The 2015 Hugo Awards are upon us! The nominees for this year are listed here and as the deadline for voting approaches I will be supplementing my usual reading and reviewing to specifically review the 2015 Hugo nominees I have not yet covered.
"The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" by John C. Wright, published in the anthology The Book of Feasts and Seasons (Castalia House) 2014 (online)
Eligibility: Eligible for 2015 Hugo in the category of Short Story
Status: nominated
This is the editorial voice review. The reader's voice review is forthcoming. (for info on what this means, see here)
First thoughts
The tale is turgid but a bit compelling. It's written in the style of fables, and the tone comes across as suitably biblical – this is a voice the author seems comfortable with – but the result is that quite a bit of the dialogue feels stilted. There also seem to be some really hard to follow assumptions about the type of biblical mythology the reader will be familiar with. This strikes me at first reading as like C.S. Lewis but steeped more deeply in the realm of Mother Church.
Ideas
This is tone and message fiction rather than idea fiction. There is a core idea from which the author builds and which informs the story (the idea that the rapture has come and animals get left behind to work toward their own salvation) but the idea doesn’t so much drive the story as underlie it. In some sense, the story could be seen as assaying an answer to the childhood question “do pets go to heaven?” but it doesn’t really engage with the idea that deeply.
Writing
The writing is, on the whole, good. Although the prose is weighty and solemn in the style of a sermonized fable this voice seems to fit the subject matter, and the author seems comfortable with it. In particular, the opening and many of the scene descriptions work well to paint a truly classic picture of the sort you might expect from authentic fables. The language does seem stilted in places, though, particularly in dialogue: this style really doesn’t lend itself well to actual spoken exchanges. There are also a number of points at which the author clearly had some difficulty driving the narrative forward, which leads to the use of awkward transitions and sudden turns that don’t seem to make much sense in the wider context of the story. More difficult is the author’s use of archetypes in the form of the animal characters. Not much thought seems to have been put into these archetypes, which rather than being crystal clear (as they should be) are a bit smeared around the edges. In particular, the sudden addition of new archetypes strictly for the purpose of delivering religious messages feels clumsy. The conceit of dividing the animal world into domesticated and wild is an interesting one, but comes across as an afterthought, mainly there to justify certain events, which feels lazy. Likewise, rather than relying on allegory to get his message across the author resorts to quite blunt religious references. The setting and narrative as presented are surely sufficient for anyone familiar with Western civilization, so this seems not only unnecessary but clumsy and at odds with the fair amount of skill displayed in other dimensions of the work.
Characterization
This is a fable, and as such we don’t expect much in the way of character development, but the lack of clear deployment of archetypes is a serious failing in such a work. The animals seem chosen for symbolic purposes, but it's not always clear what the intended symbolism was and very little is done to establish them as archetypical stand-ins for the Platonic ideals being invoked. On top of this, the choice of voice for this story conflicts with the choice to have much of the action take place in dialogue among the characters – the heavy tone of the prose clearly caused the author difficulty in switching to character speech, such that not only do the characters deliver stilted lines but they seem to have only marginal differences among them. The opportunity to use character speech to create crystal clear personas for them was missed.
Verdict
Not bad, despite its flaws. The tale reads like other good examples of “modern day fables” but suffers a bit from what seems to be unclear images in the author’s mind regarding the symbols and archetypes he intended to deploy. (Note: this seems to have been written as part of a coherent anthology with a consistent theme - perhaps these issues resolve when read in context) Furthermore, there are a few places where explicit religious messages come through in a clumsy way, as though they were added as a kind of afterthought, and this is a bit jarring. One wonders if the intended message might have been more effectively delivered if the author had trusted the power of allegory a bit more.
Readability: Pass
Hugo quality: Pass
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