Lawrence, Thorns, history and reader-fear

How far is too far?  History, Realism and Sexual Violence: A response to Mark Lawrence’s blog of the 5^th March 2015.

If there's one series of fantasy books out there at the moment that has genuinely struck upon controversial subject matter, then it's the Broken Empire trilogy by Mark Lawrence.  Fantasy, being set elsewhere and in places full of strange and unusual happenings, tends to let people escape from their daily troubles and because of the magical elements it tends to disassociate itself from realism.  As a student of ancient and medieval history, the more I read primary source material, the more I realised how far from reality fantasy fell.  Of course, you say, but it's fantasy?

The problem is that at the heart of all good fantasy lie relatable characters – people (whether they be human or not).  The people are what make the story, and everything else is just window dressing.  They are the means by which we see the world change, they hold the emotions that we connect to.  Sure, Belgarath can Will reality to be the way he wants it, and yes the Aes Sedai can alter time (coincidentally, those two examples just happen to be pieces of fantasy magic that I think fail quite spectacularly, but more on that in some other blog), but what started bothering me was just how far from reality all these quasi-medieval characters fell.  During my MA, I read considerably on the subject of the Albigensian Crusade, a period when the papal inquisitors, but mostly the French, invaded and made war on the Toulouse region.  The things that people did in those sources was far beyond the kind of evils that the villains of most major works of fantasy might do.  The more I read, the more I found that by historical standards, most fantasy villains were simply pantomime baddies.  The lack of humanity - the thirst for blood or desire to slaughter – didn’t shock me.  It was the lack of humanity that made them bland.  As I read the historical sources, I knew the people of the Albigensian crusade, as they mutilated each other and made war on the innocent, had been real.  They were people with families, people who believed what they did was not necessarily good, but they wanted to do it, so they did.  Their humanity made them far more frightening than evil incarnate could ever be.

Fantasy has come a long way since the days of David Eddings and Tolkien's simple 'good vs. evil' iconography, but many people are still growing up reading those old books and when they get to the likes of Lawrence, they suddenly come in for a shock.  If we were to grade books in how grim and dark they were, then Lawrence sits somewhere close to the top (although Glen Cook soars well above him).  In a recent blog, Lawrence wrote that "The inspiration for the main character, Jorg, came directly from Alex in Anthony Burgess' novel of 1962, A Clockwork Orange."  Lawrence evidently had in mind that his character be seen as a card-carrying psychopath, but one who is also a product of an abusive background.  When I read Prince of Thorns however, that wasn’t how I saw him at all.  When I read it, I just thought, “Finally, someone has understood how to write characters who don’t spawn from a modern set of cultural ideals.”  Well, I thought something like that, though probably in a less fancy way.  Jorg felt real to me.  Here was a character who wasn’t ultimately evil; he was an accurate reflection of a person straight out of history.  The idea that Jorg was not going to be involved in rapes, given that he spends his time travelling around with a band of ‘road-brothers’ – essentially murderers and bandits - would have been ridiculous.  Jorg could be plucked straight from the pages of Peter de les Vaux-de-Cernay’s 13^th century History of the Albigensian Crusade.  Strangely, everyone seemed to accept the violence and gore, just as they accept Sand Dan Glokta hacking off finger tips without flinching, or Mirri Maz Duur being burned alive in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Other authors are not immune to having to deal with this issue in their creation of realism in their work.  In his massively acclaimed series about Uhtred and King Alfred, writer Bernard Cornwell creates a protagonist who happily ‘goes viking’ and raids his neighbours.  At one point, Uhtred murders a defenceless man who has been cutting down his trees and then bribes his way out of the trial, using treasure he took when he piratically attacked a ship.  When attacking the ship, Uhtred’s crew take a woman prisoner and she is given over to Uhtred’s henchman to use.  When Uhtred betrays a minor king who tries to hire them, he intends to rape the king’s daughter, only Cornwell avoids this by having the girl be happy to be ‘rescued’ and set free.  That she has no choice about this is essentially played over.  Cornwell manages to dodge the bullet; he never has his main character involved in the sexual violence directly.  To me, this notion that “She would have been raped but she’s happy to be taken” is probably more concerning than anything Lawrence has written.  Why then does Cornwell get away without the internet flinging muck at him when Lawrence has been barraged by articles railing over the terribleness of a scant handful of lines?

Possibly what makes Lawrence’s work stand out from the others is the acceptance that bad things happen in the world, and because we view everything through Jorg’s eyes, we get his moralless view of it.  When Terry Goodkind polluted the world with his rape-adoring series beginning with Wizard’s First Rule, he makes it very clear that although he will treat the titillated reader to every aspect of demonic sex, bondage and leather clad S&M, gang rape and random acts of sexual abuse, these are always considered ‘bad.’  Although it’s evident that Goodkind really enjoys writing these kind of graphic scenes and is intending his reader to get a thrill, somehow his works made the transition into a TV series.  Probably because of his wholesale support for Republicanism through his books, but the fact is that in terms of graphic rape those books are by far the most violently anti-female books I’ve ever had the displeasure to read.  If you’re wondering why I didn’t stop at book 1, all I can say is that I was 15 at the time and those grotesque sexual perversions of his were interesting at the time.  With a couple of decades of hindsight, I can see it for the crap that it was.

Lawrence doesn’t jam the guilt down your throat and that’s where it sticks with people.  He doesn’t scream “This is bad!” at you whilst simultaneously delivering the arousing scenes of hyper-sexual witches fornicating with the barbed phalluses of devils.  Instead he just lets you know that Jorg has gone significantly off course in his life compared to what a moral 21^st century westerner would consider ordinary.  I say westerners, because there are still parts of our world where Jorg’s behaviour would not be frowned upon.  The sale and abuse of women as slaves in the Middle East under the Islamic State is only one example; there are those in Egypt and Iraq who believe that girls aged 9 are of suitable age to be married.  I find it saddening that Lawrence has been made to doubt his own masterpiece through the realisation that there are some really unpleasant people out there.

I’m not surprised that some people are horrified by the casual brutality of Jorg’s world, but perhaps they need to view it as just that: the world, not the character.  Like any well written protagonist, Jorg is a product of a world around him.  He neither embodies it nor is apart from it, but he definitely exists within it.  In pre-modern societies where punishing crimes is very difficult, assault, violence and rape were far more common than they are today.  They were also viewed extremely differently to today.  We might note that in the bible, a woman is to be put to death if she is raped in a town and nobody hears her screaming.  An American senator genuinely believed that women can’t get pregnant from rape, such is the ignorance that still exists around the subject.

Overall the problem lies that we want our fantasy to be historically accurate – a longsword should be the right length, a mill should be using the correct equipment – and yet at the same time we want relatable heroes.  We want to be able to support them and admire them.  Somehow modern western society has become happy with ultra-violence (a film like Sin City really shows just how happy with it we are) but one that likes to imagine that ultra-violent men somehow share our values when it comes to sexual violence.  It’s a difficult issue, and one that will continue to be argued over, but personally I thought Lawrence hit it spot on.  Understated, understood and inserted, but without anything graphic, without excusing it, without revelling in it.  For me, this is what made it real, and maybe it’s that reality that sets people off where they can laugh away Goodkind and his ilk.

Mark’s blog article that inspired me to write this can be found here: http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/a-difficult-post.html