Fantastic Metropolis

Here’s what the dust jacket flap copy has to say:

An extraordinary world of terrible beauties and awesome terrors comes alive through the courage of two very different women and is saved by the sacrifice of a man foolish enough and bold enough to love them both.

As I made my way through this strange and beautiful novel, I kept flipping back to the jacket to re-read the copy in disbelief. Who writes this shit? In the end, it turns out to be hilariously irrelevant, although I continue to treasure its ineptitude, if only for the glimpse it provides of some corporate drone trying to figure out how to market this stunningly weird potpourri of religion, sex, and drugs.

Waking Beauty was in and out of bookstores before most people got a chance to notice it. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1997, it is now—unhappily and undeservedly—out of print. If you can, by any means, obtain a copy, I enthusiastically encourage you to do so—Waking Beauty is one of the most distinctive and meticulously-rendered fantastic visions of the last decade, a violent and erotic reimagining of the story of Sleeping Beauty. Part parable, part allegory, and part contemporary mythology, Waking Beauty explores the intricacies of passion and cruelty through a tableaux of dreamlike imagery that just manages to resist drifting into straight surrealism. Relentlessly ambitious and often strikingly beautiful, it’s an imaginative achievement of wonderful originality and intensity.

The novel is set in the stratified culture of the Hierarchate, where life is dominated by the nightly appearance of Beauty, a scent that rises from the forest of Herwood to lure men from their homes. Defending their men from Beauty is the central fact of daily life for the women of the Hierarchate and is accomplished through an elaborate set of rituals: women bind men to their bed, inserting throat tubes into their trachea and plugging their nostrils to keep the smell of Beauty out.

Those of you who are looking for a genuinely original imaginative vision will find much to feast on here: a drug-addicted puppeteer haunted by the personalities of his mannequins, opulent whorehouses where genetically-altered slaves satisfy the desires of a decadent elite, a series of macabre but bizarrely beautiful murders, and a richly-imagined religious mythology resonant with the vibrancy and color of stained glass.

Tales of the saints of the Hierarchate permeate the first half of the novel, and the stories of Saints Ixion Diospyros, Viridis Lacrimata, Samsum Oxalis, and Jewel and Roemer resonate with echoes of more familiar stories: Samson, the Virgin Mary, Rumplestilskin, Orpheus & Eurydice. In Witcover’s versions, however, both the meanings and the structures of these familiar tales have been transformed. The result is something that is both familiar and strange-traces of the ordinary that mingle with a strange and beautiful dream.

The novel’s mythological themes are entwined with an incisive examination of gender politics, resulting in one of the most creative explorations of gender roles and institutional power since Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Throughout Waking Beauty, Witcover demonstrates how institutional authority is maintained through the stories those institutions tell; in this case, how the religion and mythology of the Hierarchate justify and perpetuate a repressive patriarchy.

In the Hierarchate, women are either unmarried virgins (their labia sewn shut), dutiful wives, or whores. For married women, the responsibility of protecting their men from the ravages of Beauty is only an illusion of power that dissipates with the catastrophic consequences of failure. Women in the Hierarchate are poised above a gulf of humiliation and disgrace, their prestige as wives and mothers as evanescent as it is precarious.

This social system is sustained by the religious mythology of the sun-god Ixion Diospyros, the ascendant male force deified for banishing the Furies (primal symbols of female strength, lust, and violence) to the forest of Herwood. In the Hierarchate’s pantheon of saints, the only woman is Viridis Lacrimata, who is, appropriately enough, known as Our Lady of Perpetual Sacrifice. Despite the prevailing patriarchal setting, Waking Beauty maintains a consistently feminine point of view, its primary characters the women Rose and Rumer and its central mythology the sacrifice of Viridis Lacrimata.

Waking Beauty is ultimately a novel about transformation, and its central theme is the ability of old tales to take on new forms and meanings. The novel’s three parts recapitulate the movement of one of the oldest mythic structures: death, descent into the Underworld, and rebirth. This vision subverts the cyclical symbol of the Hierarchate, the ouroboros-the snake devouring its own tail. The ouroboros is a closed cycle—like the Wheel of Ixion, it offers repetition rather than change. In the novel’s stunning final chapter, Witcover offers an alternative: an ending that is a new beginning, a transformation, and an awakening.

At one point in the novel, a character tells Rumer that “What you call heresy is only love,” and Waking Beauty is ultimately about the power of love to transform reality. Hold on a second—I know that statement sounds goofy, but separate it for a moment, if you can, from its lingering odors of patchouli and unwashed flesh. What but love, after all, keeps us from screwing each other in the name of commerce? What but love causes an author to write, not for popularity or fame, but to satisfy her inner vision? Through the character of Rumer, Witcover provides a moving and very strange meditation on the meanings of sacrifice, passion, and love.

In the stunning final section of the novel, Witcover depicts a transformation that transcends the oppositions of the old stories and brings into being a new and uncharted world. This apocalyptic transfiguration is both wondrous and terrifying—it is nothing less than the Unspinning itself, the unraveling of the forms and meanings that gave shape to the world of the Hierarchate. It is an awakening, an ending, and a new beginning; a stunning vision of Life as Dream and Dream as Life—a web of perception and meaning that binds us all together. In the end there is no ending—only transformation.

 

Despite its many accomplishments, Waking Beauty has some rough edges. While Witcover’s highly stylized prose is often perfectly suited to the story’s dreamlike tone and imagery, it also establishes an emotional distance from the novel’s characters and actions. Despite a general chilliness of characterization and tone, however, moments of raw emotion do frequently emerge. Witcover’s decision to double the character of Rose and Rumer—two women who are virtually indistinguishable—is also puzzling.

Despite its flaws, the novel often achieves a crystalline beauty of language and imagery. The opening scenes of Part II, in which the simularter Sylvestris Jaciodes contemplates his own reflection while in a metheglin haze, are among the finest in the novel and define Witcover’s style: dense, ornate, and sharp and precise as a razor’s edge. The novel also achieves moments of a transcendent strangeness—both its beauty and its horror are processed through a bizarre set of imaginative filters, and in a genre plagued by imitation, its unique and distinctive voice is a remarkable accomplishment.

It’s an imperfect novel, but still one that is richly rewarding. To be perfectly honest, I’d rather read a novel that takes great risks—and occasionally fails—than one that achieves perfection by taking none.

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Despite a profligate and misspent youth, Jeff Topham has somehow become a responsible adult. He lives with his wife Anne and daughter Judith in a very nice old house on a shady street in Louisville, Kentucky. He welcomes comments at tophamj@earthlink.net.