Hugh Cook’s Chronicle of a World of Darkness, Part 2
I return to you for the end of the tale. Hugh Cooks
intended-sixty, planned-twenty, published-ten Fantasy Series; ‘A Chronicle
of an Age of Darkness’. Or as I re-named it in my first review; ‘Zaan
Said the Sun’, from one of the more pleasing euphonic discursions of Book
Two, ‘Worsmiths & Warguild’. Or, as the planet upon which the story
set on is named; ‘Olo Malan’, a planet in the Tulip Continuum, in the
Permissive Dimensions. So let’s call it ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’, for the sun
is rising on a darkened world, beneath strange multicoloured stars.
This is a Long Post!
So, here is a contents list;
Here is the first Hugh Cook review, covering Books 1 to 5
Part One of this Review – Escape
from Injiltaprajura!
Part Two of this Review – Werewolf
& Wormlord
Part Three of this Review –
Worshippers & Way
Part Four of this Review –
Witchlord and Weaponmaster
….
The last half of the series takes us through sweaty
intrigues in a blissfully described tropical island city, post-beowulfian
Warrior Saga in the mud and marshes of Wen Endex, Science-Fantasy
Trans-Colonial Trauma and accidental Mau’Dibification in the city of the future
of the past, and finally; a big sprawling adventure by a Fated Heir that links
the whole thing.
With all this we climb deeper into Hugh Cook. A
comfortable fit, and, as so often happens when reading a bunch of stuff from a
singular mind, our interest transmits itself from the world described to the
mind describing, for there are many themes and repetitions in ‘Zaan; Olo
Malan’, many sons will deal with fathers, many scholars will argue with
warriors, powers will be struggled for (and with), there will be less, but
still several, visionary and often horny dream-sequences, and much realism will
be woven ‘midst the unreal. In the end, justifications will be denied,
questioned and claimed. In the end of the end there will be one
singular message, one lambent individual fragment that Hugh Cook would wish you
to take away from these stories. One thing that, above all, he would
wish you to remember. It is a subtle piece of wisdom, yet can be quickly
described. But I will not reveal it! Not until the very, the absolute, end of
what looks like it’s going to be a very long review. To see, and to understand,
you must come with me to that end, and to get there, we must start, as all
things do, in the middle, on the isle of Untulchilamon…
……..
But before that, consider this extended quote, which
comes not from Untilchilamon, the location of books Six and Seven, but
from the very end of the series, from book Ten; ‘Witchlord & Weaponmaster’,
and which I put here at the start of the article, partly because it’s quite
long and there is more of a chance of you reading it here, and partly because
it gives you a reasonable idea of where we are going with all this, and why and
how Hugh Cook is a little different.
Here the Narrator of ‘Witch & Weapon’, who may
be the diegetic Wizard Sten-Pilitkin, but who is probably also Hugh Cook, who
was also an army medic for much of his youth, describes the death of a
Washer-Woman, cruelly but randomly killed, whose body lies near the path of the
Hero, Guest Gulkan in a story which is both True History, and Deliberate
Fabulation;
“And if you are surprised to find in these pages so
much war in combination with so little suffering, why, then know well the
reason. This is Guest Gulkan's story, the biography of a warrior, and a warrior
of the Yarglat at that. And your ever accomplished warrior is necessarily an
amnesiac - and, more, neglects to see that which is not useful for his
purposes.
It is said by the tender that any tale of war should
concentrate on its suffering, for the tender-minded hold such suffering to be
the ruling reality of war. In this they are in error: and, focusing on the dead
and the dying, they misunderstand that which they deprecate. Misunderstanding
the dynamics of war, they cannot thereafter hope to alter those dynamics.
If history has any moral mission, then it is this: to
render to the fullest the complexities and uncertainties of the living human
reality which we endure. For it is we ourselves whom we seek to understand when
we read in the pages of history - we, the human people, wizards and warriors,
wonderworkers and washerwomen.
If we study the affairs of puppets and poppets then we
will be well-equipped for life in a dolls house; but the world is not so amiably
constituted, and attempts to treat it as if it were lead commonly to disaster.
Let us then stage no moral charades with puppets and
poppets. For if we do, then we delude ourselves; and, surely, to choose to be
wilfully blind as to our own nature is the greatest of crimes, for without
self-knowledge there can be no governance of the self by the self.
Yes and there are those who deny this, and say that it
is sufficient to yield in faith to the diktats of some deity such as Zoz the
Ancestral or similar. In such faith they are prepared to burn all history,
blaming the page for the battle, the court record for the crime. The reason for
their willed ignorance is simple: self-knowledge and self-awareness are
painful, so the weak and the inadequate customarily prefer the numb oblivion of
the slavery of unquestioning faith.
In defiance of such wilful ignorance, this history
speaks, holding truth to be the highest virtue. For only through an
acknowledgement of the living realities of our world and our own existence can
we attain self-knowledge and autonomous adulthood. And only by acknowledging
the living realities of war can we hope to understand the persistence of war,
which continues to blight our world despite the best-hearted efforts of those
tender-minded moralists who would have us believe that war is one mass of
conscious suffering, and that every warrior is a victim.
This book is a history of a warriors living reality.
And the truth of the warrior is ambition combined with amnesia, selective
vision combined with selective memory, and the belief that victory is the
validation of all suffering. Therefore, believing truth to be the highest
virtue, we will not distort the record with moral charades incompatible with
the truth; but rather, will note the plain fact, which is that Guest Gulkan
swiftly forgot the dying washerwoman as he hastened up the stairs towards the
Hall of Time.”
….
That this is an ostensible justification and moral
argument for the nature of a story from one of its characters, (and perhaps
from that characters creator), who had previously, (in book Nine, ‘Worshippers
& Way’), partly denied the need for such justifications, should not be
taken as a criticism. Many questions and moral conflicts have no absolute
answer, and some perhaps should not. The creator is always a work in
progress, and in very long creations, that take a while to make, the presence
of the living, changing, mind of the creator is an essential part of the work. We
deal here not in numbers but the deeds of man.
But these are worries for the end of our history. Before
that; the middle, and, (like I said), Untulchilamon;
PART ONE - Escape from Injiltaprajura!
Our last encounter with ‘Zaan; Olo Malan’ was ‘Wicked
& Witless’, starring the tiresome and dislikable Sean Sarazin,
aka; WATASHI!, and his witnessing of the Fall of Argan to the Swarms of the
Deep South.
Now, a change in both scene and time! We fly across the
great (rectangular: will fit on a two-page spread), ocean of Moana, half way
across the described world, to the baking Isle of Untilchilamon, and as we fly,
we return also in time to before the Fall of Argan. For this shall be the
setting of books both Six and Seven! ‘The Wazir and the Witch’ and ‘The
Wishstone and the Wonder-Workers’.
The Land and the Location
Untulchilamon, a sweaty island in a southern sea, and
more; beset with stilling winds for fair chunks of the year, this in an age of
sail. Yet bountiful and home to the bloodstone city of Injiltaprajura, its
walls bright as wounds beneath the burning sun, green with moon paint beneath
the multicoloured stars. Why? Because it is built on the ancient ruins of a
possibly-interdimensional arcology/prison/space ship which goes down
maybe-infinite levels into who-knows-where and which also has several
still-functioning infinite-production machines which no-one understands.
Specifically - the magical machines from Below produce
enough water to fill the thirst of Injiltaprajura and to keep that part of
Untulchilamon fertile. They also produce ice, and some very random
post-singularity industrial products which sometimes spurt up out from
underneath and totally poison local fishing, but which are also rare and
valuable. Thus lies the wealth, and life, of Untulchilamon - built unwittingly
on an ancient magical prison or unnatural nature and to which it seems every
basement and stairway in Untulchilamon is somehow connected. The city has an
'Underdark', or perhaps a Mega-Dungeon, which comes in very handy for Hugh Cook
as he needs to rapidly apparate and randomly transport his dazed protagonists
between various situations.
What are its cultural ancedents? If Argan was roughly
America-sizes and arranged, (cold on top, hot below), Untulchilamon is
equatorial, maybe a bit Indian, a bit South-East Asian, maybe a bit
Madagascarian? It is quite possibly Banaba, or ‘Ocean Island’¸ a very small
and very isolated tropical island where, for some reason, Hugh Cook spent
several years of his childhood.
It is a small place quite close to one large big place;
the continent of Yestron, so that, whatever happens in Yestron ends up,
ultimately, but not immediately, affecting Untulchilamon. This will prove
consequential.
The Chaos and the Catastrophes
A great teetering unstable pyramid of complex conflicts
weighs down upon our protagonists; (initially this is the ever-callow red-skinned
Ebrell Islander Chegory Guy, and later largely the large Empress Justina Thrug).
Since we are not Chegory Guy, and are actually capable of arranging and
organising our thoughts, I will describe these conflicts from the top down,
from the highest level of organisation to the lowest.
The Pogroms and the Politics
Untulchilamon falls within the sphere of Yestron, the
large continent to the East. The last appointed governer from that Empire was Wazir
Sin, a man bent on Pogrom and murder, especially of Ebbies, the red-skinned
Ebrell Islanders, who he nearly wiped out.
When Yestron fell into Dynastic War, (the Talonsklavara),
Sin was deposed by Lonstantine Thrug, a Yudonic Knight of Wen Endex,
who stopped the genocides, and introduced a (more) liberal regime, but who then
got syphilis and went mad, and was succeeded by his daughter; the sleazy but
likeable strong and large Empress, Justina Thrug. Justina is opposed
initially by Aquitaine Varazchvardan, the albino Lawgiver who served
under Sin and quite liked the pogroms, and in the second book, by Nadalastabstla
Banraithanchumun Ek, a man whose name I will not write twice, the much more
effective, evil, racist and competent High Priest of Zoz the Ancestral.
As our tale begins, it seems like a winner has emerged
from the Talonsklavara; Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and
ruler of much of it. If this is so, then as Aldrach Three consolidates his
rule, his eye will eventually fall upon Untulchilamon. He will be coming, and
he will be mutilating. (If he actually won, it’s not like there are telephones
on Olo Malam).
The Crooks and the Criminals
At this exact time, Thieves attack! Two separate sets of
thieves/adventurers are infiltrating Injiltaprajura! They seek the 'Wishstone', sacred jewel of Office of the
now-Empress Justina.
The apparently-successful theft of the Wishstone triggers
absolute multilayered chaos in Injiltraprajura as the original thieves are
chased by the adventurers, and the forces of Justina, and as the relatively-evil
Varazchvardan, and anyone else, arrest all the Usual Suspects (Ebrell
Islanders).
The Dreams and the Demon
While all of this is going on, a mysterious
supernatural force is effecting Injiltaprajura, melting the boundary between
dreams and reality, making nightmares real and generally being strange - a
Demon is coming through into our world! This seems to have literally nothing
to do with any of the other plot threads! It’s just happening!? What?
The Golden Gulag
Did you think that was the end of the plot threads? We
are barely half-way through!
Injiltaprajura is actually built on a crazy piece of
post-singularity science-fantasy wreckage. A ruined arcology, and mysterious
inter-dimensional prison realm from before the Days of Wrath, twenty thousand
years ago!
It’s a hundred-layered massively malfunctioning prison
complex for the questionable private security apparatus of a long-gone
multidimensional star empire! Many of the odd people and curious creatures
roaming around Injiltaprajura are products of this ancient time, although,
(apart from the hidden immortals) no-one currently alive really knows or fully
understands this. Within the depths of the Golden Gulag is an evil Therapist;
a sentient and immortal torture machine which largely wants to do evil things. Also
present Below is a mysterious Organic Rectifier; a piece of technology capable
of changing the form of a living being, and even of creating immortality!
The presence of the ruined hyper-dimensional prison
complex has nothing to do with the threat of Aldrach Three, Dream-infiltrating
Demon, (which is its own separate plot thread), or, to begin with, the Crab.
The Crab and the… Confinement?
A major part of both books is the presence of a magical
and (arguably) semi-divine giant Hermit Crab whose origins are almost
completely unrelated to everyone and everything else. He just happens to be
there.
An immortal spirit of the Sun, (or a sun), the
Crab-soul was banished from its natural sphere over a religious matter, ended
up on Olo Malam and inhabited the body of the first thing it could understand;
an ordinary crab.
Now trapped in Crab form, (though it did manage to grow
the body very big, and also has terrifying telekinetic powers), the Crab is
unquenchably tired of its immortal form and of the endless efforts of humanity
to suborn it towards their intrigues and dramas.
The Crab is a wild card!
The Sanity and the Summation
So much happens on Injiltaprajuna that I think even Hugh
Cook has trouble remembering in later books, (and he is very good at organising
his notes). Suffice to say that after a
great deal of intrigue, adventure and bouncing around, the Demon is defeated,
the terrible rule of Aldrach III is returned to Injiltaprajura, the
Wonderworking Sorcerers of Injiltaprajura consistently fail to do anything
useful in either book, the Wishstone is recovered by Guest Gulkan, (star of
book Ten), the sorrowful Hermit Crab is finally given an immortal human body by
the Organic Rectifier and, with the enforced aid of some other immortal
characters, sets about the long repair of the Chasm Gates that connected Olo
Malam to the Star-Spanning Civilisation of the Nexus, and Chegory Guy, Justina
Thrug and the core cast manage to escape from Injiltaprajura via the flying
machine of the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin.
The Annoyances and the Aggravations
There were several things I did not love about book Six ‘Wish
& Wonder’, which were partially absolved in Book Seven ‘Witch and
Wazir’.
Chegory Guy is yet another frustrating teenage boy
protagonist who notices less than the reader. This is the fourth such out of
six books. Bring back Miphon, Blackwood and Yenn Olass!
Not only that but Chegory Guy is powerless, passive and tongue-tied (at first
at least). There are a few too many moments when someone speaking clearly would
end the plot, or at least shorten it.
Furthermore ‘Wish & Wonder’ is made of several
plots that have nothing to do with each other but just happen to interact.
Which... fine. Ok. A Cook-Book is always anarchic in plotting but there is
usually a through line and some kind of tie-up by the end.
There is also a lot of ping-pong with the characters and
plotlines, plenty of people rushing around and not really getting things done.
Add to this, a new manic meta-epistolification which
besieges the narrative of ‘Wish & Wonder’ with unrelenting terror.
Much as I have seen Kenneth Branagh’s ‘Hamlet´ described as “a brilliant
production by Kenneth Branagh, horribly monstered by the performance of Kenneth
Branagh”, so ‘Wish & Wonder’ is a hyper-dense narrative created by
Hugh Cook, absolutely stabbed and molested by the Epistolary Enthusiasms of
Hugh Cook.
First; this is the first story set in the Age of
Darkness that has, not the ever-faithful variable third person, but an in-world
writer. All, (nearly all) of this narrative is ostensibly being written by an
individual who was, at the time of the events, present, close to the action,
perhaps a resident of the Domjaradron (loony bin).
Second; this text is being/has been, edited and
cut down by the Redactors of Odrom, a tiresome and unimaginative group
who note when they disagree with the factual basis of events and even argue
with each other in the comments, and who apparently have cut out quite a
gigantic amount of discursive rambling by the Originator.
Thirdly; Injiltaprajura being a deeply
cosmopolitan place, there are many and varied tongues spoken there. This being
a Cook book, everything is given in English and we only find out what the
actual language is when the writer, the originator, starts commenting on the
translation of various words and phrases and what they might mean.
This is common enough for a Cook Book BUT - since all the
characters are also multilingual, we can be in a situation where the characters
are arguing about language, in various languages, and the Originator
is also commenting on what they are arguing about, and the
Redactors of Odrom are ALSO commenting on this with each other, and
perhaps arguing, so we can have an active three-level meta-argument going on.
Fourth; the main character of ‘Wish &
Wonder’, Chegory Guy, cannot speak well. He is massively afflicted
with a systemically tied-tongue! The point of view in 'Witch and Wazir'
floats around a lot more but not being stuck with a vocally-frustrated
knife-fighter who never fights with his knives and who would shorten the book
by half if he could just form a sentence, is a relief.
Fifth and last - there is STILL the omniscient
thirdperson as, before the book even starts an un-named and unknown entity, who
sounds a lot like Hugh Cook, gives us an introduction, and a description of the
origins of the magical hermit crab who nearly forms a deus-ex-carcinoma in
Wishstone.
This is too much epistleisation Hugh Cook.
The Good and the Gleeful
Those were most of my problems with Injiltaprajura, most
of which attach to the first of the pair; ‘Wish & Wonder’. Things get
better in Book Seven; ‘Witch and Wazir’, and in both there is much to enjoy.
The Classic Cookisms
Cook is absolutely WALLOWING in euphony, neologisms,
invention and the sheer ridiculous music of prose. At times his coagulations of
sound and meaning form a near textual Jazz made purely out of sound and symbols
which flows alongside the text. Try saying some of these out loud;
….
" Firfat Labrat's warehouse of drugs in
Marthandorthan"
….
"The man in question was actually Pelagius
Zozimus, a wizard of the order of Xluzu and the quest-companion of Guest Gulkan
(pretender to the throne of Tameran), Hosaja Sken-Pitilkin (a fellow wizard)
and Thayer Levant (a cut-throat from Chi'ash-lan)."
….
"Have you in your voluntary or involuntary possession
any knife, bodkin, knitting needle, dragon hook, sword, spear, bow, catapult,
arbalest, fighting stick, battering ram, snake, scorpion, basilisk, vial of
vitriol or other weapon of death or terror or violence?
Whereupon Zosimus answered in the negative, was
subjected to swift but expert search, then was allowed to step closer (but not
too close!) to the Empress. The Imperial Linguist stepped forward with him.
Both elven lord and linguist bowed.
'Toxteth', said the linguist, then bowed again and
withdrew."
 |
| Danny Paik on Artstation |
There are more Cook-Book staples, like;
·
The extensive sex-dreams of teenage boys,
·
Characters entering states of mystic logarithmya
which seem oddly like Cooks internal state.
·
The sheer joy in trying to find out just how
long he can make regularly used words, which is finally reached in; "Zazazolzodanzarzakazolabrik,
also known as the Scraglands, the Wastes, the Scorpion Desert - or Zolabrik for
short.”
·
More Court Cases (what lawyer hurt you Hugh
Cook?)
·
Lots of interweaving strands of action; (you can
never tell which will be dominant).
·
Another very misogynist Empire, (this
time the near-fascist worship of Zozz the Ancestral).
The Jubilant (?) Justina
Even better, the tale increasingly orbits around the
Empress Justina Thrug, a woman consistently described as 'large' and 'fleshy',
and a consummate schemer and protagonist with less than five teeth, (sweet
foods).
Justina mixes a wider range of more complex emotion, a
deeper experience of life and more subtle awareness of and relation to, power,
with a dram of the slightly deranged optimism and indefatigable spirit of Drake
Douhey. Thus, she engages with a lot of crazy schemes, is nearly executed
multiple times, is restored to power multiple times, adventures underground,
lies, tricks, astounds and generally is more fun and tolerable to be around.
The Bubble of Bounce
"Shabbles light dimmed immediately to nothing and
the demonic one soared up, up, up into the night sky. The humid darkness of
Injiltaprajura and of the polluted Laitemata fell away below. All Untulchilamon
came in sight, a mass of dark within dark, reaching away for league upon league
from Justina's capital to the desolations of the north.
Higher and still higher yet flew Shabble, ascending
imaginary mountains in nary more than a couple of heartbeats. Exulting in pure
speed flew Shabble. So does the dolphin exult when from the water it explodes
in joy shimmering. So does the dragon rejoice when in its strength it holds the
heights then plunges, diving with a scream, with power ferocious, with speed
controlled and absolute precision, terror matched to beauty as it stoops. Up
rose Shabble in such triumph until the very curvature of the planetary surface
was clearly to be perceived, and the sun also, the sun of the new day.
Then sang Shabble, then Shabble sang, louder and then
louder yet, pouring out music unheard for twenty thousand years, rejoicing in
the Symphony of the Sun, a song of joy to exult and honour all those who argue
with mortality, a paen of praise for the will to be and to become, for ambition
unlimited, audacity vaulting and the triumph of the moment.
Shabble rose yet higher. Singing singing singing to
the rising sun, the local star, the star itself delighting as it sang with a
song fiercer and braver yet than any known to creatures of the flesh, its joy a
blaze of energy unleashed, exploding light outburning in vacuum wastelands a
hundred million miles distant.
Glory to life!
Glory to us and our becoming!
And to the sun, glory!
Thus Shabble, singing as if to rival the sun itself.
Non servium."
…
But who, or what, is this mysterious soaring entity or
demon, this Shabble?
It, or ‘they’ are a children’s toy, twenty thousand years
old, slightly lonely and constitutionally unable to take anything seriously.
Shabble is a Sun. A real, life-sized one, wrapped in its
own pocket dimension and given access to ours through a hyperdimensional
transponder about the size and coolness of a big orange.
Why would the society of the Nexus do something as
insane as making an entire sentient sun, then locking it in a micro-cosmos on
its own, and why would they then make this potentially-godlike entity a
children’s toy?
It seems its quite difficult to make an actually
more-than-human intelligence that can still, and still wants to, communicate
with humans. Shabbles were one of the only ways they found to do it. A failed
experiment as, though they have the calculation powers of supercomputers, they
don’t really like to calculate. Instead they were produced en-masse and sold as
children’s toys.
Shabble, this Shabble, may be the only one left. Shabble
was made to play, but has lasted twenty-thousand years, and may need a little
adjustment. Shabble is also one of the most curious and interesting characters
in ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’. Don’t worry! He returns in Book Ten!
…
“Injiltaprajura saw nothing of Shabble as instarlat's
shadows shortened toward noon. Shabble was still missing as the shadows of
salahanthara lengthened toward sunset. Yet all that time the demon of Jod was
furiously busy.
Doing what you ask?
The answer is simple.
Falling.
From morn to noon fell Shabble, from noon to dewy eve
- a summers day; and with the setting sun dropped from the zenith like a
falling star. Steam in whispers vapoured into shreds as deep to the seas drove
Shabble, descending fathoms five and full, drawn down to the depths where the moray
weaves in coils than cobra greater, then drawn far deeper, down to the utter
dark, the siltworm cold, the black of blindness engolding.
Then Shabble uprose and surfaced.
Hovered briefly, then was gone, making for
Injiltaprajura - leaving the dark seas rocking, rocking endlessly toward the
shore.”
.......
The Precision of Plots
‘Witch & Wazir’ is also better because it’s
mainly about one thing; Escape from Injiltaprajuna!, instead of the complex
intrigue plus random-demon plot we got in ‘Wish & Wonder’. Now the
looming political threat of Aldrach Three is the main driving problem and our
'protagonists' have the central difficulty of escaping the island alive.
The Empress Justina has a tenuous grip on power, is
opposed by a big chunk of the population and power brokers of Untulchilamon and
is dedicated to getting off the island with as many of her followers as she
can.
The same ships which can get her off, will also carry bad
news and enemies on the way in, and the soldiers she needs to seize the ships
are loyal to money she increasingly doesn't have and a position no-one
respects. The evil racist maniac Aldrach the Third, Mutilator of Yestron, has
won his civil war and as soon as he turns his eye to Untulchilamon, everyone
connected to Justina is going to get mutilated.
There is no more wondering what the plot is going to be
about and on the whole I find this makes Cook Books a lot more tolerable. He is
an amazingly discursive and wandering writer anyway, so even with a tight
central axis we are going to get a lot of hither-and-yon, but 'Wishstone and
Wonder-Workers' had TWO rambling main plots, and was written in epistolary
style by a rambling obsessive madman, AND was 'edited' in epistolary style by
craven scholars who argued with each other, AND the arguable main character was
tongue-tied. For some this might have been the right amount of crazy but for me
it was too much. 'Witch and Wazir' was a lot more manageable.
Less Decadent and Delirious
It is less packed and decadent, and less overwhelmingly
new and strange, and that is a limitation. In "Wishstone", though I
had problems with it, the torrent of wild fresh information, multiple
epistolary conceits, shifting points of view, reality breakdowns and cultural
overwhelm, actually synergised very well with hot, dense, sweaty, complex,
orientalist and luxurious Injiltaprajura. That is an effect not to be sneezed
at, though I prefer having at least one hand for the ship of story rather than
being bashed around by the storms of Cooks invention.
The Nastiness of the Nexus
We also receive, (offhand as per-Cook), a staggering
amount of backstory and information on the nature of the trillion-world
pan-cosmic mega-culture called the Nexus. Olo Malam was a Prison-Planet of the
Nexus, and a place to do questionable experiments in a dimension where the
stars are multicoloured and the laws of reality a bit more loose than the stark
white-starred Star-Trek Galaxy that makes up the Nexus-bulk.
The Golden Gulag was a mega-prison, and one of the
inmates, the super-Genius Ivan Pokrov, managed to both make himself immortal
and to cut off this planet from the rest of the Nexus 20,000 years ago.
The end of the book involves a magic crab in human form
forcing Pokrov to begin the process of trying to fix the connection to the
Nexus, which may take a million years, but he has that long anyway, and
probably the magical crab man will be a big help. This is probably the most
important thing to happen in any of the sequence and if it had gone on a long
time likely would have ended up ending the 'Age of Darkness'.
Over the next three books we will find out a lot more
about the Nexus, including one piece of information even the Nexus itself
likely did not have. One of the sub-themes of ‘Zaan Olo Malam’ is the deepening
question of whether we really want the Chasm Gates re-opened and the sci-fi
star empire to return.
But of that, more later.
The Realms and the Races
(We also find out what 'race' everyone is? Or did we
learn that in the last one? Injultaprajura is a population melting pot and for
the first time in the Cook Books we get an in-depth low-down on what colour,
shape and culture everyone is and how they interact.
Most from Argan, (the first five books) are brownish.
Ebrell Islanders are actual-red. Ashmoleans are eqiuvilent to our Africans I
think. The Japanese-seeming Yandajuulas are literal-grey and extremely racist
and those of Wen Endex seem somewhat European-equivalent).
Thus Ends Part One
That was a long first part but don’t worry, all
the others will be shorter. If you are tired of reading, now may be a good time
to take a break. Next, we fly to Galsh Ebrek!
PART TWO - Werewolf & Wormlord
We are back baby! Back to Beowulf. To fly north to Wen
Endex, the cold and swampy land where men tread mud through warriors halls. The
homeland of Justina Thrug, to which she escaped at the end of the last book.
Here the mother of a monster has arisen from the Swamps, the aged king who long
ago slew the creatures get, sets the son of his disinherited heir on a mighty
quest – for the three saga swords of legend, so that he might defeat SHE, and
become…. King!
But while this story is set after the previous
book, and likely parallel to the Matter of Argan that occupied the first
five, it does not directly concern ‘The Thrug’, but the Banker Alfric Danbog.
The Anguish and the Alienation
Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murdering
Yudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doing
that), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, but broke
from his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclave
of the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in the
otherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.
This cultural split in the mind of a man, between the
culture of his birth and that of his age, will be a theme in all three
remaining books. Each has a hero torn between one life-way and another, and
each performs the sins and virtues of each culture to the other. There is a lot
of internalising. It is something that makes the stories good.
But first; Alfric! How was he raised? What is his marrow?
Here, a scene where the Quester sits in-hall before his king, hearing the
endless stories of endless bards and boasters, for hour after hour;
…
"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Of
ring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts and
the sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; of
steeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monsters
encountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men graced
with deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes of
heartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rocky
screens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in waters
bloody and disturbed.
Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also of
the undisturbed valour of men who died
without complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbed
boar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to an
uncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and ate
through his flesh to the bone.
And they sang - there was no stopping it, though
Alfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end rather
than endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and the
weapons of their making.
Ah, the weapons!
Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in the
blood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of alien
creatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patterned
steel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, which
chopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts and
vivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lower
bowl.
Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of the
company of heroes.
 |
| a-gokhan-gultekin |
Of swords they sang, and of armour.
Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail.
Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons.
And the journeying, the endless trekking and marching
and climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to be
described a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture of
the mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches which
there battened upon their flesh.*
Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was their
way. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless.
Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from the
fiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death in
honour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of their
lungs on their lips."
…
This is how he was raised, but who is Alfric Danbrog now
and what has he become? He has become a Banker, a servant of the Circle
of Banks, of whom we shall learn much later. What does it mean to be a Banker?
It means clean clothes and clean floors, well-lit draughtless rooms, calm
conversations, the manipulation of abstracts. It means this;
“Maybe it would be possible to develop a kind of politics
in which the great mass of the people would no longer be people at all. In
which they would not be even animated rubbish or a lower form of animal life.
Suppose one were to create abstract symbols to be manipulated as one
manipulates money. Thus a stinking beggar, a leprous thing of rags and
ulcerated bones, would no longer be an entity to be either cherished or
scorned, helped or rebuffed. Rather, the beggar would be reduced to an abstract
token, a necessary side-effect of the mathematics of prosperity.
Was it possible?
Was it possible for a ruling politics to be so
detached from reality?
Was it possible, in other words, for politics to be
reduced to the painless manipulation of a web of symbols, an exercise of the
intellect totally removed (in an emotional sense) from any realworld
consequences?
For a moment, Alfric thought it was possible, and
thought too that he might be able to bring about such a state of affairs. But
he dismissed the thought as an absurdity.
Then began to reconsider.
It happened that the Partnership Banks had already
gone a long way to creating the necessary philosophical underpinning of any
such politics; for the manipulating of money already proceeded in a largely
abstract arena substantially divorced from all physical realities. Thus one
very large and complex confederation of interlocked organizations was
condicting its affairs, to a very considerable extent, as if it functioned in a
symbolic field rather than a physical universe made of earth and air, fire and water.
As money is today, so the world can be tomorrow.
Thinking thus, Alfric shuddered; and he knew then his
own true capacity for evil.
Evil?
Yes.
Surely it would be evil in the highest degree to treat
the real world as a solipsistic dream to be manipulated for symbolic
satisfaction; and, on the level of practical affairs, to deny the existence of
the real in favour of the mechanics of daydream. To puppet humans as if they
were but shadows. It would be evil, yes.
But it was infinitely appealing."
…
Since Cook is now writing a character who by his nature
is split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he can
write his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work!
And since the protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes,
embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allow
himself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axis of the story.
The Cheese and the Quest
Surely this be cringe? I hear you say. A were-Hamster? A
milk-faced assassin with a social conscience? A sketchy knightly order verses a
modern bank? A history of racial hatred against Orks, who turn out to be
whale-like swamp dwelling perfectly intelligent and likeable folks with little
sexual dimorphism and who are very helpful to the hero because he managed not
to be racist to them? A Knight destined to be King who ends up not being king
and not even a Banker? A feminist story in the background? An Ogre king called
‘King Dimple-Dumpling’? What are
these base Prachettisms? Can you truly be telling us that this is an actually
good book???!
Yes. For several reasons;
Firstly, it is short; therefore, all of its good ideas
ring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from one
end of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to have
any), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wish & Wonder',
where a compilation of complex techniques and characters combined to clog the
book up, or 'Walrus & War-Wolf', which, while each element of its
paratactic picaresque was fun, did lead to vague fatigue).
Second; we are blessed with a sustained
close-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do some
things, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustained
world, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do the
actual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughly
where one is in ‘Werewolf & Wormlord’. That is; either on the
way to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing.
Third; we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist!
Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin, nor a likeable but
slow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan, but a sane, intelligent, competent, not
necessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent sometimes in a pinch
Banker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless bad
marriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents,
a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him.
Fourth; we have a much less agonising and neurotic
synthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and between the epic and political. Any
Cook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantastic
storytelling and his political realism, grasp of psychology and mild
(relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in his
heart.
While, on the surface, the story of the events of ‘Wolf
& Worm’ might be taken to be pettily anti-heroic, (Alfric does not
become King, all of the ruling social ideas are flawed), on a personal level,
and as a man, he does actually face up to the terrible challenges facing him,
and avoid becoming an utterly evil Banker or bad King. He escapes his bad
marriage, (by which I mean his suffering wife who he treated terribly manages
to escape him, which is better for both of them). He also manages to reconcile
with his Father, his Mother, his Grandfather the King and together they manage
to defeat the very terrible monster; Grendels Mother. A magical sword even
drips to slathers in her noxious blood!
The Classic Cookisms
We have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence and
sex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist is
slightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of the
Young-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazed
fever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (this
is never explained). Still he is marginally less horny than many
Cook heroes and heroines.)
The Thrug
We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Having
survived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex takes
place in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were created
by the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole new
species, and are consistently charming.
Cancer What The Hell?
With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much of
his protagonists Energy is His energy
sometimes it feels like he is writing out his own
psycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, political
musings etc .
Towards the end of the book, one of the characters
reveals that he has cancer and will soon die
It’s particularly horrible.
“’Here, said Nappy, pulling his clothes away from his
midriff.
There Alfric had to look, had to, he had no choice, and
it was cancer all right, cancer or some kind of lethal ulcer or something
worse, yellow at the margins, yellow becoming brown, brown becoming wet black
in the centre, and the centre was a kind of funnel that descended inward,
inward to the wet pain and the glistening ooze.
Then Nappy covered the thing once more.”
....
This was published in 1991. Hugh Cook dies of cancer in 2008.
Cancer, and its terrible treatment, will return, far to
the south, and long ago, in the city of Dalar Ken Halvar;
PART THREE – Worshippers & Way
Or - how I Became Mau'dib by Mistake
I forgot exactly when we are but I do at least
remember where. We have flown south from Wen Endex, across
rectangular Moana, past the equatorial isle of Untulchilamon, to the
vast somewhat-Australian ruined desert continent of Parengarenga, and to
the dust-blasted city at its heart; Dalar Ken Halvar, city of the Silver
Emperor, and home to the single still-active loci of technology and culture
from the long-vanished science-fiction; the functional Combat College of the
Starforce.
The Stage and the Scene
The scene of action and the axis of drama in 'Worshipper
and Way' is, so far as I can tell, utterly original, I haven't seen anything
like it before, and produces and strange, dreamlike feel unique to this book.
20,000 years ago Olo Malan was part of a Star-Trek/Ian.M.Banks-Culture
dimension-spanning hyper-culture called 'The Nexus'. Then the star gate
connecting this world to the Nexus collapsed and it fell into savagery- through
endless cycles of brief renaissance followed by post-singularity hyperdoom.
The only part of this world where the technology and the
ideology of the Nexus still works even a little like before is the Combat
College buried in the mountains of the city of Dara Ken Halvar.
Within this complex, and only here, we have
replicators, post-future medicine, virtual reality training machines, somewhat
chilly comfort, sliding doors, materialising doors, clean electrical
lights and an an omnipresent A.I., with the image and personality of a
long-gone individual. Making it, in effect, a character. In a way, a strange
Prince of the City. But the only thing the Combat College wants to do, it’s
only directive, is to train Star Troopers for the Star Force. A Star Force that
no longer exists.. but might one day exist again, if the Chasm Gates are
ever re-opened
Outside the matter-energy doors of the Combat College,
the sprawling desert city of Dara Ken Halvar is a multiethnic deeply stratified
powderkeg under the rule of the often-absent, often depressed Silver Emperor -
the acknowledged ruler of the massive, and massively poor and desertfied
continent of Parengarenga. Dara Ken Halvar is filled with beggars, debts, cults
and ethnic resentment, and with little water, all of which has to be carried
up, by hand, from the river below which runs to nothing in the Plain of Jars
beyond. Great gogmagogian vents and abyssal shafts break the surface, relics of
long-crazed weather machines, one dead, the other spewing endless heat. They
have eyeless beggars and a ceremonial dog-killing festival. It is a savage
nation, of the kind the crew of Star Trek might beam down to in disguise so as
not to break the Prime Directive, though depicted with more complexity,
subtlety, sympathy and horror than Star Trek usually leant to its adventure-zone
cultures.
Every year, a bunch of (relative) savages from the desert
city of Dara Ken Halvar, come into the Combat College as Cadets, and over
subsequent years of education they are whittled down and trained up as hyper-competent
Star Troopers of the Stormforce, ready for anything from surviving on a jungle
moon to battling with space-fighters, to taking command of a super space
battleship, none of which they will ever see. They are also trained and
educated in the ideology and history of the Nexus. Once the graduating class
has achieved its highest level, they are sent back out into desert, dog-eating,
blind-beggar city of Dara Ken Halvar, and forgotten, having been trained as
Star Troopers.
The action of the book takes place across this strange
boundary between a dreamlike lost post-future and the savage, but very real and
consequential, ethno-politics of a shrivelled primitive desert empire run by an
actual Wizard.
What things mean changes as you go through the
matter-energy doors of the Combat College. All of the politics, starvation and
ethnic conflict of the Real World infiltrates the clean Star Trek halls and the
strange, now twenty-millennia-old philosophies and conflicts of the Nexus,
themselves seep out into Dara Ken Halvar, mutating and mestatising into strange
new forms.
This would make a really good stage play.
The Hero and the Heretic
While our point of view does float a little, the main
object of our story is Asodo Hatch; an ostensibly powerful man. Hatch is a
purple-skinned Frangoni warrior. He trained in the Comat College and, in the
tradition of his people, took a break to go and fight in the actual, brutal
desert dust and bloodstained spear warfare of Parengarenga. Unlike most
of the Cadets of the Combat College, he is in middle years, with actual
military experience. He is a tall, handsome, muscular man with an impressive
topknot. A leader in his community, he is a direct servant of the Silver
Emperor and is in contention for the instructorship of the Combat College; a
rare and singular role that gives one permanent access to the College as its
de-facto ambassador to Dara Ken Halvar. His main challenger? The brilliant and
ruthless Embrell Islander, Lupus Lon Oliver. Only one can succeed!
But Asado Hatch is not fighting to succeed, he is
fighting to survive. His father recently committed suicide, causing massive
shame to the family, his brother has disavowed the family, his sister is in
massive debt, sufficient to get her enslaved, and is involved with a crazy
cult, his wife has terminal cancer which is killing her slowly - the only
treatment is expensive and illegal opium - everything is mortgaged to the hilt
and his family position, for which, as a Frangoni, he is solely responsible, is
a crazy house of cards which could come down at any moment.
To anyone looking at him from the outside, Hatch is the
protagonist of a great political and military saga, and that is often how
people treat him; as the protagonist, the man who has a plan, who is going to
make things happen.
Asodo Hatch is not an anti-hero but a null-hero. To most
of the people in the story he seems like a 'main character', a driver of events
and embodier of the historic moment - and in this book he is in fact the main
character, but within his own mind he feels utterly helpless, driven
relentlessly by tangled webs of outside forces, all of which mutually conflict
with each other and none of which he has any time to adapt to, having to
improvise relentlessly in the moment, moment-by-moment. Even until the final
pages of the book his actual core beliefs and core ideology, remains negotiable
to circumstance.
The interrelationship of debt, wealth, economics,
politics and a simultaneous synthesis of deeply human emotion reminds me a lot
of Sylvia Townsend Warners multi-generational convent story 'The Corner that
Held Them'. Its relatively rare that a writer can deal simultaneously in
personal psychology, family dynamics, debt, money, low and high level politics
and often sincere and conflicting religious and ethical impulses at the same
time.
Like ‘Wolf & Worm’, this is another protagonist
caught between cultures - a man who, in a sense, believes in nothing, or comes
to almost believe in nothing, like I imagine Cook to be; he knows too much of
the flaws and failures and invisible compromises of too many different cultures
and too many different ways of life to be a thoughtless intuitive believer in
any of them. But a believer is what he must become, or pretend to be, for only
absolute belief will save him.
The Tragedy of the Triumph
While Alfric Danbrog fails in the material and power
sense, becoming neither King, nor Senior Banker, he does manage to keep his
soul and restore and renew his sense of self.
Asodo Hatch wins in the end. He beats Lupus Lon Oliver,
gets his wife healed of her cancer, protects his Daughter, (and his lover),
regains a relationship with his brother, betrays his ancestral god, and any of
the good aspects of the Nexus culture, sells his honour, massacres those who
trusted him and becomes the keystone of a successful revolutionary theocratic
revolution, for a misogynist faith twenty thousand years old, originally
revealed only though his criticism of it. A faith he does not believe in but
for which he commits terrible crimes, because he believes it is the only way.
By the end of the story, he has lost his soul. He is the
apparent Master of the hour but feels utterly hollow. He will spread the
tyrannical religion of Nu-Chala-Nuth across the whole of Parengarenga
and beyond and use its tyrannical autocratic power to begin the rebuilding of a
technological society which can repair the Combat College, which will then
spread life-altering Post-Future technology and medicine to the whole of Olo
Malan.
It will all be to the good, in the end, hopefully, after
maybe a couple of hundred years. Hopefully.
"'I have unleashed a religion militant. I have
set loose the Nu-Chala-Nuth. My people have consecrated themselves by blooding
their swords in the service of faith. I am acclaimed as a Saint already.'
Unconsciously, Hatch let declamatory passion seep into
his voice as he delivered himself of this speech. He spoke as if he addressed
an audience of seventy thousand. Rhetoric was ever a Frangoni vice, and Hatch
was true to the ways of his people: there was nothing he liked better than to
unleash a speech.
'So,' said Shona softly. 'It can trick, cheat and
kill. Oh, and make speeches! Great speeches, Hatch are you proud of your
speech, are you proud of... aagh! Whats the use? You've decided, haven't you?
'I did what I had to,' said hatch defensively.
Yet he was uncomfortably conscious of his guilt
burden. He had brought the Free Corps to destruction, yet many of those people
... well ... Hatch has trained with them, had known them as companions and
colleagues ... and ... he had feared for the future, hence the arranged murder.
But was it not perhaps better to risk the future than to do something which was
... was what? Unpardonable?
Suddenly, very sharply, hatch remembered Lupus Lon
Oliver. Lupus had said that a man who kills himself hands to his son a sharp
sword.
'I will not do it,' muttered Hatch.
But...
'I have heard that the Nu-Chala-nuth is no Way for
women,' said Shone suddenly.
'It is true,' admitted Hatch.
'Then what future for women?' said Shona.
Hatch was about to say that the women must suffer what
they must. Then caught himself. because - of course! - Shona herself was a
woman.
This came as something of a revelation to Hatch. For
Asodo hatch had never thought of the burly Shona as a woman, just as he had
never thought of her as being one of the Pang, or one of the Yara,the Unreal -
though she was all of those. he had always thought of Shona as being, well,
Shona. His ally. His friend.
'The men must have something,' said Hatch
lamely."
…
If ‘Zaan, Olo
Malan’ is about the end of an Age of Darkness, then it is a deeply realist, and
quite tragic, look at what it takes to actually create states and empires,
impose peace, unify peoples and in short, to restore civilisation. For it
cannot be done by civilised means.
The New Nexus Naughtiness
'Worshippers & Way' plays a game of long, slow
reveals, reveals of both what is going on right now, and the motivations of the
people involved. One of the deepest of these is the slow drip-feeding of ever
more information about the Nexus.
Hatch himself, raised in the frozen culture of the Nexus
and educated in its history, strongly suspects it no longer exists; likely
collapsed and fallen into chaos long ago, unable to sustain its own
dichotomies. The Narrator itself refers to the Nexus as something like an
Empire of High Riding Energy Lords.
For the power of the Nexus comes from its near-magical
technology, and the power of its technology comes from its ability to
manipulate probability, (like the Wizards of Argan do today), and how does this
technology work? It is born from the mazadath; semi-magical hyper-chip
like chunks of gemlike matter that lie at the heart of every significant piece
of Nexus tech.
And whence the mazadath? Why the Nexus trades for
them, with a curious race of hyper-dimensional aliens called ‘The Shining
Ones’.
In fact the Nexus cannot even manufacture its own
technological base and does not fundamentally understand how it works.
And whence the Shining Ones? Well.. Guest Gulkan,
warlord of Tameran, finds that out in a conversation with God in the next book.
The last book!
But before that, one more quote...
The Justice and the Justification
Maybe the editors were complaining, or Cook was finally
getting letters about this stuff, or perhaps, writing in a bubble as he did,
his mind simply began to turn thusly, for here begins the moral argument, and
justification for his work, here at the end of ‘Worshippers & Way’ not from
an epistolaric in-world figure, but from the disembodied Narrator.
“It is doubtlessly true that, in a strictly moral
universe, Asodo Hatch would not have ended thus in the arms of the Lady Iro
Murasaki. But this is a history of the world of the fact and the flesh, not a
gaudy tale of Good versus Evil such as might have been candyflossed to life by
the Eye of Delusions. This, then, is not a nicely balanced structure of error
and retribution suitable for use as a model to propound the ethical philosophies.
It is history, and it is not for history to take upon itself the mission of the
moralists.
But if some mission be demanded, if it be said that
the mere recounting of events is not a task sufficient in itself – why, then,
let this history be taken as an exemplification of the intrinsic complexity of
life. If a message be required, why then, let the very complexities of this
history be a message in itself. And if something more still be demanded – a
moral, perforce! – why then, let the moral be that life is a dice game played
in the shadows with a dog and a ghost.
Consider by the light of that moral the life of Asodo
Hatch. In the time of his testing, Asodo Hatch used means which he did not
rightly know were at his disposal to achieve ends which were not strictly of
his own choosing. He was swimming, yes, and swimming of his own free will, and
in the direction of his choosing – but he was swimming in a river that was in
flood, a boiling river of filthy brown water ever churning towards the hot pit
of its final embroilment.
And we too in our time may be plunged into such a
flood; and therefore should no be too quick to judge, or to say that Hatch
should have drunk the river dry, or should have grown wings and flown, or
should have conceded himself to the flood by evolving himself into a fish.
Let us then grant him the charity of our mercy.
And if it be objected that Hatch, whether swimming or
drowning, had no right to live when so many were dead – why then, know that it
takes only a moment’s courage to die, whereas it takes a lifetimes’ courage to
live. And Asodo Hatch had the greatest of difficulty in finding that lifetimes
courage, for the undeniable truth is that his father had handed him both a
sharpened sword and the incentive to use it.”
.......
PART FOUR – Witchlord & Weaponmaster
We are finally here, the sad too-early end for the doomed
glorious megaproject of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness. An age which now
may never end.
What on earth were you thinking Hugh Cook? TWENTY books
in the FIRST series? And THREE series? You were not thinking at all, at least,
not of things like sale and audience appeal, and this is why we love you. It is
also why you need a kicking.
Still, this is our end and we shall accept it. I will do
a grand summation but for now I will try to keep things focused on Guest Gulkan
and on the story of this book alone. But before even that get a load of this;
“Shabble drifted through the air towards the
Witchlord. The fist-sized bubble pressed itself against the Witchlord's cheek,
rolled up the Witchlords face, bumped over the ridges of the Witchlords
slanting forehead, shone a tightly focused
beam of light into the mysterious recesses of the Witchlords bat-wing
ears, then rolled down his back, ducked between his legs, and slid upwards
through the air till they were (so to speak) face to face once more.
'Welcome to my island,' said Shabble.”
....
He (they)’ s Back Baby! More Shabble incoming!
More Wizards, One Warrior
And we are back. Back for a synthesis and
expression of nearly every theme and method in the series so far. Like the
first book, Witch & Weapon focuses on the epic journeys of some Wizards,
mainly Stelt-Pitilikin, the levitating tutor of our hero, and Guest Gulkan, son
of the Witchlord and (eventually), heir to the empire. The violent scholars and
somewhat scholarly violators are our main characters and we see the world
through their eyes, and through the interaction between them;
“'I'll take no talk of sense from a schoolteacher,
which is all you are,' said Guest. 'I'm an emperors on and heir to an empire
myself. I'm oath-bound to rescue Jocasta, and so I will'.
'You are not oath-bound at all,' said Senk. 'You are
not oath-bound because Jocasta lied to you. The thing cannot make you a wizard.
it can only control you, possess you, seize you, subject you. Use you as a
tool, a thing.'
'But it bound itself to me in honour.' Said Guest.
'It has no honour!' Said Senk. 'Honour is - how can I
put this? You're mortal, you die, you seek significance in the face of
mortality, you seek a meaning. The oath-culture is quest for precisely that:
significance in the face of mortality. The honour of a mans death is the
meaning of that death. Jocasta shares no such fear of death, hence needs the
support of no such culture, hence cannot be trusted to hold to an oath. Do you
understand?
'You are a schoolmaster,' said Guest 'hence have an
ethnological temperament. But a thing - you're like Sken-Pitilkin. What's it
all about, that's what you want to say. Then you riddle out a meaning, then you
say because it’s got a meaning it’s got no meaning. First you shape the thing
in words, then you say the thing's only words so it’s nothing. But things are
things despite any number of words, and a thing is good in itself. My horse, my
woman, my honour, my sword. My honour -'
'Your honour is not a thing,' said Senk, with crushing
force. 'You confuse categories. You confuse your horse with your honour when
your horse is a flesh and blood animal with mass, weight and an appetite for
hay, whereas your honour is a cultural construct, which is something quite
different.'
'Yes, well,' said Guest, not appreciating that he had
just been crushed under one of the heavier hammers in the intellectual toolbox,
'you're talking categories, but it’s just like breaking up a bit of bread, you
get big bits and small bits but it’s all bread when you're finished with it.’”
…
The Boy, and Beyond
In 'Words & War', 'Walrus & War-Wolf'
and 'Wicked & Witless' we saw the growth of a teenage boy, through
adventure and travail, to the state of manhood and (some), depth, (apart from
Sean Sarazin, who remained a tool).
So does 'Witch & Weapon' give us Guest Gulkan as the
precocious murdering horny 14 year old son of an Emperor, and take us through
his many, many failings, his dooms and dramas, loves and losses, till,
seemingly slowly, (for the story covers perhaps a good 20 years), he emerges as
a relatively sensible, (for a murdering Yarglat Barbarian), man.
We stay with Guest for much longer than we saw Togura
Poulaan, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Sean Sarazin and because of this his story
is deeper and lonelier. His life-arc takes us more into that of the middle-aged
heroes of later books like Justina Thrug and Asado Hatch, with the sorrow that
Guest Gulkan never really has a stable home, being driven, largely by his own
impetuous energy, on a series of crazed adventures, through his teens and 20's
and into his 30's, where he seems he would really prefer that things would calm
down, but they don't.
The Father and the Failure
Themes of fatherhood and especially relationships between
flawed fathers and odd sons have been present in much of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan’.
Togura was overshadowed and ignored. Drake was orphaned, his
guardian, driven mad by Drake and by Syphilis, consistently tries to annihilate
him. His second father-figure, John Arabin, is a conniving, deadly but somewhat
honourable and rarely sadistic pirate king from whom Drake learns a lot. Poor,
awful Sean Sarazin is raised by the Randian and manipulative Lord Regan, with
disastrous results, and one of his few happy periods, and times in which he is
not an utter dick, is hanging out with his biological father in his forest
guerilla revolutionary corps. Alfric Dambrog was Wormlord' is estranged but
reconciles Asodo Hatch was tortured by
the suicide of his own father in the arena before the start of the book.
So this is 'Father and Son', Episode Six. A story of two
men tortured by ambition and empathy. The Witchlord, Onash Gulkan, a man who
murdered most of his own family to become Emperor, (normative for the culture,
as the Wizards would say), has three Sons, and finds himself somewhat
distressed by the gradually-curdling certainty that his sons will not only end
up murdering each other, but will kill him too, and that it will be Guest that
does this, for, though an utter tool at the age of 14, he is the bravest, the
strongest, the most cunning and has the strongest will-to-power. A man born of
family, slayer of the same family, wrestles with his genuine love for his sons
and his own Doom, and his own refusal to die, for old though he is, he is still
Kingly, and has a Kings will.
Our story really starts with the simultaneous awareness
by Guest and his Father, that Guest will kill his Onash, and follows them
wrestling with and against that fate over a consequential reach of history.
From Guests perspective, this is a classic tale, even a
Greek drama, of a boy destined to fight and kill his father, escaping that fate,
losing everything, actually getting to spend time with his dad and growing
closer, until fate catches up in the end.
Taking us back to 'Wizards and Warriors', and one of the
grand over-themes of the Cook-Books, this is also a story of..
THE GOGMAGOGIC GIGANTISM!
Not since 'Walrus & War-Wolf' have we had a hero who
travels so madly and so wildly, by foot, by horse, by ship and now by magical
gate and Wizardly flying machine! His stage is the whole of the world! (At
least the bits we’ve already seen, and a few more as well).
I'm not sure this makes the story better! At least 'as a
story'. The back of the book informs us; "Although it forms part of a
vast fantasy epic, this volume is a complete and spectacular tale in its own
right." And this has never been less true! The book 'as-a-book' is
pretty good, but if you haven't read the others then will seem sketchy tale
indeed. The core to the story, if there is one, is stretched like mozzarella
over such a crazy compilation of nations, kingdoms, Banks, oceans, wars,
betrayals, imprisonments, mutilations, trans-dimensional gates and a four year
long marriage, that it would be hard to make out.
If you have read the other books, (and it’s hard
to imagine someone reading this one without the others), then 'Witch and
Weapon' is a grand condensation, very like the crazy 'War-Wolf & Walrus' in
its physical range of adventure and in how it acts as twine that ties together
hugely disparate events and people and makes clear firstly; yes this is all ONE
STORY and everything interacts, and secondly; "Yes I HUGH COOK did
indeed plan all this from the very beginning! Remember this bit from that book
and that bit from this book? Well here we are! It all comes together now!!
SEE?"
If we are to be anal about it, he planned for twenty
books in the first series alone, so not everything comes together, the
story still has a wonderous superfluity of loose ends everywhere, but a LOT
does. I found myself, in the middle of the story, skipping back five or six
books, to read the same scene as I was reading in 'Witch & Weapon', seen
from the other point of view. It’s pretty impressive. It may be a unique
achievement.
The (mild) Metatextual Madness!
The Cook-Books have always elements of meta-textuality
threaded through them. Right from the beginning there are things like
'translators notes' in which the floating third-person narrator elbows their
way in to comment on a translation or the meaning of a world.
This tendency reached its crazed apogee in 'Wazir &
Witch'. Things cool off a bit for 'Wish & Wonders', which still maintains
itself to be an in-world text, but less assaulted by either madness or
academics, (but I think the original 'text' of Wazir & Witch shows up in
Wish & Wonder as part of the plot???
Cook god damn you.
‘Werewolf & Worm’ and 'Worshippers & Way' recede
somewhat to the usual Cook-Style of floating close third person with occasional
interjections. But here at the end we get a return to the Epistolary conceit
with the gradual awareness that the book itself is being written by one of the
characters in it; the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin, a Wizard who, the book assures us,
never really did anything wrong and always had everyone’s best interests at
heart, and only occasionally tried to run away to save his own skin. The
narrator, narrating the conversations of Sten-Pitilkin, is wise enough to note
that the adult Guest Gulkan remembers elements of his own youth quite
differently to what he, and we, saw through the pages of the text at the time.
The narrator does not seem aware that we also saw the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin do a
number of very questionable things, (at the time), and adopt some attitudes
that the narrator might not agree with, which he later seems to’ just kinda
forget’.
The Necrotic Nexus
Guest meets God in this one. Or at least, an
extra-dimensional being with simultaneous access to all points in local space
and time and a perhaps infinite level of knowledge to bestow. It might be a
demiurge, or an angel, or a Metatron or something. It calls itself ‘The Lobos’.
"'I was upset,' said the Lobos, now sounding sad
rather than angry, 'because the thing which you have about your neck is a thing
stolen from one of the Zelamith. Know you the Zelamith?"
'were a race of whispering dragons which lived in the
places which do not exist, the places which lie between cosmos and cosmos. For
each of the Zelamith there was a mazadath. And a mazadth, dear child of man, a
mazadath is a soul. It is like a harp: as the harp is nothing on its own, yet
comes to life when in concord with the harpist, so the mazadath is nothing on
its own, yet comes to life when in a synergetic relationship with one of the
Zelamith. The Zenalith were slaughtered by the Shining Ones, the Vangelis, who
butchered them, then sold their souls to humankind for trifles.'"
…
Well well fucking well. It seems the entire
interdimensional culture of the Nexus was built on the corpses of murdered
aliens, and perhaps they never even knew.
The Agony and the Amelioration
Let’s count again. One - Morgan Hearst and his growth-arc
from a Wizard-Hating Rovac warrior to maybe something else. Two - Alfric
Danbrog, a man separated from his northern quest-saga knightly culture, and his
parents, and drawn into the more Cosmopolitan evils of the Bank, finding some
kind of equanimity towards the end. Three - Asodo Hatch, Frangoni Warrior,
Patriarch and slave to the Silver Emperor, but also Star Trooper of the Combat
College, a man torn always between competing cultural drives.
So this is Cultural Alienation, Episode Four. Guest
Gulkan has the heart, and balls, and stomach, and mighty EARS of a true Yarglat
Barbarian, but he was raised as much by the Wizard Sten-Pitilkin as he was by
anyone, who also has a claim to 'Fatherhood' on the boy, and Guests
wide-ranging experiences across the world, his many encounters with the
super-and extra-natural, his many languages, including the ever-despised
irregular verbs, gradually displace him from being a 'pure' Yarglat into
something Other. This might be the Other of Kingship, but even so it is a
lonely place to be. Unlike the Wizards, he is not part of a semi-immortal
confraternity. He can never really go home and just be Yarglat
again.
Was Cook a culturally displaced person. Based purely on
Wikipedia, it’s hard to tell. Growing first in England, then living on a tiny
tropical island for what feels like some very consequential years of his youth,
then to New Zeland where he was in the army, but as a medic, essentially the
'Wizard' to the 'Warriors'; one of them, a healer amongst killers. Then a
writer, a father, a teacher in Japan, a Cancer Patient. If the Age of Darkness is a Guide, Cook was
never at home at home.
Still, it is partly through this alienation-from-self
that actual growth is allowed to take place. Olo Malan is in trouble! The
Swarms have taken Argan! Nothing works! An ordinary Yarglat Barbarian is not
going to cut it! Neither is an ordinary Pirate, Yudonic Knight, Wormlord,
Frangoin Warrior or Banker. The world needs new souls and the only way to make
a new soul from the ones you’ve got is to start cutting.
…
"So remember, when you find yourself in the
presence of a happily loquacious old soldier, that he is but a victim of
selective amnesia - a fact which may be amply proved by asking him to narrate
for you the manner of the death of those of his friends who took the longest to
die."
.....
PART FIVE – The Cease and the Substance
“One of the terrors of human existence is that, as we
get older, the world loses its solidity and stability which it possessed during
childhood, then the existing order seemed absolute. Indeed, to a wizard, the
world seems at times a sheer phantasmagoria, in which empires shift, deform,
and melt like fog in the sun, and in which the very gods themselves change the
faces which they show to humanity as they endure their evolution”. –
(likely) Sten-Pitilkin
…
You can kind of lose your shit when you remember that
outright child abusers with less talent wrote less books and had more success
than Hugh Cook, who died of cancer in 2008.
Let’s try not to. Instead, like a Wizard rather than a
Warrior, let us consider;
Hugh Cook consistently and brilliantly wrote books that
people didn’t want in a register and form that they were probably never going
to understand. He wrote in a bubble as perfect, playful, brilliant and
indifferent as Shabble. His bubbleation is part of what made him interesting. He
was probably never going to be a big commercial success.
He also couldn’t write believers, curiously. While he
never treats religion with contempt, and is usually sympathetic to the
spiritual yearnings which support it, I don’t think he ever wrote a religion
from the inside so to speak. All faiths were one to Cook, or simply
different species of animal.
What then, did he do?
The first is perhaps not the most important, but is the
simplest to explain; he created a ten-volume fantasy epic in which all of the
characters and events interweave in one simultaneous and concurrent story,
so that you can turn back to a book written four years previously and
read conversations and interactions that cross years in real time. No-one
has done this before or since. It is an achievement unique in fiction.
(Disprove me in the comments if you can).
He wrote stories of deep political, social and psychological realism in the most fantastic
and unreal setting. He wrote men, (and some women), of often bad, always flawed,
character, but took us through their dark lives without surrendering to either
cynicism or sentimentality. His empathy for humanity never wavered, nor did his
eye glisten with bubbling tears, he showed us only what-was, but with a clear
sympathy that told us we should value even that, and value it more because that
is what is really there, not what we dream or imagine is there.
He showed us the structures, empires, faiths, horrors,
trauma, failures and sacrifices that might be involved if you had to actually,
really, save a world.
Perhaps most importantly, while refusing to lie to us
about anything that mattered, he lied beautifully about everything else, which
must surely be the gold standard for a writer.
He had a lot of dream sequences. Like a lot a lot. I
don’t know if there is any volume without one and many have several. I’m not
complaining. Many are the best parts of the books they are in and I took a word
from one for the title of this essay; ‘Zaan, said the sun’. Still, there are a
lot of visionary dream sequences. (And a fair amount of sun-worship.)
He wrote a lot of horny teenage boys. It felt like a
whole load. Really maybe a ridiculous amount. There was a lot of horny in these
books. He also had a pretty regular, almost ongoing, dialogue between the
Soldier and the Scholar, always wearing different faces and leading different
lives, but in some ways the same conversation and the same argument, over the
nature and truth of violence and its place in our world.
He created a world! Olo Malan of the Tulip Continuum!
Land of the multicoloured stars. Home to bloodstone Injiltaprajura, Dara Ken
Halvar, the city of the Sun. He made all of Argan, of Parengarengea and
Yestron, Tameran and the Ravilish Lands!
He unfortunately wrote Sean Sarazin, aka WATASHI! However
he also wrote Yen Olass, Drake Deldragon Douhey and Shabble, which goes some
way to putting him in the black. He also put maybe way too many ideas,
characters, plotlines and crosshatching literary techniques into ‘Witch &
Wazir’, but I tell you what that book is a vibe and, as Steln-Pilitkin
would say;
“The parchment holds the ink, and holds it for all
time. So if the date be lost in the first reading, then it will be found in the
second.
A second reading!
Is the historian truly counselling a second reading of
his works?
Yes he is! And shamelessly!
Let it be clearly stated that a second reading is not
just to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is a
True History, one which faithfully stives to render the tangled complexities of
life itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single reading
will not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so how
should they be clearcut plain to the onlooker?
Read then this history a second time!
…..
He (presumably), organised his notes wonderfully, though,
it seems even the ever-perspicuous Cook may indeed have lost track of some of
the plot thread of some of the more intensely complicated tangles;
“… if you think it a long story, and a weary one, and
one quite unnecessary for the performance of this history, why, then blame not
the poor historian. Blame rather a nitpicking tradition of jealous and
intellectually impoverished scholarship which lacks the ability to appreciate
the grander of a full-scale historical tapestry, and therefore devotes itself
to picking loose any undefended thread at the corner of such a tapestry.'
Having thus defended this particular thread, let us
return to the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin.”
- likely Hjosta Sten-Pitilkin
The Needful Knowledge
Long ago I made you a promise which I have not forgotten.
The secret of ‘Zaan, Olo Malan!’ The final and ultimate piece of wisdom that
Hugh Cook would want you to take away from this epic saga! Know then, this;
“... know then the wound! First, one must look, for
only by looking can one know. One must seek for the damage, remembering always
that piercing weapons – one thinks in particular of a quarrel shot from a
crossbow – will damage with both instrike and outstrike.
Having found hole or holes, raggages or cleavages,
tears and rips, gouges and gaps, one must path the same. And immediately! Have
you no bandage? Then your hand must serve! But unless one be naked, the one
surely has bandages, for the cloth off ones back will serve when all else
fails. The cleaner the cloth, the better, though the cleanest of cloth is no
use to a washerwoman who has died of bloodloss while the ardent hygienist has
been searching for sterility.
Say it of certainty: in the face of bleeding, the
rescuer must match the urgency of the pumping heart. The wound must be patched,
and immediately.
So when you are at war, and your bloodbrother has his
swordhand hacked away by a battleaxe, then do not hesitate. First kill the
axe-wielder. Then wipe the filth of battle from the palm of your hand, and
clamp that living flesh of yours to the pumping agony of your bosom friend. It
can be done in moment, if you have the courage to save as well to kill.
Press your hand to the hot wet pumpage of blood. Press
hard, and crush the bloodflow down to nothing. Then keep your hand in place
until some hard-panting hero of your acquaintance can spare a few moments from
his saga-work to assist with a bandage. Then you had best seek the help of a
healer, though the perversity of the world is such that you may find every
available pox doctor to have been slaughtered in the first heat of battle.
If such be the case, then your friends handless arm
should for the moment be placed in a sling, so that the well-bandaged wound is
kept elevated, for the heart finds it harder to pump blood to elevations. And –
mind! – do not allow the wound to be dipped in liquid ordure, or steeped in
boiling lead, or packed with red mud, or plunged into the sexual aperture of a
menstruating cow. ……
…… And if you believe yourself likewise doomed to go
to war, then know this of a certainty: if your study in its folly concerns
itself with the mere use of weapons then you too are doomed to stand some day
in helpless guilt, watching as the object of your pity dies. So let this text
then carry an explicit message, a message apt for our age of ceaseless warfare:
those who would study the use of weapons should study likewise the cure of that
use.”
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