Valentine awakes on a sunny morning on a hillside overlooking the city of Pidruid. He soon learns that he has a pouch full of money on his belt but no memory of his past life. He falls in with a troupe of jugglers, fulfilling a quota for human performers recently enacted by the Coronal, a newly-crowned ruler who shares the same name as Valentine. In his travels with the jugglers across the sprawling planet of Majipoor, Valentine discovers that he is in fact, the Coronal, but he has been deposed and had his personality swapped into another body, while an imposter is travelling across the world, planning who-knows-what chaos for the future.
Robert Silverberg is a giant of Science Fiction. He has won most awards, been published in most magazines and published across more genres than many other authors.
But Lord Valentine’s Castle is probably my favourite out of all the novels of his that I have read.
Originally serialised in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction from November 1979 to February 1980, it was published as a novel later in 1980. It went on to win the Locus Award for Best Novel in 1981 and was nominated for a Hugo award.
It’s a rather fabulous novel set on the planet Majipoor. Majipoor is a planet larger than Earth and it was settled many thousands of years before the novel begins. Humans live on there along with many other alien races who have made it their home. However, the natives of the planet, shapeshifters known as Metamorphs, have been displaced from their place and live only in reservations and the isolated continent Suvrael.
Valentine befriends members of several of these alien species during his quest to win the throne back and this displays his natural charisma, as well as his ability to see past the exterior of a person to their worthiness and ability beneath. Initially reluctant to reclaim what he has lost, Valentine learns through his travels across Majipoor that he does in fact have a desire to regain his lost status as he begins to fathom just what damage is slowly being done to the world in his name.
Valentine’s journey of rediscovery is almost as interesting as his physical journey across the planet. Majipoor is one of the more interesting and wonderful planets in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Being larger than our own Earth, any journey takes longer and faces perils that are largely unknown to us. This being a novel that embraces the fantastical, there is a fair amount of sailing on boats and traveling in wagons undertaken by our hero and his band, but none of it feels like padding or gratuitous adventure: everything encountered shows just how varied a place Valentine is fighting for as well as his growing desire to be returned to his rightful place.
Silverberg spends a lot of time fleshing out the world and creating realistic and believable obstacles for our heroes. Some of them are fairly mundane, like needing to negotiate passage on a ship or having to pass through the different levels of a monastic order in order to be able to speak to Valentine’s mother. Others are more surreal and fantastical, like the dependence upon the interpretation and fulfilment of dreams that the characters frequently discuss, or the more adventurous concerns of hunting sea-dragons – or escaping from the belly of one that has swallowed you…
It’s the dreams that initially fascinated me when I first read this. Valentine, we learn is actually the son of the Lady of the Isle of Dreams. This was a title she inherited when her eldest son (Valentine’s brother) became Coronal, and retained upon his death (at the hands of the conspirators) when Valentine took his place. This is explained across the novel as a complicated line of succession: if you become Coronal, it elevates other members of your family to different statuses as well; the Coronal’s mother becomes a major power, controlling dreams (well, half the dreams – but more on that later), while the previous coronal becomes Pontifex and controls the bureaucracy of the planet, enforcing the laws of their successor. Through the usurpation of Valentine, the conspirators who ripped him from his throne have enacted a plan that could take decades to fulfill but which would give them control of the entire planet.
(That all of the Coronals and Pontifexes throughout Majipoor’s history appear to have been human and not members of the different alien races also inhabiting the planet remains an exercise for the reader)
But once Valentine has convinced his mother that he is who he is, she equips him with an army and the means to realistically mount a campaign to win back his place.
This point, roughly the last third of the novel, is where it appears to become a more conventional novel. But, Silverberg points out, Majipoor hasn’t conducted an actual war for thousands of years – and Valentine is appalled that his quest could be responsible for breaking that peace…
I’ll leave the recap there and focus more upon the book and why I like it so much.
First up, it’s the quality of the setting and characters that lures you in. Despite it being home to billions of people, Majipoor is quite peaceful and cozy, with all dangers appearing to be safely contained and manageable unless you seek them out. Silverberg contributes to that with his lulling prose, putting you in the moment and experiencing everything as vividly as Valentine is. Whether it’s his first performance as a juggler, his first trip through a marketplace or traveling from one place to another, you are front and centre with Valentine as he makes his long journey back home.
And Silverberg hints that there’s a lost or ancient technology that supports that peaceful lifestyle, while still suggesting the marvels of the world.
Here’s an example, from Valentine’s first performance at a festival:
The stage was colossal and many things were happening on it at once. Vroon magicians were doing a routine involving floating coloured lights and bursts of green and red smoke; an animal trainer just beyond had a dozen fat serpents standing on their tales; a dazzling group of dancers with grotesquely attenuated bodies sprayed in many-faceted silver glowstuff did austere leaps and carries; several small orchestras in widely separated regions played the tinny and tootling woodwind music beloved of the Ghayrogs; there was a one-finger acrobat, a high-wire woman, a levitator, a trio of glassblowers engaged in fashioning a cage for themselves, an eel-eater, and a platoon of berserk clowns, along with much more beyond Valentine’s range of vision. The audience, slouching and lounging out there in the half-darkness, had an easy time watching this, for, Valentine realised, the giant stage was in gentle motion, turning slowly on hidden bearings, and in the course of an hour or two, would make a complete circuit…
It’s filled with incident and description, casual details just flying out at you and creating a cacophony of detail that contributes to the baffling new world we are in, the hints of the familiar clashing with the exotic and unknown creating something altogether new and exciting.
But when tragedy strikes, that level of detail comes back to haunt us:
In the frantic melee Valentine caught sight of Carabella wrestling with a Metamorph, forcing it to the ground with the powerful forearm muscles years of juggling had developed; and there was Sleet, ferociously vindictive, pounding another with his boots in savage joy. But the wagon was burning. The wagon was burning. The woods were full of Metamorphs, night was swiftly coming on, the rain was a torrent, and the wagon was burning.
The Metamorphs are presented throughout the story as wild instruments of fate. Shunned by the other, later inhabitants, they are indirectly responsible for Valentine deciding to retake his title. Their king is also a counter-figure to Valentine’s mother: good dreams are said to come from her, while nightmares and dreams of ill-omen come, apparently, directly from the Metamorph king, the King of Dreams.
So when Valentine begins to understand why the Metamorphs are feeling as resentful as they do towards the invading races, you wish with him for a reconciliation between the races, a chance to heal the rift between them that begins to grow in valentine’s heart.
And this is where my only real problem with the novel raises its head.
And it’s a spoiler.
And I hate giving out spoilers here.
So, if you want to avoid it just skip ahead until I get past it.
…
…
…
Have they gone?
Right.
Here we go: the plot against Valentine is revealed at the climax to have been engineered by a rogue faction of Metamorphs who have murdered and impersonated their King to provoke his sons into revolution against the aliens.
So, while Silverberg goes out of his way to ensure that Valentine realises that this was a faction of Metamorphs not representing their general population, and that he still wants to go ahead with reconciling with the fallen race, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth that this wasn’t a simple court intrigue, but an effort by what we would recognise as the real victims in the story to regain what they have lost.
…
…
…
It’s safe to come back now.
So, aside from this one slight irritant to the plot, the entirety of Lord Valentine’s Castle is an epic delight. I love how it casually mixes Science Fiction and fantasy in a way that few authors have done before and since, giving us a world with a knowledge of spaceships and aliens but peopling it with belief in very real omens, fortune-telling and other aspects of the otherworldly.
There are a host of sequels, but I have sampled very few of them: on my initial read I was so enamored with the story and the setting that I was reluctant to revisit, especially when the first sequel was a collection of stories that didn’t appear to feature Valentine at all, a development that I’m not really fond of when reading a series of books.
But should you not have the same qualms and wish to be thrown into the warm seas of Majipoorian storytelling, they do come with many fans eager to recommend them.
You can find out more about Robert Silverberg at https://www.robert-silverberg.com/
