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language: English
country: USA
year: 1987
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Return to Nevèrÿon, #4
dates read: 4.5.24-12.5.24
at long last I’ve done it: I’ve finished Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon, and with it the series of the same title. the prose is as stunning as the first three volumes, and here Delany turns his (and his characters’) attention to retrospection and to the question of desire (this volume was originally published under the title Bridge of Lost Desire). I found it ever so slightly less compelling than the first three books, but it’s very nearly as breathtaking, particularly its conclusion.
its first story, “The Game of Time and Pain”, sees Gorgik the Liberator recounting incidents from his life to a barbarian boy he meets by chance on the road. Gorgik is interested especially in the relationship between desire and power, focused on the iron slave collars that have been central to the series and the power structures they represent even — in the present of narration — six years after the abolition of slavery as an institution in Nevèrÿon. here we find the sole trace of the impact of “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals”, as Gorgik and the barbarian briefly discuss safe sex in the shadow of the AIDS-like plague rumored to be spreading among men who have sex with men in Kolhari.
“The Tale of Rumor and Desire” offers a kind of parallel life to or mirror image of Gorgik’s, in the form of Clodon, an alcoholic ne’er-do-well moving from village to village, marked by the scars of corporal punishment (as Gorgik is not) but never enslaved (as Gorgik was), born in the countryside (to Gorgik’s urban childhood) but also marked by a few months spent living in Kolhari (as an unhoused vagrant, vs. Gorgik’s time as a guest of the Vizerine Myrgot in the High Court of Eagles), and with — all things considered — reasonably vanilla heterosexual sexual appetites (to Gorgik’s reasonably transgressive gay ones). we see Clodon’s life — unremarkable in so many ways — and the entanglements of lust, desire, and power that have shaped it, and we nonetheless encounter the possibility of transformation. and a dragon, far from fabled Ellamon.
and then the master (as it were) stroke of the series: the final story is once again “The Tale of Gorgik”, the story which opens Tales of Nevèrÿon — but now, after all of the intervening stories, it has a staggering depth: minor incidents and passing encounters have been developed; some characters have gone on to be major characters in their own right — Clodon makes an appearance, for example — and our fuller understanding of the social and political institutions of Nevèrÿon have radically transformed what was once a relatively straightforward (insofar as anything Delany writes is ever straightforward) Bildungsroman (or Bildungsgeschichte) into an extraordinary exploration of the ways our lives become entangled in others’, often without our ever being aware of it or of them. was this ever actually just “The Tale of Gorgik”? perhaps; perhaps not.
moods: grimy, horny, inspiring, reflective