The birthgrave (1975)

Don't remember anything about it, but marked as read in book ( )

Sounds paradoxical, that title, doesn't it? It fits though. It's the story of a woman who awakens in an erupting volcano and goes on a quest to discover her identity--for she doesn't even remember her name. Some reviewers complained she's too passive, too victimized, in all that follows--but I think that just goes with her loss of self--she learns about the world around her as we do, something the first person underlines. It's an unputdownable book, that takes you through exotic lands; it has that pulp fiction feel of H Rider Haggard She or Robert Howard's Conan, or perhaps even more akin, Jane Gaskell's Atlan Saga. Lee's style and her world could both be described as lush. Though along with Tanith Lee's poetic prose you're going to get a psychological complexity you're not going to find in Conan the Barbarian. It was Tanith Lee's first book and won the 1975 Nebula Award for best novel. ( )

The Birthgrave was Tanith Lee's first published novel for adult readers, and the first novel of hers that I've read. The Publishers Weekly review excerpt in the jacket copy stresses its size, and compares the protagonist to Robert E. Howard's Conan. But it's not such a very big book by today's fantasy standards. At just a little over 400 pages, it's fairly modest among the doorstop novels the genre has come to produce.

The acute storytelling might justify the comparison to Conan, but the central character actually couldn't be more dissimilar. A much closer comparison would be Moorcock's Elric, who is in many ways a schematic anti-Conan. Lee takes that reversal one step further with the change of gender. For style, pacing, and mood, I found myself more reminded of Gene Wolfe's multi-volume fantasies -- but it appears that Tanith Lee got there first, so I can wonder if she influenced Wolfe.

The protagonist is a nameless survivor of her own cruel, sorcery-wielding race, who adopts different identities in the course of her interactions with humanity. She is obscurely cursed, and brings misery and death to her casual and intimate contacts alike. There is an allegory here, for those who want to read on that level, made especially plain in the anagnorisis of the final twenty pages. (Feuerbachian philosophy, Freudianism, and feminism each seem to have a part in the ultimate message of the story.)

There are a number of passages of hallucinatory vividness, and I found the entire novel quite engaging. The ending is almost too tidy, and I can see why some readers resented its deus ex machina qualities, along with what might seem like an abrupt shift in genre. But at the same time as it imposes that dislocation, the book returns to the business of its beginning in a way that makes it whole.

A decadent fantasy tale of personal trials within a grand setting.

The nameless main character, who emerges from a dreamless sleep fully grown but without memories, makes her dissociated way through a largely barbaric world dotted with the relics of a once-great civilization. She moves from culture to culture, adopts various roles and professions, and plays at interacting with people she really has little interest in. Over the course of her travels patterns begin to emerge and take shape, and she slowly discovers who she is, and what the extent is of her superhuman powers.

For large parts of the book the process of self-discovery blends into the background, largely forgotten as the main character gets caught up in the events that happen around her, making other people's motivations temporarily her own. She is a passive character throughout, allowing herself to be carried along by the wills of others, usually a domineering male. This is the background against which the few active choices that she does make stand out and form recurring patterns. As a result, much of the book is contemplative in nature, with the main character trying to make sense of the world around her and her position in it -- or perhaps outside it. Fortunately, Lee inserts well-timed bursts of action that alternate pleasantly with the more quiet chapters. Through it all, the main character becomes increasingly aware of how utterly detached she is from the vividly drawn cultures around her: she is believable as a character who is not quite human, but who slowly is learning to fend for herself.

What I like best about this book is how well this meandering purposeless-yet-goal-oriented storyline blends with Lee's writing style. Both mingle the lush and the decadent with the sparse, reinforcing and echoing each other, and that makes for a wonderfully evocative reading experience. I particularly enjoy the atmosphere of living in the shadow of inimitable sophistication that permeates the sections set in the few remaining pockets of reflected civilization.

The thing I dislike most is how rushed the ending feels, in that the pacing suddenly shifts a couple of gears: in the span of ten pages a convenient explanation is provided for all the hints and the patterns that the book has slowly been building up to. This is at least partially intentional: the main character has reached a point where she can't progress without an external catalyst; but I can't help but feel that the transformation is unpleasantly jarring -- especially because Lee essentially has to shift genre to accomplish it. ( )

I really wanted to like this book. I read it to the end, hoping the lead character would redeem herself. But she never did. She is a goddess, with superpowers, but she allows herself to repeatedly be a victim of any victimizer within range.

I heard Tanith Lee was a feminist fantasy author, so I had high hopes for this... and maybe I missed something... but this book sucked. ( )