Book Review: Opprobrium

Title: Opprobrium 

Author: Wade Lewellyn-Hughes

Publisher: Wisdom Wonder & Whimsy

Date: The e-book appears to have a publication date but, for whatever unimaginable reason, the date and ISBN display in tiny pale grey type that can't be enlarged, copied and pasted, or otherwise made legible. Nice way to protect copyright material...not! 

ISBN: The e-book appears to have an ISBN...

Quote: "Aiming to bring a vivid world and robust characters to life, he appreciates diversity..."

Wokeness invades the world of fantasy in its usual clumsy way. By "wokeness" I don't mean an ordinary natural awareness that there might be different physical types in fantasy worlds--classic fantasy has always had room for those. I mean a laborious, bean-counting, is-everybody-represented-yet? approach that makes itself obvious when you look at a book. Classic fantasies have always had fun with the idea of unlikely companions sharing each other's strength. Elves and hobbits and ents, cats and caterpillars and animated playing cards, humans and centaurs and killer robots, have to be understood as metaphors for different kinds of people working together. Warrior queens travel in chariots drawn by tamed wildcats, Ganesh's mind finds itself at home in his elephant head, and while Ragnell's Blackness was only part of an uglification spell cast upon her there's no reason not to imagine that any or all of Arthur's knights whose names end in "-mor" might have been so called from their having Moorish complexions. (A lot of people in old England really were called Moore for that reason, in addition to those who lived on moors, or had Gaelic nicknames including Mor ("the great" whatever), or were associated with religious societies dedicated to the ideal of amor, Love.) So the Anansi Boys who become American Gods are West Indian, Xanth has its Black Wave, Pern's culture was influenced by Middle Eastern as well as Irish space colonists, and nobody blinks because these new fantasy series fit into the tradition 

But "wokeness" is not content with the differences among people that are part of a story or a tradition It has to drag in the whole toxic political agenda behind the current screaming for "diversity." So in Opprobrium women are sorcerers and warriors but there's still a lot of verbiage about their not being those things, slavery exists and might be imposed on anyone but Black characters still have to be extra-sensitive about it, and various ethnic-minority languages are spoken in a mainstream society despite the absence of any specific places where those languages might have been plausibly preserved by small groups of people. And one of the main characters identifies himself, and is identified by his best friends, as "a dandelion," which is a term of, well, opprobrium for a man who wants to lie with other men. (I happen to like dandelions and feel that this is unfairly defamatory.) And the parent-substitute couple who play a crucial and heroic part in the story aren't always the couple they seem: the wife has a twin brother and, for their purposes as sorcerers, they find it empowering for him to impersonate her some of the time. Nobody actually finishes the spiel about how all these people are so oppressed as groups that they can't bear to be seen as, or held responsible as, or perhaps admired as, individuals, and they can't possibly be satisfied until the diversity of their world has been flattened into total socialism, with everybody renting apartments and working sixty-hour weeks to earn their rations and saying they're happy because the penalties for not saying that would be even worse. Nobody needs to. The fictional world people want to escape into needs to be made just like the one they're trying to escape from, in all of the most tedious ways. 

Obviously that's no way to build a fictional world anybody would want to visit.

A really good writer, being aware that socialism always fails, always has failed, and always will fail the people who've thought they wanted it even in Sweden, might build a world around the aspects of the minority cultures to which socialism was supposed to have appealed, and illuminate how people's social ideals might be realized in a world of responsible individuals. The most enjoyable way to subvert elitist bigotry, for example, is to lower the priority wealth has in our thinking, and at least the nice people in Opprobrium all seem to be doing that. Classic fantasy has always had a strong tradition of de-emphasizing money--knights and princesses never lugged around much of the heavy coin of their realms, and nobody but a dragon would want to sit on a hoard of treasure, and so on. That's one reason why "wokeness," with its Marxist obsession with money, fits so badly into swords-and-sorcery, where the emphasis is on personal power as separate from money. A good writer might be able to show how a shift from tribal, "because we are, I am" thinking toward individual, "because I am and you are and we agree on something, we can use the word 'we'" thinking, might benefit cultural groups that have been held back by ways of thinking that value groups above individuals and thus enable things like selling other people into slavery, forcing people into marriage, and similar abominations. 

The reason why "wokeness" quite rightly puts readers off some speculative fiction is not that any reader in per right mind wants to cast movies with crowds of actors who all look alike--theatre has long had a rule that the more distinct and easily recognized the characters can look, the better--but that "wokeness" warns us that a story is going to lack the small amount of truth we expect speculative fiction to affirm. African, or Inuit, or Samoan motifs do belong in fantasy, just as characters with names like Cho Chang and Parvati Patel belong at Hogwarts. Fantasy all but requires quests to faraway places. The more exotic the places a story can visit, the better the readers are pleased. Japanese fantasy readers buy stories about the US and UK; Anglo-American fantasy readers buy stories about Japan. By truckloads, I mean. There's nothing at all wrong with the opening image of a White soldier and a Black soldier affirming that, having bonded through all sorts of adventures this book won't even have room to tell, they pledge brotherhood forever. There'd be nothing wrong with a writer (hello, Iris Yang, Lisa See) going on to use the extent to which these vows of friendship were taken, in some cultures, as a primary theme in the book. In Opprobrium Cord and Marlone aren't relatives or bedmates, but friends who pledge to stick closer than some brothers do, and Cord's motivation through the rest of the story is to find and help Marlone after they've been separated. That's a solid fantasy trope and, since Opprobrium is a thoroughly American story despite its many touches of European influence, there's absolutely nothing wrong with invoking the history of segregation, desegregation, and interracial bonding in the U.S. Army either. There's nothing wrong with the idea that their commanding officer saw Cord as having more of the "background" that would qualify him to play the slavemaster, first, and Cord refused the role and Julian the jerk claimed it, either. But why, in a fantasy world, do they need to have that awkward conversation about how anybody can be enslaved but darker-skinned people are more often enslaved? Why does a famtasu world need to be that way? 

There could be valid reasons. The story might be about how the characters reformed their culture's system of slavery. (It's not, though.) Many younger Americans haven't read much real-world history yet, never worked in the D.C. school system, and need to know more about what slavery meant--both in most of the world, where it meant the lowest level of employment available to the most desperate workers (usually for a limited time), and in the United States and India and a few other places where people adopted the insane idea of maintaining permanent slave castes. Maybe Lewellyn-Hughes' purpose was to inform readers about slavery? Well, it's not. The story in Opprobrium begins with a prologue story that doesn't relate to the main plot but does establish that, in this fantasy world, there can be something even uglier that masquerades as legally tolerated but widely deplored slavery. So we needed to know that in this world slavery exists, and can be inflicted on people by kidnappers, for profit, or by people in authority over them, as a punishment, instead of being chosen as a way to pay bills or learn skills. What Lewellyn-Hughes seems to think we also needed to know is that, in his mind, Blackness is inseparable from a sense of floating collective grievance, which, in fact, African and West Indian Black people often proudly affirm that they don't have. Black Equals Bitter. Some people don't seem to see how racist that is.

A few weeks ago this web site reviewed a mini-e-book called The Merchant's Son by this writer. This web site wants to make it very clear that, while I like reading and reviewing almost everything, I can be prejudiced against a writer who uses a pushy marketing system. I am so prejudiced against Lewellyn-Hughes, because his e-books arrived with a spew of spam and a demand that, although Opprobrium was published years ago, it be reviewed RIGHT NOW! That's a good way to get a book down to the very bottom of the stack. It doesn't help matters that, when I got to this book, it was riddled with "wokeness."

That's a lot of reasons to dislike a book from the beginning so I'm glad to report that, so far as possible, Opprobrium rose above the expectations the spamming and "wokeness" built for it. Actually, once the story gets moving, it can be considered a good read. The characters don't go on and on and on about their "wokeness." They start having adventures and become entertaining. My complaint about The Merchant's Son was that it didn't show us the central premises on which its fantasy world is set. Opprobrium does. This is a world where technology seems to have reached something like an eighteenth century level, skipping the discovery of gunpowder (is that possible?). Ships sail but fighting is still hand-to-hand. Instead of discovering gunpowder the people in this world are evolving magical powers that can include setting fires and causing explosions. 

The level of social acceptance for magical talents varies from place to place. Cord still thinks of his talent as a curse and works his way toward accepting it as a gift over the course of the story. "Witch" is a neutral term the character Scarlett, whose magic is compatible with the purposes of petty spite but can be used for better things, accepts without fear or shame. Sorcery is recognized as a profession, from which women are barred by some local rules but which they seem to be practicing effectively. There are other words for people with magical powers besides "witch" and "sorcerer," some of them hateful, reflecting a remembered past when society tried punishing people for witchcraft, before everyone admitted that an increasing number of humans in this world just are instinctive "witches" unless and until they become trained sorcerers. Scarlett is a teenaged witch on a quest to become a sorcerer. 

It is, however, still possible to be punished for what are generally classified as offenses against a religion that primarily worships an ancestor figure known as The Chancellor, with an assortment of lesser "gods" thrown in here and there for flavor. Traffic with "demons" is a general description for any wrongdoing for which anyone may be burned at the stake. But this world has real demons, possession by whom is what's worse than slavery. As the mentor figure Teague explains it, the possessed are conscious enough to feel themselves being tortured by physical pain that forces them to do things they don't want to do, like maiming and killing other humans and destroying their property. Usually after a few days they go insane or die, but a few people of special talent and fortitude, like Teague, have defeated their demons and led long active lives fighting against the demons. 

This wise champion Teague--old enough to be the young characters' father? grandfather? great-grandfather? They don't know--is of course the bisexual slacker who put me off in The Merchant's Son, so Opprobrium does answer the question of why anyone would bother reading or writing that story. Once you've read Opprobrium it becomes a valuable affirmation of humility. The older characters in Opprobrium have more knowledge and power because they've lived and learned. At some time in the previous century they were as young as the younger characters in Opprobrium and some of them,  notably Teague, seemed less promising.

So, yes, in Opprobrium we have a bisexual man who may or may not have achieved postsexuality yet, happily married to a woman who has a twin brother, and they enjoy playing twin tricks...but at least in Opprobrium Lewellyn-Hughes has learned the crucial skill of presenting possibilities that some readers might find erotic, without allowing erotic fantasies to sabotage the adventure fantasies for which readers have paid. A good adventure fantasy teaches or affirms something about success in real life; it must not be derailed by eroticism. As Marge Piercy and Ira Hayes put it in their book about the art of writing, the writing process even for serious literary fiction may involve writing out the porno-possibilities and even--no, not onto the computer, good writers shut off the computer and go somewhere where any damage done will be cheaper. But, yes, that. What makes the fiction publishable is that the writer has thought through all of that and cleaned it out of the story, leading room for readers to add their own erotic thoughts if they choose, or just to enjoy a good story that sticks to its original purpose. In Opprobrium we're told nothing about Teague's sexuality, and that's the way a fantasy adventure story ought to be.

After those initial warbles of "wokeness" Cord gets on with his quest to find Marlone, Scarlett gets on with her quest to become a sorcerer, the others--including Julian, who's harder to like in every scene--have their quests too, and with the help of the older mercenaries they keep busy thwarting and eventually slaying demons. Lots of cooperation, lots of opportunities for heroism, a fair bit of martial arts, some amusing touches, everything a good fantasy novel should have, is here before the end, and the epilogue suggests sequels.