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rushthatspeaksReview for the book I read Wednesday, July 13th, on the plane on the way to Boston.
Oh dear.
So, you know how I've been reading David Lindsay in aggregate, because some part of my brain suddenly went oh hey he must have written something other than Voyage to Arcturus and there was this university library sitting right there?
I am SO GLAD I left this one to last. SO SO GLAD. Because Sphinx was one of the best fantasy novels I have read in some time, and if I had read Devil's Tor before getting hold of Lindsay's other work I would never have read any David Lindsay ever ever ever again. I am going to find it very hard to explain to you exactly how terrible this book is. It is bad in the simple, basic, ordinary ways-- prose, construction, over-wordiness-- and then it is bad in a dimension I can only call world-historical, a dimension which makes me both sorrowful and angry. And yet there are ways in which I can't blame Lindsay specifically for its badness (I'll get into that), though there are ways in which I can AND DO. It is so bad I have not tagged it in this entry with the 'genre: awesomely terrible' tag, because there is nothing awesome about it. I think it is the worst book I have read this year.
One thing that I appreciate about Lindsay: he was always trying something new. He would write a book, and it would sell three copies (every single one to a future famous author), and it would make no money, and he would write another book that was totally different, in hopes that it would sell more. In fact the one novel of his that I have not yet managed to track down is a blood-and-thunder swashbuckling serial along the lines of, say, The Prisoner of Zenda (I can't picture what this could be like). He was always changing, both for artistic reasons, in that his philosophy grew and matured and shifted, but also because he was looking for the main chance, the publisher's check at the end of the rainbow. He tried straightforward fantasy epic (Arcturus) and a mode resembling early British ballad (The Haunted Woman) and drawing-room tragedy (Sphinx) and none of it got anywhere.
So Devil's Tor is David Lindsay doing Thomas Hardy.
NO, REALLY. Stylistically that is exactly what it is. I cannot imagine why he thought this was a good idea. He hasn't the ear. I don't like Hardy at all, but I will admit he had some ear; this reads more like the parodies of Hardy one gets in something like Cold Comfort Farm. Paragraphs and paragraphs of the moor being emotionally reflective of everyone's dully inarticulate unspoken feelings. Symbolic lightning. Symbolic sunrises. It is the most melodramatic geography. And it blows the pacing of the book all to hell, because whenever there's an emotional effect or something that's meant to be moving we get two goddamn pages of landscape portraiture. It's repetitive, too, because the book takes place in a quite limited geographic area, and there is only so much one can say about any given rock. I had the feeling by the end of the novel that I could have drawn a topographical surveyor's map of the titular tor at about one-inch resolution. I will not say no writer could pull that off without being boring, because there are more things in heaven and earth, but that writer is not Lindsay. Of a five hundred page novel, I would have cut half the length if I were editor; and that, the lesser of the book's disastrous flaws, is why I fell asleep reading it six separate times on the airplane. (I'd nothing else I hadn't read with me that wasn't in checked baggage. Silly, I know, but it was a five hundred page novel by a writer whose other work I've liked.) I could only take it for so long and then my brain would refuse.
As for the greater of the book's flaws, this is the thing that's going to take some time to explain.
Lindsay is fond of mythology, as are most fantasy novelists, and brings to his work a great background in Biblical and apocryphal Christian lore, some Jewish stories (mostly blurred), and a lot of scholarly reading on Icelandic sagas. The problem with the specific way in which he studied myth and interpreted it appears in this book only out of all his work, and I am glad, because that tells me it is a scholarly affectation and world-building schema, not a deeply-held set of beliefs. On matters of race, specifically anti-Semitism, Lindsay is usually neutral-to-good for his time period: which is to say, everyone in his books is from Arcturus and green or something, or is of an upper-class British milieu which the novel never steps outside, but one does not have cause to start wondering overmuch about his politics beyond recognizing their essential myopia.
But. Allow me to speak to you about the history of mythology. It is not a pleasant history.
The myths and legends of northern Europe began to become a respectable scholarly study, as opposed to a thing for hobbyist antiquarians, in the late nineteenth century, at about the same time that linguists were beginning to hypothesize the existence of the language we now call Indo-European. When folklorists and ethnographers began to collate the stories they were finding, they started to notice commonalities and shared elements in those stories. It is pretty much common knowledge nowadays that you will find indigenous versions of Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast and so on in many, many places throughout the world, and the current theories as to why have to do with the shared things about human experiences in relatively contiguous cultures. But when the similarities started to be evident, it was surprising to scholars; and, since there was starting to be evidence of a shared language from which the languages of western Europe had descended, it seemed only logical to the scholars that these stories also had descended in their scattered shards from the original tales in that language. (Maybe some did, though more recent anthropological analysis of many fairytales suggests a medieval point of origin.)
Add the links between Indo-European and Sanskrit, multiply by the fact that most of these scholars were Germans beginning to forge a national history as a unified nation out of a real mess of previous wars and regional conflicts (the process of nationalizing German mythology can be seen very clearly in Wagner, who took over the Scandinavian myth-cycles wholesale), throw in some bad anthropology, and you get The Terribly Problematic Aryan Theory, which dominated mythography and the vast portion of mythological and folklore study for oh about eighty years. The Aryan theory holds that the speakers of Indo-European were a bunch of blond blue-eyed barbarian types who came either down from Norway into Europe or out of India into Europe and took over via cultural superiority, imposing their language and story-groups via military dominance on the (assumed-Semitic) peoples who'd been there previously. The key factors are: blond, German at the time of study, related to the Vikings, had at some point conquered India and so could claim all the Vedas and other sacred Sanskrit epics and literature, spoke Indo-European, and-- a newish theory as of the early nineteen-teens-- Eugenically Superior, or else they wouldn't have won.
This theory has been since proven to be total horseshit. But, if you were a person who was seriously interested in mythology between oh the 1880s and the late 1920s and possibly a bit later, and you were reading anything beyond Frazer (Frazer has many flaws but not so much that one), this was what you knew to be true. This was The Unified Theory that made sense of Europe, of history, of linguistics, and it was accepted by a large majority of reputable scholars in the field. Folklore studies still have problems getting over this crap.
In Devil's Tor, David Lindsay uses the Terribly Problematic Aryan Theory to such an extent that it is literally only blond, blue-eyed people who are considered genuinely worthwhile humans. No, really. You have brown hair, you are inferior. Outright in the text. This is because the central conceit of the plot of his book is that the myths of the great mother goddess, the Magna Mater expressed as Ishtar, Cybele, Mary, Demeter, was in fact an alien/divine woman who crash-landed somewhere in northern Europe-- specifically in England at Devil's Tor-- produced children who introduced intelligence into the pre-human existing species along with other features such as height and blondness, lived a long time, died, and was entombed, also at Devil's Tor. In this worldbuilding anyone who isn't blond and blue-eyed and tall isn't of pure descent. The protagonist of the book is a young woman who is haunted by this Great Mother; there is a prophecy that when two halves of a meteorite which split when her ship came down meet, the Mother will overshadow a man and a woman who put them together, and a new species will be born as much above the human as humans are above pre-sentience. In becoming The Person Who Lives Up To The Prophecy, the young woman travels deep into Lindsay's peculiar theology, which combines with this already terrible plot in a manner that makes everything even worse. I KNOW THAT'S HARD.
But a consistent feature of Lindsay's theology, in every book he ever writes, is that pain is good. Suffering is the greatest reality, pleasure is a distraction from the real purpose of the cosmos which can be revealed only through pain, and pleasure is always and only an illusion. It's kind of like an impressive misreading of Buddhism.
Therefore the young woman in order to make herself ready to bear a new savior has to reject all human pleasures and put herself through horrible pain and hate the guy who's the father, okay whatever nasty but about what I expected. HOWEVER. They also insist that the only way the child can save the world is through HURTING AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE. Because pain is good! And the (inevitably blond blue-eyed) innately superior child will of course know this instinctively and so conquer the world in blood and fire and rape all the women to cause the new race to exist NO REALLY THAT'S IN THERE and it will all be terribly terribly sad but the human race will be so much better off for it because it will be forced out of the softness and complacency of this world of illusions and pleasure and of course he quotes the Biblical 'not peace but a sword' line and.
And.
THIS BOOK CAME OUT IN 1935.
I REPEAT NINETEEN THIRTY-FIVE. ADOLF HITLER WAS CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY.
David Lindsay died before the end of World War II. A bomb landed in his bathroom while he was taking a bath, and, while it did not hurt him, it shellshocked him into crippling agoraphobia. He refused to leave his room and died of untreated dental abscesses.
I do not think he ever knew about the Holocaust.
I do not think he was a Nazi. I do not even think he was, necessarily, a racist or anti-Semite in real life, or only as much as those of his class and education level, which is to say probably pretty badly but not on a level that suggests the subject of this book was intentional. This book is, actually, in point of fact exactly what you get if the common opinions on mythology that educated people shared at that time, combined with the then popularly accepted theory of eugenics, crash into the philosophical system Lindsay had been expanding on for several novels. As I have said before, there is no evidence of anything resembling this in any of his other work.
But this book, because of its world-historical circumstances, the conscious or unconscious prejudices of its author, this book is completely nauseating, unforgivable, detestable, terrible, and vile. It absolutely literally reads as a messianic aspiration towards what Hitler thought he wanted the world to have, the Aryan Nietzschean Superman. It reads as an apologia for the genocides of Europe. I kept reading it because I could not believe it was really doing that. It was. It just kept getting worse. It even had a bit where a person with brown hair goes on about how people with blond hair are superior and you know it must be true, says this character, or a person with brown hair wouldn't admit it. It just kept getting more and more outrageously horrible.
I cannot find one redeeming thing to say about this entire fucking mess, nor do I want to. It was the last book Lindsay published during his lifetime-- that wasn't due to content, that was sales. The two he wrote after which went unpublished, The Violet Apple and The Witch, show no signs of this evil. I don't think anyone ever said to him, oh hey, you know, this book is evil, except those who had been calling his work evil for theological reasons since the 1920s.
But this book is evil. I mean that. I do not think he meant it to be. It is evil just the same.
I have not lost my respect for Lindsay or my liking and in some cases love for his other books. I mean it about Sphinx being a masterpiece.
But if I ever need to teach a class on the pernicious and poisonous effects of anti-Semitism as a system, of the ways in which widely believed cultural notions influenced people into allowing hell on earth, of how even those who considered themselves and were considered by others the wise and the good could so fail to see the humanity of others without even noticing themselves doing it-- yeah, this goes right there on the fucking syllabus. Exhibit A.
The whole thing leaves me bitterly furious.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
Oh dear.
So, you know how I've been reading David Lindsay in aggregate, because some part of my brain suddenly went oh hey he must have written something other than Voyage to Arcturus and there was this university library sitting right there?
I am SO GLAD I left this one to last. SO SO GLAD. Because Sphinx was one of the best fantasy novels I have read in some time, and if I had read Devil's Tor before getting hold of Lindsay's other work I would never have read any David Lindsay ever ever ever again. I am going to find it very hard to explain to you exactly how terrible this book is. It is bad in the simple, basic, ordinary ways-- prose, construction, over-wordiness-- and then it is bad in a dimension I can only call world-historical, a dimension which makes me both sorrowful and angry. And yet there are ways in which I can't blame Lindsay specifically for its badness (I'll get into that), though there are ways in which I can AND DO. It is so bad I have not tagged it in this entry with the 'genre: awesomely terrible' tag, because there is nothing awesome about it. I think it is the worst book I have read this year.
One thing that I appreciate about Lindsay: he was always trying something new. He would write a book, and it would sell three copies (every single one to a future famous author), and it would make no money, and he would write another book that was totally different, in hopes that it would sell more. In fact the one novel of his that I have not yet managed to track down is a blood-and-thunder swashbuckling serial along the lines of, say, The Prisoner of Zenda (I can't picture what this could be like). He was always changing, both for artistic reasons, in that his philosophy grew and matured and shifted, but also because he was looking for the main chance, the publisher's check at the end of the rainbow. He tried straightforward fantasy epic (Arcturus) and a mode resembling early British ballad (The Haunted Woman) and drawing-room tragedy (Sphinx) and none of it got anywhere.
So Devil's Tor is David Lindsay doing Thomas Hardy.
NO, REALLY. Stylistically that is exactly what it is. I cannot imagine why he thought this was a good idea. He hasn't the ear. I don't like Hardy at all, but I will admit he had some ear; this reads more like the parodies of Hardy one gets in something like Cold Comfort Farm. Paragraphs and paragraphs of the moor being emotionally reflective of everyone's dully inarticulate unspoken feelings. Symbolic lightning. Symbolic sunrises. It is the most melodramatic geography. And it blows the pacing of the book all to hell, because whenever there's an emotional effect or something that's meant to be moving we get two goddamn pages of landscape portraiture. It's repetitive, too, because the book takes place in a quite limited geographic area, and there is only so much one can say about any given rock. I had the feeling by the end of the novel that I could have drawn a topographical surveyor's map of the titular tor at about one-inch resolution. I will not say no writer could pull that off without being boring, because there are more things in heaven and earth, but that writer is not Lindsay. Of a five hundred page novel, I would have cut half the length if I were editor; and that, the lesser of the book's disastrous flaws, is why I fell asleep reading it six separate times on the airplane. (I'd nothing else I hadn't read with me that wasn't in checked baggage. Silly, I know, but it was a five hundred page novel by a writer whose other work I've liked.) I could only take it for so long and then my brain would refuse.
As for the greater of the book's flaws, this is the thing that's going to take some time to explain.
Lindsay is fond of mythology, as are most fantasy novelists, and brings to his work a great background in Biblical and apocryphal Christian lore, some Jewish stories (mostly blurred), and a lot of scholarly reading on Icelandic sagas. The problem with the specific way in which he studied myth and interpreted it appears in this book only out of all his work, and I am glad, because that tells me it is a scholarly affectation and world-building schema, not a deeply-held set of beliefs. On matters of race, specifically anti-Semitism, Lindsay is usually neutral-to-good for his time period: which is to say, everyone in his books is from Arcturus and green or something, or is of an upper-class British milieu which the novel never steps outside, but one does not have cause to start wondering overmuch about his politics beyond recognizing their essential myopia.
But. Allow me to speak to you about the history of mythology. It is not a pleasant history.
The myths and legends of northern Europe began to become a respectable scholarly study, as opposed to a thing for hobbyist antiquarians, in the late nineteenth century, at about the same time that linguists were beginning to hypothesize the existence of the language we now call Indo-European. When folklorists and ethnographers began to collate the stories they were finding, they started to notice commonalities and shared elements in those stories. It is pretty much common knowledge nowadays that you will find indigenous versions of Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast and so on in many, many places throughout the world, and the current theories as to why have to do with the shared things about human experiences in relatively contiguous cultures. But when the similarities started to be evident, it was surprising to scholars; and, since there was starting to be evidence of a shared language from which the languages of western Europe had descended, it seemed only logical to the scholars that these stories also had descended in their scattered shards from the original tales in that language. (Maybe some did, though more recent anthropological analysis of many fairytales suggests a medieval point of origin.)
Add the links between Indo-European and Sanskrit, multiply by the fact that most of these scholars were Germans beginning to forge a national history as a unified nation out of a real mess of previous wars and regional conflicts (the process of nationalizing German mythology can be seen very clearly in Wagner, who took over the Scandinavian myth-cycles wholesale), throw in some bad anthropology, and you get The Terribly Problematic Aryan Theory, which dominated mythography and the vast portion of mythological and folklore study for oh about eighty years. The Aryan theory holds that the speakers of Indo-European were a bunch of blond blue-eyed barbarian types who came either down from Norway into Europe or out of India into Europe and took over via cultural superiority, imposing their language and story-groups via military dominance on the (assumed-Semitic) peoples who'd been there previously. The key factors are: blond, German at the time of study, related to the Vikings, had at some point conquered India and so could claim all the Vedas and other sacred Sanskrit epics and literature, spoke Indo-European, and-- a newish theory as of the early nineteen-teens-- Eugenically Superior, or else they wouldn't have won.
This theory has been since proven to be total horseshit. But, if you were a person who was seriously interested in mythology between oh the 1880s and the late 1920s and possibly a bit later, and you were reading anything beyond Frazer (Frazer has many flaws but not so much that one), this was what you knew to be true. This was The Unified Theory that made sense of Europe, of history, of linguistics, and it was accepted by a large majority of reputable scholars in the field. Folklore studies still have problems getting over this crap.
In Devil's Tor, David Lindsay uses the Terribly Problematic Aryan Theory to such an extent that it is literally only blond, blue-eyed people who are considered genuinely worthwhile humans. No, really. You have brown hair, you are inferior. Outright in the text. This is because the central conceit of the plot of his book is that the myths of the great mother goddess, the Magna Mater expressed as Ishtar, Cybele, Mary, Demeter, was in fact an alien/divine woman who crash-landed somewhere in northern Europe-- specifically in England at Devil's Tor-- produced children who introduced intelligence into the pre-human existing species along with other features such as height and blondness, lived a long time, died, and was entombed, also at Devil's Tor. In this worldbuilding anyone who isn't blond and blue-eyed and tall isn't of pure descent. The protagonist of the book is a young woman who is haunted by this Great Mother; there is a prophecy that when two halves of a meteorite which split when her ship came down meet, the Mother will overshadow a man and a woman who put them together, and a new species will be born as much above the human as humans are above pre-sentience. In becoming The Person Who Lives Up To The Prophecy, the young woman travels deep into Lindsay's peculiar theology, which combines with this already terrible plot in a manner that makes everything even worse. I KNOW THAT'S HARD.
But a consistent feature of Lindsay's theology, in every book he ever writes, is that pain is good. Suffering is the greatest reality, pleasure is a distraction from the real purpose of the cosmos which can be revealed only through pain, and pleasure is always and only an illusion. It's kind of like an impressive misreading of Buddhism.
Therefore the young woman in order to make herself ready to bear a new savior has to reject all human pleasures and put herself through horrible pain and hate the guy who's the father, okay whatever nasty but about what I expected. HOWEVER. They also insist that the only way the child can save the world is through HURTING AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE. Because pain is good! And the (inevitably blond blue-eyed) innately superior child will of course know this instinctively and so conquer the world in blood and fire and rape all the women to cause the new race to exist NO REALLY THAT'S IN THERE and it will all be terribly terribly sad but the human race will be so much better off for it because it will be forced out of the softness and complacency of this world of illusions and pleasure and of course he quotes the Biblical 'not peace but a sword' line and.
And.
THIS BOOK CAME OUT IN 1935.
I REPEAT NINETEEN THIRTY-FIVE. ADOLF HITLER WAS CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY.
David Lindsay died before the end of World War II. A bomb landed in his bathroom while he was taking a bath, and, while it did not hurt him, it shellshocked him into crippling agoraphobia. He refused to leave his room and died of untreated dental abscesses.
I do not think he ever knew about the Holocaust.
I do not think he was a Nazi. I do not even think he was, necessarily, a racist or anti-Semite in real life, or only as much as those of his class and education level, which is to say probably pretty badly but not on a level that suggests the subject of this book was intentional. This book is, actually, in point of fact exactly what you get if the common opinions on mythology that educated people shared at that time, combined with the then popularly accepted theory of eugenics, crash into the philosophical system Lindsay had been expanding on for several novels. As I have said before, there is no evidence of anything resembling this in any of his other work.
But this book, because of its world-historical circumstances, the conscious or unconscious prejudices of its author, this book is completely nauseating, unforgivable, detestable, terrible, and vile. It absolutely literally reads as a messianic aspiration towards what Hitler thought he wanted the world to have, the Aryan Nietzschean Superman. It reads as an apologia for the genocides of Europe. I kept reading it because I could not believe it was really doing that. It was. It just kept getting worse. It even had a bit where a person with brown hair goes on about how people with blond hair are superior and you know it must be true, says this character, or a person with brown hair wouldn't admit it. It just kept getting more and more outrageously horrible.
I cannot find one redeeming thing to say about this entire fucking mess, nor do I want to. It was the last book Lindsay published during his lifetime-- that wasn't due to content, that was sales. The two he wrote after which went unpublished, The Violet Apple and The Witch, show no signs of this evil. I don't think anyone ever said to him, oh hey, you know, this book is evil, except those who had been calling his work evil for theological reasons since the 1920s.
But this book is evil. I mean that. I do not think he meant it to be. It is evil just the same.
I have not lost my respect for Lindsay or my liking and in some cases love for his other books. I mean it about Sphinx being a masterpiece.
But if I ever need to teach a class on the pernicious and poisonous effects of anti-Semitism as a system, of the ways in which widely believed cultural notions influenced people into allowing hell on earth, of how even those who considered themselves and were considered by others the wise and the good could so fail to see the humanity of others without even noticing themselves doing it-- yeah, this goes right there on the fucking syllabus. Exhibit A.
The whole thing leaves me bitterly furious.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
