The Darkness That Comes Before

"Bakker is writing a masterwork. I would consider him the greatest living writer of grimdark fantasy, and his battle scenes are something else. Possibly slightly repetitive — he’s basically writing the same great big battle scene a lot — but they are stupendous. It’s a very misunderstood series of books. The first trilogy was published to great fanfare, then the second series of four by a smaller publisher, and I think he’s talking about self-publishing the last. Because they are very misunderstood, and they’re a difficult read, and serious — I think my criticism of them would be that they don’t have the touches of humour, the light and dark. It’s a bit like the difference between The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov on the one hand, and Shakespeare writing Macbeth on the other, which has humour. Bakker is definitely more like Dostoevsky . They are about a very classically influenced world, which is threatened by something which is presented like Mordor and Sauron. We slowly begin to discover that it is a world very like our own Bronze Age, which had a spacecraft crash. It was inhabited by very unpleasant beings who had nuclear weapons and laser technology and things, so it works really well in the Mordor/Sauron trope: we have these beings which are inhuman, but almost human. You get the sense that they were maybe genetically altered, like the orcs. It’s alien contact with an intensely toxic masculine society. Into all of this strides the “hero,” who is the Nietzschean Superman: he is blond, he is handsome, he is incredibly physically powerful and intelligent, and he’s had some kind of special training. He’s part of a group of people who have become more than human. People flock to follow him because of that; people see him as the Messiah , and follow him. He is promising that he will save them and lead a crusade against the enemy, these strange inhuman beings who are led by something called the no-God, who are a threat to life, who are utterly evil and wallow in abomination. He will destroy them. He will make us great again… And then we begin to explore what that means. It’s a blatantly toxic, profoundly misogynistic world. In this whole series of books there are three female characters; in the first trilogy there are two, one of whom is a prostitute, the other of whom is a sex slave. They are the only two women who speak. But that’s the point of the books: it is a world of male armies, and women who have no status. A woman’s only value is either to simply be part of the great masses providing food, or to be sexually attractive. There’s a scene in one of the books in the series in which one of the great warrior princes in the hero’s entourage is in his palace relaxing by having sex with a slave girl. This woman is brought in. She’s been chosen as the most beautiful woman in all of this kingdom that they’ve sacked. She’s dressed in this beautiful, revealing outfit. She’s been trained in exotic sexual techniques. It’s the James Bond fantasy. And he begins to have sex – we’re reading this whole thing from his point of view – and he cannot climax. Eventually, he orders someone to bring him a mirror, so that he’s looking at his own face; and finally, he can climax. It’s showing that absolute sterility of what his society and his role actually bring – he’s this great feted war leader, he lives in this palace with all these beautiful women, and his life is utterly narcissistic and sterile and bleak. We contrast this with another character who has a relationship which is a bit like a marriage with a woman who is a prostitute, and they just have really boring sex and they love each other. And of course they are the only ultimately happy and fulfilled people in the book. The book also examines the idea that these people are very homophobic. The idea of two men having sex in an equal relationship terrifies them. So people are making homophobic comments – but that’s the point. The only way people relate to each other is through dumb dominance, either through violence or through sexual violence against people who are weaker than them. So yes, obviously, they’re institutionally homophobic and misogynistic, and it’s horrifying, it’s horrible. It’s meant to be horrible. It’s a world that’s almost totally defined by war. The whole book is spent either following an army around, or in palaces, talking about war. But yes, it’s about the fact that war and a militarised society will mean that everything is militarised: army and war is the most important thing, and that feeds through to everything. There’s a huge cast of workers, who are totally anonymous and live in extreme poverty. And that probably is the history and reality of most heavily militarised societies. The Bronze Age palace system in Mycenaean Greece seems to have operated in exactly that basis: you have palace economies, and they seem to control the whole area around them as almost factories, producing stuff for a totally centralised economy, supporting a warrior caste. One really interesting theory about the fall of the Mycenaean palace society is that it’s an example of a culture-wide riot, the peasants rising up and sacking the palaces, which is very cheering. A Woman of the Sword is my most personal book; the central character Lidae is based on me, her children are based on my children, and the things she says about motherhood are based on my more negative and ambiguous feelings about motherhood. Lidae is a mother and also a warrior, and the back of the book says “War is not kind to mothers or their sons”… I previously wrote a trilogy called Empires of Dust , which is an epic grimdark trilogy about powerful people – high priestesses and political leaders. It’s a world of total war. And as I was writing, I became more and more interested in the lives of the little people caught up in what’s going on. The decision for an army to cross the river at one crossing point rather than another means that one village is spared while another village is doomed; or the decision to send in a small force to be sacrificed, as part of a battle tactic… So I was getting more and more interested in writing about the lives of people who are pawns in the big fantasy landscape of war and violence. I’m a classicist , and there’s a whole stark dichotomy in the classical world – wars are the sphere of men, the household is the sphere of women. But women are the ones who are giving birth to the men who become warriors. You’re a woman somehow bringing up a son in this profoundly misogynistic culture. And women are the ones who are at home, powerless, while their men go off to fight – and if your city is under siege, and if you were on the losing side, there is nothing you can do if war comes to you. So war is absolutely women’s business – just not in the direct way of holding the sword. Of course, women did fight in many cultures: in the Viking period, and in Mongol armies… In most societies which have a fairly small population, women are fighting because economically, they can’t not; you can’t afford to exclude half of your population from fighting. Lidae is a female soldier in a fairly toxically masculine army, in the way that I suspect most armies are, and she is dealing with issues around what armies do. I read a lot of stuff about the classical world, and there’s a lovely little bit in a Mary Renault book about Alexander, where the Macedonian villagers are watching the Macedonian army come back from further south in Greece with a line of slaves; and Mary Renault writes, this is the pity of war, and the message is: win. The message isn’t make peace and stop other women being taken slaves! The message is win, make sure it doesn’t happen to you. So my character is living in a world where violence is economically beneficial to her, but also a world where at any moment that might turn on her. It’s also influenced by Mother Courage; I was lucky enough to see Fiona Shaw in Mother Courage and Her Children , which was amazing. It has that sense of a woman whose life is defined by, and in some ways made better by, war. Mother Courage is economically quite well off, because she is a sutler woman in the Thirty Years War . The war completely consumes her and destroys all of her children; but even then, she cannot imagine a world where she is not caught up in the war, because her entire economic life is dependent on the war. Lidae is a woman for whom war has given huge opportunities, and I suspect war did give people opportunities: the soldiers’ fantasy of pillaging a city and making money to be able to send back to their family, so the family is able to move up in the world. So war is an economic change opportunity. But there’s also the weirdness of thinking about a woman watching her husband, her dad, or brother, or son, going off to war, and knowing what he will do – and welcoming him back, knowing what he’s done. It’s something that really interests me. At one point Lidae is confronted with the reality of what one of her sons has done, and on the one hand, it’s perfectly normal… Yes! I read about a casket that was dug up from a domestic household, and it has a woman’s name carved into it – I can’t remember if it was in Norway or Denmark – but it is clearly an Irish relic. And the best explanation is that someone – possibly the woman herself, more likely a male member of her family, I always think of it as her son – went and massacred a bunch of monks. This was his share of the spoils he brought it home. And you can you can see it, right? – “Here Mom, look, this beautiful little box, use it to keep your precious things in.” I have things like that, things that my children made me in primary school for Mother’s Day gifts. In some ways it’s kind of wholesome; and yet the most convincing explanation of how it ended up where it did is that some monks, who are entirely harmless, have been massacred. You could write this as something really darkly comic – “Oh, whoops, you haven’t cleaned up the blood off.” So there’s a sense of trying to articulate how society operates. And of course all of us do, in fact, live like that, just at a much greater remove. It’s clear if you look at the food production chains, or cheap clothing, or batteries – the conditions in which these things were produced are unspeakable. We are all complicit, we live in a society which is absolutely grounded in other people’s suffering and destitution. It’s important to talk about that. Back to exploring women and war – it bothers me when people talk about wanting kickass women in fantasy sometimes. Yes, traditionally women did nothing. Galadriel stands about being beautiful; Arwen sews a banner, that’s her big role. And then you get the occasional female warrior figure, a kickass warrior, and people talk about wanting this – and of course, seeing a woman being strong and being powerful and fighting the bad guys is in some ways really cheering. But at the same time, is that the greatest thing we can think of for a woman — to be strutting around killing people as well? It’s rather like when we talk about how terrible it is that of the top FTSE 100 companies, most of the board members are men. Great, let’s have more evil capitalists who are women, what a triumph! I don’t want parity on corporate boards, I want more men working in nurseries, not more women abandoning working in nurseries to work in the corporate world, destroying people’s livelihoods. And one more thing about gender – with the writers on this list, I’m aware I’ve got one woman of colour and everyone else is a white man. But there’s another important point to make there – in epic fantasy and grimdark, it is much harder still, depressingly, for women to get somewhere. You still see an awful lot of lists of these books where it’s a great long list of men. Robin Hobb at the bottom is the only woman – and of course, notoriously, lots of people think Robin Hobb is a man. That’s her pen name, and it’s an ambiguously gendered name."