Speaking of the Fantastic III. Брайан Герберт

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СКАЧАТЬ to me. That sounds like something systematic and institutional. As I mentioned earlier—and this was a discovery that I made while researching the book—witch persecution is, alas, a logical implication of Christian theology. Yes, there is also some demonology in the Old Testament, but we find it largely in the famous translation authorized by James I, who fancied himself an expert demonologist and even wrote a book on the subject. The King James Bible was translated by witch believers, and this state of mind influenced many of their word choices. Think about that notorious line from Exodus, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Today a Hebrew scholar would translate it in much more innocuous terms. It would come out something like, “Thou shalt not provide a fortune-teller with his means of livelihood.”

      Q: Describe your book for our readers. It’s about someone who wants to put an end to the witchcraft statues.

      Morrow: A big influence on The Last Witchfinder is a book called Masks of the Universe by the physicist Edward Harrison—whom I must get in touch with: I don’t think Harrison knows there’s a novel floating around that traces directly to his notion of the witch-universe, the “psychic space” in which most people lived during the Renaissance. The big discovery I made, as I continued my research, was that a person born around 1678 would have lived in the transition from Harrison’s witch-universe to what we now call the Enlightenment. So I said to myself, “Hey, that’s pretty damn dramatic. I won’t need a huge cast of characters to make this epic happen. It can be one woman’s quest. It will be the story of Jennet Stearne and her obsession with bringing down the conjuring statues of her day.”

      Also, being a feminist—and knowing, as with Only Begotten Daughter, that for me it’s always fruitful to put a strong woman at the center of a novel—I imagined Jennet as not only living through the great rotation, from the witch-universe to the scientific worldview, but actually helping to make it happen. She participates actively in the paradigm shift, by campaigning to destroy the 1604 Witchcraft Statute of James I, which gave an outward appearance of rationality to the witch courts.

      Q: Curiously, you did this as a form of fantasy novel.

      Morrow: I was just on a Readercon panel about the continuum that ranges from mimetic fiction to the fantastic, from characters who merely change internally versus those who come to a completely new understanding of how the world works. I think The Last Witchfinder ranges freely around among all these coordinates. Obviously it’s not a fantasy in the wizards-and-elves sense, but rather a kind of postmodern experiment that maps pretty well onto strictly mimetic historical fiction—though, of course, it’s all told by a very unusual narrator.

      As you know, The Last Witchfinder is a book written by a book. It assumes a universe in which books are conscious and have agendas and write other books. So this free-floating spirit of Newton’s Principia Mathematica is able to move effortlessly through time and space and therefore comment on the philosophy of science and Jennet’s efforts to bring the new universe into being.

      Up to a point, my Principia narrator is even willing to talk about the downside of science and technology. Near the end of the book, he-she-it visits the Place de la Révolution in Paris at the height of the Terror and possesses a priest who is subsequently marched to the guillotine—the French Revolution, of course, being Exhibit A in any indictment of the Enlightenment. The Principia is willing to acknowledge that, while the Enlightenment came along just when it was needed, it was by no means an unalloyed blessing.

      At the same time, The Last Witchfinder is obviously a defense of the Enlightenment. I take Exhibit A seriously—but it’s hard to find Exhibits B, C, D, and E after that. The Marxist totalitarian states are “atheist” or “neo-Enlightenment” in name only. Operationally, they function exactly like theocracies. No doubters allowed.

      Q: At one of the funnier moments, the Principia does a critique of the Universal horror films of the 1940s, House of Dracula and so on. What does this do to the drama of the story to have this clearly artificial framework, which makes you stand outside of the story? It constantly reminds us that this is a story.

      Morrow: I was certainly taking a risk. I tried to keep these interruptions by the Principia Mathematica to a minimum, so the “color commentary” occurs only once per chapter, and with clearly marked transitions: I use a typographical trick whereby the last sentence of a Principia interlude blends into the first sentence of the next scene in the main story. The preponderance of the scenes belong to a more-or-less realistic drama set in the past. I tried to establish that when Jennet and the other main characters are on stage, we are really in their heads, not the Principia’s head. We’re not getting the book’s subjective account of the action. The events are supposed to be happening before our own eyes.

      I did have a lot of trouble selling this book, and one of the agents I approached suggested removing the Principia narrator. He said, “I don’t know if I can make things happen with this book, boosting you to a new level in your career. But if you’d take out the framing device, we would clearly have a flat-out historical novel, and that might go over better with editors.”

      Well, I just wasn’t prepared to do that. Sure, I suppose that if that same agent had said, “If you kill the ghostly narrator, I can get Knopf to give you a hundred thousand dollar advance, and they will promote it as a breakthrough in historical fiction,” then, yeah, I might have bitten that apple. But he was merely saying, “Consider taking out that clever postmodern gimmick, but even then I’m not sure that I could sell it.”

      Q: It would have changed the tone of the book profoundly. It seems to me that a straight, realistic treatment of this story wouldn’t be as funny. It would be full of pain and loss and rage. It would be all about this woman avenging her beloved aunt who was burned at the stake in an act of gross injustice. But as the book exists, it has an arch tone which steps aside from the material.

      Morrow: In retrospect, I see you’re right. I don’t think I consciously added the humor to leaven the horror. But maybe intuitively, as I was writing, I thought, “Well, I’d better make the Principia interludes funny, and that will serve as a corrective to the distressing subject matter.”

      But even with the satiric tone, I know the book makes people squirm. I didn’t hold back when describing the ordeal of being tested for the Satanic compact: for example, the way a suspect was pricked with a needle to see if one of her blemishes bled, because if it didn’t bleed, that proved that the protuberance was really a teat for suckling an animal familiar, or else it was a mark indicating that the woman was bonded to Satan. I also dramatize the other main ordeal—the cold-water test—pretty vividly. You tied a rope around the witch’s waist and threw her into a river. If she floated, she was guilty, because water is the medium of baptism. Pure, running water is offended by a Satanist’s flesh and wants to eject it. If the suspect sank and was thus vindicated, the witchfinder would try pulling her out in time, although I am sure there was more than one case of the accused witch drowning while being proved innocent.

      One editor who almost bought the book felt that, even with all the funny observations by the Principia, the book was too morbid in tone. But I didn’t want to compromise the torture and testing scenes, because the witch persecutions were really a kind of holocaust, as I said earlier. And yet, for whatever reasons, I still added a lot of satiric distancing. I guess that’s the sort of writer I am.

      Q: I think a lot of satire works this way. If you had written the novel absolutely straight, it might have been too shrill. Often the grimmest and blackest and most terrible things have to be treated in a funny manner, even if they build up to tragedy. You can name any number of writers who do this, T. H. White most especially. What I am suggesting is that the distancing is necessary because of the nature of the material. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to make it bearable.

      Morrow: Novels that seem shrill, to use your word, preachy, novels that somberly tell the reader how he or she СКАЧАТЬ