50. The City by Jane Gaskell

Hoo boy okay now things are starting to get weird!  Thematically, The City is very much a continuation of the first two books, with Cija passively suffering from one situation to another, especially at the hands of the two men in her life (her half-brother Smahil and of course Zerd the dragon emperor).  Now we have a new evil man hovering in the shadows, her father, the priest lord of her country.

This one is called The City because it begins with her arriving back to the mainland after fleeing Atlan, finding herself sold (of course) by the captain that was supposed to be bringing her safely away.  She escapes from her first purchaser only to be brought to a brothel by the docks.  She escapes from here as well and sort of welcomed to a suburban home.  There are several adventures with the sisters here that end up making her father aware of her existence so that she is under constant threat.  The first half is all kind of meandering, though with great descriptions of the city (where she lived most of her life but never actually knew, being stuck in a single tower) and the wider politics.

It's the second half where this book gets really, really wild.  I'm going to have to spoiler here because it's too good not to share and most of you sadly will not read this book.  The son of the home where she is staying (and the guy who rescued her from the brothel in the first place) goes missing and they figure that it's the priest's men who took him, so Cija and the sisters try and rescue him.  They get captured and here we get this insane floating pyramid where people are lowered in a net down the middle.  The priest is on a throne here and has an alligator woman as a bride! This is some dark, sick cultish shit.  I hate the priest-lord and love hating him (Gaskell is good at inciting these feelings in the reader without being too blatant about it).

She escapes from that in a crazy battle (so much quick and casual violence in these books) and makes her way back to her tower where this time she is captured by a band of ape-people.  I am guessing sort of neanderthals but they are described as pretty ape-like.  The settings veers strongly into the lost world mode here, which I guess I knew from the beginning but now there are dinosaurs.  One of the ape-men protects her from the others (she was supposed to be for eating) and they are both ostracized from the tribe.  They flee deeper into the jungle and encounter two tyrannosaurus rex who at first get it on (yeah baby dinosaur sex) and then the female eats the male!  You know it's coming when you are reading it as Gaskell seems to be priming the pump with the dino-romp but it's sort of hard to believe.  That's right, she and the ape man get it on! Not only that, but he is gentle and turns out to be the only "man" who treats her right!  I felt very topical in reading this old book now because horny romances of women getting properly satisfied by non-men is a trending topic right now with the upcoming movie Wicker (which looks great, I have to admit).

I'll stop spoiling here beyond saying that the book does not close off any of the major narrative storylines.  I learned that it was not until 10 years later that she finished the fourth and final book, which is next for me.

I've done an even lazier and sloppier job of writing about these books, partly because I am quite busy with work and life (and Draconis) these days, but also because this series is quite complex and worthy of real literary analysis by an actual academic/intellectual.  

 

49. Atlan by Jane Gaskell (Book 2 of the Atlan saga)

After reading Atlan, the second book in the Atlan Saga, I am somewhat reluctant to recommend it.  I still need to complete the series to decide, but this one wallowed too long in elements less interesting to me.  It had its moments for sure and the ongoing world building of Atlan continues to be imaginative and intriguing as hell.  It's just that Cija spends pretty much the entire book being passive.  Her agency is almost entirely her own psychological processing as when she is not held against her will (which is most of the book), she is fleeing, hiding or lost.  Adding to the sense of futility is that she really doesn't seem to get beyond processing and come to any conclusions.  So a lot of the book is her in the (admittedly excellent) continent of Atlan and thinking about what is happening to her and how she is responding to it.  

Narratively, things move quite quickly in the beginning, as Zerd almost immediately becomes emperor of Atlan (the boy-emperor being so enamoured with him and decadent, he just cedes his power to Zerd).  Unfortunately, this brings the mainlanders over to Atlan and they immediately spoil it, taking the naive women, hunting the unicorns and introducing industrial farming (Gaskell makes an explicit point about chemicals in the foods in this and the first book).  The depiction of the colonization of Atlan is disturbing and realistic in the context of the world she has created.  As painful as it was to read, I wish we could have had more of that.  It felt like Gaskell rushes through the larger plot to get as quickly as possible to the internal stuff.  

She spends the first half of the book trapped in a remote inn, abused by the proprietress.  She is then rescued and spends most of the rest of the book trapped in an abandoned Atlan castle now given over to Zerd.  This is a bit gothic as the place is mostly unexplored and hostile to her.  There is a really great creepy ass wizard/necromancer here.  She ends up after being cast adrift and then wandering deeper into the continent in the camp of Sedili, Zerd's first wife sometimes enemy, sometimes ally.  Oh yeah, she also has two kids, son Nal and baby daughter Seka.  Most of the time, Zerd's forces, the north and the southern armies and the bandits are in various states of winning and losing against each other. 

The excellent Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff podcast had a great overview of melodrama that gave me a helpful framework to analyze and appreciate books where the emphasis is on passive and the internal (coded feminine) versus the active and external (coded masculine).  The melodrama was originally a play with music in it (melody drama), which in the 19th century became associated pejoratively with working class and female audiences.  In melodramas, the protagonist tends to have the world act on them.  The drama is in how they persist and then overcome (or not).  

This lens helped me to move away from my "why isn't she kicking ass" stance and accept that shit was going to be bad for her and let's see how she evolves in reaction to all this. The problem is that much of her internal stuff was being in various states of coercion with different at first creepy, then ambivalent, then rapey, back to ambivalent men.  I get a sense that Gaskell, who was a minor cultural celebrity was working through some of her own experiences with 1960s British men.

I'm hoping for the best in the next book, but I suspect this may be her groove.  I'm fine with some passive melodramatic internalizing, but would appreciate more of a balance with the cool world and larger plot (which is complex enough). 

 

Bonus, here are stamps from some now defunct used bookstores in B.C.  I guess it made its rounds!

48. The Serpent by Jane Gaskell (book 1 of the Atlan saga)

Once again, I can not remember where I learned about Jane Gaskell. She is an early British woman fantasy author who seems to have slipped into obscurity.  I wonder why, male-dominated nerd publishing industry.  It took me quite a while to find all the books in this series and then I had them sitting on my pre-on-deck shelf (where I hold books in series until they can be moved into the on-deck shelf) for quite a while before I got the desire/courage to take them on (there are 4 books in total).

This was a fascinating, mostly enjoyable and at times thrilling fantasy epic.  It is the diary of a young princess, Ciya (pronounced Kee-ya) who begins the story locked up in a tower until she is married off to a conquering general that she must assassinate.  This premise launches Cija into a rocambolesque bildungsroman across the pre-Atlantis lands of the western hemisphere.  It really goes all over the place, very adventurous.  It is also quite dark and political in a rich kaleidoscope feeling very much of its mid-60s time.  Near the end, I felt that it kind of went on too long.  I was still enjoying it but there is a lot of brutality told in a very matter of fact way that kind of wears you down.  It's also not super tightly plotted, the narrative is inconsistent in pacing and there is too much coincidence at times (that may or may not be some kind of destiny).  Despite all that, it really took me into another world, while making me think and have some feels.  I was always very much invested in the fates of Cija and the world around her.  I really want to read the second one, but currently debating if I should take a little break with something lighter between courses.

The sexual and gender politics are also really interesting.  On the one hand, it feels very progressive on gender.  There is much gender confusion and switching in Cija's journey.  One of her friends is a straight-up transsexual woman and she is loved for this in the book.  On the other hand, sexual coercion is portrayed ambivalently and even dismissed or accepted.  You would almost think it was written by a man if the heroine's inner personality wasn't so richly and complexly expressed.

There is some really cool fantasy stuff in here, like the warrior birds the Northmen (and Cija quite soon) ride, the insane decadent feast in the city climaxing in a roasted dinosaur on a platter, the route across the ocean to Atlantis (no spoilers), all the underground locations.  This book should be a second-tier staple of the genre.

Addendum:  found this promisingly long essay on Gaskell that I will read after I finish the Atlan series.