The Untold Tale

[jsburbidge]

There's a long history of meta-level commentary in literature - plays like Twelfth Night where characters remark about how their action resembles, or exceeds in unlikelihood, the plot of a play, or novels where the telling and the events are tangled up, like Tristram Shandy.

SF/F has its own meta-traditions. Some are in continuity with that of more general literature - Illuminatus! has both a character inside reviewing the book (negatively) and a character who realizes, in the middle of the third volume, that he's in the middle of a novel. (It also has a narrator who doesn't know who he/she/it is.) Others, though, are peculiar to SF/F, like the refraction of fandom through SF (Bimbos of the Death Sun, Deep Secret), or the use of the portal fantasy in contexts where the characters are aware of the conventions governing the world into which they are dropped (in some cases, as with The Secret Country, mistakenly so). Harold Shea (after some confusion at the very beginning) knows the works he's visiting, and the Fillory of The Magicians is fairly close to the stories the narrator grew up reading.

More elaborately, there are fantasies which send up plot token fantasies (Dark Lord Of Derkholm bounces off Jones' prior Tough Guide to Fantasyland) and space operas which send up cliché space opera (Erickson's Wilful Child).

The best known recent book of this sort is Scalzi's Redshirts, which both sent up Trek-style plot conventions and allowed characters to become aware that they lived inside a fictional narrative.

One can think of Frey's The Untold Tale as a sort of paired bookend at the fantasy end of the spectrum, along one axis, with Redshirts: both of them are about the relation between the characters in a Tolkienian sub-creation and the writer, and both choose a case where the work is an example of, not to put too fine a point on it, cliché-driven hackwork.

However, the parallel is only partial. Frey's book also takes on fannish attitudes towards texts and characters, includes a running stream of commentary which comes out of the tradition of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, refracts recent debates about harassment at cons and diversity in SFF, and wraps all of this in an inverted portal fantasy (i.e. the viewpoint is that of an inhabitant of the secondary world and not of the visitor from our own).

Or not quite our own. The whole conceit turns on a set of novels which seem to occupy about the same social space as Harry Potter does in our world; and they, assuredly, are not part of our world. It's still pretty close, though; there's even a (cleverly explicitly unattributed) reference to James Nicoll's quote about English worked in. (James in turn reviewed the book, but did not refer to the reference to himself).

The novels do not (as far as I can tell) have prominent close parallels in our time; they look very much like a cross of cliché heroic fantasy (with plot coupon structures reminiscent, to that degree, of Silver on the Tree, The High King, or Percy Jackson) with a mediaeval romance's quest structure.

Let me make it clear, before the following, that I liked this book. I intend to read its sequel. That bring said, I have some issues with the book that nag at me.

First, it tries to do too much. The conceit of a portal fantasy story "from the other side" is distinct from a critique of inept or stereotypical formulaic fantasy. Both are distinct again from the "clay speaking to the potter" theme, or the critique of aspects of fandom, or the concern with agency and repression. Its not that one has to have one single focus, by any means, but the sheer number of tasks the narrative takes on makes it blurry, less focussed than it might have been.

Secondly, it's told using the historic present in the first person. There's a very long history of the historic present in the third person going back to the classical world, but in the first person it's essentially the mode of a pub story ("So I go into the room, and I see it's empty, and the package I'm looking for is on the table..."). As such, it's disconcerting, even though there's a thematic reason for it (it highlights interiority which is presumably absent from the published books, and from their general kind of story, at that). Eventually enough exposure renders it transparent; but while Frey's prose is reasonably good, it's not at the level which makes having one's attention shifted from the story to its textuality an actual pleasure.

Finally, there's a great big chunk of missing mechanism; and given that this was originally written as a stand-alone novel (the author then was offered a three-novel contract) I wonder very much whether it will end up being addressed. To wit: it is made very clear, on one hand, that this is not a case of an author tapping into knowledge of a general pre-existing world; it's very clearly shaped by his imagination. No mechanism is even gestured towards why the works of his imagination should have the power to call anyone from our world into them, nor why they should have enough substance to enter our world and live comfortably there. Is this some special gift of the author's? Is it true of all secondary worlds (if it is, it's the equivalent of perpetual motion, an ability to pull being out of nothing)? Is there an infinite continuum of worlds, a sheaf of which will match any given literary work (the Harold Shea model)? Is the "our world" of the story radically different from our own in other ways (Eris is real, and this is a joke on her part)?