Читать книгу The Worm Ouroboros: The Prelude to Zimiamvia - James Francis Stephens - Страница 8

‘The Worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail …’

I FIRST read these words more than twenty years ago. They seemed magical, an invocation of something locked deep inside me – something dark and dangerous, and yet desperately alive. They intrigue me, uplift me, haunt me, even today; and I introduce them to you with the anxious delight of a child who wishes to share a special secret. You hold in your hands the best single novel of fantasy ever written in the English language.

Eric Rücker Eddison (1882–1945) was a civil servant at the British Board of Trade, sometime Icelandic scholar, devotee of Homer and Sappho, and mountaineer. Although by all accounts a bowler-hatted and proper English gentleman, Eddison was an unmitigated dreamer who, in occasional spare hours over some thirty years, put his dreams to paper. In 1922, just before his fortieth birthday, a small collector’s edition of The Worm Ouroboros was published; larger printings soon followed in both England and America, and a legend of sorts was born. The book was a dark and blood-red jewel of wonder, equal parts spectacle and fantasia, labyrinthine in its intrigue, outlandish in its violence. It was also Mr Eddison’s first novel.

After writing an adventure set in the Viking age, Styrbiorn the Strong (1926), and a translation of Egil’s Saga (1930), Eddison devoted the remainder of his life to the fantastique in a series of novels set, for the most part, in Zimiamvia, the fabled paradise of The Worm Ouroboros. The Zimiamvian books were, in Eddison’s words, ‘written backwards’, and thus published in reverse chronological order of events: Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), and The Mezentian Gate (1958). (The final book was incomplete when Eddison died, but his notes were so thorough that his brother, Colin Eddison, and his friend George R. Hamilton were able to assemble the book for publication.) Although the books are known today as a trilogy, Eddison wrote them as an open-ended series; they may be read and enjoyed alone or in any sequence. Each is a metaphysical adventure, an intricate Chinese puzzle box whose twists and turns reveal ever-encircling vistas of delight and dread.

Eddison’s four great fantasies are linked by the enigmatic character of Edward Lessingham – country gentleman, soldier, statesman, artist, writer, and lover, among other talents – and his Munchausen-like adventures in space … and time. Although he disappears after the early pages of The Worm Ouroboros, Lessingham is central to the books that follow. ‘God knows,’ he tells us, ‘I have dreamed and waked and dreamed till I know not well which is dream and which is true.’ One of the pleasures of reading Eddison is that we, too, are never certain. Perhaps Lessingham is a man of our world; perhaps he is a god; perhaps he is only a dream … or a dream within a dream. And perhaps, just perhaps, he is all of these things, and more.

Eddison was exceptional in his embrace of the fantastique; in his fiction there are no logical imperatives, no concessions to cause and effect, only the elegant truths of the higher calling of myth. Characters traverse distances and decades in the blink of an eye; worlds take shape, spawn life, evolve through billions of years, and are destroyed, all during a dinner of fish. These are dreams made flesh by a dreamer extraordinaire.

‘There was a man named Lessingham dwelt in an old low house in Wastdale …’ Thus The Worm Ouroboros introduces Lessingham and his lady, Mary, the first glimpse of the tragic romance that will haunt the Zimiamvian novels. Lessingham retires, alone, to the mysterious Lotus Room, a place of contemplation and opiate calm – there to sleep, perchance to dream. ‘Time is,’ speaks a little black bird, and a shining chariot, drawn by a hippogriff, arrives to fetch Lessingham to Mercury. His destination is not the first planet from the sun, but a medieval Norseman’s nightmare of our own Earth, ‘all grey and cold, the warm colours burnt to ashes’, save one: the crimson of blood. It is a grim world, peopled by Demons and Witches, Imps and Pixies, Goblins and Ghouls – all of them human, and all of them at war. Swordplay and sorcery and Machiavellian intrigue are the order of the day; vengeance and feuds, betrayal and bloodletting, as common as the dawn.

The heroes of this majestic Romance are the Demons, ruled and captained by the three brothers – Lords Juss and Spitfire and Goldry Bluszco – and their cousin Brandoch Daha. Valiant in war, courtly in speech and stance, these are heroes in the classical sense, superhuman, violent, passionately alive, with the ferocious good looks and fate of fallen angels; if there is a single certainty, it is that those who befriend them will die. The Demonlords are demigods who struggle for a kind of savage nobility, forever pursuing a sentimental, romantic code that places word before deed, death before dishonour. Their trials are many, and painted brightly with blood.

Arrayed against the Demonlords are the Witches of Carcë, purveyors of a blackness ‘which no bright morning light might lighten’. Their king is the crafty warlock Gorice XII, an egromancer ‘full of guiles and wiles’. Skilled in grammarie, he lurks forever in his citadel, which stands ‘like some drowsy dragon of the elder slime, squat, sinister, and monstrous’. At his side are his warlords: brave Corund, the bearish Corsus, the insolent Corinius, and ‘the landskip of iniquity’, the renegade Goblin Gro – philosopher, schemer, and traitor by nature. No blacker and more dastardly crew of scoundrels could be found; yet Eddison’s passion for them is obvious and intense.

The struggle between the Demons and Witches is nothing less than epic; the battles of this modern Iliad rage on land, sea, and air, taking us from the ocean depths to the lofty pinnacles of heaven. Among its finer episodes are the ‘wrastling for Demonland’, which pits Goldry Bluzco against the King of the Witches and sets an entire world aflame; the fog-clouded siege at Eshgrar Ogo; the harrowing ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha and the struggle there with the beast mantichora; the bloody battle at Krothering Side; the flight of the hippogriff to the gaunt peak of Zora Rach; and the playing of the final trumps at the dark citadel of Carcë.

Eddison’s prose is archaic and often difficult, an intentionally affected throwback to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His characters are thus eloquent but long winded; they speak not of killing a man, but of ‘sending him from the shade into the house of darkness’. In his finest moments Eddison ascends to a sustained poetic beauty; listen, for example, to the haunting premonition of the Goblin Gro:

‘in my sleep about the darkest hour, a dream of the night came to my bed and beheld me with a glance so fell that the hairs of my head stood up and pale terror gat hold upon me. And methought the dream smote up the roof above my bed, and the roof yawned to the naked air of the midnight that laboured with fiery signs, and a bearded star travelling in the houseless dark. And I beheld the roof and the walls one gore of blood. And the dream screeched like the screech-owl, crying, Witchland from thy hand, O King!’

At other times the reader is virtually overwhelmed with words. Palaces and armoury were Eddison’s particular vices; he describes them with such ornate grandeur that page after page is lavished with their decoration. The reader should not be deterred by the density of such passages; like a vintage wine a taste for Eddison’s prose is expensively acquired, demanding the reader’s patience and perseverance – and it is worthy of its price. These are books to be savoured, best read in the long dark hours of night, when the wind is against the windows and the shadows begin to walk – books not meant for the moment, but for forever.

The Worm Ouroboros inevitably has been compared with J. R. R. Tolkien’s later and more popular Lord of the Rings trilogy; apart from their narrative ambition and epic sweep, the books share little in common. (Eddison, like Tolkien, disclaimed the notion that he was writing something beyond mere story: ‘It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake.’ But, as the reader will no doubt observe, he proves much less convincing.)

If comparisons are in order, then I suggest Eddison’s obvious influences – Homer and the Icelandic sagas – and that most controversial of Jacobean dramatists, John Webster, whose blood-spattered tales of violence and chaos (from which Eddison’s characters quote freely) saw him chastised for subverting orthodox society and religion. The shadow of Eddison may be seen, in turn, not only in the modern fiction of heroic fantasy, but also in the writings of his truest descendants, such dreamers of the dark fantastique as Stephen King (whose own epics, The Stand and The Dark Tower, read like paeans to Eddison) and Clive Barker (whose The Great and Secret Show called its chaotic forces the Iad Ouroboros).

Eddison would have found this line of succession, like the cyclical popularity of his books, the most natural order of events: the circle, ever turning – like the worm Ouroboros, that eateth its own tail – the symbol of eternity, where ‘the end is ever at the beginning and the beginning at the end for ever more’.

You hold in your hands a masterpiece.

DOUGLAS E. WINTER

1990