It was thus something of a surprise to me that Wright’s newest book, The Last Guardian of Everness seems to have appeared with little fanfare, at least in this part of the virtual world. Particularly since The Golden Age merited multiple reviews (indeed, those rpg.net reviews were what convinced me to read it in the first place). The new book is more straight-forwardly fantasy and I can’t help but wonder if that hasn’t contributed to its absence here. Perhaps the prospect of yet one more Fantasy Trilogy is just too much to bear.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of this trilogy-in-the-making as just “one more of those things”. By no means perfect, The Last Guardian of Everness is still quite an interesting book, both as a new entry in the field of fantasy and as a resource for gamers. I’ll discuss both of these aspects. I should also note here that Style and Substance seem even more inappropriate to this review than usual. I have thus more-or-less randomly rated it a “4” in each, but that is mostly meaningless. Take heed, gentle reader.
As A Modern Fantasy
I won’t bore you with a sketch of Fantasy as a genre. Let’s follow that old dictum of knowing it when we see it. For those inclined to subdivide and classify, The Last Guardian of Everness might be more properly put into the class of Modern or Urban Fantasy, wherein fantastic goings-on intrude upon what we call (for lack of a better term) “our contemporary world”. Modern Fantasy can often be distinguished from High Fantasy or Sword and Sorcery not only by the setting (“here and now” versus “there and then”), but by the nature of the Fantastic, which is more often of a faery-tale or mythological character. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (and pretty much everything else he has done) might be a recent exemplar; Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, two older examples. Even when the Fantastic is not derived from any real myth or legend, it tends to share in that quality. Thus Clive Barker’s Weave World does not use real-world stories, but it does use the feeling of those stories, essentially creating artificial myths about the Seerkind. In other words, while there are a plethora of Once-and-Future Kings in Modern Fantasies, there aren’t too many drow rangers or plucky halflings or moody barbarians.The Last Guardian of Everness, however, doesn’t just use myths and faery-tales: it is quite explicitly about those things. And what a bunch they are. This is not the first book to try and unify myths from diverse origins into some kind of whole, but the sheer density of stories being manipulated here is rather dazzling. Not just traditional myths and legends, but urban legends, literary and Biblical myths and fictional traditions collide here in the land of dreams. Norse jotun travel with Scottish selkie in advance of Arthurian knights with the Three Storm Princes, one of whom was tamed and bound by the magus Ben Franklin, to capture Tolkien’s city of elves in Aman in the service of almost-Lucifer, who broods in his drowned city in the dark.
A large part of the fun, for me, was trying to catch the references and work out what was real myth and what Wright had invented for his needs. That this wasn’t easy strikes me as indicative of the quality of this mélange: it conceptually hangs together and doesn’t come across as a “kitchen-sink fantasy”. I’d contrast this with Matt Wagner’s second MAGE series which had a certain “and then there’s this other guy” quality of throwing in one culture after the next. I found Wright’s implementation of this idea skillful and easy to digest, if that metaphor makes any sense. Besides, I can’t recall ever having caught references to the Julian Jaynes classic of wacky psycho-history (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) right alongside several worshipful steals from the mysteriously-overlooked fantasist, Alan Garner (The Weirdstone of Brisingamen). If that doesn’t strike you as fun, then bear my sense of fun in mind when evaluating this review.
I should point out, however, that the mythic resources being drawn upon are largely Western European and Classical. I noticed one reference to The Mahabharata, but that’s about it for anything from the Eastern Hemisphere. This is not uncommon, but is a bit disappointing. Wright’s done such a nice job of welding these stories together, that it a shame he wasn’t able to extend much beyond the Dead White Guy canon. I don’t want to criticize him too sharply for this, as I wouldn’t want to try and put all world myth into a semi-coherent whole. Actually, I would want to do just that and have tried and failed spectacularly, so that may account for my willingness to overlook this point. Others may feel differently.
Faery-Tales and Dreaming
You will have noticed that I have not discussed the plot. This is intentional. The Last Guardian of Everness is one of those books that does not benefit from previews. I read several before I read the book, so I speak from experience. You are advised to pull the dust-jacket off the book and ignore it. Preferably burn it. Since the jacket art for this book, unlike that of The Golden Age, is uninspired at best, this will serve a dual purpose.What I will say about the plot is that it revolves around standard tropes of Modern Fantasy—the intrusion of the Fantastic into the mundane and the secret history of the two. The working out of this is, for lack of a better expression, darn clever. I like the way in which Wright deals with a venue set in North America that’s awash in European faery-tales. I greatly admire and enjoy his ability to discuss imaginary technology with which that the reader is completely unfamiliar as if they were commonplace. He used this same technique to great effect in The Golden Age: in that book, he discussed “sense filters” and “sophotechs” and “noumenal recorders” in such a way as to make them seem as mundane as telephones and DVD’s. In this book, the Waylock family (central characters) discuss what we might call oneirotech (dream technology) with the same familiarity and the effect is the same: to make the reader feel that this is a real technology operating upon a real world.
The subject of dreaming brings us to the central concept of the novel: the relationship between dreaming and waking reality. This subject has been explored in both literature (you know that I am going to reference The Sandman here) and games (Changeling: the Dreaming). Wright uses the perceived disjunction between the two as the same as that between magical and mundane reality.
Modern Fantasies have to decide why the Fantastic vanished from sight: sometimes it’s an historical accident, sometimes a conspiracy, sometimes it’s vaguely imputed to “the rise of science”. Wright suggests that once dreaming and waking were undifferentiated activities and that life, so to speak, really was but a dream. Or that dreams were once as real as anything else. This is an enormously appealing idea to me as it bundles together all aspects of the Fantastic and explains why you can have that mythic mélange of which I earlier wrote.
This explanation has some other interesting corollaries. First, it suggests that people are not quite as stupid as they seem. I mean that in contrast to other “hidden magic” stories in which people just refuse to believe the truth before their eyes. The implication in those stories is that most folk are too set in their ways, too content to notice reality. And that’s fine. But the idea here is that people absolutely can ignore this stuff. Indeed, the fantastic events in the book do not exist in waking reality, barring some exceptional circumstance. So those in the know, rather than being smarter or better than everyone else, are just different. They are open to great powers by their lucid dreamings, but are just as exposed to nightmares which the rest of us are not.
Tied to that is the suggestion that the separation of waking reality and dreaming was, on the whole, a good thing. As enormously appealing and exciting as the faery-tale world is, human existence before the disjunction is implied to have been one of abject servitude to the Fantastic. One might recall here the myths of Antiquity which say that humanity was created to be the slaves of the gods. The separation freed humanity from the capricious whims of the Fantastic and allowed us to find our own way in existence, for better or worse.
The Dreaming World in this book is also the world of faery-tales and myths (which are not quite the same thing, but let’s not quibble about that here). And Wright pulls his trick of making the magical seem mundane again with the conventions of those sorts of stories. The Dreaming World works according to Faery-Tale Laws in the same way that the Waking World operates according to Natural Laws. And these are as prosaic to its inhabitants as gravity is to us. They are, of course, substantially more whimsical and obscure from the perspective of most of the human beings.
I enjoyed the ways in which the humans—both those mundane and those who are experienced dreamers—are forced to use the Faery-Tale Laws. One of the protagonists was groomed to be dreamer, but turned his back on that role and has lived in the mundane world for decades. Once the Fantastic begins its incursion, he is forced to try and remember the odd, little rules he has forgotten over the years. There’s a nice scene where he remembers one of these things and is so astonished that it works that he can’t help but laugh.
Even better is a conflict in which the opponents are essentially trying to out-whimsy each other. These faery-rules are so convoluted and bizarre that nobody seems able to remember them all at the same time. This fight—deadly serious in its implications (horrible death, end of the world, and those sorts of things)—plays out like a farce or a child’s game, where each actor says something like: “Aha! But you have forgotten to say ‘Bibble’ and turn around three times!” It is very funny to read.
Having said all of the above, I can also admit to a slight frustration with the plot. There is a certain “great fight against ultimate evil” notion here, which is a bit too frequent in fantasy stories. As usual, the Little Bads are more interesting than the Big; the Littles in the case being the creepy-yet-funny Selkie. And the narrative force gets a bit diluted as it goes along. Roughly half the book ends up being an extended fight-scene, which was a bit too extended for my taste. This is, I fear, characteristic of Wright—the conceptual delights of The Golden Age were seriously thinned out by the “find the Bad Guy” plot of its sequel.
But those are relatively minor quibbles on the whole and Wright presents a take on the human reaction to the Good Guys which I found interesting enough to make up for the old Save The World bit.
Gaming the Dream
The Golden Age made me want to play a Baroque Fantasy with a Transhuman setting. The Last Guardian of Everness made me want to play a faery-tale game. It would be well-suited to creative pillaging for players of Nobilis or Dark Ages: Fae or any other game in which faery-tales and Modern Fantasy play a role.The whimsy-rules conflict was a high point of the book and one ripe for the picking. Although I’m not overly-familiar with Exalted: The Fair Folk, I suspect that that game’s Shaping Combat might mesh very well with the idea. But any game that uses an abstracted conflict system (such as HeroQuest or The Shadow of Yesterday) could use this idea to create some fantastic duels:
“Well, you remembered to place a daisy-chain on your head because it’s Friday, so +2 for your efforts to deny him entry to your house. But you didn’t turn and spit over your left shoulder every time you said Nastrond’s name. That’s gonna make it real difficult to banish him back to his realm.”
It could be equally fun to play these conflicts whether the character’s are supposed to know all of these rules (the GM would then have to provide a “weapon list” as it were) or if they have no bloody idea what is going on and are just winging it (“I don’t know; try throwing some salt over your shoulder!”).
The Magic-Dreaming association would also be useful in games. I found myself thinking a lot about WW’s Mage, and how the ideas of the novel might be plundered for that game (I’m speaking of the old Mage games since I have no idea what the new one is going to be like). Maybe the split between the Earth and the Umbra is lot older than anyone suspects (in fact, the situation in the book between the real house of Everness and its dream-world version is very much in the spirit of Mage). Maybe there is no Technocracy, since the split is self-sustaining. Or perhaps the Technocracy are simply people who found out about the Dreaming World and realized the untold potential for disaster waiting within. Do they secretly scheme to “cure” us of dreaming entirely? The whole Paradox thing would be out since Mages walking down the street wouldn’t be able to do anything too fantastic, except to other inhabitants of the Fantastic. But get them into the Dreaming World and things get wild. There’s a Matrix-like quality in this scheme that appeals to me.
Going further, I have this idea that the Dreaming might be used for a Planetary Romance. John Carter himself believes that he is dreaming when he walks out of that Arizona cave and reaches out to Mars. Perhaps Barsoom really is a dream-world and Carter the unaware-but-lucid dreamer. The faery-tale laws might find a counterpart in the Victorian conventions of Burrough’s world. In Dream-Barsoom, people never have sex unless married, men are always polite to ladies, and nobody ever steals anything. That is as bizarre as any faery-tale.
