Fantastic Metropolis

Despite Jane’s moral failings, she is in many ways an admirable character. In an environment where loyalty is often compromised by pragmatism and friendships are extended lessons in using and being used, Jane is no worse than the characters that surround her and is frequently better. Swanwick’s depiction of her sexuality is especially interesting. Jane uses sex in ways that are traditionally male-for power as well as pleasure-and she is both confident in and in control of her own sexuality. While Jane struggles for autonomy, however, there is a malignant shadow hanging over her: the dragon Melancthon.

A sentient war machine, Melancthon is the embodiment of hate, destruction, and deceit; the proponent of a nihilism so profound that its only defining feature is the impulse to utter annihilation-not only of the self, but of history and existence itself. In his unrelenting hatred for the Goddess, Melancthon recalls Milton’s Lucifer, and his sole ennobling quality is his refusal to bow before an authority he despises. Jane’s tumultuous relationship with the dragon is the ultimate ambiguity in a novel fraught with ambiguities: her commitment to his rebellion is both a quixotically heroic attempt to overthrow a fundamentally unjust order and a rejection of all order, meaning, and responsibility.

Throughout the novel, Swanwick stubbornly refuses to reduce his moral landscape to a prim black and white, and Jane often finds herself struggling in a murky and puzzling moral realm. She makes both good and bad decisions, but the results are almost always disastrous. She struggles for independence, but continually finds herself frustrated. Her escape from the steam dragon factory leads to continuing humiliation and disgrace in Grunt’s sadistic school, and the status of her college scholarship is continually besieged by outside forces: first by the threat of the Teind and later by the intervention of the suave but deeply disturbing Galiagante, who basically buys Jane from the cash-strapped university.

Part of Jane’s problem, Swanwick suggests, lies in the nature of Faery itself. Despite its frequent outbursts of anarchy and chaos, it soon becomes clear that Faery is both rigidly stratified and curiously static, its inhabitants caught in recurring patterns that are neither acknowledged nor questioned. As Jane’s tutor tells her in a blackly comic scene, “We are all of us living stories that on some deep level give us satisfaction. If we are unhappy with our stories, that is not enough to free us from them.” As the novel progresses, it becomes evident that Jane herself is caught in a recurring story whose details may vary, but whose conclusion-despite Jane’s best efforts-is always the same. By the end of the novel it becomes clear that Rooster, Peter, Puck, and Rocket are iterations of the same character, their role in Jane’s life part of an ineluctable and inscrutable design. In a world where individual autonomy seems illusory, Swanwick asks, and fate seems to override the will, does it still matter what we do?

In the end, Swanwick’s novel turns on some pretty big questions: What is the meaning of suffering? Is there a purpose to our lives? Although Swanwick (and Jane) seem ultimately to reject Melancthon’s nihilism, it’s not clear that too many viable alternatives remain. After Melancthon’s demise, the Baldwynn tells Jane that she is permitted to ask anything of the Goddess, but Jane learns that the freedom to ask does not necessarily guarantee an answer. Jane’s half-anguished, half-accusatory stream of questions is met only with silence, and the answers to these questions (if they do indeed exist) remain inscrutable. Like the needle and dog’s tail extracted from the mystified Jane’s chest (the final iterations of the Tetisgistus and Kunosaura figures that have woven themselves through the fabric of her life), all that remains are clues to an elusive and potentially illusory meaning. In the face of such uncertainty, Jane’s final act is another Miltonian defiance: a refusal to serve or accept a justification that justifies and explains nothing. This renunciation, it seems to me, is the central moral act of the novel.

I would also make the case that the entire novel is Swanwick’s own renunciation of stories that have become stagnant and meaningless; stories that cannot accommodate truly meaningful questions; stories whose conventions will not allow them to illuminate or address the complexities of our lives. The critique of genre conventions is largely implied, but unmistakable: Swanwick assaults conventional Fantasy’s reluctance to engage with the complexities of our experience at the same time that he demonstrates with great skill its ability to do so. Convention, after all, protects us against risk, growth, and change with heavy walls of comfort and familiarity. The power of Swanwick’s novel is that it forsakes this familiar territory and encourages us to do the same.