Mechail is the son of Korhlen and his second wife, Nilya. At the age of three he was attacked by something while asleep in his cot, leaving him crippled. As an adult, he is the target of fear and abuse from those around him, mostly his stepbrother Krau. Krau finally arranges for Mechail to be killed in a raid against a neighbouring lord’s men, but Mechail’s life only takes a weird, horrific different turn after that…
Tanith Lee (1947 – 2015) was a British writer of… pretty much any genre you might care to name. She rose to fame in the 1970s with some wonderful and idiosyncratic novels that straddled fantasy, horror and science fiction. She is probably most famous for her novel The Silver Metal Lover, about a girl who falls in love with a robot, or for the two episodes of Blakes 7 that she wrote (Sarcophagus and Sand, for Series C and D respectively. However, as she wrote over 90 novels during her lifetime, it’s possible that you might know her for something else entirely, like her Flat-Earth Cycle, or The Birthgrave, or…
What we’re looking at this time around, though, is her 1990 novel, The Blood Of Roses. This starts off like a pseudo-historical novel, with elements that remind us of our own history: there are indicators of some kind of Eastern European setting here, as well as a religion similar to mediaeval Christianity.
Which is pretty much the standard for Twentieth-Century Fantasy. While I adore the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, he unwittingly paved the way for a lot of imitators who mistook his use of a Northern European setting as an instruction rather than a choice. In The Blood Of Roses, Lee takes what we think of as a backwood rural setting familiar to us from a thousand fantasy and historical novels and turns it into something dark, atmospheric and pregnant with danger.
I want to spend a little time on the setting because it is very important to the novel as a whole. Chapter One begins with:
In the beginning there was silence, winter night, and the great moon burning on the snow. The earth was frozen like a glass ball. Timeless. Not a pleat of the ground, not a branch of the forests stirred.
Then came the sound. A dull faint drumming. A little snow shook and shifted.
We are instantly placed in this setting and immersed in the action. From that ominous “In the beginning…” we know that we are in the presence of something darkly numinous.
From the forest we then move to the Tower belonging to Korhlen. We’ve seen his sort before: he’s ambitious, well aware that he is far from the influential parts of his country, but determined to boost his own importance through a strategic marriage and maintaining a feud with his neighbouring lords, completely unaware that it is his own nature that holds him back. All his frustrations and deficiencies bubble out and are mirrored in the slovenliness of his Tower and the general ennui and entropy of his demesne.
This disorder is exposed to the wider world after the death of Mechail. But when it becomes apparent that Mechail is not actually dead and has escaped from the chapel where his body was lying, leaving a trail of genuine corpses in its wake – including his stepbrother Krau – there is an investigation. Magister Anjelen, a church official, has come to look into the event. Anjelen is presented to us, the reader, as an aloof and fearsome priest who is trusted to get to the bottom of the issue. He manages to locate Mechail in the forest after a fearsome chase through the forest:
Then the frozen pool broke up in shards, and out of it came bursting black wolves, a hundred of them, or maybe only one seen a hundred times over in the exploding prism of the ice. They raced into the forest, and the men on the slope above also broke into screaming shards, flying and trampling away.
We’re moving away from traditional fantasy influences and going into proper Angela Carter territory here.
Anjelen takes Mechail away with him to his own Tower, the rambling Christerium, where he heals him – body and soul – with the aim of turning him into an instrument of his own agenda.
Anjelen’s Christerium is presented as something similar to the forest that surrounds Korhlen’s Tower. Like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, they are both sprawling monstrosities with dark, vast histories behind them, filled with characters apparently divorced from the rest of the world because of that cloying suffocation that the isolation gives them. But like the forest with its culture of blood sacrifice, there are secrets within the Christerium… and Anjelen is a product of them both, using Mechail and others eerily like him to fulfill his plans. But he hasn’t banked on his creations discovering their own sense of free will and purpose…
The story twists and turns across its own history. The first chapter of the novel ducks backwards and forwards in time across one night. This foreshadows the anachronic order the rest of the story is told in, with each successive section of the novel telling the story of other characters across their own lives, revealing the dark horror that led to Anjelen coming to the Christerium and enacting a revenge on the religion that he has risen so high in.
As usual, I’m really trying to avoid spoilers for this book because I don’t want to ruin the surprises for anyone who wants to seek it out for themselves.
One thing I will let slip as a spoiler is that the Christianity of this book is as widely accepted as Christianity is in our own world, but that it, too, crushed other religions in its drive to become the dominant, if not only, path to religious enlightenment. And Anjelen is a product of that.
The anachronic style of the story really works to the story’s advantage here: just as you feel that you are getting a grasp on a character and their motivations, you are presented with another chunk of their history to take that understanding away from you and give you more – but possibly not yet enough – information.
I’m not normally a fan of this style of storytelling. Often it indicates that the author can’t think of a way to reveal the twists of their tale except by changing the order that the events happen in, or it might be that the story just isn’t dramatic enough without the sudden chopping and changing in event order to ramp up the excitement artificially.
At times it seems that the stakes are being raised overly dramatically, but the reveal of the story and the extent of Anjelen’s plan makes it all worthwhile.
And it’s Lee’s prose that takes us through it all. From that “In the beginning…” at the start of the novel, she lets us know that there are deep, almost biblical things going on here. And the slow, sensual, horrifying ride is completely worth it.
Which is what makes it an important book to me.
I first read it in 1991, when the paperback edition came out. I’d read a few of her books by this point: I’d adored The Silver Metal Lover a couple of years previously and enjoyed Kill The Dead (in which two of the main characters were based upon Vila and Avon from Blakes 7, which she had just written for) and I really looked forward to seeing what she could do with an epic fantasy.
Well, The Blood Of Roses isn’t really an epic fantasy: it takes place across generations in a secondary world but that is all it shares in common with other members of that genre. Perhaps, I thought, it was a horror novel: there was a lot of darkness in the settings, characters and events of it, but nothing that really made it stand out as obviously horror. I’d recently read Wuthering Heights, so I then thought it might have been something a little more Gothic: the characters are isolated in an oppressive environment, after all, living lives consisting of seemingly equal amounts of terror and tedium.
Turns out, it was just a Tanith Lee novel: most of her books mix genres effortlessly and to great effect.
And this particular novel was another brick in the wall of support for my idea that good literature could be found anywhere.
I’ve spoken at length elsewhere on this blog about how my reading material was often challenged by people who I thought knew better. About how I was an avid reader who read reasonably widely but often hit a wall when discussing something that was a little bit too “unacceptably genre” for polite company. About how I one day realised that the people who were slagging off what I was reading almost never had a book in their hands. And, finally, about how I spent a couple of years trying to read as much classic and literary fiction as I could so I could be seen as a “good” reader – which, in turn made me stop worrying about what other folks complained about because my reading tastes were my reading tastes, not theirs.
I’ve mentioned in other posts some of the books that contributed to that: The Blood Of Roses is another. The story was compelling but Lee’s writing sealed the deal: I didn’t want to live in this world but I did love hearing about what was going on there, and the way it was described was also astonishingly wonderful. And I loved the way that she wrote characters so you could recognise their motives even as you were repulsed by their actions.
In all her books, Lee wrote with consideration for every word. As a reader, I love it when an author does this because it creates some wonderful moments that are only enhanced by the craft used to put them together. Even when she was retelling stories from other sources (fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, classic novels) they felt new in her hands. Her voice was unique.
Unfortunately, that uniqueness made her a publishing liability: at some point in the late-1980s/early 1990s, publishing changed somewhat and began focusing more attention toward authors and books who could sell more copies over a shorter timeframe rather than reliable and prolific authors who could turn out books frequently and produce a smaller but more consistent income. In Fantasy and Science Fiction that meant turning away from authors who wrote individual novels in favour of those who multi-volume epics. Midlist authors, as they were known, began to disappear from bookstores. Lee, for all her talent and originality, remained widely admired but less frequently read. However, since her death many smaller publishers are reprinting her books as a new generation of readers begins to appreciate her work.
So, like Anjelen discovers in The Blood Of Roses, your creations can live on past their expected span and still find ways to surprise you. But a lot more pleasantly in this case.
You can find out more about Tanith Lee at http://www.daughterofthenight.com/
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