Thus were the sides drawn; men, wolves and birds pitted against the wild dogs and bats. A war to end all wars. Win or lose, both sides knew that by summer's end the world would never be the same again.
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| Left: What the front of my copy of The Haven looks like Right: What the front of your copy probably looks like |
When I heard on the news that the federal government is making the taxpayers pay my debts for me (thanks, suckers!) I decided to splurge and buy some crazy books I have been curious about and can't find on the internet archive, even though I suspected I wouldn't even like them. When other people pay your debts for you, you might as well make risky investments! First up, The Haven by Graham Diamond!
I have been curious about The Haven (1977) and Lady of the Haven (1978) for years, my interest piqued by ads for them in places like Richard Meredith's No Brother, No Friend and the Winter '78-79 issue of Algol. Sometimes The Haven is marketed as a horror novel (it looks like one of those "paperbacks from hell," doesn't it?) and sometimes as a "fantasy adventure." The thing is apparently rare and collectible--at least it is expensive! I managed to buy one online for only ten bucks because its cover is missing. It seems pretty lame to spend ten smackers on a book with no cover, I grant you, but I'm a reader, not a collector, and there was no sexy girl or dinosaur on the cover, so I figured, hey, no big loss.
It is the future, two thousand years from today! But it is not the future of which you have dreamed, the one with anti-grav scooters, interstellar trade and sex robots! Oh no, buster, this is one of those futures in which nobles riding horses and wearing swords lord it over, I mean have pledged their lives to protecting, a bunch of farmers and servants and everybody is liable to die from plague at any moment. Oy! This future sucks! And it gets worse! The human race has been reduced to a mere 13,000 souls in a valley, half of them living in a fortified city--the Haven of the title--and the other half living in a bunch of villages within 15 or 20 miles of the Haven. Beyond the capitalized Valley is the capitalized Forest, which conventional wisdom suggests covers the entire planet, and which sad experience has proven is home to the intelligent talking dogs who hate humanity and have been trying to exterminate us for as long as anybody can remember!
A bookish young lord, Nigel, isn't so sure that the Forest covers the entire planet; he wants to lead an expedition into and through the Forest, thinking it possible that better lands lie beyond it. He keeps petitioning the Council to put in action such an ambitious policy, but to no avail; after all, all such expeditions in the past have been massacred by dogs and packs of dogs are currently attacking the villages in the western part of the Valley so it seems silly to send soldiers away on such an risky expedition.
In this feudal future in which the most complicated machine is a crossbow it is not only the dogs who are intelligent and will talk your ear off, but the birds! Fortunately the birds are on our side, providing aerial reconnaissance and close air support in our endless war with the dogs! The king of the hawks reports to the Council that the traditionally disparate packs of dogs are uniting--the prophecy of a dog king has come true and this revolutionary figure is massing a huge army to the south with the aim of leading a crusade against the Haven that will wipe out us bipeds once and for all!
In a way I didn't quite understand, this horrible news convinces the Council to let Nigel take some of the Haven's precious few soldiers on an expedition into the Forest. They will travel north to look for "new lands," which they hope will, somehow, help them defeat the dog army. This component of the novel would have been more convincing if there were some ancient legend of an arsenal of super weapons or a rumor of a fortress inhabited by a lost tribe of men or something, but Diamond offers no rationale for this expedition whatsoever. Another problem with the whole "we gotta explore the woods that we fear covers the entire world" idea is that these humans are intimate friends with talking birds who draw maps in the sand with their beaks--don't birds migrate for hundreds of miles? Can't our fine feathered friends tell us in detail what lies beyond the Valley?
In Chapter Seven (The Haven has thirty-five chapters) we get more talking among rulers and their counsellors, but not among humans this time, but wolves! The king of the wolves has to decide how to respond to the fact that a decisive war is about to break out between the dogs and the men. Wolves are small in number, and so will be easy prey for the dogs once the humans are gone, so the wolf king decides to ally with mankind, even though man and wolf have never been friends. So, after several chatty chapters set back in the valley that cover recruitment and diplomacy, when Nigel's expedition finally sets out in Chapter Sixteen, Nigel is accompanied not only by ten soldiers and two birds (a hawk and Nigel's friend the parrot), but the wolf king's closest adviser and his two bodyguards.
(Besides all the chapters of wolves and birds and men talking blah blah blah, we get Chapter Twelve, set in the camp of that new dog king, whom I had been hoping would turn out to be a wizard or a werewolf or a robot or something cool, but is just a dog. His Majesty gives a totally forgettable speech, just like any other politician in this book. He announces an alliance with the kingdom of the venomous vampire bats, but the wolves gave this intelligence to the humans back in Chapter Eleven, so it is old news to us readers.)
Nigel's expedition journeys north, overcoming obstacles like quicksand and fog as well as attacks from various animals. This stuff is marginally more interesting than the talk talk talk that characterizes most of The Haven, but is not good. The action/violence elements are handled poorly, with bad word choices; at one point Diamond says of a guy reaching for his sword that a wolf "could have sprung and slit his throat before the knife was out of its sheath"--in the space of a paragraph Diamond uses the words "sword" and "knife" to describe the same weapon, and suggests a wolf's jaws "slit" throats rather than crush them or rip them out or whatever. In the next paragraph the guy with the knife/sword looks at the wolf's claws and can see they are "sharp as razors." Are a wolf's claws really sharp as razors, and could you tell that just by looking? And these are not isolated examples of distractingly bad sentences--The Haven abounds with such sentences, and all the fight scenes and all the discussions of weapons and military matters feature them.
Nigel and co. find the decades-old bones of an earlier explorer, and the diary found among them guides them to a valley beyond some mountains, a paradise where animals all live in harmony under the beneficent rule of giant snakes--nice snakes, not like the venomous giant snakes they fought several chapters ago! The lord of the nice snakes generously guides them to a ruined human city, where Nigel digs up books over a thousand years old. Nigel sends the soldiers back to the Haven and stays in the happy valley to excavate and research the human past.
The almost tolerable chapters covering Nigel's expedition are interwoven with boring and irritating chapters on the war down in the Valley and the woods to the south of it as the humans and wolves launch an unsuccessful spoiling attack on the dog king's gathering army and then the human and wolf survivors are besieged in the fortress city that is the Haven. These chapters are very tedious, inhabited by flat characters who spend page after page discussing routes of march and detailing plans for flanking maneuvers and ruses and then, when these plans invariably fail, reporting exhaustively on the disaster. Late in the book the head of the Council decides to build a huge wooden dog on a wheeled platform and give it to the new dog king, ostensibly as a peace offering; it will be filled with soldiers (that the dogs will somehow not smell) with the job of assassinating the canine monarch, and we actually have to read a politician's long retailing of the story of the Trojan Horse, suggesting Diamond fears we've never heard of this classical caper.
(It seems possible that Diamond took Virgil and Homer as models for this book here, and the description of the episode of the Trojan Horse is his way of making it obvious for us.)
When we are not reading brain-numbing dialogue we are enduring long, tedious and badly-written fight scenes in which characters whom we can't tell apart get killed. Diamond repeatedly uses the word "snipe" to describe dogs biting their opponents; officers order archers to "fire" and multiple times arrows are said to "pound" dogs. If the fighting were entertaining we might forget the fact that the whole idea of an army of thousands of dogs marching for miles and laying siege to a town for weeks is a little hard to take--what are the dogs eating and drinking? They have no supply wagons or backpacks or canteens or anything... they can't be eating plants, can they? Of course, these dogs torture a man by peeling off his skin and then spike his dead body to a wheel to display to the other humans, so I guess anything is possible for these pooches, hands or no hands.
In the middle of a boring battle which the humans and wolves seem doomed to lose, there are suddenly inexplicable explosions that panic all the dogs so the lupine-human alliance can hunt them down and exterminate them with ease. The dog king is killed by a minor character. In the book's final pages we learn through dialogue, as usual, that the lord of the snakes lead Nigel to a cache of gunpowder left over from a thousand or more years ago and Nigel brought this stuff back to the Valley and secretly planted mines all over the battle zone, then at an opportune moment somehow detonated all these IEDs without harming any humans. The survivors of the war live happily ever after, with Nigel and his best friend both getting engaged to forgettable women characters who have had almost no screen time; one of these women's names is misspelled half the time it appears.
The Haven is a real disappointment. Seeing that this book was published by Playboy Press, that its cover looks like one of those crazy horror books covered so extensively by Will Errickson and Grady Hendrix online and in an award-winning book and the covers of its first two sequels feature attractive young ladies by Vampirella artist Jose Gonzalez, I expected The Haven to be a wild exploitation novel full of sex and/or gruesome violence. As for sex, there is zero. ZERO. There is some gory violence, dogs getting their eyes gouged out and their legs chopped off and people getting their heads chopped off and their eyes gouged out (lots of eye-elated violence in this book), but Diamond's writing is so lame none of it is shocking or entertaining. Rather than a paperback from Hell, The Haven is like a young adult or juvenile novel, complete with scenes of little kids embracing adorable wolf cubs!
Diamond's writing has no personality or style. His prose is simple and straightforward, but that doesn't mean it is sharp and clear--rather, it is muted and bland. Diamond's rare efforts to introduce some excitement are ludicrous, like when he declares that Nigel the scholar, in battle with some bats, "fought as no man had ever done before." If I can complain some more about his vocabulary (thank you for indulging me), Diamond uses the hackneyed and stupid phrase "will never be the same" like four times in the course of this book. Annoying!
The plot of The Haven is like that of a pedestrian fantasy novel--the boy who goes on a journey and becomes a man, the fortification under siege, the humans making alliances with non-humans--but it lacks much of the stuff that makes high fantasy epics like Tolkien's or sword and sorcery stories like Howard's or Leiber's compelling. There is no supernatural element--no sorcery, no divine or alien entities, no living dead, no elves or dwarves--and there is no ideology, no philosophy. There are no jokes. There is no fun larger-than-life character like a Conan nor a somewhat realistic character you might identify with, and there are no interesting, much less moving, human relationships like those between Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or Frodo and Sam.
Diamond fails to create a vivid alien world; he sets his tale in a totally crazy environment of talking animals and medieval technology and institutions, but everybody talks and acts like a late 20th-century person, saying banal lifeless gunk that middle managers at a widget factory might say, like "peak performance" and "maintaining efficiency." In Chapter Fourteen there is a scene in which an officer is training "raw recruits," and one of the fresh squaddies asks the officer, "You've told us about choosing our specialty, but what can you tell us about what to do when we actually come face to face with the enemy?" This sentence might make sense in 20th-century America, where the Army teaches people to be radio technicians and engine mechanics, but we're talking about a feudal milieu in which people fight with crossbows and swords. In this pre-capitalist economy, what does "specialty" even mean? And it is not just the humans I'm talking about--the dogs, birds and wolves speak and act just like the men do--the birds shake their heads "no" and shrug their shoulders to express ignorance just like a human being does. The birds even smile and frown! Do birds have lips? Why fill your book with animal characters and then have them act just like humans?
The Haven is like 340 pages of text; by the time I got to page 240 I was bitterly wishing the ordeal that was reading it was over. Gotta give it a thumbs down--a quite bad investment, a loss which I compounded by buying three of the sequels as a lot that same day. Ouch!
