucking up to readers. The giveaway in Historical Fantasies is the War Weary Warrior.
Ironjaw Misgivings murders ten men before breakfast but guilty nightmares keep
him from his beauty sleep. He'd run rings around Alexander, make Genghis Khan
look a sissy, but all Ironjaw yearns for is his little highland farm where he
raises organic lima beans. Ironjaw is as peace-loving as Gandhi but somehow he's always the one holding his
sword aloft crying ‘Charge!’
Convenient that.
I’m musing about martial matters
because my war of the worlds is drawing to a close. In Spira Mirabilis, a multi-ethnic coalition faces down an empire of fanatics. The empire is crumbling from within,
but the coalition is fracturing, and the winner will not be the greatest
killer, but the one who falls apart last. The composition of each army then is
crucial, and my recruitment policy was catholic: I handed out weapons to underage
cripples, blind pacifists and mutinous midgets. The only one volunteer turned
way was the War Weary Warrior.
My objection to old Ironjaw isn't
that he's anachronistic or a bore; it's that he's a phoney. This painfully
contradictory creature was spawned in the trenches. The generation that marched
to the Western Front cheering were misguided, but they were neither fools nor
hypocrites. Had you asked them why they cheered they might have repeated Kant’s
assertion that “at the stage of culture at which the human race still stands,
war is an indispensable means for bringing it to a still higher stage.” This
notion, madness to us, was commonplace. Until the 20th Century, war
was like childbirth, over so quickly that the pain was quickly forgotten. Gettysburg,
the worst battle of the American Civil War, lasted three days. The Great War
had battles lasting months. There is nothing new under the sun, saith the Lord,
and for most of human history He saith correctly. But the Great War – with its machines
that consumed lives like coals, its creeping gas and raining bombardments making
courage an irrelevance – this was something new. After the Somme, only a fool
could believe what a first-class mind like Kant could have once asserted. But here’s the rub: since almost all Historical
Fantasy exists in pre-industrial worlds, our modern attitude to war is as
misplaced as that famous wristwatch in Ben-Hur.
The young writer of Historical
Fantasy has a conundrum. He (this is almost exclusively a male complaint, women
know better than to tie themselves in knots unnecessarily) is torn as Buridan's
ass. His head knows that war's a
frightful business but his heart yearns for a grand stage on which to celebrate
great and valorous deeds. Whatever the lessons of history, he remains a mammal
with far too much testosterone. He wants to pen tales of derring-do, but he
knows that the frank bloodlust of, say, the young Theodore Roosevelt is no
longer socially acceptable. He squares the circle with the War Weary Warrior.
All the fun of a bloodbath, none of the guilty aftertaste. That writers must be
moralists seems a dubious proposition – we’ve priests and tabloid journalists
for that – but if there's anything to the notion, a necessary precondition is honesty.
If the would-be moralist is false, their prescriptions too are false.
The World Weary Warrior naturellement, is, never sexist,
homophobic or racist. These things are deplorable, but in the past they were ubiquitous.
Readers know that. Flashman is a chauvinist, but devotees know he’d be an odd
Victorian gent if he wasn't. No, Flashman's sin is being heartless, which is
bad no matter what the prevailing norms. It’s a different matter entirely if a
Fantasy is about an inversion of
norms (Ursula K. Le Guin has created such alternate worlds), but when writers simply
take our modern conception of equal rights as read, when they only put bigoted
views in the mouths of villains, they short-change readers. Worse, they diminish
the victory of the emancipationists who, to win their battles, had first to
overturn convictions that once seemed the most elementary common sense.
The War Weary Warrior has become
a stable of the brand of Heroic Fantasy known as GrimDark. The bearer of Grimdark’s
(soiled, shredded and blood soaked,) standard in Britain seems to be Joe
Abercrombie, and so it’s perhaps inevitable the sins of his followers fall on
his head. This is unfair. From the few Abercrombie books I’ve read, he is too assured
a storyteller to waste time striking poses. He isn’t interested in bleeding-heart
butchers, but drunks, poltroons, traitors and scoundrels fall effortlessly from
his pen. He writes witty swashbucklers in the spirit of Dumas, and when he does
bloodlust, he does it right: tomahawk in one hand, twenty bloody scalps in the
other. It’s exhilarating, rather than obnoxious, partly because Abercrombie drolly
undercuts things with satire, but mainly because it’s honest. His legions of
followers either can't manage the trick or they haven’t noticed it.
Writers can face Mars without falling to our knees and worshiping the old
brute. Dan Simmons won the Hugo in 1989 for Hyperion,
several tales framed by a pilgrimage to a temple of death. The goodly gentil
knight’s tale, told by Colonel
Fedmahn Kassad, a man in thrall to war, is both a lament and celebration. He
and a Kali-like goddess of death make love on all the great battle fields of
history. This dark and adult rendering is light-years away from Ironjaw
Misgivings. Kassad is a soldier driven half-mad by the realisation that war is
at once ennobling and degrading. Simmons,
I fear, is saying we can’t outlaw war and won’t ever evolve beyond it. We love
it far too much for that.
Few writers can match Simmons’ profundity
or skill, but honesty is available to all of us. If you’ve got war fever, don't
hide it (you’ll fail) or apologise for it (we won’t believe you). You might
even strike gold – there's a diabolical magic to antiheros like Tamburlaine who
spin the world because they can. A less elevated example than Marlow, or
Simmons, is
Robert E. Howard. Conan
the Barbarian’s daddy was, to put it mildly, an unreconstructed sort.
Anything but the palest of skin aroused Howard’s suspicion. Conan drags many women
around over the course of his adventures but they’re all either lascivious
whores or simpering madonnas. As a person, I suspect, Howard was a knuckle-dragging
barbarian. As a thinker, the less said the better. But he is a compelling story teller, vigorous and visceral. I'll take that
over a pious hypocrite any day.
Comments
Post a Comment