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language: English
country: USA
year: 1988
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, science fiction
series: Darksword, #3
dates read: 7.4.25-9.4.25
in thinking about how to review Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Triumph of the Darksword, the conclusion of the original Darksword trilogy (the sequel, Legacy of the Darksword, was published a decade later), I find myself returning to something Simkin says in Doom of the Darksword, in response to Mosiah’s question about the fate of a lost enchanted realm (i.e., Camelot):
What always happens to enchanted realms. I suppose […] Someone woke up and the dream ended.
if one were to pick a single sentence to summarize these books it would be: Someone woke up and the dream ended.
I observed in my review of Doom of the Darksword that one of the series’s central concerns is the unreality of life in the kingdom of Merilon — an identification of the contradictions that underwrite its social and economic structure as a kind of waking dream, one that, if it ended, if those who benefit from the maintenance of that dream were ever to wake up and genuinely perceive the reality that underlies it, would utterly destroy the kingdom. in Triumph of the Darksword, this focus on (un)reality is extended to Thimhallan as a whole: this magical world is, we are forcefully reminded, only a dream. and, as the opening chapters so bitterly highlight, despite the beautiful veneer that covers it, for most of the people resident in the world it is, in fact, a kind of nightmare.
the book begins with Joram and Gwendolyn’s return from across the magical Border that protects(?) Thimhallan — though from what no-one inside remembers. meanwhile, Garald and his allies, including Mosiah, are preparing Sharakan for war against Merilon, only to find an incomprehensibly powerful enemy intruding into their conflict: a legion of Dead soldiers from Beyond the Border, equipped with tanks and what seem to be laser weapons. this army is seemingly bent on destroying everything in its path, and the people of Thimhallan are not prepared for weapons that can kill in an instant and enemies who cannot be weakened by draining them of magic.
key to the first section of the novel is the opposition between war as historically practiced in Thimhallan and “real” war. war in Thimhallan has become conventionalized, governed by strict rules and “fought” partly ceremonially within a defined, confined space governed by a “Gameboard” — war, in other words, is a kind of sport (the people of Merilon cheer for the display of Sharakan’s armies and are disappointed that the Emperor has declined to host a celebratory party), albeit one with potentially dramatic and notionally legally binding consequences. Garald, Mosiah, and others yearn for a “real” war, with “glorious” battles and life-or-death stakes.
Thimhallan, the novel suggests, is one great game, thousands — perhaps a few million — people playing at having a world of their own when in fact all they have are a series of elaborate illusions so lifelike that they’ve forgotten they’re illusions at all. it is a world that is utterly stagnant. when Joram returns — supposed by prophecy to be “hold[ing] in his hand the destruction of the world” — he looks around, seeing among other things the cruelty done to Saryon in his absence, and says: “Nothing has changed. Nothing will change.”
“The destruction is not in my hand,” Joram said bitterly. The darkness closed around him, the rising wind obliterating all trace of his footsteps in the sand. “It is not in my hand but in theirs!”
there’s a double meaning here, in light of the arrival of the army of the Dead — not in Joram’s hands but the hands of those who are coming after him; not in Joram’s hands but in the hands of those who rule Thimhallan and have perpetuated the mass injustices that are the foundation of this world. caught between “dreams of two worlds”, Joram is both a hinge of history and, at the same time, crushed into powerlessness by histories and systems beyond his control.
as the novel continues, it becomes clear that more is at stake here than just one world, however. first, of course, there is an archvillain, the banished Sorcerer Menju, who wants to lay sole claim to the magic of Thimhallan — by committing genocide and wiping out all of its people — and rule the universe. Joram — of course we must have a single Great Man hero — must find a way to stop him, though he is not at all sure Thimhallan is worth protecting.
the reason Menju‘s plan is possible at all, however, is because of another part of Thimhallan’s forgotten history: when its people left Earth to colonize this new planet, they did so because they had identified it as the source of all magic in the universe, a source they intended to keep for themselves. when Thimhallan sealed itself away behind its Border, it imprisoned all magic, everywhere, except the occasional scrap that escapes. and magic — literally personified — demands release. Thimhallan is not so much a world as an enclosure, one so carefully constructed that its owners do not even perceive the enormous benefits they have reaped by denying its contents to the rest of the universe. it is the imperial core, actually, and I would teach these books alongside Jameson’s “Radical Fantasy”.
(the personification of magic is, incidentally, the heavily queer-coded Simkin — here Menju and the non-magical soldier who’s leading the expeditionary force intended to conquer Thimhallan refer to him derogatorily as a “fop”, which I suspect was Weis and Hickman euphemizing. something I haven’t mentioned in the previous two books, because I knew what was coming, but which probably would have irked me under normal circumstances is Simkin’s heavy use of anachronisms and/or perhaps anatopisms — regularly quoting Shakespeare, for instance, among other very Earthly references that clearly fly over the heads of his listeners in Thimhallan. the fact that Simkin is magic personified and ambiguously omniscient despite being apparently trapped within the Border of Thimhallan makes this make sense — the signs have been there all along.
Simkin-as-magic-itself is juxtaposed strikingly here with, essentially, confirmation of the existence of the god of Thimhallan, the Almin, who at one point in fact speaks directly to Saryon. certainly the Almin seems to be a god, and since Hickman is Mormon I suppose we might assume he’s the god, but also…is he? it’s also very clear that whatever the Almin’s will actually is, it bears no relation to what anyone in the Church — neither the “evil” Bishop Vanya nor the “good” Cardinal Radisovik, and certainly not Saryon — wants. if the Almin is a good, he is a god who is utterly indifferent; he has a plan and he will see it carried out.)
I’m also particularly interested in the treatment (both literal and figurative) of Gwendolyn here. crossing the Border has — supposedly — driven her “mad”, but Joram and, ultimately, others come to believe that she is not, in fact, “mad” at all; rather, she has been revealed to be one of the Necromancers, those born to the Mystery of Spirit, who were believed to have died out centuries before. untrained and overwhelmed by her passage to a new world, Gwendolyn has ceased to interact with the living, speaking only to the spirits of the dead. one of the most striking moments in the book is a conversation between her parents and the healer they have called to examine her. while accepting that there is such a thing as “madness” in the abstract (which she defines as “a state into which the subject falls whether he or she wills it or not”), the healer rejects this as a frame for understanding Gwendolyn’s condition:
I tell you, milord and milady, that there is nothing wrong with your daughter. If she talks to the dead, it’s because she obviously prefers their company to that of the living. And from the way I gather some of the living have treated her, I don’t much blame her. […]
Madame, […] your daughter chooses to be who she is and where she is. She may live her entire life in this manner. She may decide at breakfast tomorrow that she doesn’t want to anymore. I can’t say and I can’t force her to come out of that world into one that doesn’t appear to me to be much better.
there’s a lot going on here. on one level, of course, there is the identification of the “mad” subject as (merely) willful, as if Gwendolyn’s decision were entirely arbitrary. at the same time, there is also a recognition that her behavior is shaped by the social context she lives in: “the way I gather some of the living have treated her”; “[a world] that doesn’t appear to me to be much better”. this is the kernel of a social model of (dis)ability, however underdeveloped, linking Gwendolyn’s apparently “disordered” behavior not only with particular traumatic experiences but with a broader social and political context. the problem is not — or at least not only — Gwendolyn but the world(s) she lives in.
I suppose I should also talk about the sci-fi elements, but the truth is that there’s not a lot to say about them — while their presence provokes a bunch of compelling plot decisions and world-building reveals that substantially complicate our understanding of the setting and of history, they’re simply not very…present. while the outsiders arrive from a sci-fi space future where there are phasers and starbases, fundamentally they’re just a carbon copy of the US military, without even the imagined future gender or race situation of, say, Starship Troopers. just a bunch of anglo men with guns, some of whom have pictures of their wives and children. but I can’t really fault the novel for this, because it’s not like they’re underdeveloped in a way that’s dragging the book down — they’re there as a convenient plot device and Weis and Hickman are only interested in offering a minimal, stereotyped sketch in order to get the plot moving.
and the prophecy turns on an em dash. sex is illegal. the dead are in perfect union with god but also their ghosts are just…trapped all across the world in the places where they lived, unable to communicate directly (and only erratically able to physically affect the world) except through a Necromancer. Garald loves Joram. Mosiah loves Joram. Saryon loves Joram. Saryon cannot forgive his god. and when the dream ends and you wake up, the world seems a bitter, dead place — but there is magic in it once again.
truly these are books.
moods: dark, reflective