June-July Rereads of Barry Malzberg and Tanith Lee

Taking a break from blogging, I reread a pair of novels I had already blogged about by writers particularly dear to us at MPorcius Fiction Log, Barry N. Malzberg and Tanith Lee.  Then I decided to blog about them again.   

Inspired by that two-hour interview of Malzberg, I reread The Day of the Burning, which I first read in 2011; feel free to check out the 2017 blog post into which I cut and pasted my 2011 Amazon review of the 1974 novel.  The Day of the Burning is a fun--but bleak!--satire of the public welfare system and the inability of  government--portrayed as hopelessly corrupt and incompetent--to help poor people, or really accomplish much of anything, as exemplified by subplots about failed space missions to Mars and Venus and terrible urban unrest.  Sexual dysfunction also figures in this one, as in so many of Malzberg's productions, and there is a sort of sub rosa attack on Christianity; also presented is the idea that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the educated middle classes and the uneducated working and lower classes--interestingly, in this novel the representatives of the middle classes are hapless and impotent, while the lower orders are vigorous, aggressive, even perspicacious, but still doomed.  

Malzberg has addressed sexual failure and the shortcomings of the welfare system and the space program time and time again in his large and somewhat repetitious oeuvre.  One thing that sets The Day of the Burning apart is a sort of solipsistic brand of literary criticism, in which Malzberg has characters (who may or may not be figments of the probably insane narrator's imagination) attack the narrator's writing--each element of the narrator's prose which his readers dislike is an element characteristic of Malzberg's own style.

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Way back in 2010 I read Tanith Lee's breakout novel, The Birthgrave.  (In 2013 I copied my three-year-old Amazon review of the novel into this blog.)  In 2010 I owned the 1982 DAW edition with the Ken Kelly cover and the Marion Zimmer Bradley intro.  I guess I sold or lost that book in one of my many moves, so when I recently had the idea of reading it again in preparation for reading its sequels, I bought a 1975 edition with a George Barr cover that advertises the Bradley intro but, due to some strange mishap, does not include it.  (I really should have held on to that 1982 printing.)

A woman awakes underground--she doesn't remember any specific thing about herself and little about her origin or milieu.  A voice tells her she is the sole surviving member of a fallen race of arrogant and evil men and women far superior to mere humans, and that she is cursed and will not find happiness.  The volcano above her begins to erupt, and she flees.  She doesn't know her own name and she is afraid to see or show her face, and she travels the world, always wearing a mask or veil, on every hand finding the physical artifacts and cultural remnants of her own long lost race of cruel overlords and enduring dreadful adventures that last 400 pages of fine print!

This book is long and dense, but it is a pretty smooth read.  Lee's prose is good, with lots of vivid descriptions and clever or powerful metaphors, and on almost every page we find disturbing sex or grotesque violence, a classic SF or sword and sorcery concept (e.g., ruined haunted cities, chariot races between archers, castles full of secret passages and moats inhabited by voracious monsters) or some allusive clue about this strange woman or her world.  Because of her striking appearance and miraculous powers (these powers sometimes recall the abilities of a vampire, sometimes the miracles of Jesus Christ), everywhere she goes the narrator is the center of attention, received as a goddess or a witch or a hero, sometimes exciting abuse and resentment, often admiration and worship.  All you grad students may be excited by the novel's many innumerable references to gender and sex roles; Lee depicts many societies in The Birthgrave, and they all have different ideas about how women should be treated and what a woman's responsibilities are, and as a weird outsider with special powers the narrator can inhabit any of these roles and can slip through or batter down any of their restrictions.

Even though The Birthgrave is about a beautiful woman who is better than everybody else and has as one of its main topics the place of woman in society it doesn't come off as a wish fulfilment fantasy or some kind of feminist polemic.  This novel is grim.  Everywhere the narrator goes calamities and tragedies abound, suffered by those who seek her help or strive to aid her as well as her enemies and scores of innocent bystanders.  The sex and violence in the novel is rough and nasty rather than life-affirming or glorious; success in love or battle, when it does come, does not lead to peace or joy.  The narrator is compelling but not really sympathetic--she is cold, callous, and alienated, and buffeted by the winds of fate hither and thither she commits all kinds of crimes offhandedly, and experiences indignities and reversals as well as triumphs; none of the triumphs really profit her or anybody else.  

Halfway through the novel, after dealing with bandits and villagers and fighting in the hippodrome, the narrator meets a man with powers much like hers--the general Vazkor.  She has a love-hate--mostly hate--relationship with Vazkor, who uses her as a tool in his pursuit of his doomed Napoleonic dreams of taking over a kingdom and then uniting all the other kingdoms under his rule through chicanery and total war.  There is plenty of backstabbing and palace intrigue, and a weird love triangle, as well as long marches and sieges and ambushes and all that.  The narrator is impregnated by Vazkor, and her efforts to abort the baby come to naught, as the baby has inherited her super-durability.

Her final showdown with Vazkor drains much of her power and in the final quarter of the novel the narrator finds herself a slave among a cruel barbaric tribe, the body servant of the chief's beautiful wife.  This woman and the narrator give birth the same evening, and the narrator switches the babies, replacing the chief's wife's own sickly baby with her own super baby.  The narrator then sneaks off, joins another, more welcoming tribe, and then we arrive at The Birthgrave's crazy finale.  Threatened by a lizard bigger than an elephant, the protagonist and the kind tribesmen are rescued by a flying saucer which kills the lizard with a ray cannon.  The narrator goes to the saucer and joins the spacemen, who tell her she, unconsciously, summoned the saucer to herself with her psychic powers--her mental abilities allow her to control the ship's computer.  This computer is able to read her mind and unlock all her lost memories and cure her psychological problems: she and we learn the truth of the fall of her superior race, how she was interred under that volcano and survived so long, what her face looks like, and the psychological and psychic reasons for all the wild stuff that has been happening to her.  The spacemen then leave and the narrator, who now knows her name, apparently starts living life as a hermit.

I enjoyed The Birthgrave but some will dislike its despairing tone and some may find the Freudian science-fiction ending jarring or disappointing (though it is all foreshadowed.)  I'm curious to see what happens in the sequel, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, whose 200-plus pages I will be discussing in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.