But don’t let that put you off. It doesn’t hurt. In fact, it actually makes reading his books more fun.
Dave Duncan has a clear and well-organized “perspective on the significance of the story.” He has read a lot of history and anthropology. He has read a lot of the Great Literatures of several European cultures. He knows stuff about population migrations, climate changes and their effect on human tribal cultures. But Dave isn’t one of those writers who insists that if he had to do all that research, the reader darned well better sit through all of it. No, Dave’s more of a prestidigitator. He saves the technical stuff for behind the scenes. Instead, he provides story: action, character, dialogue, movement, change, catharsis, suffering, insight, prejudice, individual point of view—all the stuff we look for in “pure entertainment.”
The reason Dave warned me not to explode back in 1989 is that he knows I’m a feminist. He put some pretty patriarchal and misogynist societies on Vernier. He wanted me to wait to pass judgment until I saw what the story did in the way of transformations—and I did. Yeah, West of Januarys protagonist is probably the furthest thing from the kind of save-the-world protagonist I’d write (except for the good sex, of course). But so what? I don’t know whether Dave would explode himself if I were to call him a feminist too. But the fact is, despite some local differences in the ideology of gender, Dave is a civilized person, and not only does he really like women, he really thinks women are—gasp—people. Doesn’t that make him a feminist too?
Okay, Dave, do you buy the argument that West of January is the kind of book a Scottish-born (in 1933), happily married, well-read, logically minded, conservative, interesting, genre-loving, ambitious, fast-typing, bearded feminist writes? I bet that sound is Dave snickering. Tough luck. And it’s true, I’m not sure that some doctrinaire radical feminists of my acquaintance would buy the argument either. But I will still argue that books like this are necessary, valuable and useful as well as being fun. I think that people of good conscience who are gutsy enough as writers to go where the story demands are the writers who are going to raise new generations with more thoughtfulness, more conscience than the generations before. If we can’t all contribute to that great endeavor of changing the world for the better in ways that are colored by our individual selves, then to quote a feminist (and a popular t-shirt), I don’t really want to be part of that revolution.
Now, let’s face it. Getting one writer to comment on another’s way of solving story problems is a “parlous” enterprise: are we driven by ideology or the almost irresistible urge to tell our own version of the story? So that’s all I’ll say about ideological concerns or story structure. I’ll leave it to the scholars to apply feminist theory or sociobiology or queer theory or deconstructionism or the theory of Canadian SFnal uniqueness to West of January. They can get all the pub. credits. They won’t find it a perfect book. But that’s not the point. It’s a fascinating book. It’s an entertaining book. It has texture and structure. It has secrets and surprises. It’s a real book.
It’s been a long time since 1989 and lots of things have happened in the world. Some of them seem almost designed to convince us that the concept of “civilization” is just a human pipe dream. Modern humankind has a lot more in common with Knobil than we think. We too are trying to figure out how to save and improve our world. At least we can see, by the end of West of January, that Knobil, as an appropriately larger-than-life hero type (self-effacing though he may be in the first person), had a chance with his, and made the most of it.
—1—
THE HERDFOLK
I WAS STILL VERY YOUNG WHEN I FIRST SAW AN ANGEL, yet so great was the impression made upon me by his visit that it remains my earliest memory, like a most distant tree at the limit of vision on an empty plain. Or so it seems, for all I truly remember are a few vague images enclosed in mist, recalled in later times. Inevitably the details have been smeared and entangled with details of other visits by other angels, when I was older and better able to understand. Even that first time, though, tiny as I must have been, disturbed and troubled me. What I recall most clearly is a small child’s sense of injustice and betrayal.
The herdfolk divide a man’s life into five stages, and at the time I barely could have reached the second, the toddler stage. I can retrieve no other specific event from those far-off times, only a general blur of memory, of the soil that nurtured my infant roots. All of the landscapes have merged into the endless rolling grassland of my youth, and all weather has become the constant golden sunshine of childhood. Certainly that sunshine was spotted by showers. Certainly among the little hills lay innumerable sloughs and watering holes, set in their guardian clutters of cotton trees. It was by those that we camped. But again all those are merged, one into another. I remember sitting in my mother’s tent, listening to rain and the thump of cloth beating in the wind, spraying me with a fine mist. I remember playing on the edges of wide stretches of blue water, immeasurably vast to a toddler. And yet all storms are now one storm in my mind; all rainbows, one rainbow; all lakes, one lake. In truth those little ponds were larger then, for they did dwindle as I grew, but to the small eyes of a small child they seemed most terrifyingly huge and clear and shiny.
Angels were the only visitors the herdfolk trusted or made welcome. The herdfolk honored angels, admiring their lonely courage and self-reliance, valuing the information and counsel that an angel could bring, his advice and his warnings. In return, the herdfolk freely offered their humble hospitality—food and shelter and safe rest.
I do not recall the angel’s arrival. I do not know who first noticed him coming. Most likely it was my father, for little escaped his notice by land or sky. We may have been camped, or we may have been on the move, but if that was the case, then the tents would have been pitched again at once.
The earliest of all my memories is of that angel sitting at my father’s side, cross-legged on cushions on a rug. Behind them were the tents—four of them, for at that time my father owned four women. Later he had six, and when I was a herdboy I was proud of his wealth, but when the angel came he had but four. The rug, the tents, and the cushions were all made of wool from our own herd, all striped and checkered in saffron and scarlet and vermilion, eye-nipping bright in the harsh white sunshine, squatting on small puddles of black shadow.
The visitor must have alarmed me already to have made such an impression. He was a great contrast to my father, for like all herdmen, my father was enormous. He outweighed any two of his women, and even sitting, he towered over the angel. In fine weather he wore only riding boots and leather breeches. He had little need for a shirt to protect him from the sun, for his thick black hair flowed down to mingle with the dense fur on his shoulders and back. His great beard merged into the pelt on his chest and belly. In only a few places, such as the sides of his ribs and the undersides of his forearms, was any of my father’s walnut skin ever visible.