Flyting – examples of which can be found throughout Northern European literature, from Irish and Scots to English and Norse – was a performative exchange of insults between poets that celebrated their wit, eloquence, and general capacity to be a Bad Bitch. These verbal (and textual) duels typically comprised insults focussing on a foe’s sexual perversion, their lack of courage in battle, or their physical ineptitude, and were frequently, joyously vulgar. Think Christmas dinner conversation with your favourite drunk aunt.

An early example can be found in the Lokasenna (or The Flyting of Loki), a poem from the Poetic Edda which depicts the poetical invectives between Loki and the Æsir (the main pantheon of Gods in Norse mythology). Below we have an excerpt from an exchange between Loki and Bragi (the god of poetry and music no less):

Bragi spake:
"Now were I without | as I am within,
And here in Ægir's hall,
Thine head would I bear | in mine hands away,
And pay thee the price of thy lies."

Loki spake:
"In thy seat art thou bold, | not so are thy deeds,
Bragi, adorner of benches!
Go out and fight | if angered thou feelest,
No hero such forethought has."

Bellows (1936): 151-152.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice? The first line is Loki essentially decrying Bragi as a keyboard warrior: sweating Mountain Dew and explaining comedians’ jokes back to them on Twitter. 

Bragi, conversely, does seem somewhat less well-stocked in the ol’ wit department: “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” he says: “Don’t make me get off my chair! I swear, if I have to stand up! Mum! He’s doing it again!” I squared up to  my grandma in this fashion once; she punched me in the throat.

Which brings us to Valhalla (2020). Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018) was a phenomenal recreation of the ancient Hellenic world – just ask this archaeologist – and they’ve taken a similarly well-researched approach to Valhalla: from silver coinage to longship design. “But it was wildly historically inaccurate: that’s not how kings were chosen!” I hear you shout from your basement, dribbling soda. I don’t care: back to the bench with you! (I will concede, however, that male Eivor is not nearly as hot or funny as Odyssey’s Alexios, and no I will not surrender the tannoy in Tesco until everyone shopper knows this).

For me (and therefore for you), the most notable historical inclusion was, of course, flyting. These stats-boosting poetic duels are common throughout the map in both Norway and England, and will test your ability to detect rhyme and intuit metre. Some bold-as-brass NPC drops a phat insult against you, and you – absolutely raging by this point – have to select your response from three available choices. The correct one is that which complements both the NPC’s end-rhyme (final sounds which rhyme e.g. 'I serenaded the old woman who lives across from my door | She bade me “shut the fuck up” and called me a whore') and its number of feet.

Feet, for the unfamiliar, are a basic unit of measurement in poetry: collections of stressed and unstressed syllables which structure the rhythm of a poem. For example, the word unite is comprised of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Typically, these are characterised as dee – short, unstressed – and dum: longer, stressed. Whether a syllable is stressed or not is dependent on the emphasis placed on it during an utterance: for me, the emphasis is placed on the second syllable when I say ‘unite’: dee-dum. This may not be the case for everyone: heretics undoubtedly live among us.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice?

Now, there are all kinds of feet (beyond nice ones like mine and everyone else’s gross ones). ‘U-nite’ for example, is an iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Byron’s She Walks in Beauty is a nice example of iambic metre: “She walks in beau-ty, like the night.” A trochee, conversely, is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable e.g. Gar-den. Poe’s famous The Raven is primarily written in trochaic metre: “Once u-pon a mid-night drea-ry, while I pon-dered, weak and wea-ry.” And you certainly aren’t limited to two syllables. An anapaest is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one e.g. O-ver-come. You’ll find an example of this type of foot in Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib – absolute banger if you haven’t read it: “When the blue wave rolls night-ly on deep Gali-lee.” And they said an undergrad in English literature was a waste. I may have debt and limited job opportunities but behold! My mountain of incredibly google-able knowledge!

 Armed with this understanding of Valhalla’s flyting victory conditions, let’s consider this early encounter with Manning, Fighter of Wolves. A burly type, I was initially surprised by his eloquence – shame on me. His opening volley is: “Have you ever seen muscles as massive as mine?” And to be fair, his muscles are sizeable and inspire in me unclean thoughts. Our task is then to select from the three options the ending which best complements this line and, of course, delivers a devasting riposte. Listening to the museful Manning, he is using iambic metre: unstressed syllable, stressed syllable. Our three options are:

“You have the form of a very large swine.”

Wrong: this is in fact a savage put-down from my mother when I’m just trying to enjoying a swim at the pool. And it’s not entirely iambic – I’m hearing a couple of cheeky trochees in there – and there certainly are not enough feet (said the cannibal to the chef). 

“I’m not awed by your muscles, but shocked by your pride.”

Also wrong: a yearbook entry from my favourite PE teacher. “I’m not awed” reads as anapaestic to me, and “pride” doesn’t work as an end-rhyme.  

“What you make up in muscles, you’re lacking in spine.”

Boom! We have a winner! “Spine” compliments the end-rhyme of “mine,” and you can comfortably read it aloud as iambic. Also a direct quote from my concerned chiropractor. 

...these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games...

Beyond Valhalla, we can find numerous examples of flyting in modern media. In the final installation of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy, The Ship of the Dead, the eponymous protagonist flytes to the death with Loki (an event involving body-shrinking and walnuts, I don’t know).

In the Monkey Island video game series (and especially The Secret of Monkey Island), flyting is integral to victory in sword-fighting: as in Valhalla, you must counter your opponent’s invectives with insulting (and, in the sequel, rhyming) ripostes. A sufficiently stinging jibe will throw your enemy off and give you the upper hand in battle, which, if maintained for long enough, secures you the win. Memorable exchanges include:

“I once owned a dog that was smarter than you!”

“He must have taught you everything you know!”

And:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”

“How appropriate. You fight like a cow!”

Perhaps most heartening is that these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games with meaningful narratological and ludological function: see also the haiku quests in Ghost of Tsushima.

And if you’ve an interest in the ritual insulting of others (and if you don’t: why do you hate fun?), I would recommend The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (the earliest example of flyting in Scots: c.1500 baby), which has been suggested to possess the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as an insult. A particularly delightful line is Kennedie’s accusation that Dunbar is: “a shit without wit, only cheap tawdry tricks.” The perfect Twitter bio, frankly. 

References

• Bellows, H. The Poetic Edda (Bibliolife, 2011).
• Dunbar, W. & Kennedie, W. The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (OUP, 2021).

I don’t write reviews, and I don’t read non-fiction. Neither of these things are strictly true, of course: this is a review of sorts. And philosophy is, at least occasionally, non-fiction.

I still mean to finish it, once I get my thoughts in order about fiction, truth, and the relation between the two. In the meantime, here’s another not-quite-a-review, or at least very-partial-rather-short-and-only-focussing-on-specific-details-review. It concerns the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Cymbeline, which is running in London for another few weeks, and which I heartily recommend you see, if you can.

Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s weirder plays. The RSC describe it as the “rarely performed romance of power, jealousy, and a journey of love and reconciliation.”^[1] Depending on who you ask, it’s billed as a tragedy, a romance, or a comedy. It’s all three, in its way.

The original is set in Ancient Britain, with the latter ruled by the eponymous Celtic King, vassal of the Roman Empire. The RSC’s version turns this on its head, setting the events in a dystopian near-future, and casting women in many of the originally male roles. If you’re not familiar with the play going in you mightn’t notice – it just works. These aren’t merely cross-cast roles: that is, it’s not that female actors are playing male characters. Rather the characters themselves have been genderflipped, a male heir becomes a female heir, a male servant a female servant, and so on (think Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck in the new Battlestar Galactica, rather than Margaret Cho’s Kim Jong-il in 30 Rock). Most striking is the gender flip of Cymbeline – now Queen of Britain – and the formerly wicked stepmother, now the Duke.

This choice subverts our expectations, and calls into question the tropes we take for granted. As director Melly Still puts it:

I love wicked stepmothers in fairy tales. But Cymbeline is more than a fairy tale – it’s a thriller, epic and mythic. Hopefully this interpretation of the Queen as the Duke allows us to focus on his actions rather than his type. It sharpens the audience’s eyes to who he is: this is a man who is obsessively power hungry and loves his son beyond reason.^[2]

Cymbeline’s ability to rule does not derive from masculinity, and the Duke’s villainy isn’t reduced to the plotting of a power-hungry woman. The audience is confronted with characters, not merely stereotypes.

The play is brutal, bizarre, and in unexpected moments, laugh-out-loud funny (with the addition of musical numbers an unexpected delight).^[3] You can find more information (including an actual plot synopsis, which I’m told is a staple of most reviews), on the official RSC site.

The Modern Scots era was a period of enterprise and radical tumult, both for Scotland and her languages, encompassing the Treaty of Union, the Jacobite Rebellion, and the advent and diffusion of Scottish Standard English (the not-at-all embarrassing Scottish equivalent of RP). Whilst the Union of Parliaments in 1707 is often regarded as hastening the demise of the Scots language, the ensuing protests (read: shit-storm) produced a resurgence in Scots literature: ballads and oral tales and songs were revisited, revitalised and committed to paper, many for the first time. Despite this literary response, though, the political and social centre of gravity had inveterately shifted south and the century would confirm the Scots leid’s demotion to a non-standard language, a shift attended by the issues of stigmatism, stagnation and obsolescence anticipated by such reordering. The so-called Scots continuum – polarised by Broad Scots and Scottish Standard English – emerged to become the defining apparatus for approaching the language, linguistically and aesthetically; a framework that would increasingly force most readers to discriminate Scots texts via dimensions of class and education.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the advent of literacy^[1], wherein Scots would be taught English linguistics norms, would result in the use of Anglicised <oo> spelling to represent /u/ in words such as hoose, moose and aboot, and the exponential erosion of Scots lexis: the departure south of Scotland’s premier political institutions limited the capacity of Scots to innovate lexically, particularly for scientific or specialist terms – there being, for instance, no specifically Scots term for evolution. Or felching. (Editor's note for the unwary: please don't google 'felching'.)

Most iconic, perhaps, of the official downfall of Scots was the introduction of the apologetic apostrophe: the item of punctuation signifying ‘missing’ letters in Scots words such as no’ (not) and fu’ (full). First used by the notable antiquarian, Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), the apologetic apostrophe was a marketing strategy by the Scottish literati, designed to make the language accessible to a swelling, middle-class English-speaking readership whilst retaining, ostensibly, the perception of authenticity. For example, observe below the opening lines of two versions of the story of Thomas the Rhymer, the first by Anna Gordon (1747-1810) and the second by Walter Scott (1771-1832):

True Thomas lay oer yon’d grassy bank

And he beheld a Ladie gay

A Ladie that was brisk and bold

Come riding o’er the fernie brae

Her skirt was of the grass green silk

Her mantle of the velvet fine

At ilka tett of her horses mane

Hung fifty silver bells and nine

Gordon, 2011: lines 1-8

True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank;

A ferlie he spied wi’ his e’e:

And there he saw a ladye bright,

Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.

 

Her shirt was o’ the grass-green silk,

Her mantle o’ the velvet fine;

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane,

Hang fifty siller bells and nine.

Scott, 1812: lines 1-8

Aside from obvious differences in orthography, structure and punctuation (to be revisited in a later article), note the absence of apologetic apostrophes in Gordon’s version and their introduction in Scott’s in line 2 (the latter’s version being inspired by the former’s). Unlike Scott, Gordon wrote down her version of the ballad purely for the benefit of various antiquarian scholars and writers. Scott, however, produced his version in his ballad collection, The Minstrelsy, whose ensuing popularity with English-speaking audiences would make him very rich indeed. This strategy to improve the marketability of Scottish prose and poetry would, according to Corbett, Mclure et al, have “the unfortunate effect of suggesting that Broad Scots was not a separate language system, but rather a divergent and inferior form of English” (2003: 13). Of course, as the Mongongo nut is salvaged from even the most impenetrable pile of steaming elephant shit, so too was there a redeeming factor to this affair. As a result of the uptake of textual transmissions of Scots works by the antiquarians and other interested parties, “from the eighteenth century onwards there is an exponential growth in the variety of literary forms in which Scots is used” (Bann & Corbett, 2015: 67). So that’s nice.

It’s important to differentiate between an apologetic apostrophe and a simple contraction – something this linguistics podcast fails to do. They argue that contracting over to o’er is an apologetic apostrophe – which is incorrect. Crack out the pitchforks and dismiss their lies! Possibly burn their holdings. Leer at their cat and thus make him uncomfortable… Contracting over to o’er is a common method, evident throughout the history of English, for shoehorning bi- (and sometimes tri-) syllabic words into monosyllabic varieties for the purposes of metrical rhythm e.g. if you’re writing to a meter of iambic tetrameter (four feet of dee-dum) but have nine syllables, that just won’t do. What they’re referencing is an eliding apostrophe – NOT an apologetic one. Be vigilant and stay safe, kids.

Someone really ought to write a history of the apologetic apostrophe – indeed, a detailed history of the apostrophe itself would be fascinating (fuck you, it would be). I say this only because, in the course of the last three hundred years, the apologetic apostrophe went through a period of radical evolution, transforming from a linguistic unit of accessibility and into a literary device, and the details of this mutation are unclear. By what manner (and media) did the apologetic apostrophe diffuse? At what pace? Was there more than a single country of diffusive origin, or is this a singular Scottish innovation? Or, one wonders aghast, is the literary device an independent invention, originating independently from its linguistic cousin? If you don’t find out, I’ll have to do the donkey work and I tire so very easily.

The influence of an English-speaking readership would be critical in the development of the Scots language’s fortunes in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

Despite the fug of terra incognita, the apologetic apostrophe made the transition from linguistic feature to literary device and, as with all things literary, the function of the apologetic apostrophe in fiction seems less concerned with accessibility than it is expressing a characteristic of its respective speaker. Question: recall, if you can, instances of the apologetic apostrophe in novels, poems, video games etc. What was the nature of the speaker? An august elf? A sagacious wizard? A young hero, emerging into adulthood and struggling to not masturbate for 500 pages? You’re fuckin’ right it wisnae. The apologetic apostrophe in literature has (almost) become universally applied as part of a wider characterising apparatus wherein supporting characters of certain personalities, such as the brutish minion, the sweet-but-simple friend, are given non-standard dialects – indicated by apologetic apostrophes – to indicate their natures. Observe the two following examples:

“An’ here’s Harry!” exclaims Hagrid, when he meets the novel’s protagonist in chapter four, continuing, “Las’ time I saw you, you was only a baby” (Rowling, 1997: 39). Note the apologetic apostrophes in the opening words of each sentence and then consider Hagrid’s nature: a good-natured groundskeeper, loyal but naïve, rustic, comedic (crucially unintentionally), and magically-impotent. This echoes historical examples – for instance in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the character of John Barnet is a reverend’s manservant: perceptive but disposable. Hinting at his suspicions of the protagonist’s dark heart, he says: “They find ma bits o’ gibes come hame to their hearts wi’ a kind o’ yerk, an’ that gars them wince” (Hogg, 2010: 80). Of course, whatever perceptive abilities he possesses are rendered ineffectual by his non-standard dialect – his efforts to thwart evil are ignored.

As with Hogg’s prose in the early 19^th Century, Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is part of a wider nexus of sociolinguistic and phonaesthetic tropes: pioneered in Scots literature (for the same reasons as the apologetic apostrophe), it became, and continues to be, a popular device by authors to write narrative in standard English and contain non-standard dialectal speech within dialogue.

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist of any literary venture, but one such instance is Lyra Belacqua: the fearsome, bidialectal protagonist of Pullman’s (utterly magnificent) The Northern Lights (also known, unnecessarily, as The Golden Compass). Unlike Hagrid, then, where Rowling’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably solely literary to convince us of the stereotypical qualities that attend its use (see also the driver of the Knight Bus, Stan – Choo lookin’ at? – Shunpike), Pullman deploys the apologetic apostrophe in order to reflect the communities of practice that Lyra moves in, a phenomenon explained by Milroy as “the closer an individual’s network ties are with his local community, the closer his language approximates to localised vernacular norms” (1980: 175). In essence, Lyra uses standard English variants whenever speaking to an authoritative audience, such as her father, Lord Asriel, and non-standard variants when speaking to peers.

Observe this passage from chapter 2 between Lyra and Lord Asriel:

“Did they vote to give you money?” she said, sleepily.

“Yes.”

“What’s Dust?” she said, struggling to stand up after having been cramped for so long.

“Nothing to do with you.”

“It is to do with me,” she said, “If you wanted me to be a spy in the wardrobe you ought to tell me what I’m spying about. Can I see the man’s head?”

Pullman, 1995: 28-29

Now consider this passage between Lyra and the other children of Oxford:

“The Gobblers,” she said. “En’t you heard of the Gobblers?”

…

“Gobblers,” said Lyra’s acquaintance, whose name was Dick. “It’s stupid. These stupid Gyptians, they pick up all kinds of stupid ideas.”

“They said there was Gobblers in Banbury a couple of weeks ago. They probably come to Oxford now to get kids from us. It must’ve been them what got Jessie.”

“…They en’t real, Gobblers. Just a story.”

“They are!” Lyra said, “The Gyptians seen ‘em!”

Pullman, 1995: 60

The Lyra engaging with the other children of Oxford would never use ought; likewise, the Lyra attendant to her father carefully avoids non-standard expressions requiring the authorial illumination of an apologetic apostrophe such as “en’t” or “’em.” Whilst Pullman’s use of the apologetic apostrophe is arguably somewhat more sophisticated than Rowling’s, functioning as an indicator of the complex linguistic landscapes we all navigate, and Lyra is certainly less of a caricature than Hagrid, the use of the apologetic apostrophe in both texts remains bound to its original mission: decorating non-standard speech for the benefit of standard speakers (or at least speakers with an understanding of standard English as the default). It ought to be said there’s nothing inherently wrong with this – all languages have prestige forms – but it is important we’re aware of its function and impact. For science.

There are many souls the world over for whom language is a political battleground, often attended by issues of language revival. Such a scrimmage is (and has been for some time) being waged in Scotland. Not being in the business of language revival myself, suffice to say the situation concerns attempts to rejuvenate a stagnant Scots language, presumably with ultimate goal being to establish it once again as a prestige form within Scottish society. The role of apologetic apostrophe has been integral within this movement and its exorcism from textual varieties of Scots has become a socio-political act. Minutes from the meeting of the Makar’s Club in 1947 simples reads: “Apostrophe’s to be discouraged.” The website of the British Ordnance Survey, a repository of maps and guide to outdoor Britain, writes: “In earlier writing an apostrophe will be found in such words, for example, ha’, to indicate the loss of ll, but this is no longer acceptable.” The banishment of the apologetic apostrophe was a key tenet of Lallans Scots, the synthetic variety of the language created in the early 20^th Century by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid to supply Scotland with a unified national language. Whilst one might describe the idea of Lallans as an ongoing project, it has produced some rather beautiful lexis e.g. watergaw: “an imperfect or fragmentary rainbow” (Macleod, 1999: 59).

It’s still less common for a speaker in fiction (and particularly the fantasy genre) of a non-standard dialect to be written as the protagonist…

The elision of the apologetic apostrophe can also be interpreted as an important political statement, particular concerning notions of identity, in other varieties of English.

A notable example is in the poetry of the much-celebrated (and rightly so) writer and artist, Louise Bennett (pictured above). Her poem, Yuh Nephew Sue, is written in unfettered Jamaican English, as shown in its opening lines:

Aunt Tama, dear, me sad fi hear

How storm wreck Jackass Tung;

But wus of all, yuh one deggeh

Coaknut tree tumble dung!

Las week dem had a meetin fi all De coaknut growers what

Lose coaknut tree eena de storm, So me was eena dat.

Bennet, 2016: lines 1-6

In a world where social issues inevitably intersect with one another, reifying one’s identity through language is an understandable act, and thus the elision of the apologetic apostrophe an understandable protest – and in the 21^st Century, it can be profoundly post-colonial. Socio-politics aside, the deconstruction of the apologetic apostrophe is perhaps an inevitable outcome of language evolution: change and deviation, as it does, becoming subsumed by systemic regulation.

Given its current trajectory, it’s likely the apologetic apostrophe will vanish genre-by-genre, beginning with, one imagines, non-fiction and its dissolution eventually migrating throughout the entirety of fiction. The apologetic apostrophe, however, is a fascinating example of how a single unit of punctuation can reach across linguistics, literature, history and politics, and in that regard we ought to admire the pluck of the little fellow.

If your whistle has been moistened by this article, you might consider ‘It’s glo/t/al stop, not glo/ʔ/al stop!’ Or don’t – I’m not paid to do this so my attitude to your education is, at best, apathetic. As a parting gift, however, do enjoy this screenshot of a cockney cockatrice.

References

• Bennett, L. (2016), Yuh Nephew Sue, Retrieved from: http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/art-leisure/20160911/poems-0

• Corbett, J., McClure, J. & Stuart-Smith, J. (2003), A Brief History of Scots, The Edinburgh Companion to Scots, ed. Corbett, McClure & Stuart-Smith, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

• Hogg, J. (2010), The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

• Macleod, I. (1999), Scots Thesaurus, (Edinburgh: Polygon).

• Milroy, L. (1980), Language and Social Networks, (Baltimore: University of Park Press).

• Rowling, J. (1997), Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, (London: Bloomsbury).

• Pullman, P. (1998), The Northern Lights, (London: Scholastic).

Everyone who’s read anything about the novel will know that it had a long and tortuous genesis. Ishiguro came up with the plot, he tells us, at an early stage, but took some time to settle in his mind whether to set it in Japan or Britain; it was a reading of that most ironic of Arthurian romances, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, that helped him make up his mind. He wrote a first draft which was dismissed by his wife as a failure because of its lavish prose style; he then wrote a second in a completely different register. The novel once completed, he was worried that his more serious-minded readers would dismiss it as ‘fantasy’. All these things work in its favour, to my mind. The book imports the traumatic experience of Japanese history – and the way this has been represented in art, especially film – into the Matter of Britain. Everyone knows about the multiple traumas and atrocities buried in Japan’s past, but the British have been more assiduous in burying theirs, from massacres in Ireland and India to the invention of concentration camps in the Boer War. This book invites us to exhume them, by revising that most cherished of British myths, the story of Arthur, who is supposed to have united a divided Britain by humane means – though even Malory ascribed to him an imperialist impulse that took him on the rampage through France and Italy to Rome. The novel ironizes romance and heroism as vigorously as Gawain or Beowulf. Its prose style is deeply strange. And its uneasy deployment of the tropes of fantasy invites its readers, whether or not they are well versed in them, to reconsider their function in literature and culture past and present. I think we’ll look back on it as a major achievement, and one that speaks to the many revisions of myth that have been going on in recent decades.

[I]ts uneasy deployment of the tropes of fantasy invites its readers... to reconsider their function in literature and culture past and present.

The book is as full of echoes as Shakespeare’s island in The Tempest. It begins in a grimmer version of a hobbit hole: a village of gloomy burrows, whose apparently genial communitarianism masks a propensity for bullying the weak which turns out to be a trait of just about everyone we meet in the story (the old couple we meet in the first pages have recently been robbed of their only candle, for no apparent reason, so that they have to live for the most part in the dark). A later incident, in which a Saxon warrior kills two ravaging ogres, recalls Beowulf’s killing of Grendel and his mother, while a visit to a monastery summons up the grotesquerie and ingenious misdirections of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose. The Greek ferryman of the dead, Charon, crops up repeatedly, and talks about taking passengers across to an island that sounds much like Avalon. One of the most fascinating figures in the book, from the point of view of his literary ancestry, is the knight Sir Gawain. His abnormal height, his advanced age and his thinness might make us think of Don Quixote drawn by Honoré Daumier, as does his apparent confusion over which remarks directed at him he should take offence at and which he should embrace as well-deserved compliments on his outmoded fidelity to a long-lost ideal. His clumsiness, his solitude, his white hair, his initial appearance in a wood of forgetfulness, his bouts of yearning after inaccessible young girls, might bring to mind the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass, who is also a figure of his creator Lewis Carroll. His fighting technique, like that of the Saxon warrior, is pure Samurai – a single well-aimed, deadly stroke is his preferred method of dispatching opponents (think of Kyuzo’s terrifying efficiency in Seven Samurai, or Zatoichi’s in Takeshi Kitano’s version). The mysterious widows who torment him with reminders of his past dark deeds recall the ghostly old women of Japanese tradition, such as the witch in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood or the periodic apparitions in Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress. Beckett is present in much of the action, as is The Blair Witch Project, Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Echoes of films, books, poems (the name Beatrice summons up Dante’s Divine Comedy) tug at the reader’s memory at every turn, exacerbating the sense that past and future tragedies are always on the verge of re-emerging from obscurity as the story unfolds. And the overlapping of these different narratives and traditions reinforce too our sense that no story is singular – all are interwoven, and every reader will trace a different set of influences through the novel, all of them subverted by Ishiguro’s ironic tone.

When I say that characters in Ishiguro’s book – like his readers – read each incident differently, it should be stressed that this extends itself to the objects and creatures they see or which they signally fail to notice. Over and over again what they see differs: above all when it involves the supernatural or fantastic. The central characters, Axl and Beatrice, have poor eyesight, and often mistake things seen at a distance. For them the arm of an ogre, yanked off by the Saxon warrior Wistan, looks at first like an eyeless head, something like the Pale Man’s in Pan’s Labyrinth: ‘where the eyes, nose and mouth should have been there was only pimpled flesh, like that of a goose, with a few tufts of down-like hair on its cheeks’ (75-6). Only later does Axl realize that what he is looking at is not a head at all, ‘but a section of the shoulder and upper arm of some abnormally large, human-like creature’. Later, on an underground journey that recalls the visits of epic heroes to the Shades, Axl sees by candlelight the body of a dead bat where Beatrice sees the corpse of an abandoned baby. Axl entirely fails to spot the moment when Gawain slays the monster that lurks in this subterranean maze – he sees it run on after its death stroke but does not notice it has lost its head. Later still, Beatrice sees a distant row of soldiers in the mountains, which Axl takes for birds and the aged knight Sir Gawain for the tormenting widows who follow him everywhere. Looking down into a ditch, it takes Axl several minutes to distinguish the corpse of a goat from the body of the dying ogre that has been eating it: ‘Only then did he see that much of what initially he had taken to be of the dead goat belonged to a second creature entangled with it. That mound there was a shoulder; that a stiffened knee’ (288). Here again an ogre is presented to us as dismembered, but on this occasion its predicament elicits sympathy: Axl calls it ‘some poor ogre […] dying a slow death’ (289). Earlier, the boy Edwin saw three more seemingly dismembered ogres by a pond in a wood, one of them ‘crouching down on its knees and elbows at the water’s very edge, its head completely submerged’, so that ‘To a careless observer, [it] might have been a headless corpse’ (272). He too feels pity for them, as if his earlier abduction by ogres had given him an insight into their perspective, rendering them ‘human-like’ rather than monstrous. Meanwhile the warrior Wistan sees the partly submerged monsters by the pond as ancient trees, attributing Edwin’s view of them to a bout of delirium. Seeing things with distorted vision is, in fact, not just possible but highly likely in Ishiguro’s Britain – partly because of the physical condition of the land’s inhabitants. There are no corrective lenses for Axl’s eyes; Beatrice suffers from some nameless and possibly terminal affliction; Edwin has been wounded (though again, no one has a clear idea what by – a dragon, a cockatrice, an ogre?); Wistan is in a fever from wounds sustained in battle. As in Ishiguro’s previous novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), physical pain is a constant presence in the book’s landscape, serving to locate the appalling damage inflicted by tyranny and random violence in the inner organs of still-living victims. Everyone is journeying to a slow death, carrying mementoes of their mortality in their chests and bellies and sides, no matter how hard they seek to defend their minds from an awareness of its imminent approach.

The land partakes of the body’s sickness. The earth is full of slaughtered corpses, from the buried giant of the title to the remains of Saxon civilians slaughtered by Arthur’s knights in his final battle – no longer the heroic act of self sacrifice it was for Malory but a savage breach of promise, the deliberate violation of a carefully negotiated truce between enemies. Sir Gawain is reluctant to be buried anywhere but on top of a mountain for fear of the vengeful dead he might share the soil with. The Stygian tunnel through which Gawain, Edwin and the elderly couple travel is floored with bones. Christianity is less a religion than a means of distinguishing the Britons from the pagan Saxons; the Christians in the book have little confidence in God’s mercy, subjecting themselves to appalling torment as a means of anticipating the punishment he might mete out after their deaths, and only the pagan afterlife left behind by the departed Romans has any substance, manifesting itself in the ubiquitous figure of the ferryman. The land of chivalric romance is notoriously featureless, unlike the secondary worlds of epic fantasy, which are invariably given shape and substance by an accompanying map. Ishiguro’s Britain is closer to the former, with few names assigned to communities or features of the landscape – there’s a brief mention of Badon Hill at one point, but one cannot imagine a map being drawn of the land where it would feature. Place has come detached from place like the limbs of the ogre emerging from the mud in the ditch, entangled with the limbs of a goat.

Communities, too, have come apart in Ishiguro’s Britain. Families have been separated: Axl and Beatrice set out on their travels in a bid to find a son they may have driven off, or who may never have existed, and on their journey they encounter many more children who have been neglected, forgotten or betrayed. A little girl called Marta causes consternation in her village when she stays out after sunset; but before long the community gets distracted by something else, and by the time she gets safely home they have half forgotten she was ever missing. The boy Edwin seems at first to have a loving family, since his uncles muster the courage to attempt his rescue when he is abducted by ogres, but his relatives quickly turn on him when they think he has been infected by a vampiric bite from one of his abductors. Much later, Axl and Beatrice meet a young girl who has been abandoned by her parents, and who defends her younger brothers against another marauding ogre. The young generation have, in fact, become thoroughly at home in the cruel world they inhabit, and this acclimatization is part of what separates them from their elders. At one point the boy Edwin remembers meeting a teenage girl who has been tied up by her fellow travellers for their gratification. She is not particularly outraged by what has been done to her, and later when Edwin is in turn tied up and used as bait to attract the dragon he too takes it in his stride, expecting nothing better even from Wistan, the man he most admires. The little girl Marta is confident she will not get in trouble when she goes wandering, since she knows full well that her family will soon lose interest in looking for her, and like Edwin she can manage ogres: ‘I know how to hide from them,’ she tells Axl cheerfully (12). She shares, in fact, the attitude of Ishiguro’s narrator to monsters, as expressed in the opening pages: ‘One had to accept that every so often […] an ogre might carry off a child into the mist. The people of the day had to be philosophical about such outrages’ (3-4). Ogres are part of her community, like the humans who fear them, and both (as Edwin has learned long before we meet him in the narrative) can be equally deadly.

Each sacrifice – of oneself, of one’s enemies, of one’s children, parents or partner – triggers further bloodshed...

The most broken community in the novel is an isolated monastery in the mountains which occupies the site of a genocidal massacre. Religious communities are places of peace and contemplation, but Ishiguro goes to great pains (the phrase is apt) to show how they are also embedded in the landscape as well as the history of atrocity. His monastery is an elaborate physical and mental trap: Axl and Beatrice go there to get medical help for Beatrice’s ailment, but are betrayed by one of the monks into entering a monster’s lair, where he hopes they will be killed and eaten, and it’s implied that this happens regularly to the monks’ guests. The healer-monk whose advice they seek is himself dying from self-inflicted injuries sustained in penance for Arthur’s massacre of the Saxons. The monastery is an old Saxon fort which has been seized and turned to new uses by its British conquerors. The fort was designed not so much to protect the Saxons as to destroy the Britons in their moment of victory – like the young girl’s poisoned goat which kills the ogre even as the monster devours it. There are left-over booby traps in the repurposed fort, one of which is activated in an act of vengeance by the Saxon warrior Wistan; but the site itself seems to be destructive by virtue of its genocidal history, working on the consciences of its religious inhabitants until they subject themselves to Christ-like excruciations in a desperate bid to save their souls. In fact, as the novel goes on the imagery of sacrifice and betrayal proliferates in it, becoming in the end a pastiche of the Christian sacrifice to which the monks are ostensibly committed. Each sacrifice – of oneself, of one’s enemies, of one’s children, parents or partner – triggers further bloodshed, in a vicious cycle that predicts the continuing cycle of history from the so-called Dark Ages to the present.

My account of the book makes it sound unrelievedly grim, but it really isn’t, and this is largely thanks to the sometimes comic detachment of its style – a detachment that reinforces the sense that its characters can endure the monstrousness of their Dark Age situation precisely because of their wilful removal of themselves from the stark realities of past and present. Axl and Beatrice, Wistan, Gawain and the boy Edwin converse in an awkward succession of stilted politenesses, even when they are drastically at odds with one another; Axl calls his wife ‘princess’, and treats her like one, constantly striving to protect her from the pain and exhaustion their journey brings her, acquiescing to all her proposals even when they distress or hurt him. Wistan expresses unwavering hatred for the Britons who massacred his people and seeks to bequeath this hatred to young Edwin, his fellow Saxon; but he treats the Britons Axl and Beatrice with affection and respect, and behaves with ridiculous courtesy to Gawain even at the point when they’re about to spill each other’s guts. Edwin promises to hate all Britons when Wistan asks him to, but he clearly can’t see the point in it; the elderly British couple are his friends and so must be exempted from the blanket injunction, and if them, how many others? People, like ogres, can be liked and pitied even by those who seek their deaths – the young girl who poisons the ogre with her goat is afterwards sorry for what she has done and claims she didn’t intend it. Even the dragon is a pitiable creature, worn out by its hard life like Axl, Beatrice and Gawain; it must be killed, but it is also a victim, forced into spreading oblivion across the land by Merlin’s spells, and its would-be killers feel no resentment as they approach its ailing body to lop off its head. The elaborate verbal courtesy, then, that people extend to one another in Ishiguro’s Britain is not just a means to cover up their true feelings (whatever these may be – the novel suggests that human feelings are always conflicted). It also serves to manifest their genuine affection for one another despite all the cultural and historical pressures that combine to drive them apart. Courtesy endures even after the stark realities of the past have been unveiled thanks to the dragon’s death, and it’s this courtesy, like the unfailing courtesy of Gawain in the Green Knight, that one remembers afterwards, rendered all the more poignant by the savage setting in which it somehow survives.

The chief characteristic of the book’s style – especially the dialogue – is that it reads like a work in translation. It is clear and spare, stripped of rhetorical flourish and colloquial punchiness, and stripped too of dialectal elements specific to a certain class or locale or historical period – in marked contrast to the language of, say, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Wakefield cycle, or Morris, or Tolkien. I was reminded as I read of the translations of Homer and Ovid I read as a child in the continuous prose of the Penguin Classics series, largely composed by its founder, the poet and scholar E V Rieu: a prose which reminded you at every moment that what you were encountering was at several removes from the original, yet which also miraculously seemed to convey certain crucial elements of that original in heroic defiance of the mists of time. Here is Ishiguro’s version of Rieu, in a passage from near the beginning where the elderly couple are striving to remember their departed son:

‘Some days I remember him clear enough,’ she said. ‘Then the next day it’s as if a veil’s fallen over his memory. But our son’s a fine and good man, I know that for sure.’

‘Why is he not with us here now, princess?’

‘I don’t know, Axel. It could be he quarreled with the elders and had to leave. I’ve asked around and there’s no one here remembers him. But he wouldn’t have done anything to bring shame on himself, I know for sure. Can you remember nothing of it yourself, Axl?’

‘When I was outside just now, doing my best to remember all I could in the stillness, many things came back to me. But I can’t remember our son, neither his face nor his voice, though sometimes I think I can see him when he was a small boy, and I’m leading him by the hand beside the riverbank, or when he was weeping one time and I was reaching out to comfort him. But what he looks like today, where he’s living, if he has a son of his own, I don’t remember at all. I was hoping you’d remember more, princess.’

‘He’s our son,’ Beatrice said. ‘So I can feel things about him, even when I don’t remember clearly. And I know he longs for us to leave this place and be living with him under his protection.’ (28-9)

The language here is formal, for all its occasional gestures towards the demotic (the contraction of ‘has’ in ‘as if a veil’s fallen across his memory’ is a classic bit of rather stiff translator’s colloquialism). There is no attempt at a lyrical rhythm. The vocabulary is simple and clear, as if selected by an adherent of the Campaign for Plain English – or deployed in a classroom by a teacher keen to ensure her charges can readily follow her words. Beatrice speaks of her son in platitudes: ‘our son’s a fine and good man, I know that for sure’, she tells Axl, awkwardly but confidently combining a claim to certainty (‘for sure’) with the vaguest of epithets (‘a fine and good man’), and she does the same twice more in this short passage: ‘he wouldn’t have done anything to bring shame on himself, I know for sure’; ‘He’s our son […] so I can feel things about him […] And I know he longs for us to leave this place’. Axl, meanwhile, remembers only gestures, detached from the markers of individuality, face and voice – the ‘things’ Beatrice repeatedly refers to. Both of them, then, represent their son in what are effectively verbal fragments, like the fragments of the ogre in the ditch. The most translation-like feature of the passage, perhaps, is its frequent use of the present continuous – a tense not so very often used in colloquial English: ‘sometimes […] I’m leading him by the hand […] or when he was weeping one time and I was reaching out to comfort him […] he longs for us to […] be living with him under his protection’. The overall effect is to suggest that Axl and Beatrice are constructing their son not from memories or instincts – however tenuous – but from what their culture generally assumes a good parent would think about his or her offspring: that he is ‘fine and good’, that he would never misbehave, that he wants them to be with him as a good son should. The continuous present indicates that their thoughts about him are not bound by time, as memories are, but permanent features of their mental landscape. Their courteous attitude to one another’s perspective (‘Can you remember nothing of it yourself, Axl?’ […] ‘I was hoping you’d remember more, princess’), suggests that they are keener to achieve consensus than to draw attention to some striking recollection of their own that might clash with their spouse’s. Axl and Beatrice are dedicated to holding things together, and the strange translator’s English they speak, treading a tightrope walker’s path between abysses of contention and contradiction, is their sole defence against the imminent collapse of all agreements among the inhabitants of the damaged Britain they wander.

At various points in the book the consensual translator’s language shows clear signs of the intense strain to which it’s being subjected by the old enmities, buried atrocities and conflicting emotions and loyalties it conceals. Sir Gawain, in particular, sometimes lapses into incoherence as he seeks to sustain his image as the solitary warrior dedicated to preserving his idealized monarch’s vision of universal peace at the cost of personal relationships:

I had a duty. Ha! And do I fear him now? Never, sir, never. I accuse you of nothing. That great law you brokered torn down in blood! Yet it held well for a time. Torn down in blood! Who blames us for it now? Do I fear youth? Is it youth alone can defeat an opponent? Let him come, let him come. Remember it, sir! (309)

The collapse of distinctions here – it’s hard to tell which ‘him’ or ‘you’ or ‘us’ is referred to in successive sentences – has the effect of conflating all the characters in the book, making them all equally the guilty parties and the victims of the cycle of violence in which they are caught. In this it replicates the way implements make their way from one person’s hands to another in Ishiguro’s novel. One hoe in particular – a farming tool consisting of a long pole with a downturned blade at one end – is at one point to be found in the hands of a young girl, who uses it to exact an appalling vengeance on the man who raped or murdered her mother and sisters (241): a vengeance so terrible that it shocks Sir Gawain and violates his sense of the girl as an innocent victim. Later in the book an identical hoe is seized by Axl as he fights to defend Beatrice against a swarm of pixies, tiny malevolent beings whose disturbing resemblance to young children serves utterly to compromise Axl’s apparent act of chivalry (263). The hoe, like the plain language used by Ishiguro’s characters, is no more than a tool, but the second time we encounter it this instrument has been contaminated by the previous encounter – hoes have become instruments of appalling sadism, and this association is impossible to shake off as Axl attacks the swarm of creatures whose ‘collective voices seemed to him to resemble the sound of children playing in the distance’ (263). At this point Axl, like the girl, is no longer identifiable as simply criminal or victim, aggressor or defender against aggression. The language of Gawain’s speech extends this moral confusion to everyone else in the novel – Wistan, Axl, Gawain, Edwin, the long-dead Arthur, and the young people (like the hoe-wielding girl) who can so readily accommodate themselves to the violent world King Arthur bequeathed to them. All have been cross-infected by association with atrocities, just as the boy Edwin was deemed to have been rendered ogreish by the bite he sustained from an ogre. I, you, we, he, she, they – all pronouns are in a similar position, interchangeable in any given sentence relating to guilt, shame, pain or sudden aggression.

[H]e leaves his sympathetic readers with little doubt of...the capacity of fantasy to represent the pain involved both in sustaining and dissipating the mists of illusion.

The one exception may be Axl’s wife Beatrice – though even she is to some extent compromised in Axl’s mind by one highly unreliable memory that surfaces towards the end of the narrative. Beatrice’s mission throughout is to recover the memories obscured by the mist, first by visiting her lost son and later by helping slay the dragon who gave rise to the mist of forgetfulness. Her conviction that Axl and she have nothing to fear from the return of memory is always touching, but the trajectory of the story tends to expose it as a comforting dream or fantasy, sprung from the fund of comforting fantasies by which people preserve their sense of order, love and justice. I suspect this is one of the reasons Ishiguro turned to fantasy in this novel: as a means of exploring the quotidian fantasies we cling to – chief of all, perhaps, the fantasy that we live in a civilized epoch, firmly founded on previous epochs of civilization – which are aided and abetted by the patterns of our everyday discourse.

The final chapter draws out this theme with consummate skill. Throughout the novel points of view have shifted from time to time – we see things successively from Axl’s, Edwin’s and Sir Gawain’s perspectives – but this is the first time we have been invited to see an episode from the perspective of a fourth individual – one of the Charon-like boatmen who have cropped up periodically since soon after the beginning of the narrative. It’s also the first time we have been given a first person narrator – apart from the anonymous first person narrator of the first chapter (are we meant to believe, then, that this is the boatman, that we are being addressed throughout the book by the ferryman of the dead?). In the last chapter, the elderly couple finally seem to be approaching the moment of their journey that Beatrice, in particular, has anticipated from the beginning, when they will be reunited with their long lost son. Beatrice is convinced the happy ending will soon take place and that the three of them will be permitted to cross to the island where her son lives and inhabit it for ever in blissful unity. The boatman’s perspective, however, gives us access to his intentions, which increasingly suggest that her hopes are misguided. His narrative is filled with expressions of pity for the couple, as if he is convinced they will soon be permanently parted – and that there’s nothing he can do about it, in spite of his agency in parting them. ‘I cannot lie and I have my duty’, he says at one point (348) as he directs them to the shack where their passage to the island on his boat will be arranged (in this book the island is a topographical emblem of isolation, as in Donne’s celebrate sermon – though Beatrice sees it as a site of recovery like the Avalon of Arthurian legend). The word ‘duty’ used here by the boatman has by this time been contaminated by Sir Gawain’s repeated use of it to denote the dubious responsibilities he was assigned by Ishiguro’s demythologized Arthur.

Axl, meanwhile, becomes increasingly – and as the reader know, rightly – suspicious of the boatman’s intentions, but continues to sustain Beatrice in her fantasy of a joyful conclusion to their adventures. Beatrice speaks of the boatman’s kindness with conviction, as she did of her son in the earlier passage: ‘He’s a good man and won’t let us down’ (360). Axl does not believe it – he has caught the boatman in one lie at least and is certain all his other promises too are lies; yet he chooses not to puncture his exhausted wife’s last dream; and to the last moment they spend together he sustains her fantasy, although he does not share it. The book ends with the old woman happy in her conviction that her future will be a loving one, and the old man wandering away from her, lonely in the dark.

The reader is left wondering which condition is better: Beatrice’s knowledge, which is really ignorance, or Axl’s, which the reader knows to be well founded. The question is not an easy one to answer. Beatrice leaves with the boatman, certain she will be reunited with Axl and her on on the other side. Axl leaves alone, certain that he has given his wife – at least for a time – the happy ending she longed for, in the only way available to him. His own unhappiness is assured – but so too is her happiness, however long it lasts. Axl asks a similar question of Beatrice not long before they part: ‘Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did? Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal’ (361). In the end he believes, as he has done since the beginning, that it is best to leave the mist of illusion in place – ironically enough, since it was the ignorant Beatrice who always insisted that it is better to remember every detail of a relationship than to lose even a single memory to time, however painful. Ishiguro leaves us to judge for ourselves which of these two perspectives we share. One thing, however, he leaves his sympathetic readers with little doubt of: the capacity of fantasy to represent the pain involved both in sustaining and dissipating the mists of illusion.

He also leaves us with a memory: that of the only true act of self-sacrifice in the novel. I said earlier that every sacrifice in the book triggers further bloodshed. From what we can see, this is not true of Axl’s – though it’s also not clear how far he had a choice in making his sacrifice, since the sense of its having been somehow predestined has been implanted in the reader by our earlier encounters with the boatman. Then again, the one event in all our lives which is predestined is the fact of death, and the parting with loved ones this entails – a parting considered in many religions to extend into the afterlife, where there will be no marriage or giving in marriage, as the Bible tells us. Axl’s parting from his wife, then, is both the most painful moment in the book and the most movingly memorable.

For me this makes it a moment of light in Ishiguro’s meditation on Dark Age darkness; though it’s a fading light, like the ‘low sun on the cove’ to which Axl moves in the final sentence. We should be grateful for it.

You can find more of Rob's eloquent reviews, as well as short stories and other delights, at the City of Lost Books.

I felt a sense of pain when I beheld

The silent trees, and saw the intruding sky.

Then, dearest Maiden, move along these shades

In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand

Touch – for there is a spirit in the woods.

William Wordsworth, Nutting (1800)

With not a little reservation, I’ll admit: previously, I’ve never liked platform games. The rigid, linear trajectory always struck me as tyrannical; an autocratic device that purposefully dispensed with meaningful story and character development in favour of a tightly-controlled ‘bonus’ economy, the player conditioned from the game’s inception to be satisfied, even sedated, by the promise of scores-without-ceilings, base power-ups dosing ephemeral advantages, and a trope-drenched plot dotted with Manichean characters, each of whom are about as charismatic as a recycled tampon. Further, and I regard this as a foundational gaming principle to which I fervently subscribe, if there’s no opportunity to creep on a broody elf or dashing mage, I’m really not interested.

So when I chanced upon an image of Ori and the Blind Forest, I’m not really sure why I decided to buy it. Likely it’s the result of my prizing aesthetic quality above all else (life is infinitely more negotiable, if a little less rich, when you estimate the merits of a prospective friendship based not on personal compatibility but on how long you’ll be able to tolerate their looking like an animated bin-bag). The bioluminescent landscape, the character design, the obvious depth of Naru and Ori’s connection: it’s disarming, and immediately brought to life by the exquisitely haunting opening soundtrack, all of which inspired the thought, quite unbidden: “This game is going to be baws-to-the-wall awesome.”

The story itself recalls the abiding trope of the endangered forest, destabilised and unbalanced, its peril engineered by an external, often apathetic force. Throughout the game, I was reminded of Princess Mononoke, and in particular the kinship in motive between Kuro, the bereft antagonist, and Lady Eboshi. Both fight against a forest indifferent or opposed to their wellbeing, and both intend to retaliate with fatal finality, regardless of consequence. This is what stayed with me – long after the credits were done and I’d moved on to my n^th replay of Inquisition, I couldn’t forget the injustice. Through no fault of her own, Kuro’s chicks are killed by a reckless ceremony of the Spirit Tree, the heart of the forest of Nibel. In an effort to protect her last egg suffering a similar fate to its brothers and sisters, Kuro strikes at the Spirit Tree and triggers a cataclysmic series of events that threatens to devastate the landscape, an act whose motive is cruelly dismissed by the narrator as the result of “her misguided will.” And the injustice is poetic: the fateful ceremony conducted by the Spirit Tree was itself a desperate attempt to find its lost charge, Ori.

The experience of playing Ori and the Blind Forest is restful, and nourishing, and revitalising – it’s a game that provides the player with a supreme sensory satisfaction. But it’s also frustrating, and heart-breaking: Kuro ultimately sacrifices herself, not for the forest, but to protect her last egg from being destroyed by the destabilised landscape. She has no way of knowing that, after her death, her last egg would be found and nurtured by Naru, Ori’s adoptive mother. There’s no apology, no justice and barely any acknowledgement for what was inflicted on her and her unborn young.

But it’s this poetic injustice where so much of the game’s narrative and emotional impact draws strength. The theme of parental love and altruism is prevalent throughout – we see it in the motives of Naru, Kuro and the Spirit Tree – and the absence of a universal happy ending, a reward for each character’s efforts, is what gives this game the emotional maturity that makes its story so compelling.

“…it’s this poetic injustice where so much of the game’s narrative and emotional impact draws strength.”

Despite the absence of any humankind in the game, there is a distinct anthropocentric imperative present, each character compelled by distinctly human sensations and scenarios: Kuro’s bereavement and righteous rage, her and Naru’s selfless capacity for sacrifice, their desperation to protect what they love; Ori’s heartbreak and resolve; and Gumon’s dispossession and loneliness. This kind of anthropomorphism has often been dismissed by critics as “sentimental appropriation of the non-human for human ends,” and guilty of what John Ruskin called the “pathetic fallacy” – an emotional falseness. Examples can be found throughout art, historical and contemporary, popular and obscure: from Dream of the Rood, a 10th Century Anglo-Saxon poem told from the perspective of the cross on which Christ was crucified, to “Angels of rain and lightning” in Percy Shelley’sOde to the West Wind(1820); from Aesop’s brash hare and slow but steady tortoise (and refereeing fox) to Tolkien’s Ents. A primary issue that ecocritics have with anthropomorphism is that conceiving the non-human world as human-centric compels us to understand nature, the landscape, in human terms and thus inevitably exploit it for human benefit. Tempting thought it may be to dismiss such a construction as the ramblings of a dehydrated hippie, there is a substantial subscription to this argument (see Further Reading) and so, I suppose, we ought to consider it. Certainly, constraining one’s world view to any universal principle is, universally, a bad idea but scholars such as Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle (who offer an admirable explanation of ecocriticism in their book Literature, Criticism and Theory) fail to show why anthropomorphism is a bad thing – ecocritics in general have established themselves as talented archivists of anthropomorphic instances in literature but offer little empirical data on how this translates into pitch-fork-wielding villagers lynching daffodils.

The ‘anthropomorphism = bad’ contention is administered by its proponents largely against literary instances and so, crucially, this ignores the sizeable swathes of media, such as video games and animation, which deploy anthropomorphism either in defence of the landscape (think virtually every Miyazaki film) or as a performative device with which to deepen our relationship to the narrative – and, consequently, the landscape in, under and on which it takes place. Imbuing something with human qualities intensifies, rather than negates or qualifies, our affections: the friendly dog who adores touch, the recalcitrant kitty who resents affection (and this only makes us love him more), the parrot with a sense of humour, roses that shiver with delight when watered. Language, most glorious of human constructs, invites anthropomorphism, and understanding something in human terms is an inevitable, but by no means necessarily disastrous, consequence. Ori and the Blind Forest captures the performative quality of anthropomorphism perfectly: my heart broke for Kuro the owl, and sharing Gumon’s sorrow as you understand he is the last of his kind is inexorable. Even if a White Rhino doesn’t understand its state as the last of its kind, we – humans – do and it compels us to care and defend and nurture.

Ori and the Blind Forest celebrates that human capacity to relate to the non-human: with only minimal subtitles to edify the strange, sonorous language of the Forest Spirit, the game and its narrative flawlessly communicates its message through the character’s meaningful relationships and the trials they face – and, sometimes, don’t overcome. By no means didactically, it’s a game that proposes the value of self-awareness but respect for blinding grief. It is singularly, to date, the most beautiful video gaming experience of my life, and wholly responsible for my nascent love affair with platform games.

References

• Bennett A. and N. Royle, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fourth Ed.), (Harlow: Pearson, 2009).

• Ruskin, J. Of the Pathetic Fallacy, Modern Painters, 1856: http://www.victorianweb.org/technique/pathfall.html.

Further Reading

If you’re interested in a rough introduction to ecocriticism (and, indeed, literary criticism in general) that’s an easy read, I’d recommend An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle.

Two elements drive the novel’s plot: the standard story of the dragon and the hero who slays it to rescue the lady, and the story of the unheroic rank and file (here reduced to the ‘rank’, one suspects because of their attitude to personal hygiene) known as the Guards, whose main function in narratives is to be fooled, ignored or randomly slaughtered. Combining the two elements gives rise to an essentially political question: what kind of society perpetuates these particular clichés, one ancient, the other more or less modern (though Sir Lancelot and Sir Tristram unseated and casually slew innumerable anonymous knights in Malory), and how do they sit in a world that claims to value democracy and gender equality? How do they sit, indeed, as working models of anything at all? What desires do they cater for? What possibilities for better social structures do they tend to suppress?

One answer, of course, is that both fantasies pander to a certain view of masculinity. Men fight to show their manhood, as the young adopted dwarf Carrot (who is over six feet tall, and rather stooped from having been raised – no pun intended – in the dwarfish mines) has been led to expect, since he sets out on his journey armed with a battered sword and a reinforced codpiece. The hero fights and wins; the Guards fight and lose; the hero thereby confirms his greater share of testosterone. Carrot’s codpiece confirms one of the flaws in this male rite of passage: that even the strongest warrior can be floored by a well-aimed kick in the testicles. The lone hero is ridiculously vulnerable under any circumstances, and the concept of the lone hero facing up to an armour-plated flying monster that breathes fire merely serves to reinforce that vulnerability to a ridiculous extent. Pratchett slightly tips the scales in the hero’s favour by ensuring that his dragons, too, are flawed, despite their scales: their habit of breathing fire involves an insanely volatile digestive system which is vulnerable, in its turn, to spontaneous chemical explosions at awkward moments. The traditional über-masculine hero and the traditional dragon, in other words, are imaginative confections, ill suited to the rough-and-tumble of real city life in any era. Why then do we persist in imagining them, rather than turning our attention to more practical fantasies – such as the unheroic Guards in Pratchett’s book, who prefer not to fight at all, thereby preserving every portion of their bodies, not just the family jewels?

The same thing, of course, could be said of the law – which Hope Mirrlees identified in Lud-in-the-Mist as one of the most inventive products of the human imagination. As well as his sword and codpiece Carrot owns an ancient lawbook, and seeks to put its precepts into practice against all odds, even (at one point) placing a prone dragon under arrest while reciting the charges against it with meticulous reference to the entries in his volume. The city of Ankh-Morpork, to which he travels to enlist in the City Guard, has little respect for either law or order. Indeed its cynical and efficient ruler, Lord Vetinari, has built his success on the principle of encouraging lawbreakers to police themselves in order to protect their own interests – not so much organized crime as crime legitimated, without reference to conventional legislation of any kind. The thieves have their own official guild, which ensures that the proper quantity of robberies is committed each year, and the guilds of assassins, merchants and beggars are equally well integrated into the machinery of the commonwealth. As a result the upholders of the law, the City Guard, have been rendered redundant by the time Carrot joins them. Undaunted by, indeed wholly ignorant of this redundancy, the young man flings himself enthusiastically into the task of enforcing long-forgotten regulations; and in the process he reminds not just the rest of the Guard of the value of what they stand for, but the city as well, whose lapse into absolute pragmatism and self-interest gets arrested – no pun intended – by his quiet assumption that he can do the impossible: uphold the good and protect the weak.

There is something endearing, of course, about Carrot’s idealism, and the city is soon endeared by it – though this is partly because Carrot is immensely strong and, thanks to his codpiece, more or less indestructible by any being of a similar size. He reduces even the troll Detritus to a tearful wreck in a barroom brawl, though here, too, there’s a sound practical reason for his victory: the troll is unfortunate enough not to own a reinforced codpiece. Carrot can stride through areas of the city barred to other Guards, thanks not just to his ignorance but his size; and he can take lodgings in a brothel not just because he doesn’t know what a brothel is but because he affords welcome protection to its workers. Carrot is not just an idealist, he’s a practical asset. And not just because of his strength. His willingness to see the best in everybody helps to forge communities where before there were only loose agglomerations of people banded together for mutual protection. Carrot, then, is not just a stick to beat the wicked, like the traditional hero, but a carrot to tempt them. He has value, which is sometimes measured in carrots – or at least in carats, which are rather less useful than the currency Carrot deals in, honesty, commitment and affection. By the end of the book we have discovered that Ankh-Morpork contains very little gold (the dragon that threatens it is disgusted by its absence); but Carrot imports or restores a new set of valuables – not private parts or a crown, but the simple truths it was in danger of forgetting.

Carrot stands, in fact, for several truths of some importance: that the hero cannot manage on his own; that the qualities traditionally associated with masculinity aren’t enough to sustain an individual, let alone a community; and that the best intentions are useless – indeed highly dangerous – unless they have a solid material basis, a foundation in pragmatism; that is, unless they incorporate a recognition of what can practically be accomplished with the ingredients available. Guards! Guards! is an extended meditation on the precise combination of ingredients required to enable a society to function without falling into either tyranny – totalitarian control by a single authority – or anarchy – not organized anarchism but a Hobbesian struggle for survival. There are a number of characters in it who represent certain points on the scale between the two conditions; and indeed the sheer number of characters that represent these points is what makes each of Pratchett’s later fantasies such a complex feat of narrative engineering.

‘Of all the cities in all the world it could have flown into […] it’s flown into mine’.

It’s worth pausing to consider the narrative form within which these characters operate. A Pratchett novel is made up of a series of short chapters written from different points of view. At first the reader has no notion how these points of view – most of them those of misfits, obsessives and eccentrics – fit together in the machinery of plot; and a final understanding of the role of each element is never achieved until close to the end. No one plot strand takes precedence over any other. It’s a democracy of narratives, a cityscape of storytelling, and enacts Pratchett’s philosophy of collectivism; the notion that any major event involves collective rather than individual action – the precise reverse of the philosophy that drives the fairy tale of the Hero and the Dragon.

Motifs and allusions form part of this assemblage, and like the multiple strands of plot reveal their function in the overall machine only near the dénouement. Guards! Guards! includes, for instance, at least a couple of references to that old chestnut of a movie Casablanca. On p. 94, Captain Vimes of the Guards thinks to himself about the dragon that is stirring up trouble in Ankh-Morpork: ‘Of all the cities in all the world it could have flown into […] it’s flown into mine’. At this point, for Vimes the dragon is a solitary problem and an ungendered one; it bears no relation to any other aspect of the narrative, as far as the Captain is concerned. Towards the end of the novel, however, another quotation from Casablanca shifts the focus to another narrative strand, and draws attention to what has changed in the interim. Having accepted an invitation to supper from the dragon-breeder Lady Ramkin, and enjoyed her company, Captain Vimes searches for a way to express his growing fondness for her. ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ is what he comes up with (p. 285). The context for this second reference to the movie is, of course, quite different from that of the first; and it indicates a radical shift in perspective. By this stage in the book the marauding dragon is no longer a neuter ‘it’; the monster has become a female, and ceased to be a monster by teaming up with Vimes’s pet marsh dragon Errol, bred (of course) by Lady Ramkin. As a breeder of dragons, Lady Ramkin has shown an interest in the giant scaled intruder from the start; it is for her a splendid example of the draco nobilis, and therefore related to her marsh dragons. For her, then, the giant dragon is no isolated terror but the member of an identifiable species, linked by blood and habits to the diminutive creatures she rears in her shed. But the dragon’s breed also associates it with Lady Ramkin herself, who is both a member of an ancient breed – the aristocracy – and the kind of large-scale, dominant woman who used in the past to be branded a ‘dragon’. The dragon-breeder’s attitude to the dragon has brought it in out of the cold, so to speak: integrated it into a community, given it a home. And Vimes’s second quotation from Casablanca confirms that something similar has happened to Lady Ramkin. Thanks to the dragon, her status as an eccentric outsider living in isolation in her dilapidated mansion has changed – as has that of Vimes himself, who at the beginning of the novel was a broken-down drunk with only the shreds of an official function. When he parrots Humphrey Bogart, Vimes is looking at Lady Ramkin and really seeing her, perhaps for the first time – not merely (against romance convention, given her size) as a desirable woman, but as a person with many qualities: ‘style and money and common-sense and self-assurance and all the things that he didn’t [have]’ (p. 284). He is looking at her, in fact, as the emblem of the city he loves: ‘she had opened her heart, and if you let her she could engulf you; the woman was a city’. The second Casablanca reference, in fact, identifies the moment when both Vimes and Lady Ramkin settle at last into the urban community – thanks to the dragon who first flew into and threatened that community (‘Of all the cities in all the world…’), and later found, like them, that it had brought her love.

Vimes’s reference to Lady Ramkin as a city reverses the cliché he first uttered in a drunken mumble in the novel’s opening pages: that the city is a woman, who both acts like a ‘lady dog. Puppy. Hen. Bitch’ and also has moments when she opens ‘her great big booming rotten heart to you’, catching you off balance (p. 8). Captain Vimes’s trajectory from solitude to companionship, from half-affectionate resentment at the city to contentment with what it offers him, is the point of the novel, which uses it to illustrate the necessity of coexistence in a complex society, and offers itself as a fable of the techniques that make coexistence possible. His journey to companionship identifies Vimes as a true member of the Guard, all of whom are in the end bonded to the city as well as each other. Sergeant Colon shares his house with a wife he never sees, since she works the day shift and he works nights; they communicate through written notes, but their companionship seems to work well for both of them. Lance Constable Carrot, who begins the novel yearning for the dwarf lover he left behind in the mountains, ends it in a contented relationship with one of the workers at the brothel where he first found lodgings. Corporal Nobbs is a member of a Morris dancing club, which shares its quarters with other clubs – including the secret society that summons the dragon. The Guard is a collective, and seeks companionship outside its ranks (or the rank) as a logical extension of its duty to protect and serve the urban community.

In this communitarian impulse, the Guard stands in opposition to the other strand of myth that shapes the narrative. The legend of the Hero and the Dragon depends on exclusivity and uniqueness: the hero is unique in his strength, the princess offered to the dragon is unique in her birth, virtue and beauty, the dragon unique in its monstrosity. And in this novel, the conventional dragon myth is the product and province of self-centred loners. The anonymous Supreme Grand Master of the secret society that summons the dragon, who scorns the other members of his circle and looks forward to the time when he can rise above such dross (his name, when we discover it, turns out to mean Lone Wolf). The members of the society themselves, each of whom harbours a grudge against his fellow citizens. The dimwitted hero selected by the Supreme Grand Master to defeat the dragon, who has been carefully bred in seclusion to think himself special. The dragon itself, as the Supreme Grand Master conceives it: a lonely being, bigger and nastier than any other creature. All these people perceive themselves, and the dragon they summon, as solitary animals – despite the fact that solitude, for Pratchett, is more or less impossible, since no one can survive for long without the help of others (and solitude in this respect is not the same as loneliness, which is suffering born from the fact that being alone is not a natural state for human beings). Solitude is often the chosen state of the selfish rather than the condition of the disenfranchised. It can be a fantasy as recklessly extravagant as dreaming of dragons. To seek to make that fantasy concrete, for instance by seeking to demonstrate your own uniqueness through an act of reckless daring, can be highly dangerous – to yourself as much as to the community you plan to foist it on. Certain kinds of fantasy, in fact, are pernicious, and no practitioner of fantasy fiction can afford to forget it.

Certain kinds of fantasy, in fact, are pernicious, and no practitioner of fantasy fiction can afford to forget it.

There’s a third element in the novel besides the gregarious Guards and the self-segregating Supreme Grand Master: and this is the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, ruler of the city. Vetinari stands (among other things) for cynical pragmatism: the notion that men and women are ruled not by ideals but by self-interest, and that they can only be controlled by appealing to their concern for their own well-being. It’s on this principle that the Patrician founded the Guild of Thieves; if crime cannot be wiped out, why not make it pay? And of course he has a point. At various moments throughout the novel the citizens of Ankh-Morpork find themselves consenting to atrocities, happy to tolerate tyranny if this will ensure their continued survival. When a king emerges to kill the marauding dragon they forget democracy and make themselves monarchists. When a dragon seizes the king’s throne they put on tunics embellished with a dragon emblem. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler sells his sausages with equal enthusiasm on every occasion: at the ritual sacrifice of an innocent woman to the dragon, at the coronation of the king who purportedly killed the dragon, and at the dragon’s installation as the king’s successor. For the Patrician, this makes ordinary citizens like C.M.O.T. Dibbler ‘bad people’; people who will ‘follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity’, out of a ‘kind of humdrum, everyday badness’ (p. 274). He counts himself among them, which is what distinguishes him from the solitary tyrant (or tyrant’s vizier) the Grand Master wishes to become. Lord Vetinari is thoroughly democratic in his dismissal of the moral fibre of humankind. And he also sees what he calls ‘badness’ as functional. Good people, like Captain Vimes of the Guard, need bad people like himself because they know how to plan ahead, as the good do not. He demonstrates the fact aptly by fitting his prison with a lock on the inside, for the eventuality that he might one day be locked into it, and by making friends with the city rats, ahead of the day when he loses the support of his human followers. Planning like this would have been branded obsessive lunacy or visionary madness by anyone who had known about it before it was confirmed as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘well-planned’ by the Grand Master’s coup d’état, and the Patrician’s imprisonment.

The truth is – as this last sentence implies – that inhabiting a city, and the planning that makes it possible, is not a matter of simple pragmatism, whatever the Patrician may claim (and he admits as much a short while later when he confesses he needs idealists like Captain Vimes). Dreams are necessary, as well as practicality, if the city is to retain its resilience, its endless capacity to reinvent itself in response to every twist and turn of an arbitrary fortune. The adaptability of the citizens of Ankh-Morpork is a testament to their imagination as well as their unerring instinct for survival. They aren’t absolutists – not committing themselves to any one philosophy, since this would limit their capacity for self-defensive metamorphosis. But they are perfectly capable of seeing things from a new ideological perspective when this becomes necessary. And they are also perfectly capable of defending their interests against real oppressors, again when this becomes necessary and not before. A healthy community, in fact, depends on a volatile balance of dreams and pragmatism, much as a dragon’s fire depends on a volatile mixture of chemicals in its various stomachs; and this is the place to return to Carrot, who is the gold standard by which to measure that balance.

As a personality, Carrot has all the qualifications to become a unique hero of the sort the Supreme Grand Master needs to fight the dragon and win the kingdom. A member of the Grand Master’s secret society lists these qualifications before Carrot has even entered the narrative: ‘There used to be some old prophecy or something […] “Yea, the king will come bringing Law and Justice, and know nothing but the Truth, and Protect and Serve the People with his Sword”’ (p. 17). Sure enough, Carrot arrives a few paragraphs later carrying a sword he has inherited, wielding Law and Justice in the form of a book, literal-minded enough to believe he knows what Truth is, and determined to Protect and Serve by joining the Watch. Later in the book, some of his fellow Guards notice something else about him that makes him kingly: ‘“Something odd about that boy,” said Colon, as they limped after him. “He always manages to persuade us to follow him, have you noticed?”’ (p. 253). But by this time Carrot has been integrated into their company; he has changed them and they have changed him. No longer so strait-laced about Law and Justice, Carrot has instilled in them a new sense of responsibility towards their fellow citizens. He may be leading them towards danger like a hero, but before doing so he has asserted the interdependence of the Guards by citing the first part of the famous catchphrase of the Three Musketeers, ‘All for one!’ – to his comrades’ confusion. He has brought them dreams, they have brought him pragmatism, and their qualities have become fused, making all of them stronger. Throughout the book the conventional reader is waiting for the moment when Carrot will be exposed as the true king of Ankh-Morpork – perhaps a few minutes after he has slain the dragon. That moment never happens. The dragon is not slain – it gets a happy ending. Kingship is abolished. The myths are changed. Things are arranged much better than they were in those old stories about winged lizards and expendable nobodies.

Of course, the rearrangement of the stories involves a good deal of magic, though to a different end than the magic of the sword that killed the dragon. One kind of magic involved is the old cinematic magic of the million-to-one chance: the last-minute escape or rescue in a thriller, which is just barely believable, because it could work, but so unlikely as to resemble divine intervention. Another is the magic of the imagination, which conjures dragons into existence as we read. On the final page of the novel, the image of two dragons flying out across the void that circumscribes the Discworld represents just about as magical an ending as you could wish for. The magic that propels the lizard lovers is the special kind Pratchett has engineered out of the components of his tale: a utopian, urban, pragmatic kind of thaumaturgy, unseen outside his books, at least before he wrote them (it has spread since). The sense of community it fosters, too, may last beyond the final page. Or, to paraphrase Pratchett’s last two sentences – themselves paraphrased from the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – perhaps it won’t. But then again, what does?

You can find more of Rob's eloquent reviews, as well as short stories and other delights, at the City of Lost Books.