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rushthatspeaksI swear Naomi Mitchison was writing things in the twenties that nobody else considered for decades. This collection, which came out in 1929, ends with a short story set in an extrapolated dystopian 1935 Britain in which, to pacify the incredibly poor, short-lived, and overworked masses, every year everyone above a certain income carries out the plot of Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery', publicly.
Of course, Shirley Jackson didn't write 'The Lottery' until 1948.
When I think of Mitchison I think of her as out of her time, as a voice we still haven't caught up to, and I also think of her as a historian, as one of those few writers who really internalizes the ways that people thought in different parts of the past and can show how different it was.
Barbarian Stories is not quite as glowingly, magnificently brilliant as The Delicate Fire or Memoirs of a Spacewoman, but it is an amazing book: a collection of short stories, none of which contain any characters in common, none of which share a geographical setting, none of which have plots that are in any way similar, none of which even take place within fifty years of one another, which are nonetheless clearly and obviously all about the same thing. The key is in the title. In each of these stories, there are two cultures or groups which meet, sometimes clashing and sometimes not; these are stories about the ways that groups of people see one another as human, and don't, about the drawing of lines in the sand, about how this can be done within a tribe and outside it. Nobody has the moral advantage, though the sides who think that they do are more likely to be worse.
So there are people of Iron Age Dorset here, a woman whose chieftain husband has been captured by enemies, desperate to ransom him so that his followers do not make her a common possession, cold pragmatism backed with solid bravery backed with cunning, and loyalties turning on a dime for the main chance. There is a Roman citizen captured by pirates from the North, who complains all the while about the food and the weather and the work and cannot see that the people who have caught him are ransoming him fairly and dealing with him more lightly than his temper might provoke. There are the Varangian guards of Byzantium, facing the practices of courtship of the Byzantine Greek women who differ from them in everything from height to religion, all sides lost in a morass of total sexual confusion. There's the ghost of an early Christian martyr, speaking to the author to explain how it all went badly, how difficult it is to be brave at the last even if you mean to be good; there's a young Roman boy in Britain and his father and his uncle, who ride to a place called Mai Dun and cannot figure out what the natives built it for, or why it is filled with sheep. There are wishing wells and angry devils, crops planted and crops failed, attempted rape and successful marriage, Harald Hadrada of Norway helped in battle by his dead relative Saint Olaf. And all of it comes down to the increasingly angry and confused under-question: how do you decide which side to be on? and why does there have to be a side?
The writing style changes, story by story, clear and simple language in the early Bronze Age moving to the crisp diction and sunny images of the reach of Roman law, and then the confusion and complexities of Byzantium. There are happy endings and unhappy endings and uncertain ones, and many of the stories are very short for the punch they pack, though some are better overall than others (the one with the martyr's ghost comes so close to working, but doesn't, quite, is ever so slightly too sentimental a voice).
Someday I may read a Mitchison that doesn't read as though it were written yesterday about tomorrow. This is not that day; I recommend this. It's less ideologically slanted than I've made it sound, for it does care about its characters and settings and plots individually, deeply, and it is mostly questions rather than answers.
And then that final story, both extrapolation of her question and a possible answer to it (the mere shift in setting from past into future lends the never-was the semantics of distressed, unlikely prophecy): the lottery which the observer finds completely numbing, neither horrific nor interesting, another day at the races-- but, she thinks, the people must get some satisfaction from it; only the death of those they hate can make their lives bearable, even if it's almost entirely symbolic and enacts no real change. Interestingly, this story predicts that there would be a second world war, worse than the first. I don't see many stories from the twenties that do that. The killing of the rich was started, here, as a gesture against the war profiteers by a tired and traumatized generation of veterans. I'm not sure how well it would read without the weight of the entire book behind it, but as a climax it's so sharp it cuts almost painlessly. After all, what else is anybody going to do, in times like that, considering?
Of course, Shirley Jackson didn't write 'The Lottery' until 1948.
When I think of Mitchison I think of her as out of her time, as a voice we still haven't caught up to, and I also think of her as a historian, as one of those few writers who really internalizes the ways that people thought in different parts of the past and can show how different it was.
Barbarian Stories is not quite as glowingly, magnificently brilliant as The Delicate Fire or Memoirs of a Spacewoman, but it is an amazing book: a collection of short stories, none of which contain any characters in common, none of which share a geographical setting, none of which have plots that are in any way similar, none of which even take place within fifty years of one another, which are nonetheless clearly and obviously all about the same thing. The key is in the title. In each of these stories, there are two cultures or groups which meet, sometimes clashing and sometimes not; these are stories about the ways that groups of people see one another as human, and don't, about the drawing of lines in the sand, about how this can be done within a tribe and outside it. Nobody has the moral advantage, though the sides who think that they do are more likely to be worse.
So there are people of Iron Age Dorset here, a woman whose chieftain husband has been captured by enemies, desperate to ransom him so that his followers do not make her a common possession, cold pragmatism backed with solid bravery backed with cunning, and loyalties turning on a dime for the main chance. There is a Roman citizen captured by pirates from the North, who complains all the while about the food and the weather and the work and cannot see that the people who have caught him are ransoming him fairly and dealing with him more lightly than his temper might provoke. There are the Varangian guards of Byzantium, facing the practices of courtship of the Byzantine Greek women who differ from them in everything from height to religion, all sides lost in a morass of total sexual confusion. There's the ghost of an early Christian martyr, speaking to the author to explain how it all went badly, how difficult it is to be brave at the last even if you mean to be good; there's a young Roman boy in Britain and his father and his uncle, who ride to a place called Mai Dun and cannot figure out what the natives built it for, or why it is filled with sheep. There are wishing wells and angry devils, crops planted and crops failed, attempted rape and successful marriage, Harald Hadrada of Norway helped in battle by his dead relative Saint Olaf. And all of it comes down to the increasingly angry and confused under-question: how do you decide which side to be on? and why does there have to be a side?
The writing style changes, story by story, clear and simple language in the early Bronze Age moving to the crisp diction and sunny images of the reach of Roman law, and then the confusion and complexities of Byzantium. There are happy endings and unhappy endings and uncertain ones, and many of the stories are very short for the punch they pack, though some are better overall than others (the one with the martyr's ghost comes so close to working, but doesn't, quite, is ever so slightly too sentimental a voice).
Someday I may read a Mitchison that doesn't read as though it were written yesterday about tomorrow. This is not that day; I recommend this. It's less ideologically slanted than I've made it sound, for it does care about its characters and settings and plots individually, deeply, and it is mostly questions rather than answers.
And then that final story, both extrapolation of her question and a possible answer to it (the mere shift in setting from past into future lends the never-was the semantics of distressed, unlikely prophecy): the lottery which the observer finds completely numbing, neither horrific nor interesting, another day at the races-- but, she thinks, the people must get some satisfaction from it; only the death of those they hate can make their lives bearable, even if it's almost entirely symbolic and enacts no real change. Interestingly, this story predicts that there would be a second world war, worse than the first. I don't see many stories from the twenties that do that. The killing of the rich was started, here, as a gesture against the war profiteers by a tired and traumatized generation of veterans. I'm not sure how well it would read without the weight of the entire book behind it, but as a climax it's so sharp it cuts almost painlessly. After all, what else is anybody going to do, in times like that, considering?
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Date: 2011-07-12 12:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-12 03:45 pm (UTC)I don't suppose it's in print?