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language: English
country: UK
year: 1949
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 14.7.23-17.7.23
I read Robert Graves’s Seven Days in New Crete (so you don’t have to) in order to better situate Islwyn Ffowc Elis’s Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd in its literary context. Elis’s book is MUCH better and more interesting, and while there are some substantial issues with his utopian future it’s so much better than Seven Days in New Crete. good god, this was bad.
the novel appears to be an attempt to imagine a benevolently matriarchal society built along the lines imagined by Graves in The White Goddess (BIG caveat: I haven’t yet read The White Goddess, so I can’t confirm this for sure). the protagonist, Edward Venn-Thomas, is conjured into the future while he sleeps by a group of magicians living in the utopian(?) society known as New Crete. I say “utopian(?)” both because a neo-Bronze Age society built on eugenic principles and governed by a caste system (which rests partly, like so many speculative texts, on the idea that some people are inherently, temperamentally (and perhaps even biologically) predisposed to be servants) is decidedly not my idea of utopia and because the book itself — through Edward — also regards New Crete as less than utopian, but for different and bad reasons.
Edward regards New Cretan society as essentially an improvement over his own, with a few minor reservations (mainly about the New Cretan rejection of written history and literature and privileging of the oral above all), except that by virtue of having created a near-perfect utopia they have effectively eliminated evil from their world — and so have also lost the ability to experience true good, as opposed to the simply everyday “good” of their virtuous lives. he initially intuits this difference only vaguely, but over the course of the novel it leads him — with a bit of prodding from the Goddess — to become an active agent of chaos, disrupting the lives and social systems around him as the prelude to Goddess’s great wind of change. this part was actually probably the most narratively compelling part of the novel, except that it rests on the assumption that humans need to suffer in order to acquire “character” — he describes the people of New Crete, and especially its men, as “cardboard cutouts”, in contrast to the (presumably) “real” men of 1940s England. to be clear, the caste/estate system is not an issue for him: once he grasps it, he’s unbothered by the relegation of a portion of the population to the permanent status of “servants” (both socially and pharmacologically reinforced, in cases where someone determined to belong to the servant estate isn’t as servile as they’re “supposed” to be). of course Edward, as a poet, is assigned to the magician estate, the smallest but also obviously the most prestigious.
he also makes such awful political observations about his present as:
When the [modern medical] system was introduced into backward countries like India and Egypt it worked almost too well. The native systems discouraged the survival of weakly children or of people too old to do useful work. Now the population’s increasing absurdly, and will go on increasing, I suppose, until war or famine reduces it to a sensible size.
despite his rather milquetoast observation that New Crete’s apparent execution of homosexuals “seems a bit hard”, he also goes out of his way to emphasize his homophobia:
I rather like walking in arm in arm with a woman, though it makes me shorten my pace uncomfortably, but to have a man linked to me in tender-hearted brotherhood embarrasses me.
at the end of the novel we also meet the “holy perverts”, who are the homophobic/transmisogynist end result of the execution of homosexuals (which is carried out in typical New Cretan fashion, with a mix of drugs and hypnosis to “kill” one person and replace them with a new personality/self):
[…] they’re reborn as hand-maids of Mari and live without benefit of estate in a convent at the back of this playhouse. […] The Goddess has a tender regard for perverts—not the unnatural perverts of your epoch who despised women and preferred boys, but natural ones, who love her so extravagantly that they want to be one with her, as women.
Edward is, in two words, utterly insufferable.
the book again draws together the disparate strands of fantasy — the language of New Crete is “based on Catalan” but incorporates “some Gaelic”; the bynames used by New Cretans in lieu of their secret names “reminded [Edward] of the Red Indians: ‘See-a-Bird’, ‘Fig-bread’, and ‘Starfish’”. when Edward visits a kind of New Cretan brothel, his encounter with the prostitutes is framed through the Thousand and One Nights:
But even with Antonia by my side I had often dreamed my recurrent Arabian Nights dream, a relic of adolescence, in which I was a sultan among his complaisant harem, in a setting not unlike this—always to wake in acute disappointment before I had made my choice between the slender, haughty, high-breasted blonde, the plump little seventeen-year-old with the brindled curly hair and the friendly smile, and the exquisitely fragile, honey-skinned Indian princess with jewelled wrists and ankles and the solitaire pearl folded in her navel.
just an awful man.
the world-building is also a mess — the history leading up to the establishment of New Crete, of which Edward gets a brief overview, features the clearance of the inhabitants of Australia, Russia, Central America, and Central Asia on the grounds that these regions are “unsuitable for permanent occupation”, and are “written off as Lands of Mystery”. there’s a vague white supremacist linking of New Crete with an “Alpine” race near the end of the book, perhaps linked with a device from the “Logicalist” period of pre-New Cretan history, the “Cix-Fax”, which created cross-species mixes, one of which is the “negro-mandril” which “did a deal of damage to crops on the frontier forms”. other parts of the world, meanwhile — “Western China, Malaya, Central Africa, India and most of North America” — are “abandoned to degenerate forms of society and called Bad Lands”; meanwhile, Eastern China, the “East Indies”, and Japan have been depopulated by nuclear war and recolonized by New Cretans.
thank god Islwyn Ffowc Elis took only the inciting incident — a man from the present projected bodily into the future while he sleeps — and none of the actual substance of the novel.
moods: mysterious, reflective