“This adventure will test the nature of the world.”
- Title: The Etched City
- Author: K. J. Bishop
- Genre: Fantasy/Surreal/New Weird
- Year: 2003
K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City is one of those books that are at once both obvious and perplexing when trying to assign to any one genre. It’s undeniably fantasy in the same way Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and China Mieville’s Bas-Lag series (two works that The Etched City has been compared to, a comparison that is perhaps useful and misleading in equal amounts) are fantasy, but it’s also very much unlike most traditional fantasy. Perhaps that’s why the distinction of New Weird has caught on as it has for, even if there isn’t some movement afoot to change the rules of how secondary world fantasy is written as there was in science fiction’s New Wave, the distinction between the traditional fantasy of the best-seller lists and a wave of newer fantasies with more literary and cross-genre elements is still a useful one to make.
Questions of genre aside, The Etched City is certainly fantastic fiction, in every sense of the term. Beautifully written, it evokes both the miraculous and the mundane with a lyricism never out of proportion to the mood or subject matter of the scene. And there is great subtly at work, too, in The Etched City; the sort of thing that gets under your skin and creates not only a sensation of dark strangeness, but also underlies the novel’s surreal trajectory as it steadily builds toward its climax. With this book, amazingly her first, Bishop demonstrates an ability to pursue both exuberance and restraint that shows a fine attention to craft and a mature sense of balance one might expect to find in a more seasoned writer.
The mercenary and shootist Gwynn and the surgeon Raule are the central characters of The Etched City, though it is Gwynn who truly takes center stage. We are introduced to the two in the Copper Country, a desolate landscape of scrub towns and nomads, when Raule discovers her old wartime companion Gwynn in a near-deserted settlement. The two served on the wrong side in a losing war and are now on the run. We get a few glimpses into their character in this opening sequence as they journey through the waste and flee their pursuers — Raule’s intellectual but dispassionate morality and her disapproval of Gwynn; Gwynn’s casual ruthlessness, his gentlemanly flare, and the strange luck that keeps him whole in the midst of danger. The two eventually escape to the Teleute Shelf, to the city of Ashamoil that Raule had learned about in a travel book she had carried with her all through her desert wanderings — a glimpse of a world she had never hoped to see for herself.
If one imagines from the title of the book that Ashamoil is some fantastic creation of etched glass, a stupendous landscape dictating the turns of the story like Gormenghast, then put that notion aside. Ashamoil is a vivid creation, a teeming city astride a river in the midst of unhealthy jungle, a place that serves up anarchy and squalor in equal measure. But The Etched City of Bishop’s title is instead a metaphor for the intersection of art and life, of perception and creation, and of the roles we choose to play. These themes are central to the strange journey Gwynn takes as he falls in love with the magnetically alluring Beth Constanzin.
Her call to him is a kind of summons, and Gwynn responds one evening when a weight of self-reflective angst triggers within him a sincere desire for change. The two compliment one another, are images of one another’s desire; the Sphinx and the Basilisk, reflections of the monsters featured in the etching that Beth extended to Gwynn as an almost magical invitation to seek her out. Beth is an artist, an etcher of strange fancies on glass, and a great deal more besides; and it is her formidable and half-understood presence around which Gwynn, and The Etched City as a whole, revolves. But to say much more about her, the most intriguing character of the book, would be to risk spoiling the pleasure of the reader in discovering her themselves, so I’ll go no further beyond including this quote from Beth:
“I have come to believe that we steer our individual spheres of being through the spectra of possible worlds via the choices we make, the acts we perform. Most people stick to known routes, and therefore cannot travel far. They live too modestly, and perhaps too privately. Only by being strange can we move, for strange acts cause us to be rejected by whatever normality we have offended, and to be propelled toward a normality that can better accommodate us . . .”
But Beth is by no means alone is espousing (or representing) a personal philosophy in The Etched City, as a character who is perhaps her opposite number, the Rev, a besotted man of the cloth that works with Raule at a clinic for the poor, has equal time in trying to convince Gwynn of a more universalist theory of the divine. But interwoven in this heady mixture of theology and metaphysics, of visions, strange happenings, and oddities, there is the matter of Gwynn and Raule’s day-to-day existence. Gwynn, employed by a crime family, is involved in nefarious dealings, brutal acts, and a fair share of gunplay. Raule, laboring as a doctor in one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city, treats knife wounds and diseases and investigates a rash of monstrously misshapen stillbirths. Their worlds intersect again, as Gwynn involves Raule in doctoring his thuggish associates, much to her distaste.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of The Etched City is just how skillfully it moves from the ostensibly real to the surreal. There is a point in the book that had me sitting up in some amazement as a character performs what can only be described as a miracle. Which leads me to ask, when was the last time anyone was surprised by magic in a fantasy novel? The subtle shift from the concrete to the numinous at work in The Etched City is handled with a master’s touch, and this novel’s capacity for surprise and real sense of wonder is far in excess of anything written along more traditional lines I’ve read in a long time.
Thoughtful, ambiguous, fascinating, brutal, cynical, mythic, beautifully strange — all this and more, The Etched City is perhaps best and most easily summed-up as ‘indispensable.’
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }