ISSN 2662-8562 ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-031-71566-2 ISBN 978-3-031-71567-9 (eBook)
A review by Dev Agarwal
With his latest work, Paul Kincaid looks critically and in-depth at Keith Roberts’s novel, Pavane.
Keith Roberts (20 September 1935 – 5 October 2000) was a science fiction writer and illustrator. His work on Pavane appeared first as a series of novellas from 1966 and then as a collected book in 1968.
Kincaid notes that Roberts’ work is often admired by his fellow writers but neglected more widely as science fiction. In part, this could be due to reactions to the artist rather than his art itself. While his work is respected by those already familiar with it, Roberts’s personality probably damaged his wider lasting recognition. Kincaid observes that Roberts may have been “incapable of friendship, someone who distrusted everyone on principle, and fell out with everyone who became close to him.”
We must go back a generation to find writers discussing Roberts’ work. Both AJ Budrys and Kingsley Amis lavished praise on Roberts. Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove also cites him positively, but Roberts is otherwise “almost entirely absent from other surveys of the genre.”
This deficit of attention has only grown in the years since Roberts’ death, which makes Kincaid’s literary appreciation particularly relevant. Kincaid speculates that Pavane may suffer in genre terms from being neither fish nor fowl. It does not sit easily “in the technological territory of science fiction,” yet it is also not modern fantasy. Pavane is a particularly British work, a book made up of a cycle of stories, and one imbued by religion, sense of place, and the mythical past of the English countryside.
Kincaid notes that, while much of Roberts’s output appears “nominally the future, what we see of it is redolent of the past” and that Roberts is one of a group of British writers who “write within the future historic, whose inspiration comes more from the depths of English literature than the glittering surfaces of American science fiction.” The challenge with this type of fiction is that “Roberts sets himself in opposition to how science fiction commonly perceives itself.” To engage with Pavane therefore requires the reader to commit to a similar opposition to what “normal” science fiction is doing.
This in itself suggests that a clear analysis of Pavane requires us to step away from familiar genre referents to unpick the tonality and mood of the book. Two names that come up regularly with Roberts, and which Kincaid cites early on in his Critical Companion, are not genre authors at all, but writers “whose work resonates with the landscape of southern England” — Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.
Pavane was written in the 1960s, and it now competes for attention in a distinctly changed genre market. As book’’s’ reputations often precede the reader opening them, Pavane may be well-known as a work of alternative fiction (where Britain is dominated by the Catholic Church) instead of science fiction. Putting aside that this is inaccurately reductive, I’d note that since Pavane’s writing, and in the intervening decades, alternative world fiction has become so well-established that it has slipped its genre bonds and become respectable. It has been confirmed as palatable in the mainstream by being renamed and tidied up for literary consumption under the nom de plume “counter-factual fiction.” Pavane is therefore ripe for rediscovery by readers who wish to know more about SF’s antecedents, alternative world fiction, or to gain a window on one of the more distinct and singular interpretations of “what if?”
Pavane’s particular “what-if” speculation is built from the early death of Elizabeth I, a successful invasion by the Spanish Armada and a world dominated by a globalCatholic Church. After Elizabeth’s death, King Philip of Spain’s Armada lands successfully and his army squashes both the English army and English Protestantism. In short order, Dutch Protestantism is also suppressed, and Europe becomes a majority Catholic continent. The colonies in America and Australia are now also outposts of Catholicism, and the Church deliberately restricts scientific advancement in each nation. Britain becomes a stifled backwater, culturally and technologically.
Roberts’s book is perhaps best explored as both a novel and as a collection of interconnected stories developed and published individually. John Clute’s terminology for this type of work entered the canon long ago: the “fixup.” Kincaid prefers the term “mosaic novel,” and both terms describe the structure of a series of stories that are linked thematically but also stand alone from each other (mostly).
Pavane might be considered a paragon of this form, as each part of the book not only focuses on particular characters, but also defines an aspect of the world. Kincaid tells us that: “‘The Signaller’ explained the semaphore stations; next “The Lady Anne” is concerned with steam-powered road trains; “Brother John” gives attention to the role of the Catholic Church. The last of this initial set of Pavane stories to be written was “Lords and Ladies,” which carefully provided the link between “The Lady Anne” and “Corfe Gate”.”
Just as the map is not the territory, so too, the alternative world conceit is not the whole story. Both the alternative setting and each individual story allow Roberts to also explore the mythic in the English landscape. Faery magic, a component of a specific form of British myth and fiction dating back to before Shakespeare, features in “The Signaller” and “Lady Margaret”. Roberts mines the English countryside, and often specifically Dorset, to explore a hidden faery world, creating an emotional resonance for the reader with the landscape itself.
Kincaid divides his Companion into six easily digestible chapters. He guides the reader through the structure of the novel, then maps its worldbuilding (which was, he notes, arrived at aggregately, as new stories were written, not worked out systematically in advance). Kincaid unpacks “the network of semaphore signal stations and the Fairies” and then discusses the complex religious history. Religion dominates an entire chapter, as it should given its significance as the Catholic Church rises and both English Protestantism and older faiths fall away. Kincaid notes that “an inescapable feature that has to be central to any evaluation of the book, is the role of religion. This is not just the fact that the Catholic Church plays the part of the villain in this story, something that Roberts would later come to regret, but ranged against the Church and the social and economic system it has created, are other belief systems.”
Religion is the spine through each element of Pavane, both in favour of the new Catholic majority and through resistance to it. Kincaid observes that “Anglicanism survives as an underground movement, but here it works in concert with folk beliefs, with the Fairies, and with a survival of Norse mythology.”
Religion as a motivating force in genre fiction is a two-edged sword, giving context and impetus to characterisation and driving the plot. But when the religion that the writer settles on is not itself fictional, it brings a host of other issues with it. As Kincaid observes, Roberts later regretted a narrative where the Catholic Church was the antagonist, stifling both progress and dissent, and working against the benefits of the modern world that we enjoy.
The cycle of stories contains hidden references to religious resistance that the casual reader is unlikely to notice. In “The Signaller,” Kincaid notes that when the protagonist Rafe “graduates from the College of Signals he is required to spend a full day in the physically arduous task of transmitting “the Book of Nehemiah.”
Kincaid explains that the Book of Nehemiah is a codified reference. It is a book of the Bible, but crucially, only Protestant Bibles refer to this book by this term. Rafe has fought to join the Guild of Signallers and is presumably unaware that it is a covert, Protestant body.
Kincaid tells us that Roberts became discontented with Pavane, going so far as to see it as an albatross around his neck. Kincaid’s conclusion is that Roberts’s discontent sprang from his own approach to the Catholic Church in the story.
Roberts stated that his position was neither for or against religion and that “I was rather sorry when I did Pavane, I felt I’d dragged the Catholic Church in by the scruff of its neck, screaming.” His regret infused his later works, and Kincaid observes that this is most notable in another novel, The Chalk Giants. Roberts addressed his own feelings in Pavane’s final story, “Coda.”
The thematic aspects of Pavane’s story cycle include the overt: an alternative world, the religious triumph of Catholicism, the deformed nature of technology (slowed but not stopped by the Church), and the covert activities of religious resistance and old gods hidden in the landscape. However, less explicit is the idea that this is not an alternative world story at all, but one where history repeats in cycles.
Kincaid summarises this development by stating that “read as alternate history, therefore, Pavane suggests that Catholic domination might have retarded both technological and social advance, rendering fragile our familiar modern world. But the Coda tells us something else; here we learn that there were no concentration camps, that many of the horrors of the twentieth century were thus avoided.”
The inexplicit conceit of Pavane is then made explicit in “Coda” — that history loops and repeats, rather than runs here in a parallel and alternative track to the real world. The Catholic Church, armed with this knowledge of cycling history, has chosen to manipulate the world from the sixteenth century onwards in order to avoid the horrors of the twentieth century. This is a redemptive arc for the institution. They had humanity’s best interests at heart.
As Kincaid observes, “this new information does not fit within an alternate history scenario, because if the concentration camps never happened in this reality, there would be no knowledge of them.”
Kincaid offers two further observations about the revelation of the cyclical story. The first is that Roberts is clumsy in his execution. The explicit revelation is addressed to the reader rather than the characters. As Kincaid notes above, how can the character John, reading a letter that he has received, discover the good news that the Catholic dominion has meant that “there was no Belsen. No Buchenwald. No Passchendaele.” This would not be a celebratory revelation for John. If the horrors associated with these places did not occur, then the place names would not resonate for him and give him a sense of relief that they were avoided. This scene is therefore a “fourth wall-breaking” address from the writer directly to the reader. It inevitably jars.
However, Kincaid tempers his criticism of this flaw. The flaw is the overt declaration of the cyclical conceit, not the conceit itself. The cyclic history was always intended as an aspect of the book, and is not thrown in in a last minute surprise. “Anyone reading the book with even a modicum of attention would have seen references to cyclic history crop up all the way through.”
Kincaid brings his detailed analysis to a close by turning to two key figures in Roberts’s work. The first is an actual person, the late Paul Nash, a landscape painter and official war artist. Roberts was both a writer and an illustrator himself and was strongly influenced by art, and landscapes in particular, and by an appreciation of Dorset. Nash enabled him to visualise the physical environment around Dorset.
Also, Nash often painted surreal landscapes, which would logically appeal to a genre writer.
The second person is a character and, in particular, a female character. Kincaid notes that Roberts was unusual from the 1960s onwards in that he featured women in his work as protagonists. They were also more active and powerful than male characters. Roberts stated that he was not seeking to create powerful female characters, but more that the sexist nature of much science fiction meant that treating women “as human beings rather than angels or demons, made them stand out.”
As Kincaid notes, discussing Roberts’s female characters is to enter a cultural minefield. While attempting to rescue women from “from the male gaze, his own descriptions of women would often centre upon (their) sexual characteristics. Moreover, few if any of his female characters were individualised, he presented them rather as aspects of some universal, archetypal form.” As with any writer, Roberts’ presentation of women is inextricably linked to his own evolution as an artist and to the formative experience he had, born in 1935, coming of age in the 1950s, and finding his voice as a writer in the 1960s.
Roberts’s particular evolution includes the importance to him of Nash’s art, the English landscape, and the body of his own work, which would have both entrenched his thinking and offered him opportunities to experiment. In exploring these factors, Kincaid provides greater depth and context to Roberts’s themes around women in Pavane.
As mentioned earlier, Roberts has become obscure, so Kincaid does a significant service to the writer and to those readers who may be unfamiliar with him through this critical analysis. Kincaid speaks with authority and, crucially, enthusiasm, about his subject. His passion is both infectious and well-informed, and carries through to the reader. He considers Pavane, and by extension, Roberts, as extraordinary. This is likely to win Roberts posthumous attention and new readers. Kincaid sets out his argument for why Roberts is entitled to them, and he brings an old writer together with a new readership. His Critical Companion is a triumph and worth the time readers will invest in it.
Kincaid concludes his work by stating that “I hope I have demonstrated how these consistent themes were all laid out in Pavane, how they were responsible for the particular richness and complexity of that extraordinary work, and consequently why Pavane remains an essential work in the history of science fiction.” He has achieved that goal and he contextualises the art through the artist’s life. This reinforces why Pavane remains a crucial text for genre readers and an unexplored pleasure for those readers unfamiliar with it.
Bio:
Dev Agarwal is a science fiction and fantasy writer. His fiction has been published online and in magazines in the UK, US and Ireland. His nonfiction has been published online and in the magazines Vector, Focus and the BSFA Review.
His fantasy draws on history, in particular the medieval and ancient Roman world, while his SF tends to be set in the near future and explores technology and social change.
Dev is also the editor of Focus, the magazine for genre writers produced by the British Science Fiction Association.
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