Slow Funeral by Rebecca Ore Tor, 1994, 320 pp., $21.95 hc
Back in the fifties and sixties, when nobody in science fiction or fantasy made best sellerdom or big bucks, in many important ways everyone in the field was treated pretty much the same. The income difference between the top-paid writers and the lowest may have been significant, but it wasn't a different order of existence. And the difference between the kind of fiction Poul Anderson wrote and the kind Fritz Leiber wrote may also have been significant, but no one questioned whether they both belonged in the field.
Things have changed a lot since then. Now the market's puffed up like a blowfish, so that those at the top get advances on single novels that represent ten times the career earnings of those at the bottom. There are many kinds of writers: the highbrows, the packagers, the high fantasists, the low fantasists, the horror writers, the hard sf writers, the soft sf writers, the feminists, the series writers, the producers of movie and TV tie-ins, the sharecroppers. People debate whether much of what fills the science fiction racks of your local bookstore even qualifies as science fiction, and by what definition. Meanwhile the field is being driven by publishing perceptions, marketing decisions, conglomerate bottom lines. In 1960, no one wrote sf to become rich; I can't presume to say why individual writers write sf today, but some are getting rich.
You may have noticed before now that in these columns I've spent my time reviewing only certain corners of the field. (For instance, as a rule I don't read fantasy series or war game books--not because I'm avoiding them deliberately, but because I find most of them hard to like.) Some of the writers I've reviewed here are big names, some are quite popular, some even earn a lot of money. But much of what seems to me the most challenging sf published today earns its writers neither fame nor fortune. You might think that critical attention would make up for commercial success, but unfortunately there are lots of intellectually ambitious writers who don't have either critical or commercial clout, who though they are trying to do something different within the constrictions of today's bottom-line dominated market, are so packaged and sold that their work doesn't attract the sophisticated readers who might appreciate it, nor does it satisfy the least-common-denominator reader. Not all of these books are successful, or good reads. But it's especially galling for those who write solidly within the traditions of sf and fantasy, while trying to push the edges a bit, to get little money and precious little respect for their efforts.
I don't know what her commercial track record is, but Rebecca Ore is one of those writers I think of as laboring to produce work that's commercially acceptable while still doing things that matter to her. Her first three novels, Becoming Alien, Being Alien, and Human to Human, gained her some attention, but at the same time placed her is a niche that is not, I think, an accurate reflection of her intentions. The books were a series, paperback originals, packaged with space opera covers, rife with aliens. To some extent this was an accurate representation, but it obscured how Ore was trying to do other things besides tell an adventure story about humans among the galaxy's exotic aliens. Her later The Illegal Rebirth of Billy the Kid was not much like that trilogy and must have confused those readers who bought it expecting more of the same. Slow Funeral, a contemporary fantasy set in a backwoods county of Virginia, takes Ore in a still different direction.
The story concerns Maude Fuller, who as a young woman ran away from the hereditary aristocracy of Bracken County seeking "the dream universe of level playing fields and meritocracy and rules that worked the same for everyone." Twenty years later she's ended up in Berkeley, living in a house of counter culture people who consider themselves "witches," though they are nothing like the real witches Maude grew up with. That dream universe of equality and reason may not exist, though Berkeley is closer to it than Bracken County.
The novel begins when Maude hears the supernatural voice of her dying grandmother Partridge calling her back to Bracken County. She hesitates, then goes, there to struggle with her family and its heritage of magic. Bracken County not a part of the continent geologically, and not part of the 20th century. It is fighting a so-far successful holding action against science and reason. Logic counteracts magic, magic seeks to encompass and control logic, as with the Virginia state senator who has a scientific research institute in the back of his pickup truck--shrunken and controlled, with researchers as his puppets. The locals react to overflights by National Guardsmen looking for fields of marihuana:
"Most older Bracken County people hated having the helicopters overhead because that much unadapted machinery in the air spread logic all over the place and killed magic . . . But children looked around when the machines flew. Freed of a compulsion to stay in the county and fetch and carry for someone powerful, some local kids from powerless classes joined the military under the protection of its vast machines . . . and left, got educated, and never came back."
Maude's arrogant boyfriend Doug, fascinated by magic, follows her from Berkeley. Doug is an engineer who is attracted by Maude's great aunt Betty and Betty's husband Luke, the most powerful witches in the family. He is befriended by Maude's cousin Terry and her husband John, who represent a younger generation that uses magic unconsciously. John, a modern Southern weapon-toting rugged individualist, has, apparently unawares, eaten the soul of a black boy who was fascinated by John's guns. He is a contemporary redneck as warlock.
Back in Bracken County Maude finds herself caught in the middle. Magic allows her relatives to control others, with users in turn controlled by "entities," non-human forces from which magic originates. Though magic is part of her nature, Maude doesn't want to be either a controller or controlled. She doesn't want to use the power, but wants to protect those like Doug who are at risk.
All of Ore's earlier books have in different ways expressed the vision of someone living in or tied to the rural South; in Slow Funeral's portrait of Bracken County she gives us the South and its peculiar culture more directly than she ever has before. In the way that Bracken County is physically isolated from the rest of the American continent (geologically it is built on rock separate from the structures that raised the Appalachians and the surrounding land), the South as a whole has been culturally isolated from the rest of American society. Ore shows us this cultural separation in real places, habits and people, from auto repair sheds to cockfights to quiltmaking to the inhabitants' casual and unapologetic racism and their steady opposition to change. The lives of Bracken County's people are penned in by family history. One of the first questions a person gets in the South is "Who are your people?"--as if to know a person's family is to know all he is capable of. In Slow Funeral, Maude struggles against a place that sees family as destiny.
Maude, unable to meet the expectations of her "people," has become a permanent outsider. Outside Bracken County she has never found a home, has drifted, taken many lovers, held various jobs. Though she is highly intelligent and penetratingly analytical, she is also deeply insecure, perhaps even clinically paranoid. Back in Berkeley Maude claimed to be mad in order to get welfare money, but maybe she is mad, and the magic calls she hears in her mind are only the delusions of a schizophrenic. For its first half the novel hovers between psychological and supernatural explanations for "magic." Ore uses this ambiguity to make social comments: Slow Funeral says as much about traditional forms of social control as it does about witchcraft. Ore shows how many exploited people hold tight to the very habits and institutions by which they are being used. She understands "the deep loyalties given by the powerless to those who never planned to honor their workers' faith." Beneath the placid and seemingly easygoing surface of this Southern way of life there is no escape from the ethic of "use or be used"; as Maude's Aunt Betty tells her, people in Bracken County "can choose whether to be on top of magic or under it, not magic or no magic."
At points Maude wonders whether all the mind control that goes on in Bracken County is merely psychological intimidation by upper class whites over the tenant farmers and poor blacks. Is magic just another word for power of place in the Southern social structure, or intimidation by personality? Slow Funeral is about this as well, how even a woman like Maude who grew up in this world, sees the way it works, and does not want to participate in it, is still run over by it.
In the course of this supernatural arm wrestling, one gets the sense of the alienation of a woman born and raised in the South, a close observer of its mores who has tried to escape it but has been drawn back. Someone who is both a part of and a critic of this place and culture. Ore offers many skewed observations about human behavior, some of them very penetrating, others funny, others just odd. At times Rebecca Ore is hard to read in the way that Gwyneth Jones is hard--I can't always follow her thought; her characters make leaps of allusion or reaction that seem unnatural to me, so that I have to stop and figure out how they draw the conclusions they do. It's as if Ore, and her characters, think sideways from the rest of us (or at least me). But as I've commented in the past about Jones's White Queen, this can be a virtue as well as a drawback.
The first half of the novel develops too slowly for my tastes, but eventually it gathers force to a harrowing climax. Maude must choose between using magic or forsaking it, leaving herself and others vulnerable to those who see exploitation as natural, justified by hundreds of years of history and embodied in the personalities of the users and the used.
Though the Southern social structure provides a place, security, and to some, power, in the end Maude votes for the "level playing field world"--the 20th century, or perhaps the 21st--even if for most it's still only a hope.
Do we have that level playing field in SF publishing and marketing? It would be nice to see this different sort of fantasy find a wide audience. How awful if we were prisoners of a culture as rigid as that of Bracken County--prisoners of other people's perceptions, expectations, our own histories. How awful if science fiction were a world of the favored vs. the neglected. Of names that people conjure with, of eaters of souls--even unconscious ones.
Comments or questions: write Kessel on the Internet: tenshi@ unity.ncsu.edu
Prisoners of Perception first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.