While growing up, I knew a girl who had
a hard life. Born into a broken home,
she would talk back to the teacher in class for no other reason than simple
rebelliousness, she could be seen smoking outside of school at a very early
age, and was pregnant by the time she reached sixteen—an unfortunately classic
story. I do not know the details of her
home life, but certainly it must have been far from ideal. This is not to say the girl bore no
responsibility for her actions, only that the situation she was born into
didn’t make life any easier. Though outwardly
appearing something totally different, Michael Swanwick’s 1993 The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is the story
of one such girl. Fantasy that subverts
common conceptions of the genre yet confirms its potential as meaningful literature,
Jane’s story is largely surreal yet retains a visceral edge that propels the
story beyond mere genre.
The
Iron Dragon’s Daughter is the coming of age of Jane. The girl’s developmental years the furthest
from idyllic, her story begins in a factory that produces mechanical dragons. Going through puberty in the opening
chapters, times are tough for Jane. She performs manual labor for long hours,
has a demanding foreman, is called upon to perform extra-curricular activities
for the aging owner, and must deal with the jealousies, petty feuds, loves, and
hates of the creatures she calls co-workers.
But things change one day when walking through an out-of-the-way corner of
the factory grounds. Following a voice
in her head, she comes to a rusting heap of a dragon calling itself Melanchthon.
Stepping into the metal beast’s cockpit, she makes a deal with the machine: help
free him, and in return earn her own freedom from the stark exigencies of life in
the factory. All hell breaking loose in
the escape attempt, Jane sees life morph before her eyes as she enters the real
world. A place where her inner desires
are satisfied, all hell eventually catches up to her.
Justin Landon is currently performing a
re-read of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law
trilogy at Tor.com. One of his primary
goals is to highlight the series’ subversive qualities, and in the process, to confirm
it as more than average epic fantasy. The
problem is, Abercrombie’s story, from character to setting, plot devices to
motifs, remains 90% borrowed and 10% ‘subversive’—and those elements which are ‘subversive’
remain cheap literary tricks. In other
words, Landon has a tall task ahead of him.
The Iron Dragon’s Daughter,
however, is truly dissident. In dialogue
(interrogatory, in fact) with the genre, Swanwick uses tropes every reader of
fantasy is familiar with, yet integrates them with story to create layers of
sub-text that force the reader to think upon the history of the genre, the representation
of the tropes, and most importantly, how a truly human story can still be related
with elements so disparate from what we consider reality. In contrast, Abercrombie is limited to
surface misdirection and bits of sensationalism, the story having little to no
bearing on reality. The sum of
Swanwick’s novel is therefore greater than the parts, the tropes of fantasy
used with integrity.
So while The Iron Dragon’s Daughter’s title is intentionally epic, its story
a coming-of-age, the imagery fantastically intense, and its characters all
manner of dragons, gnomes, elves, trolls, dwarves, zombies, etc., at no time
does one feel as though they are stuck in the latest R.R. wannabe (J. and
George). Instead, Swanwick sets the
story in a bleak Dickensian city; the main character does not begin the story in
a bucolic village or wilds of adventure, rather the dirt and grime of a factory;
the language is wholly modern and explicit, as opposed to any pseudo-Olde
English or typically epic mode of writing; the idea of women in fantasy as warrior-ess
sex objects is challenged; there are no prophecies writ large; the choices are
colors of humanity, rather than the black and white morality that stereotypes
the genre; there is graphic drug use and sexuality; and the protagonist is a chronic
shoplifter who sleeps with people for ulterior motive and is uncaring as to her
effect on others, occasionally destroying those around her with
indifference. If this is not enough to
rock the fantasy boat, then I don’t know what is.
At this point the reader understands the
most significant difference between Swanwick’s fantasy and other books in the
genre: the fantastic elements fulfill their symbolic potential, that is, rather
than being just eye-candy. From the
fantastical opening to the realism of the closing, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a human story—a self-abusive,
self-delusional, dregs-of-society human story, but a human story nevertheless. Jane’s story may be grimdark, but it is not
sensationalist. Like the girl I knew in
school, Jane appears functional enough, but forever makes decisions that hurt
rather than help, no matter how many times they slam their hand in the same
door. I hate to pick on Abercrombie, but
there is one scene in First Law
wherein a supremely arrogant character is beaten near death, and immediately thereafter
behaves with altruism—their personality turning on a violent dime. More subtle, Swanwick postulates that such a
change of heart can only occur after multiple beatings, or in Jane’s case, numerous
trips to the gutter in escalating iterations of self-abuse. It is through this process her character slowly
evolves into someone better suited to function in normal society. Many shortcomings still exist in her
character at the end, but at least there is an understanding and desire to
comply with the realities of quotidian life.
It is on these evolving iterations that Swanwick
paints the intense imagery of the novel.
Describing the dragon factory in the early going, the following is a
good sample of his style:
The
worst assignments were in the foundries, which were hellish in summer even
before the molds were poured and waves of heat slammed from the cupolas like a
fist, and miserable in winter, when snow blew through the broken windows and a
gray slush covered the work floor. The knockers and hogmen who labored there
were swart, hairy creatures who never spoke, blackened and muscular things with
evil red eyes and intelligences charred down to their irreducible cinders by
decades-long exposure to magickal fires and cold iron. Jane feared them even
more than she feared the molten metals they poured and the brute machines they
operated.
Swanwick outlays the aesthetic side of
the novel through such wording, but provides the artistry at depth. There are doppelgangers, allusion, absurdism,
surrealism, magic realism—rendering the novel complex mosaic that rewards upon
re-read, particularly digging at the layers of symbolism.
In the end, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is an allusive amalgam of genre tropes
that aims at, and strikes the heart of something human (something dark, but
something inherently human), culminating in a book that is as much anti-fantasy
as it is pure fantasy. There are surface
elements of sword & sorcery, science fiction, cyberpunk, voodoo magic,
horror, and just about every fantasy creature one can imagine: elves, trolls,
feys, shifters, cyborg hounds, mechanical dragons, imps, thumblings, grigs, rusalka,
ogre, hag, meryon, froudlings, etc. But
no matter what you slather on top, or how much decoration is wadded on, the
structure holding the story in place is of a young woman finding her way—a
rough and tumble way brought about by poor decisions—into the realities of adulthood. Contrasting much fantasy of the 80s and 90s
(e.g. Jordan, Goodkind, Eddings, Brooks, etc.), the novel bears more in common
with Lucius Shepard’s The Dragon Griaule,
M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and to
some extent Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. And it has had
its influence on the genre as well, including Mieville’s Bas-Lag works (I could write a paragraph
or two on the similarities between The
Iron Dragon’s Daughter and Perdido Street Station) and the milieu of Charlie Stross’ Laundry Files (though Stross isn’t trying to subvert anything).
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