Excessive Candour
Megatext Anxiety

There was once a story that was told for the first time, or so we've been told. It was a story that used only True Words which said only True Things, before history got at them. It is the Story at the bottom of the Well of the Past that fantasy tales puddle over in their attempts to recover the truth down there: but never really find. It is not, however, the kind of story that any writer of fiction in the 21st century hopes to write, though one might question the self-awareness of the remaining authors of convention-ridden High Realist novels about the unrepeatable thingness of the world seen through the eyes of a protagonist who, like some magic phoenix without a Pa, experiences the world for the first time ever. But writers of fantasy and SF—like the visibly learned and savvy Gwyneth Jones in Spirit; Or, the Princess of Bois Dormant—should not ever be accused of failing to understand they ride the megatext.

These are deep waters, peopled with taxa we should perhaps avoid awakening, this time round. It might simply be enough to say that negotiations between the Twice-Told and the new in any SF novel written in 2008 are constant; and that to follow the plays between echo and Novum in any modern text can sometimes comprise the main pleasure of that text. In SF and horror—and, less obviously, in fantasy—the Shock of Recognition is sometimes most intense when that which has been told and retold takes its final shape at last. Even at the time, I think most of us understood that the shock of 9/11 was not surprise but recognition.

The problem with Spirit certainly does not, therefore, lie in the fact that Jones has chosen to inhabit the conversation—the megatext—of fantastika, but in the fact that by actually focusing on that conversation she has exposed herself to what one might call a fairly severe case of megatext anxiety: a condition which often presents as a denial that Hyde has won: that Jekyll has been eaten by the megatext within. None of this shows on the surface of Jones's text, which in fact contains no explicit reference to any prior text that hydes within, though the Gollancz blurb blows any possible plan she might have had to force the reader to earn the recognition, by stating specifically that "Spirit is a high-octane re-telling of The Count of Monte Cristo".

How long the unprompted reader might have taken to cotton on to the original tale inside it is hard to say (Jones does not, in fact, imprison her heroine unjustly until halfway through the long tale); but even when we are prompted, the complexities of the interaction between Spirit and Alexandre Dumas' quite astonishing novel of 1844-45 are far more intricate than I (not a recent reader of Monte Cristo, though a devoted one) could begin to master. Some are as clear as the Chateau d'If; some as contortedly wreathed in plot fog as the family romance of the corrosively interwined Yu/Scolari clan/conspiracy, which reflects (almost certainly more precisely than I could follow) the intricate story of the Villefort family in Dumas' original: right down to the morally compromised ancient general who, now paralyzed by a stroke, still manages to unveil just before his demise a lost document which will expose the long-ago crime against the heroine and save the bacon of an innocent Scolari daughter due to be sacrificed into forced marriage.

I've said heroine a couple of times. Some synopsis might be useful. We are in an already existing Jones universe, some time after the Gender Wars closed off the last volume of her Aleutian Trilogy, which comprises White Queen (1991), The North Wind (1994) and Phoenix Cafe (1997). The backstory—some of it helpful if one hopes to make much sense of the long history of internecine politicking that still ravages the period Spirit is set in—is dauntingly complex (I could taste some assonance with the history of France 1817-34 or so, but then maybe it's just that all unhappy families are alike); and it might be prudent to ignore it as much as possible. The Gollancz blurb, so refreshingly open about Monte Cristo, is mum about the chains that bind Spirit to the previous series (which was in fact originally published by Gollancz; go figure why they don't mention it here), and maybe we should follow suit. But we can't entirely.

The Spirit of the century

In the first trilogy, Earth is invaded by the Aleutians, an alien species Jones described in great and fascinating detail 15 years ago; most of them have since departed, leaving Blue Earth a minor but waxing force in the interstellar culture whose control point is the artifact known as Speranza, where the latter portions of Spirit take place. What we need to know now is that Aleutians abhor nonliving electronics and have mastered biological interfaces with what we think of as the electronic world; and that individual Aleutians are immortal rather in the way a genre of the fantastic is immortal: the spiritus mundi (as it were) of a dead Aleutian becomes a kind of megatext only recognizable by its intimate biological descendent, an essentially soulless corpus whose main function is to recoup its previous self by a profound assimilative resumptive act of Recognition. The unfolding of this process in Spirit has nothing I could calibrate in common with Monte Cristo, and takes most of the book to come into focus (though we are signaled clearly that something like this is going to happen); but the life and death and reborning and Recognition of Francois the Aleutian is perhaps the most gripping aspect of the novel as a whole. Over the first half of Spirit—where the spirit of Dumas was least manifest to this reader—Francois acts as the mysterious savant/advisor to the heroine's Mistress, Lady Nef, and also as her lover. He is an unguent for the telling, an enabler. We come finally to Edmond Dantes.

And to the main fissure that divides spirit from old substance. In Dumas' novel, Dantes is a full-grown man, a young seafarer due for promotion to captain who returns to Marseilles to marry his childhood sweetheart. For various reasons he is shanghaied by the law on his wedding day and incarcerated in the Chateau d'If, where he finally meets the Abbe Faria, whose worldly wisdom allows him to expose to the desperate Dantes the motives and identity of his betrayers. Over the following years, Faria teaches him all his wisdom, and on his deathbed tells him of a vast treasure secreted in a cave on the Island of Monte Cristo. Dantes escapes in Faria's shroud, gains the treasure, becomes the Count and creates a vast spiderweb in whose strands his unspeakable betrayers gradually entangle themselves. En passant, Monte Cristo becomes philanthropically involved with various offspring of the villains; he both uses them (to force their parents into the open) and saves them. Monte Cristo has undergone a metamorphosis in prison, from which he emerges almost supernaturally agile, learned, sensitive, with a secret identity, and as costumed as Mephistopheles. We follow his every move. Although his initial goal—it is the engine which drives Monte Cristo—is a just revenge, it is moderately clear that he gradually becomes a hero whose ultimate goal—just like almost any of Dumas' swashbuckler heroes—is to defend society. Batman would be nowhere without Edmond Dantes.

In Spirit, young Gwibiwr—luckily for us she is known as Bibi until she becomes the mysterious Princess of Bois Dormant—is a child of rebels rescued into posh servitude by the mysterious Lady Nef, who is the wife of General Yu (he who saves bacon at the end of the book). She grows up slowly in the complex effluvial City where the Nef/Yu household harbors itself. Like many teenage girls in YA novels, she gains considerable knowledge while eavesdropping. She becomes a young woman and follows her mistress and Yu on a diplomatic mission to another planet; the mission goes savagely wrong. She is locked into a forced marriage with a distempered princeling (he dies after a while); she is imprisoned; eventually she discovers that Yu has betrayed his wife—in the course of a centuries-old battle for power on Earth I have no intention of trying to understand—and that it is just in case Bibi knows something incriminating that she too has been cast into hell. Eventually she discovers Nef, who becomes her Faria; and the rest of the novel—we are now well over halfway through—unpacks with some speed, though fettered by long passages of chillingly unidiomatic interactive chat from various characters on the sidelines. (Jones is almost always at her best dealing with one character at a time; she is curiously inept in her attempts to represent the interplays between tacit and explicit communication rituals that people engage in together; the result in Spirit is a large number of pinball scenes—arenas of discourse crammed with figurines who carom off one another blindly, emitting en passant almost random bits of plot data almost inaudible against the racket). The mysterious Princess of Bois Dormant—Bois Dormant being the uninhabited planet Nef/Faria has bequeathed Bibi—appears intermittently, in a gray-gown costume, pulling strings. After half a novel deep inside her, we do not get much inside Bibi anymore. She does defend society; and Spirit ends in a slew of marriages.

A conversation with Culture

The Count of Monte Cristo is a novel about a natural hero of the world who has been cheated of his just domain, and who recaptures his place in the sun of France by transforming himself into a savior-figure one step short of becoming an Ubermensch. Spirit is about a natural refuser of the world—Bibi's main resource as savagely abused child and as visitor to worlds she cannot understand is to refuse any sweets on offer—who loses the world she had been given by her psychic owner, and who transforms herself into a figure who is so deeply recessive—remember we do not get inside her head—that we cannot quite grasp the kinetic reality of anything she does.

There is some considerable argument governing some of the talk that fills so much of Spirit, usually involving Nef and/or Francois and/or Bibi; but the grounds on which some of the sterner utterances are based are sunk deep in the quasi-megatext of Jones' own previous volumes in the overall series; and this I cannot unpack safely. It may be taken, however, that moments of clarity of discourse have almost certainly been earned; and that we may safely figure that a re-reading of Spirit, and probably of its predecessors, will make Lady Nef's final words of wisdom even more pointed than they seem out of context:

"Ah, my people," sighed Nef, tugging at her skinny braid, and grinning with her few [remaining] teeth. "Those Traditionalists! They must win, they always win. And after each crushing triumph, their territory is a little smaller."

Passages like this hint at a conversation between this series and Iain M. Banks' Culture books (given names like S'na'ulat'tz and S'n'l't''tz and Yelaixiang Konoe-Hosokawa are also dreadfully similar to Banksian monikers); all of which gives comfort.

Only when on returning to the megatext does unease strike again. It is, I think, a dis-ease that I am detecting in the book itself. I think Jones does fail to keep Bibi properly alive throughout these long pages, and I think she fails to inhabit the Princess of Bois Dormant—a name which should ring within the megatext like a bell—out of something very much like embarrassment: as though Dumas's novel had suddenly become gauche. The passages describing Bibi's imprisonment have a cleansing, forwept intensity, as though they had been scribed onto the page; and I think Jones was happiest there. But the heart of The Count of Monte Cristo is release. It is not good news that a novel called Spirit prefers the Chateau d'If.