The Rule of Crime
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 10:04 amOk, it only took me 5 years, but I think I’ve worked out what the significance of the deformed fetuses in TEC was. Raule is on the right track when she says they’re Gwynn and Elm and everyone like them, but it isn’t much of an explanation. I just couldn’t work it out any better at the time. Now I think I know what they are, both in terms of the magical world in the book and their metaphorical significance. I think I can work it into the doujin, so I won’t try to explain it here yet, but –
I think I also know why the Rev has to succeed in saving Gwynn, apart from I Love Gwynn ™ and the Rev needing redemption. I figured it out on the way to tai chi this morning:
Gwynn works for the military-industrial complex, symbolised by Elm and his gun-running, slave-trading shady business. Elm stands for what I would call the Rule of War, or the Rule of Crime. It starts off in early societies when war becomes the principal economic activity. A tribe derives income from booty and captives (slaves); it creates the warrior myth, and, because of the well-nigh unavoidable biological division of labour and role along gender lines in materially primitive cultures, makes men more important than women. It also establishes an abusive patriarchy which makes cannon fodder of its sons (those that survive continue to administer the Rule of Crime) and confines its daughters to the reproductive role. Its mottos are “might is right” and “you are mine”.
Gwynn is a son of this kind of culture. The fact that he possibly comes from a matriarchy is irrelevant; it is still a Rule of Crime kind of culture. Both Raule and the Rev wish Gwynn would choose a different lifestyle, but he doesn’t. He likes the Rule of Crime. He chooses Elm, the bad father. The Rev, on the other hand, is a good father (and Gwynn literally calls him “Father”, when he doesn’t have to, not being of the faith). Not a perfect man by any means, but essentially a good paternal figure to Gwynn. Gwynn’s association with the bad father Elm leads to him destroying Marriott and finally to a sticky end of his own. But it’s the good father’s prerogative to try to undo the bad father’s influence and try to put the screwed-up son to rights. In the epilogue, Gwynn seems to have acquired a rudimentary sense of justice and compassion, albeit within a primitive theatre of violence where might is still right. Amirite? I think I am. (Ok, only 2.5 readers of this blog actually care, but I’ve been puzzling over some of the things in that book on and off since I wrote it. I’m happy that I figured something out to my own satisfaction.)
Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that the Rule of Crime is everywhere in the real world. It’s probably the natural behaviour of social, organised predators, but I’m wondering what an alternative might look like.
February 26th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I always thought that The Rev was able save Gwynn because there was an emotional bond that the Rev enjoyed and because Gwynn didn’t want to die.
but then again it’s your book and you gave birth to the cast.
February 26th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
There are reasons why the Rev was able to save Gwynn. But I had a hard time deciding whether I should let him be successful, and I always wondered if I had enough good reasons to let Gwynn live. Of course, the argument I posted is just one way of looking at it.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
maybe it’s just he had such a karmic backlog that death had to wait in line.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
That’s also a plausible explanation!
February 27th, 2008 at 8:01 am
Interesting - it raises the question, then, if he is a product/representation of this Rule of Crime, and if this Rule of Crime tends to lock in abusive patriarchies, then why Gwynn does come from what seems to be a matriarchy, and why he has such a thing for strong women. I’m not so sure it’s irrelevant - well, it’s certainly a Rule of Crime sort of culture, no doubt about that, but what’s up with the unusual dominant position of women? Aidan’s culture is a matriarchy, and undoubtedly a Rule of Crime sort of culture. I’ve never given any thought to it before.
I’m not so sure it’s only the rule of predators - it seems it’s the rule where ever you look. Among both predators and prey mothers will often abandon or even eat the weak among their young, members of groups will attack and kill each other for mates or resources, even plants will do their best to choke out their neighbors for more resources of their own, ect. (I’m beginning to sound like Gwynn here.)
February 27th, 2008 at 9:20 am
not much else to add, other than that was a chewy read. Shall chew on it s’more over lunch.
February 27th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I admit I’m not entirely sure about the matriarchy issue. Their economy and physical society must have developed in a way that didn’t create the usual patriarchy. I think his people are highly concerned about protecting the family/clan interests, and that the women are something like the dominant females in a hyena pack.
I think the harsh climate makes shelter/home/hearth very important to them. I don’t see their homes as private spaces; they’re communal strongholds with semi-private living quarters and a lot of public areas. They don’t have nuclear families. With people living in such close quarters it would always have been hard to prove who anyone’s father was, so matrilineal succession would have arisen. The mother is therefore the owner of the family property and the head of the family. Which isn’t to say men aren’t important or don’t have power — undoubtedly they do — just that the clan is seen as proceeding from a mother, not a father.
Life in their region is too harsh for anyone to be idle or less than optimally occupied, so I figure the old people would have a lot to do with raising the kids, which frees (or obliges) young and middle-aged women to work in other roles. While their women do fight, I suspect their men do more of the warrior work. However, I’m convinced they view childbirth as analagous to battle in terms of honour and danger.
With their hive-like living conditions, there’s probably little separation of the domestic and the public sphere of life. There’s no idea of coralling the women indoors to keep them safe (everyone wants to be safe indoors, out of the cold!)
But there’s still a Rule of Crime in that family competes against family for resources. They’re inculcated with a love of their own kin and a callousness towards outsiders, probably. A sense of precarious survival inclines them towards rapacious behaviour — which ties in with what you so rightly say about all of nature being out to get whatever it can. Humans are unique in that we can think of the future, imagine consequences, and try to calculate whether crime is actually going to pay or not. When we feel in urgent need, those calculations go out the window. I think Anvallese clans live in a constant state of anxious competition, always sensing the wolf at the door, with the mothers fighting for the survival and prosperity of their young.
It probably goes without saying that the women control their own fertility. I like to think they have a lot of oral sex.
Gwynn might have been the eldest child of a woman without daughters, leading to succession and inheritance wrangles — or he saw those coming and decided to go before anyone could murder him.
Hmm, that was chewy. It’s sort of a start, anyway.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Myself and a few friends of mine all studied your book in a fantasy literature class at the University of Calgary. We all theorized that the fetuses were evidence of this sort of creeping doom that was gradually making itself felt on the world through corruption of life at its most basic level. But I tend to see insidious evil as being at the core of any story involving psuedo real magic. All things considered, many of us are still at odds as to whether the more magical elements of the story were real or some kind of drug trip.
Anyway, we’re all eagerly awaiting your next book and are desperately hoping there will be some means to acquire it in Calgary, which decidedly lacks good book stores.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:20 am
That would work too! It’s way open to interpretation. I don’t want to tell anyone how to read the book. It’s probably impossible to be sure whether the magic was real or a trip…or even if the characters are all alive in the first place. I wanted there to be many plausible readings.
My idea about the fetuses, which I might as well put here, is that they’re “gods”, or memes, or latent legends, that failed; new paradigms that didn’t work, attempts by the magical spirit working through the world to cross previously uncrossable boundaries and make something truly different. So that they aren’t evidence of creeping evil so much as stymied change. Dreams trying to be real, but not succeeding. Beth is the one thing that truly seems to break the old rules. Elm adheres to his archetype and dies for it. Gwynn shifts to a slightly different place within the field of his archetype, but basically adheres to the path of badassery rather than trying something new, even though he has the capability to do so. And the world…doesn’t really change. And when the world does at last produce a new being, it seems only superficially new - ok, it’s a man-croc, but it still thinks it’s a god, so it’s just an old paradigm in new clothes.
Anyway, all those thoughts are just thoughts. I like them, but I don’t know if I could go back and add them to the book now.
So…are you Peter Steckley of the Pedroverse?