Fantastic histories: three short reviews

1.  Michael Moorcock's Gloriana: Or, the Unfulfill'd Queen, originally published in 1978 and recently rereleased with one revised chapter, escapes easy classification.  It's simultaneously a twisted revision of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and an alternate world scenario, just about all of it taking place in an elaborate, labyrinthine palace that is Moorcock's nod to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.  As it happens, I was reading Moorcock at about the same time I was teaching Keats' "The Eve of St. Agnes"--another work that casts the romance genre in a simultaneously luxuriant and sardonic light.  Moorcock's Gloriana, far from being a virgin, has nine children and an immense seraglio; her lack of fulfillment derives not from celibacy but from her apparent incapacity to climax.  (One can see why the novel proved somewhat controversial on its first appearance.)  Contending for control over Gloriana and her polymorphous perverse court are Lord Montfallcon, representative of Order, and Captain Arturus Quire (presumably, Spenser's Prince Arthur), an amoral, Lord of Misrule-figure.  While Montfallcon and Quire appear to exist on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Montfallcon representing absolute devotion to the good of the state and Quire devotion to an extreme version of enlightened self-interest, Montfallcon actually employs Quire to maintain the so-called Age of Gold.   Montfallcon thus maintains the illusion of national glory through recourse to the underhanded means employed in the age of the insane King Hern (an even nastier version of Henry VIII), much as the castle conceals leftover horrors from the past within its very walls.  And it can't be a good sign that, as we're told in a throwaway line, the eventual heir to Gloriana's throne will be the son of Duessa. Gloriana's eternal quest for an orgasm is itself a strikingly debauched version of the quest-romance--a kind of profane Holy Grail--and Moorcock represents the political significance of profligate sexuality in a manner akin to Aldous Huxley's in Brave New World: the pursuit of sex becomes a stand-in for the pursuit of true liberty, intellectual and otherwise.

Gloriana does not quite succeed on its own terms, although it's still a striking read.  Moorcock does a fine job crafting his alternate Albion, and the plot qua plot moves along quite nimbly.  The last third or so of the novel, however, feels somewhat crumbly: Gloriana's obsession with Capt. Quire never makes much sense, and the horrific results of Lord Montfallcon's insanity seem to be more the outcome of Moorcock's underlying political critique than of logical plot development.  The political allegory is the novel's weakest point, although Moorcock's interest in the rituals and image-making that somehow create the monarch resonates with much of the recent scholarship on Elizabeth I and other royal figures.

2.  There's lots more sex in Paul di Filippo's rambunctious The Steampunk Trilogy (1997), which consists of three interlocking novellas: "Victoria," in which Lord Melbourne conspires with a hapless inventor to replace the missing queen with a hypersexed, um, newt; "Hottentots," in which a very careerist Louis Agassiz finds his world turned upside down by a South African adventurer, the daughter of the Hottentot Venus, and sheer American cussedness; and "Walt and Emily," in which Emily Dickinson falls in love with Walt Whitman and takes a bizarre trip into spiritualist circles.  I don't normally enjoy madcap comedy, which I tend to find merely maddening, but this was hilarious.  All three novellas work on the kitchen sink principle, tossing randomly assorted historical figures into increasingly nutty events.  There are literary allusions galore, too, ranging from Walt Whitman's rampant self-quotations to Emily Dickinson's dashes to (oh, dear) a visit from one of H. P. Lovecraft's Elder Ones.  In a sense, the raging hormones on view echo the structure of the novellas themselves: lots of bodies from different times, places, and backgrounds brought into energetic collision.  Queen Victoria finds that a life of prostitution provides a truly "diverse" education; Louis Agassiz's obsession with racial purity blinds him to the historical forces at work in American culture; and Walt and Emily's one-night stand gives birth to American poetry itself.

3.  Prior to reading Mortal Love (2003), I hadn't picked up anything by Elizabeth Hand since her first novel, Winterlong.  Hand's multi-generational fantasy follows the interlocking fortunes of Radborne Comstock, a minor Victorian painter and illustrator; his descendant, Valentine, a minor scenic designer whose artistic talents have been choked off by psychiatric drugs; and Daniel, a minor cultural critic at work on a study of Tristan and Iseult.  Not surprisingly, the narrative is chock-a-block with references to medieval romances and British folklore, as well as Pre-Raphaelite and fairy painting (Jacobus Candell, one of the minor characters, is a knock-off of Richard Dadd).  At the heart of the novel is a mysterious figure associated with all things green, known by various names, who seeks through time for her lost beloved; along the way, however, she acts as Muse to artists and poets, all of whom are terribly scarred--literally and figuratively--by their encounters with her.  The mystery of artistic creativity and its relationship to death forms one of the novel's major themes.  As one of the supporting characters ultimately explains, the world of faerie produces no art:

"...You burn, somehow, even after you die.  We just go out, like a flame.  And we leave nothing behind, no books, no songs, no monuments.  We don't understand them, but we love them, your making of them.  And that is what she desires.  Seeing herself transmuted into all these things.  She craves that.  She tries to make it happen.  So that when she at last goes out, something of her will remain here."  (337)

In the novel's clever central paradox, the faeries lack what we would call "imagination," but inspire some of the most brilliant and outrageous examples of human imaginative activity.  When the green lady crosses into human time and space, the results prove simultaneously powerful and traumatic: in losing himself to the Muse, the artist achieves greatness (even if of a sometimes marginal variety), but the Muse herself remains untouched.  Like Shelley's West Wind, the Muse takes on the aspects of both "Creator" and "Destroyer."   The Learmont family, who run counter to the novel's main characters, aspire to own the Muse and reveal her mysteries; significantly, the Learmonts aren't artists, but in the mental health business.  Such attempts to capture and dissect creativity, the plot implies, are their own form of madness.  Overall, this is a striking and complex fantasy, disappointing only in its somewhat clumsy wrap-up.