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language: English
country: USA
year: 1988
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Darksword, #2
dates read: 26.3.25-29.3.25
Someone woke up and the dream ended.
Doom of the Darksword, the second book in Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword trilogy, develops both the personal and the political aspects of the first book, satisfyingly in some ways and not in others. I think it’s better overall, which is interesting because I haven’t read this one since about 2004, whereas I reread Forging the Darksword in 2012.
having defeated the warlock Blachloch and liberated the Sorcerers — sort of, anyway — in the first book, now Joram, Saryon, Mosiah, and the enigmatic Simkin make their way to the capital city of Merilon, where Joram intends to claim his birthright and ends up caught in a tangle of contemporary politics, world history, interpersonal relationships, and the truth of his own past. the writing remains a bit dubious, but the characters remain surprisingly compelling, and especially towards the end of the book the narrative is quite gripping and makes some really interesting perspective choices.
on the personal side, the upside of this book is that we finally have a female POV character, Gwendolyn (Gwen). unfortunately, she’s introduced to be Joram’s love interest, which rather undercuts her presence; also I remember some parts of what happens to her in book three; also, there is a profound gender essentialism and weirdness about her age (she vacillates between Girl and Woman as narratively convenient). still, it’s a nice change of pace. Gwen and Joram have a certain Romeo and Juliet vibe, since he’s seventeen-turning-eighteen and she’s sixteen-turning-seventeen, but her earnestness makes her an interesting narrative counterpart to Mosiah, in particular: each of them is encountering the Real for the first time, Mosiah as a peasant faced with the artifice — and the evil — of the wealth he once dreamed of and Gwen as the child of a wealthy guild artisan realizing that the world she has grown up in is a lie.
in spite of the introduction of Gwen, Joram’s relationships with Saryon and Mosiah continue to be the emotional core of the novel, and for a while this book also adds another man, Garald, Prince of Sharakan (more on this later), who also has a vibe with Joram — while observing an interaction after they have become (somewhat grudging, on Joram’s end) friends, Saryon’s perspective, seeing Joram watching Garald, says:
How he reaches out for love, Saryon saw, his heart aching. And yet when a hand starts to grasp his in return, he strikes it away.
this is a story whose central protagonist is deeply traumatized — and, indeed, has believed himself, and to some extent still believes himself — incapable of love, even though he desperately wants it, and whose protagonist doesn’t seem to recognize the love he receives from others — mostly, in this case, from men. Joram is, like, on the verge of revealing his deepest feelings to Mosiah and has to be — almost comically — interrupted by Simkin. Simkin starts turning people into illusions of Mosiah as disguises, at one point including Gwen, which Joram finds extremely confusing (including describing Mosiah/Mosiah’s seeming as “a virile, handsome young man”). truly it feels like Weis and Hickman knew what they were doing and were intentionally dancing around actual queer content.
sex continues to be a sticking point, and this is related to the politics. the series is clearly invested in a conception of “decadence” or “hedonism” as the root of social-political problems (reminding us again that only the Merilon aristocracy are finding their children born Dead, while many surprisingly strong magic-users are born among the peasantry). fatphobia (with fatness as marker of “decadence”) is mostly offhand or in the background but is constant through the book — Simkin is particularly relentless about Bishop Vanya. crucially, though, sex isn’t part of this “decadence”, and in Doom of the Darksword the narration clearly points the reader to sex as an aporia or inconsistency within Thimhallan, as when Gwen and her cousins are speculating about Joram and company at the gates of Merilon:
“You’re right, Lilian,” Gwen said decisively. “That’s what they are—highwaymen, bold and daring.”
“Just like Sir Hugo, the one Marie told us the tale of?” whispered Majorie in excitement. “The bandit who stole the maiden from her father’s castle and carried her off on his winged steed to his tent in the desert. Remember, he carried her inside and threw her on the silken pillows and then he…” Majorie stopped. “What did he do with her when she was lying on the pillows?”
“I don’t know.” Gwen shrugged her shoulders, a movement that showed them off to their best advantage. “I’ve wondered myself, but Marie always stops there and goes back to the girl’s father, who calls his warlocks to rescue her.”
“Did you ever ask her about the pillows?”
“I did, once. But she got very angry and sent me off to bed,” Gwen replied.
in another book, this could be explained as the ignorance of teenagers with no access to sex education. in this book, it seems to me to point to a central contradiction within the world: sexual attraction is clearly still a major element of social interactions and even of romance (see Gwen “show[ing] [her shoulders] off to their best advantage”), but the physical act of sex is erased even from torrid romance novels, so far beyond the pale that teenagers don’t even whisper to each other about it. it seems possible that under normal circumstances only catalysts and, one assumes, druids generally know about the mechanics of sex, presumably because they play a role in the management of reproduction, though some adults have at least a limited understanding of it, or at least an understanding that reproduction without magical intercession is possible (though sinful and also morally disgusting).
(that said, it’s also clear that this is another aspect of the world-building that’s difficult to sustain, as there are hints — not least Simkin’s off-color jokes, but also comments from other people — that some kind of sexual contact may, in fact, occur; maybe they just don’t do penetrative sex of any kind? but there are inconsistencies about other aspects of the world-building — like the existence of fabrics described as, for example, “silk”, implying the existence of weaving, which would unequivocally be Death/Technology and so evil. mainly, I think Weis and Hickman mainly just didn’t quite manage to sustain or fully think through certain aspects of their stated world-building.)
in spite of this core ambivalence, though, Doom of the Darksword continues Forging the Darksword’s interest in class conflict as a driver. once again the economy of magic/Life is highlighted as a tool of social control — the aristocracy have effectively unlimited access to Life while the peasantry’s access to it is strictly rationed. we are likewise constantly reminded of the fact that Gwen’s family, despite her father’s knighthood, are not actually aristocrats and, in fact, must be very careful about how they perform their class status: that “Lord Samuels ‘knew’ his place” is what allows them to remain on the periphery of the upper-class social world (literally floating above working-class Merilon) rather than down with the rest of the working class and artisans, like Gwen’s cousins.
Mosiah saw Merilon for the first time, truth illuminating the city in his eyes with far greater brilliance than the light of the meek spring sun. These people were locked in their own enchanted realm, willing prisoners in a crystal kindom of their own manufacture and design. What would happen, Mosiah wondered—looking at them with their costly robes and soft bare feet—if someone would wake up?
the imperial core…
I certainly wouldn’t say this book is Doing Historical Materialism, but neither do I think it’s doing the classic “aristocrats are bad because they are Morally Weak and don’t understand that Real Life is about Struggle and Hardship”. it recognizes that the aristocrats and the proto-bourgeoisie among the artisans of Merilon have specific material interests as a class; the artifice of Merilon is the embodiment of this aristocratic/proto-capitalist ideology, making invisible the labor of the peasantry and the working class —
— it just also, then, treats this as a Moral Failing that is specifically about Merilon and only secondarily about Thimhallan as a whole, because, of course, we have Garald. a Real Aristocrat like Garald wouldn’t behave this way, would respect the labor of the peasantry, would “deserve” the social and material privilege he is afforded by birth.
but the tantalizing possibility of real class consciousness is there.
moods: adventurous, dark, horny, reflective, tense