The Island Under the Earth by Avram Davidson

Was it indeed what that fool redbeard had said?  Was there indeed truth to all that legendry?  How much of it could be true?  That he now held something in his hand which was so strange, in itself was no proof.

But, what was proof?

Down in South Carolina on my holiday travels I went to a huge 2nd and Charles location and scrutinized the paperback SF shelves.  Among the books I purchased was a somewhat defaced copy of the Ace Science Fiction Special edition of Avram Davidson's 1969 novel The Island Under the Earth.  What's that, you ask?  Why yes, I have read and blogged about several books that appeared as Ace Science Fiction Specials.  Behold this convenient list of links:

The Demon Breed by James H. Schmitz

Past Master by R. A. Lafferty
Synthajoy by D. G. Compton
The Steel Crocodile by D. G. Compton
One Million Tomorrows by Bob Shaw

Orbitsville by Bob Shaw

Yes, I paid $1.50 for a book upon which some other guy scrawled "SUX"

Besides the unauthorized one-word guerilla art blurb on the front cover, my copy of The Island Under the Earth has long blurbs on the back cover by fantasy icons Fritz Leiber of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser fame and Peter S. Beagle, whom I have never read but who is apparently a big wheel--his famous novel The Last Unicorn was even made into a cartoon voiced by our hero Christopher Lee and that lady from Murder She Wrote.  These gushing billets-doux to Davidson alert us to the fact that this novel is full of traditional fantasy fiction creatures who are half-human, like the harpy, the centaur, the eunuch and the thief.  A note inside the book tells us that The Island Under the Earth was "conceived as the first novel in a trilogy," but I don't think the other two volumes ever appeared.  Let's assess whether or not the failure of volumes 2 and 3 (to be titled The Sixlimbed Folk and The Cap of Grace) to see print is a tragedy to be mourned.

The Island Under the Earth starts with a brief foreword which is a sort of spoof of academic writing; as he succinctly informs us about the scarce sources of information on the fabled land that is the novel's setting, a scholar complains about other writers' poor writing and plagiarism (hey, everybody does it!)  This foreword's references to unreliable written sources foreshadows what I am taking to be a major theme of The Island Under the Earth: obscurity.  Knowledge, Davidson tells us, is hard to obtain and what is obtained is incomplete and likely erroneous.  Throughout the work characters are always forgetting things, asking questions which are not answered, and trying with limited success to keep records, access records, communicate information, decipher messages and divine the purport of clues.  The narrative proper begins with a little background that lets us know that in this fantasy world there has been feuding between the Hobar clan and centaurs for many generations--it is strongly impressed upon us that the details of how this feud started are in dispute.  (Was Davidson inspired by the famous story of the fight between the Lapiths and Centaurs, an episode immortalized on the Parthenon?)  The final line of the novel turns the book's title on its head, as a character insists that what matters is not an island under the Earth, but one above it.

Davidson doesn't just portray his characters dealing with such issues of limited knowledge, he puts the reader through the same challenges.  Davidson's style here is cold, detached and somewhat obscure.  He uses esoteric words that many readers may not know like "onagers" for asses and "onagerer" for the man who manages them; early on we also get "ashlar," "sternutate" and "besom" (for those scoring at home, these are: a cut stone like those that make up the walls of the Hobar stonehouse (see below); to sneeze; and, a broom.)  Davidson introduces characters and doesn't tell us their names until pages later; the characters keep mentioning "The Cap of Grace" but we readers have no idea what that is until the final third or so of the 180-odd page novel.  The Island Under the Earth has no numbered or titled chapters, there are just a few blank lines between each section.

All that background out of the way, we meet the two most important of the novel's many characters, a sea captain, Stag, and his business partner, the merchant Tabnath Lo.  Lo is married to a Hobar woman, and received as dowry a long-vacant stone house in the country; Stag is renting this odd piece of real estate from Lo for a nominal fee.  On the way to this fixer-upper, Stag's party (Stag, his wife Spahana, his bosun, a priest who traffics in divinations, and a few others) is ambushed by centaurs, and the ass-train with all their supplies is stolen.  When they reach the old Hobar stonehouse they encounter an old and sick centaur; Stag, only half-intentionally, heals the centaur, and the centaur then provides food for the hungry party and even helps reunite them with the lost baggage train.

Proceeding parallel to this Stag plot is a plot that follows Tabnath Lo and a bunch of other characters back in the port city.  Lo has a business rival who is perhaps engineering, and certainly taking advantage of, a change in the local economy--people are no longer purchasing grain retail and making their own baked goods (or as I guess we are all saying now thanks to that British TV show, "bakes") at home, but rather buying them ready-made from a store.  Lo's rival, the tricky eunuch Dellatindilla, has cornered the market on grain and is profiting from this new arrangement, to Lo's detriment.

In his blurb on the back of the book, Leiber mentions Dellatindilla by name, and another character, Zorbinand the Thief, and appropriately so, as they are the most entertaining characters in the book.  The eunuch has two midget assistants, Mote and Atom, who are sort of amusing, and Zorbinand is also a fun character, a man expert not merely at stealing things, but at sexually satisfying women--both skills come in handy in his quest to rob Dellatindilla of some valuable jewels and also in his efforts to keep his nagging wife off his back.  (The sexual relationships in this novel are all uncomfortable in one way or another.)  

Perhaps unfortunately for the reader, these two striking figures are only minor characters, and we spend most of our time with Stag, Tabnath Lo and other characters whose motives and personalities remain mysterious for most of the novel.  As you know, Davidson won not only SF's prestigious Hugo but also the Edgar, an award for mystery writers, and we see in The Island Under the Earth many elements that are reminiscent of detective fiction--at one point somebody throws a spear at Stag from the bushes, and it is many pages later that we learn who threw it.  Throughout the bulk of the novel I found it hard to become emotionally invested in the characters and their struggles because they were so unknowable, making the first two-thirds of the book unsatisfying.

In the final third of The Island Under the Earth there are long flashbacks to the maritime careers of Stag and the bosun and passages about Spahana's life that fill us in on their motives and personalities, as well as a strange dreamy sequence involving Tabnath Lo that reveals the nature of his business-- and personal--relationship with Stag.  These revelations form the meat of the book's climax--they resolve the tensions experienced by the reader, the tensions created by all the mystery Davidson has shrouded his main characters in.  In more conventional fiction the climax generally consists of the characters overcoming obstacles to achieve goals (or coming to terms with their inability to achieve them) but The Island Under the Earth ends without the conventional plot being resolved--we readers have to accept that the pay off of the book is that we now know who Stag, Tabnath Lo and Spahana are and how they feel about each other.  The threads of the conventional adventure plot (will the captives be rescued, who will get the treasure, etc.) are left hanging, perhaps an artifact of the fact that Davidson expected to publish two more books in this setting about these characters. 

      

Inscrutability is the theme of the book, as I have suggested, and perhaps the ultimate expression of this theme is the nature of the setting.  This world Stag and company inhabit can abruptly change, both physically and temporally.  An island once visited by Stag can all of a sudden become part of the mainland, and when Stag crests a hill the day after the centaurs steal his baggage he sees a fight in the distance, and realizes he is witnessing the battle in which he himself participated the day before.  A woman whose children went missing a week ago is reunited with them, but they are years older and she doesn't recognize them.  I am guessing in later volumes Davidson would have provided some kind of explanation for this linked to the repeated (and vague) references to strange phenomena in the sky; here in The Island Under the Earth, though, he does hint that this chaos is a sort of metaphor for the chaos in our own world which is the product of human failings when Dellatindilla the eunuch muses 

"Long ago I heard it read, 'Thus say the geographers: Justice and equity are the sole foundations of the world.'  Do you hear?  Do you hear?  Is it true?  Then the world has no sure foundations--!"

Injustice is a sort of sub rosa theme of the book, with hints that we should see the centaurs as victims of human imperialism and exploitation (there is something of the noble savage about these centaurs), and quite a bit of talk about piracy and slavery; it is also suggested that Tabnath Lo's ultimate goal is political power and that he seeks office not merely to enjoy a sinecure but to make changes, perhaps revolutionary changes.  A more explicit theme, linked to this theme of abuse of power, is the theme of incomplete humanity.  The centaurs and harpies are half human and half beast, and the midgets, eunuch and Lo's assistant--a mute--are truncated or shrunken humans, but shouldn't we see the various thieves and pirates and grasping adventurers as similarly lacking in humanity because they lack compassion?   

(It is perhaps appropriate that a novel that is full of truncated or incomplete people should itself, the sole volume of a projected trilogy, feel truncated and incomplete.)   

It is hard to recommend The Island Under the Earth; while there are plenty of fun little bits along the way it is not a smooth read that you enjoy from start to finish, rather it is a somewhat frustrating and difficult journey, and when it is over you feel more uneasy than satisfied.  Perhaps the novel was meant to introduce you to the characters and setting and set up the conflicts that would be resolved in its two sequels.  I'm glad I read it, but suspect I can only recommend it to serious Davidson fans.

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There are three pages of ads in the back of this edition of The Island Under the Earth.  The first is a list of Ace Specials, a number of which I have blogged about (see list above.)  I have also read but not blogged about Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage, which I recommend, and Piers Anthony and Robert E. Margroff's The Ring, but I read The Ring so long ago I can't remember much about it, save that I found it more serious and less fun than Anthony's popular series books, which are full of the kind of sensationalistic sex and violence that appealed to a young MPorcius.  

The second page of ads lists other Ace SF, including Leigh Brackett's The Big Jump, Jack Vance's Big Planet and Clifford D. Simak's City, all of which I read before this blog made its debut and which I am comfortable recommending and which I think are pretty representative of their authors' bodies of work.  Those superstars of the internet SF community Joachim Boaz and tarbandu have both blogged about Big Planet, Joachim in 2013 and tarbandu in 2017; Joachim also wrote about The Big Jump in 2011.  

Also among the advertized tomes is Across Time by Donald Wollheim (writing as David Grinnell,) which I read and blogged about in 2016; I called it "a disappointment" and explained why it deserved that designation at great length--2000 words!  If the length is scaring you away from clicking the link, let me sweeten the pot by telling you my review includes a gratuitous attack on college professors.  Well, if you don't want to read 2000 words about Donald Wolheim, one of SF's greatest editors, how do you feel about reading 5500 words about one of SF's greatest Canadians, A. E. van Vogt?  In 2014, I reviewed The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. van Vogt, but don't worry, this non-Aristotelian feast is split into four bite-sized chunks: one, two, three, four.  And I didn't just judge whether or not the 12 stories in the volume were good (they are almost all good!) but assessed how "far-out" they were.  Spoiler: "By my reckoning, seven stories are definitely far-out, three are somewhat far-out, and only two are not at all far-out."

The last page of the Ace Special edition of The Island Under the Earth is an ad for three of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books.  Of course I have read these classics of sword-and-sorcery and recommend them, and I have even blogged about two of them, Swords Against Wizardry and Swords in the Mist.