taken around the city by Gorgik. His narrative of the city takes up two-thirds of an approximately fourteen thousand–word chapter. Yet what disturbs the reader is the ease with which Pryn moves from one truth to another. She is always slightly distrustful: what do each of the free liminals want from one another? She specifically breaks the rule that says the protagonist of the quest narrative must trust those who interpret the world on her behalf. But equally, the links of the bracelet are constructed of those moments when she carries the desires of each person encountered over into the next sequence.
The critique of the quest narrative that structures the book. Neveryóna is a discussion of the structures of narrative and the epistemological conventions of fantasy. It begins when Pryn first meets the storyteller at the end of the dragon flight. The storyteller’s tale is polysemic, and shaped by this polysemy. What is told is mutable. And the tale is understood, not because it is right, or prophetic, or handed down from an authority, but because it is constructed. We are made to understand that neither storytelling nor oral traditions are natural; they are learned, and the rolling phrases of the high oral narrative, the understanding of the importance of reader response, is as yet uncoded in Neveryóna: “You want to know the outcome—I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must” (15). Pryn’s reactions are shaped in part by the rudimentary nature of storytelling. We may be able to judge her choices, but that is because, as we are told, “it was all a very long time ago, so that many tales that have nudged you to such a reading had not yet been written” (56).
There is also an issue of ownership of the tale: in a market that is, arguably, driven by reader demand for sequels and continued worlds, Pryn considers, “it was the teller’s tale; the teller ought to know what happened in it, for all her multiple versions” (15). This attitude carries over to Pryn’s reception of Gorgik’s guided tour. She accepts the version of the city he narrates for her, yet notes: “Occasionally the huge slave’s monologue had seemed to coincide with the real market they walked through; more times than not, however, it seemed to exist on quite another level” (55). Gorgik sees a promising young musician, pretty and talented, where Pryn sees a young woman, shabby, ill-kempt and not quite in touch with the world. Both Gorgik and Pryn are making story, but—atypically for quest fantasies—Gorgik’s authority and role as a leader/counselor does not give him the authority to force his story upon Pryn; it is her freedom to resist that allows her to apparently switch sides at various points in the tale. She does not. It is rather that others view her as a pawn, to be engaged and captured; in Carroll’s terms, she is in fact a Queen, self-directed and ultimately only on her own side.
In a pastiche of the quest tale, many of Pryn’s tales are “abbreviated” into a lengthy narrative of what might have been told in another kind of tale:
Were this another story, what we have told of Pryn’s adventures till now might well have been elided or omitted altogether as unbelievable or, at any rate, as uncharacteristic. In that other story Pryn’s next few weeks might easily have filled the bulk of these pages.
Such pages would tell of a dawn’s waking in the public park.… They would describe the two young women Pryn met working there [in the market] who dissuaded her from her plan for the next day: to go to the New Market and ask for a job as a bucket carrier. (188)34
Instead of listening to Pryn’s experience day by day, we are allowed, for a while, to have been there, to have seen it happen. The diegetic ellipsis is used here to divide the Real from the Unreal, the true fantasy from the mundane life; the unity of the epic is broken. Delany does not tie us to his character with handcuffs, but he acknowledges the presence of such detail in other such novels. At the same time, the structure offers another function. Given that Delany’s historical narratives of invention are always questioned and permeable, in that first short paragraph, and others like it, he builds his world out of denial. This is not this kind of story, it is another.
The epistemological ideologies of fantasy are challenged and challenged repeatedly in Neveryóna (as they will also be in The Scar). The storyteller claims to have invented a syllabary (9); Belham and Venn seem, between them, to have invented so much that one comes to wonder if they were indeed contemporaneous geniuses, or if a variety of inventions have come to bear their mark as a kind of catchall. Yet even that claim is challenged as we hear that this wonder “humankind will know and forget” (153 and again from another speaker on page 306): inventions are repeatedly reinvented, continuously disappear and reappear, so that there may be nothing new in the world. But we also hear that this is a tale told to account for the spread of knowledge. And tales and their telling are a rooted part of the system of knowledge. The making of double soup becomes first magical and then believably a thing of magic. The astrolabe that Pryn carries travels in the opposite direction, to stand first as a tool of mystical power, and later to be denied even the status of tool, or key, map, or coded message. The revealed knowledge endemic to the quest fantasy is denied; the nature of knowledge becomes transmuted. History does not carry power in quite the same way it does in other quest fantasies: most specifically, it does not carry authority. People find it difficult or undesirable to keep the past organized unlike the Scholastic and impermeable histories passed down in many quest fantasies. Tratsin, a carpenter, does not wish his memories of a suppressed rebellion to be to passed to his child; memories such as these are restrictive, not empowering. A lost battle in the past is not an incentive to fight more in the future. A fallen empire, its monasteries and courts emptied, will not suddenly spring up, revived. Knowledge must be invented, not found in old books. This fantasy world is built looking forward, not backward. Yet it is still built using the same components we have seen elsewhere.
The narration of fantasyland when done poorly is often didactic, but even the most creative writers find it difficult in this form to avoid impressing upon the reader an authoritative interpretation of their world. An interesting test case, because it is so otherwise divorced from the usual quest fiction, is the work of China Miéville. The Scar (2002), in which the protagonist is running away from her own society, while as elegantly written as Perdido Street Station (2000: see chapter 2, this volume, where is it discussed as an immersive fantasy), requires that much more be explained. Bellis Coldwine, the protagonist, acts as our guide to the world, whereas there is no such role in Perdido Street Station, and the descriptions are of what is seen, rather than what is. The result is that The Scar is less baroque; because the baroque functions best in the taken for granted, the immersive: while overdescribed in the quest fantasy, its function is to create landscape rather than tone.
In The Scar, these intense moments of description are almost always employed when either Bellis Coldwine, or Tanner Sack, the protagonists, see something new. They are moments of alienation, rather than impressions of familiarity. But they are marked for us: “Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories” (7–8). Reverie here is a device that deliberately impresses memory onto the traumatized; Tanner, at moments of stress, is told in the first person: “All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds” (17). This is not the smooth, narrated reverie we have seen elsewhere. Miéville uses these moments to demonstrate the fragmented nature of observation; to demonstrate that what we see is not a painting, but abstracted, a personal construct.
Alienation is one of the keys to what Miéville achieves. In most quest and portal fantasies, the process of the novel requires the protagonist to become ever more comfortable with the fantasyland that she has entered. Yet Bellis Coldwine never does. Her alienation is expressed; explicitly; her culture shock is profound (see page 78 for an example). This alienation enables Miéville to give to Bellis the role of describing the world she can never take for granted because she cannot engage with it. Thus we never see Armada through the eyes of
