Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.
No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.
But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.
But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.
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