Distant Suns: Caveat Oriens
Chen. To stand still. To gallop at full speed.
Wan. A small mouth. Some say a large mouth.
Ch’he. Devoid of intelligence, deficiency of wit, silly, idiotic. Also used for borrowing and returning books.
Pee. A dog under the table.
A dog with short legs.
A short-headed dog.
Maou Tsaou. A scholar not succeeding and giving himself over to liquor.
When fantasy uses mythology as a base, and it’s right, it’s fantastic. Unfortunately the typical result is more David Gemmell than Evangeline Walton. Arthurian, Celtic and Norse mythology have been mined so steadily for decades, it’s both depressingly fusty, and almost part of the furniture now; we think of elves and dwarves as fantasy, rather than Norse.
Which is why I’m always interested in reading fantasy based around non-European mythologies. The results can be just as dreadful, but at least the scenery is different.
Bridge of Birds is probably the best World Fantasy Award winner you’ve never heard of. Written in 1985 by Barry Hughart, and followed by two more books in the same world and characters, Bridge of Birds uses Chinese mythology as the base for its delightful story.
Propelled by two main characters – the irascible centenarian Master Li; a number one graduate of the imperial exams, saddled with a “slight flaw in his character”, and the narrator Number Ten Ox; plucky, naïve, muscular and faithful.
Despite the oriental setting, reading Bridge of Birds immediately brings Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to mind. Master Li and Number Ten Ox careen no less wildly through their medieval setting. However, unlike Don Quixote there is a strong narrative underneath it all and a keen intelligence to both characters.
Also, they’re likeable – and this extends to the whole novel. What I really loved about Bridge of Birds was its humanity. Hughart largely eschews the evil-without-a-cause that provides so much fantasy with its narrative impetus, and invests even the most repugnant villains with a motivation, and sometimes even a justification.
In this respect, the book mirrors its mythological roots. Few legends outside of the religious waste time with pure evil; unknown and unknowable. Far more common is the evil motivated by jealously, anger, lust etc. Think of Zeus’ rapes or Hera’s vindictive transference.
This is all consolidated by Hughart’s deft weaving of classical mythology into his very creative story. Readers familiar with even a slice of Chinese mythology will recognise some of their favourite stories or devices. Even more impressive, however, is the way Hughart manages to capture the tones of these legends, effortlessly replicating the humour of Journey to The West, the pathos of Chang’e, and the mystery of fox fairies.
And so Bridge of Bridges becomes one of those rare fantasies that adroitly commands several emotions. The books are undeniably funny – Hughart has a light touch and a flair for description – but they are also quite sad in parts. Bridge of Birds is not blind to the suffering of both common and rich people, and demonstrates an understanding that true fairy tales do no always have a happy ending – and that this is in fact one of the keystones linking mythology to life. It’s just as much how to deal with the bad times as the good.
Of course, I’m getting very functional here, but it’s a question I find myself often asking when reading, and particularly when reading SF/F. Bettelheim eloquently extrapolates the social function of fairy tales, and it’s a mantle that’s been very effectively taken up in intervening years by academics like Jack Zipes, Maria Tartar and Marina Warner (also a gifted novelist in her own right).
These questions clamour loudest when reading SF/F that plays with mythological tropes. Do these books adapt, subvert, or obliterate the original function? And in such a radically different world from one where a church bell could be the loudest thing in a person’s life, how do we navigate a new meaning that neither proselytises nor misrepresents something that is after all very new to the printed medium; the vagaries of oral tradition, pinned down on pages like butterflies in a display case.
I’d like to make a case that Bridge of Birds gets it right. The book isn’t about how to live – a rookie mistake when it comes to writing fairy tales – it’s about living, a far more three-dimensional, nonsensical, tragic, hilarious and exciting proposition.
Hughart only wrote two more books, both featuring Master Li and Number Ten Ox. The story behind his publishing travails – for example, he wasn’t told he won the World Fantasy Award until much later – forms a sad story in itself. Some readers have argued that the follow up novels are not as strong as Bridge of Birds, but I disagree. The first mouthful of a truly singular meal is always the best, however the end of Eight Skilled Gentlemen, the last novel, – whilst predictable – is no less exciting, sad, brave and fitting for that.
These books are not easy to find – I got mine from the US (a truly beautiful and substantial Subterranean Press edition), but they are worth it if you are a fan of mythology in your fantasy, picaresque adventures, or something you’re not going to find down at Angus and Robertson.
I read Bridge of Birds several years ago, and it was a refreshing change from the usual fairytales in fantasy novels. As you say, elves and dwarves are everywhere now. I think they’re almost part of the furniture now for regular fantasy readers, and they’ve lost that sense of the fantastic that they had for me as a child. Hughart’s book introduced a new-to-me world and I really enjoyed it’s light touch – it felt like anything might happen to such haphazard characters, which was part of the fun.
You’re completely right about Hughart eschewing “evil so evil” – everything in the book is beautifully deep and rich, yet drawn with such a light touch that you never realise that you are accepting every last unreliable moment of the narration until it’s too late. Wonderful books.
Great post, charming and informative.
Sorry to quibble over one minor point, but…
Zeus and Hera *were* part of a religion.
True Havana, that’s true. I wasn’t really saying that weren’t religious per se, just that Hades doesn’t correspond to satan, etc. My knowledge of non-monotheist religions is a bit sketchy, so maybe I should have phrased it as more of a dig at monotheist myth and legend.
I think there’s space for a whole post simply on the tragedy of the cultural commons, since the adaptations from mythology that become generic and stale is a strange kind of tragedy in which no-one is to blame. I can assume its also the same with sub genres that become genres, like detective fiction, vampire fiction, superheros etc. We wax lyrical about contemporary recontextualisations and post modernities that either shed or celebrate the conventions (well at least the conventional frills) whilst only coming to the source material polluted by expectations. And the starting point ends up lacking all those pointless frills and often displays a striking (but often naive) innovativeness that still shines through.
In fact, I would venture to suggest that many people (including my teenage self) was only aware of the above genres in their parody form in popular culture; parodies that weren’t directly making fun of any material but had become stock parodies in the culture. This may have masked the virtues of the ideas seen with untainted gaze, but whom can I blame for this attrition. The people whom kept it going were only working on legitimate cultural terrain.
On the main topic, I tried to read Bridge of Birds once and stopped. This is a mystery to me. With some exceptions I struggle to read fantasy. There us no snobbery involved at all, and I can’t find any reason why I should have any problem. I have no problem with SF, and the dividing line is so arbitrary.
I actually started reading it because I went through a phase of (unsuccessfully) trying to find fantasy I could keep reading, to challenge this problem (2nd hand parodies convinced me I didn’t like comics….I was astonishingly wrong). It was recommended to me. I started reading it, noted its quality, got distracted and stopped.
Perhaps I’ll try again. Maybe learning Mandarin and the associated cultural baggage gives me a better appreciation of the subtleties of the views/humour etc.
I don’t read fantasy, more of an SF man myself (and I resent that fantasy has almost overwhelmed SF).
But, putting my scholar of the classics hat on for just a moment, in relation to Havana Affair’s comment “Zeus and Hera *were* part of a religion.”.
Well, the answer to that is really, yes and no, and not really. To classical civilisation, “religion” wasn’t the mythology per se – mythology was typically a etiology, an excuse to claim some particular territory, or an exercise in nation building. “Religion” in classical civilisation is the practice of cult; the thesmorphia, or the sacrifice to the Genius of the Emperor on January 1. “Religion” in other words, is a practical act carried out in public (or to a select group or witnesses). The Zeus of mythology is quite different to the particular Zeus that you’re sacrificing to at this particular altar at this particular time. And there’s plenty of “religion” around important gods (the Phyrgian Mother, for example) for which there’s only a little mythology extant.
I think it very well could Richard – Hughart isn’t just an armchair fan of this kind of stuff; after the Korean War, he worked in China for many years with I think an export company of some description. It really is a tragedy that his negative experiences put him off writing.
Whilst there is certainly a formula that becomes apparent over the novels; I truly don’t believe they are weaker for it. After all, Propp outlined the formula for Russian wonder-tales so clearly, and Aarne-Thompson did it for fairy-tales in general, but it certainly doesn’t them any the weaker (esp the wonder-tales, some gold is there to be had).
I do agree with you on the power of originals, but in some respects – with regard to mythology and perhaps not genre so much – I think the idea of an ‘original’ is a suspicious one. These stories are older than any language we now possess, and who knows how or why they circulated prior to the written word?
And this is why I think the power of themes and symbols is so paramount. Words can change, but a bird is a bird in any language, and it might mean similar things in different languages or cultures.
What I do find tremendously interesting is the way these stories evolve over time, and the emphasis on certain symbols changes. Beauty and The Beast is a _fantastic_ example of this – the story has altered a tremendous amount from its initial editions.
Is there a mod? Too much linky has put a comment in the slammer. Ta!
To cite a recent example of very, very stale myth-based fantasy that I pulled from a book exchange while travelling (nice disclaimer!): The White Raven by Diana Paxson. Tristan and Isolde, ruined by a writer with an academic knowledge of the “history” of their story.
I resent that SF overwhelmed the Western and am bitterly gleeful that fantasy should return the favour.
So Gilmae where do you sit on Joe Lansdale?
Ah yes, my use of the term “originals” was misguided, and my whole comment is a bit muddled.
To express it another way, works of art like American Gothic, the Mona Lisa, or some of the better known classical music is so established they mean no more than a stop sign or a coca cola logo. We know them since birth so its too hard to look at them.
In the same way the establishment and genrefication of tropes can blind us to why they were popular enough to become tropes in the first place. The sadness of Elves fading away, the Gatsbylike alienation of the hard-boiled detective, or the anger against social injustice and corrupt authority in superheros (they were created by and for urban poor migrants, when were they ever to be the quasi fascists half arsed academics wanted them to be).
And of course we can’t stop this without rationing any idea to stop it becoming too popular.
But imagine a moral dillemma, you find a concept in a mythology or another book or wherever and you love it, you want to adapt it, but there’s always the slight chance that should it be successful enough, over time it will be bleached out into standard material, the magic you saw lost by overexposure.
But of course its better that other people can share the magic rather than you keeping it to yourself.
Acquisitive, patrick.
If anyone is interested in similar stories, Jeanne Larsten’s ( a professor of English at ) three novels Bronze Mirror, Silk road and Manchu Palaces all explore Chinese history and mythology via a young woman’s experience. One of the things I love about these books is the way she wears her learning and research lightly. Also how the mythological worlds meet, influence and blend with the “real” world of the protagonist.
I found these after I’d read everything by Hughart twenty times, and I was hankering for more. If you like fantasy set in places other than the bog-standard medieval/Norse/European settings, find these. I got my copies via ABEBooks.
“…or the anger against social injustice and corrupt authority in superheros…”
Unless Lex Luthor, the Joker, the Green Goblin, and Bluto were all agents of “social injustice,” then I’m kind of missing something here…
“social injustice and corrupt authority”
I’d rephrase that as “…corrupt power”
Larsten sounds really cool Murasaki. Has anyone here read Liz Williams’ Inspector Chen novels?
Re the superheros – go way back to 1930s and 40s superheros and note how often the bad guys are corrupt politicians and slum lords, and then how superheros were fighting hitler in 1940, 18 months before Peal Harbour, when active opposition to Nazism was almost exclusively a left wing cause. The science fiction elements became paramount only in the late 1950s, both because of the sputnik mania and because the Comics Code put a lid on anything that could be vaguely subversive, like having black astronauts. [Although then in the 1960s they got the civil rights bug and ran with it hard, and by the 1970s you had Green Lantern/Green Arrow unsubtlety, but I digress].
That said, using your specific examples, some of the less subtle Spider-Man comics tend to explicitly put the Green Goblin in the military-industrial complex.
patrick – On Inspector Chen, I enjoy them alot, but I particularly like the way Qiu handles the difficult and extremely awkward exposition needed to explain 1990s Shanghai to a English speaking audience. If a writer has a detective in 1920s America enter a speakeasy, we’re conditioned to expect the intricacies of official corruption, seedy glamour and organised crime that were associated with them. We at least know what a speakeasy was, and about prohibition. if Qiu describes Chen entering a government store, he needs to explain rationing and price controls compared to newly emergent private stores, and the corruption that allows sales to those with the best guanxi, and then the meaning of guanxi and then the blackmarket in subsidised good and on and on and on.
it still feels like exposition, that’s unavoidable, but he handles it well.
Um, amazingly, different Inspector Chen
Tell me more about your Inspector Chen, that sounds cool!!!
They’re a series of detective novels based in Shanghai, starting in 1991 and moving on, written by a Chinese ex-pat (Qiu Xiaolong) living in the United States, starting with Death of a Red Heroine.
The protagonist, Inspector Chen, is a graduate of Chinese literature drafted somewhat absurdly into a high ranking police position in the rush to get educated cadres after the mess of the cultural revolution.
The stories involve crimes committed against a background of absurd party mechanations, lingering legacies of the cultural revolution, the rapid onset of market economics and the effect all of these have on daily life in Shanghai during that time.
Additionally, because of Chen’s background, he tends to ruminate on poetry and food alot, which is a very interesting element.
Best of all though is Qiu properly appreciates his subject matter (afterall, he is chinese, although that’s not a requirement), so he avoids most of the orientalist bullshit that could infest something like this, especially as topical a society as post-Deng China. We get characters, not carictatures of the sinister triad member or exotic woman. But since he’s also American, he’s writing in English for an audience that may need the intricacies explained somewhat, as described in my post above.
They are quite easy to find in Australian book stores in the crime/mystery section, but look under X, since the bookstores are either confused or anticipating confusion on the part of shoppers.
I’ve always wondered why more Western speculative writers haven’t tried to do fun things with the Hindi pantheon – as rich a collection of red-blooded gods with superpowers embodying transcendental issues yet as entangled in carnal matters as you’d find anywhere.
Big shout out here to Roger Zelzany for “Lord Of Light” which did just that with a nice meta-story twist that introduced into an amazing scenerio, Siddhartha Gautama as a geo-political culture-jammer.
And to Ian MacDonald for combining the Hindi pantheon as AIs avatars in ‘River Of Gods’.
As long as you don’t lose track of the central meme in well-selling and unoriginal classical Western fantasy/SF/slipstream fiction – a dull dog in a humdrum life is suddenly plucked into a new world where he or less occasionally she could be the chosen one to make things better – always provided they can suffer through a potentially fatal flaw or trail. From Jesus to Frodo to Neo it’s always basically been a Mary Sue exercise, mitigated only by the author’s skill in backstory and backdrop.
Trial! I meant trial. My fatal flaw has always been paying not enough attention to the trial of my spelling. Trail! I meant trail.
Yep! They are tres fantastique!
/bad pun
Really, they’re among the few series these days where I actually get excited waiting for another one!
He’s got a new book out – shorter pieces from the same world.
The “rewriting” is something of a sub-genre by itself these days. I’m looking forward to Le Guin’s new Lavinia but there’s certainly some that leave a lot to be desired. I’ve been reading Theodore Judson’s The Martian General’s Daughter on and off. It’s basically a retelling of Commodus’ reign – but set in the nearish future with not much explanation of how Earth (and Mars) got to be so like Rome circa 193AD in 2193AD. That’s ok – there doesn’t need to be – and here maybe it’s more at the fantastic end of the spectrum. The writing is assured, characters well developed, and some of the humour and irony telling. But – you know what’s going to happen next – if you know any Roman history at all basically – don’t need to have read Polybius!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_General%27s_Daughter
I suspect it’s a harder trick to pull off than some might assume.
Speaking of Hindi pantheon, there is of course the classic Song of Kali. It does show its age a but, but still a decent read imho.
thanks for all the tips everyone.
I think that Bulgakov fit in here, in The Master and Margarita he mixes old Russian, Christian and Leninist mythology. and anyway it is a fine book and anyone who could bend Stalin the way he did deserves every mention possible.