Brother Kings
[Review of "The Scrolls of Nef" by Gary Glickman,
Hand to Hand Publishing]
(1374 words)
Despite
the hype around the publication of
Gary Glickman's "The Scrolls of Nef" (Hand to Hand
Press—Topanga, CA), the actual information offered to the press has been
ambiguous at best. The mystery as well as the hype had me skeptical, but the
novel's innate charms quickly infused my imagination, and I happily forgot the
politics of publishing and film options.
In
any aesthetic environment—but perhaps especially in today's
violence-obsessed culture—this novel is a discovery, a reviewer's
delight: a complex, elegant wonder, a combination of epic origin story, heroic fantasy, treatise on love, time
and literature, told with the intimacy of a realist comedy of manners. Those
archetypal story patterns balance among several styles, voices, plots,
characters, and worlds that are simultaneously archaic and contemporary. And
the reader is constantly made to feel that such worlds exist, though no such
worlds exactly exist—exactly the novelist's task. The work of Ursula LeGuin comes immediately to mind, surely one of the
author's influences, and Marion Zimmer Bradley—The Scrolls of Nef is sort of an Earth Sea meets Left Hand of
Darkness meets Avalon.
Epic
in scope, and weighing in at 565 pages, nonetheless it is a compelling, quick
read, the kind of vivid pleasure-dream one hopes will not end soon. In proper old-fashioned style, the
first "scroll" is a brief Prologue, explaining the discovery of the
lost library of ancient Nef, after an earthquake "cracked open" the
wall of lava that had protected the scrolls for 3,000 years. The
prologue-writer's great-uncle's great uncle, we are told, had supervised the
discovery and the translation of the scrolls a century earlier.
At once
we are plunged into the great uncle's childhood, a pre-modern patriarchal
kingdom resembling medieval Europe, but with a mythical ancient history of
high-technology. The kingdom of Ruhal (draw-bridges, horse-drawn carriages,
cross-bows, burning arrows) is being invaded and attacked by a Fundamentalist
Empire called "The Godlians," and I don't know if the Godlians are
supposed to be an actual religion, but they are scary heretic-burning Monotheist
extremists who want things done their own way.
The two
young princes of the invaded kingdom are separated and cast into diverse
fortunes: the narrator-prince Orland into southern exile with his mother and
sister; the warrior-prince elder brother Talland into hiding out among the
threatened indigenous people of his northern kingdom, the Celebrants.
Thus
begins "Part One" of Nef, entitled, "Spellbinder." It is a daring
title, risking a critic's defiance, but the double-meaning of the title is
deserved. The book, like its characters, weaves a spell. Orland, the young
narrator, apprentices to his great uncle Mordec, a prince of Nef, who is also a
wise elder and an old romantic, whose lover had been a priest of the old
ways—a 'spell-binder.' Such
inter-generational attention to detail is part of the spell of the novel, that,
like any accomplished art,
succeeds in bringing to life the beauty of wisdom passed down through
generations, in all its complex dimensions. When successful—and I believe
this novel 'succeeds' in this sense— the complexities cohere organically
into one driving story. That, as Great Uncle Mordec of Nef might say, is the
artist's magic.
To
sum up an epic, then:
Naive
prince Orland has his Bildungsroman
coming of age in his mother's sophisticated ancient culture, on the island of
Nef. It is a culture completely foreign to him, ever on the verge of collapse,
threatened by the same fundamentalist empire that here seeks to eradicate the
scrolls and impose their own version of the past—a plot sometimes honing
surprisingly close to contemporary politics. Along the way, Orland writes his
imagined version of the story of
his crown-prince brother, who has stayed behind in Ruhal to fight the Godlians.
It is the brothers' alternating stories, eventually intertwining, that make up
the branches of the plot.
"Pirates
of Nef," the Second Part of the novel, recounts the narrator-hero's exodus
from Nef by sailing ship, escaping
with a precious cargo of banned scrolls that the Godlians would like to
destroy. He takes with him his beloved, a celebrant refugee named Rabjam, and the young woman they have saved from the bridal
slave-auction. The trio disguise themselves as itinerant musicians, succeeding
at last in finding safe harbor for the scrolls. It is a lovely image, the heroes disguised as a kind of
ancient rock-band, and allows for the introduction of lyrics ancient and
modernized, supposedly translations of even more ancient lyrics. The idea
allows for the inclusion of many of these 'translations,' and it is to the
author's credit that they hold up so well as ancient lyrics, translated several
times into the current fluent translation, in this case, English:
When I'm with you,
The clouds are spirits reaching up
To touch the highest place in heaven.
When I'm with you,
The colors spill down from the sky,
They paint the waves,
I don't know why I never saw these things before
in color. And if there's nothing more,
When I am with you, that'll be okay—
Those colors—with me.
It seems a tight-rope walk each time, to
credibly bridge cultural and epochal differences in aesthetics, reminding
readers that all archetypal lyrics and stories are translations from long ago
imaginations, even when they re-appear through contemporary imaginations. Here
the English translations of the lyrics are so beautiful they create a longing
in the reader to know the "original language" versions—another
neat novelist's trick. (Tolkien, of course, created an actual language to
further blur the lines of history and fiction; but his poems, too, are all
'translations.') (PS: There is an iBooks version of
the novel, with full-color illustrations, links to videos and maps of Nef and
surrounding environs, and, in the Full Version, wonderful settings of the charactersÕ
songs by The Dream Brothers.)
Meanwhile,
in the North, the older brother Talland nearly marries the Godlian
Questioner's vicious daughter, waking up just in time. Later he earns his own
moral education among the mountain-top healer-women, half-crazed healers
considered to be witches. It is one of the pleasures of this book that what
might easily fall into clichˇ constantly evades clichˇ by its balance of detail
and nuance. Thus again and again it resonates with archetypal energy: these are
real woman, but it is also easy to see how they might be perceived as witches;
any reader might think so, were they not in the spell of the narrator, whose
vision is loving and wise, but also unsentimental, spare, and self-aware: the
narrator knows he himself was arrogant, thoughtless, dense in his youth. The
king is a story-book king, but he is also a tired old man with a mistress, and
then with a young wife who abandons him. Even the most unpleasant character in
the novel, the arch-villain, "Virdurshk,"
has his legitimate motivation and complex life (he is handsome and mild), all
too credible in his venality and viciousness.
"King
of the Celebrants," the third and final section of the scrolls, recounts
the narrator's return to his native country to fight the Godlians—with
only song and story, evidently— and join again with his warrior
brother. Really, though, the brief
third part and epilogue is a sweeping, quick magic act, a pulling together of
many characters and many decades. The narrator is an old king now, dictating to
his own great-nephew, teaching him his stories and his songs, writing out one
last 'scroll.' Orland has, in effect, become the great-uncle, the old man who
was his own great-uncle and great teacher. The precious scrolls of Nef have
been saved, translated, dispersed; we are reading them. The ancient songs and
stories have been translated, memorized, sung, the voice of the great ancient
poet, "Hazell," resonates again through the
land.
The unknowable past, in other words, can
speak to us, as close to us as our own present-moment's imagination. Our present moment will of course one
day be a relic for a future reader. That is a message and gift that literature
can deliver—that the best literature does deliver— perhaps most
eloquently of all the arts.