Currently reading

First Terry Pratchett, and now this.

Whilst America had Anne Rice, we had Tanith Lee. Unlike Rice, and unlike writers such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman whose work also can also be described in terms of sharing an aesthetic with her work, Lee never had the kind of popular success which might have buoyed her up commercially when fashions changed. She was a deeply romantic writer, whose concerns and style seem rooted in the genre landscape of 70s and 80s commercial fantasy fiction (and what other era/area of the publishing industry could have accommodated her incredible productivity?).

And her concerns seem to have been pretty constant through everything she wrote: often youthful protagonists, concerned with issues of personal growth or metamorphosis; vivid settings, which variously drew on standard genre tropes or twisted historical landscapes or myth or fairytale, and which often feel more like stage settings for her characters' inner dramas; plotting that often has more the quality of a dream than anything so prosaically mundane; an unconventional approach to ethical issues and concern with her characters' sexuality; and a prose style which was evocative, opulent, overwhelming - and at times, yes, somewhat purple in it's excesses.

It was this latter which captivated me when I first encountered her writing as a teenager. I'd be willing to bet that - apart that is from the restructuring of the publishing industry which saw saw the gradual narrowing and even disappearance of the mid list in the 90s, confining so many of the more interesting genre writers to smaller, independent publishers - it was perhaps this more than anything else which saw the eclipsing of her reputation with major publishers. Modern genre writing seems to favour a kind of prose which is more functional, more conversational with less flourish and style, probably thanks to the influence of film and television. Indeed, as I've said, purple prose was always a trap Ms. Lee risked, and occasionally fell prey to, not that that ever bothered me, since it was that opulence which attracted me in the first place.

When I finally encountered actual decadent writing a few years later, I remember several short stories from an anthology of female decadent writing which I read during my undergraduate degree which felt as though they could even have been written by her. And like so many decadents, she seems to have been obsessed with beauty. So many of her characters are extravagantly beautiful, always in some way above or cast out from the common herd. Central characters included not only aristocrats, but even Gods. (Again, this is perhaps another way in which she was somewhat out of step with modern culture, an era in which even our elites wish to clothe themselves with the language of equality).

Not that she ever really celebrates or idealises any kind of authority and hierarchy. Rather, where they appear in a story, these archaic power structures are accepted as a part of the world in which her characters live and have to negotiate. Patriarchy is always suspect. I'll never forget her story 'The Devil's Rose': the absence of any overt moralising of its telling and its lush, decadent prose, not only makes the final twist all the more horrific, but demonstrates even more effectively the callousness of a certain kind of predatory masculinity that is so easily romanticised.

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So, currently, I'm reading an early work, a collection of the somewhat clunkily named Four-BEE novels, Don't Bite the Sun, followed by Drinking Sapphire Wine - the first British edition which combined them after their initial American publication. The text is littered with plenty of future slang from it's post apocalyptic world in which humanity is confined to three cities, taken care of by robots, and allowed to indulge themselves in any way they like. If they die, a new body will be supplied, so characters change not only faces, but also their gender, only 'tending' to either male or female out of personal preference (the covers of not only my, but of all, editions that I've found online obscure this point by over emphasising the femininity of the main character). It's a flamboyant brightly lit future which surely has something in common with 70s glam. The characters frequently take ecstasy pills - it's weirdly prescient for science fiction which seems blithely unconcerned with any notion of futuristic prediction. Rather the tropes of science fiction are deployed for their sensuous pleasure.

It's a vision of paradise in which our narrator is coming to realise the extent to which humanity is actually imprisoned by this superficially paradisiacal artificial environment. By the end of the first volume at least, she's come to make some kind of peace with her world - there are epiphanies along the way, but no delusions about finally breaking free from this artificial paradise in some way (the way we might expect this sort of story to go). Beneath the sprightliness and narrative propulsion - plenty happens, but for little ultimate purpose, and our central narrator ends up largely back where 'she' started out from - there's quite a knowing comment about the compromises modernity forces us to make. It will be interesting to see where the second volume takes the story.