Death's Master by Tanith Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “What hero is greater than Lord Death?” OR “Love is not enough. Nor life. Neither sorcery.” OR “…half-smiling at an unremembered love…” Whereas Tanith Lee’s first Flat Earth series book, Night’s Master (1978), is a composite novel made of linked short stories featuring the relationship between Azhrarn the Prince of Demons and humankind and the world, the second one, Death’s Master (1979) is an epic novel depicting the conflict between Uhlume Lord Death and his “human” servants and their enemies, with interference from his rival Azhrarn. (“There was this between Lords of darkness… a sort of allergic yet loving rivalry, a sort of unliking affection, a scornful unease, xenophobia and family feeling.”) In addition to the enigmatic black-skinned white-haired Uhlume, who can go anywhere anything has died, and the sublime Azhrarn, who hates boredom and likes mortals who do interesting things, the novel features monstrous and compelling characters who are both beyond human and very human: Narasen the proud leopard queen, who prefers women to men, makes a desperate deal with Death, turns indigo, and broods on vengeance; Simmu her strange child who, conceived by his masculine mother’s coupling with a (dead) feminine father, can change gender at will, and who, abandoned in a tomb as a babe and raised by demonesses, fears nothing living (not even cobras) but fears everything dead (even sparrows) and communicates by graceful gestures and uncanny glances; Simmu’s childhood friend Zhirem, who is invulnerable and, perhaps, joyless after having been comprehensively burned at age five in a sublime fire; Death’s witch-servant Lylas, who’s 230-years-old but physically and psychologically fourteen; the beautiful merchant’s daughter Kassafeh, whose real father is an aethereal being and whose strangely changing eyes see through any illusion; the grotesque buffoonish “slit-purse, night prowler, seller of ineffectual potions,” Yolsippa, who is a “shrewd fool” incontinently attracted to any cross-eyed person of either gender. Etc. Tanith Lee sure created augmented, alienated, crooked, and charismatic characters and wove ironic and moving interconnected destinies for them! Despite being monstrous, we care about them as we (in morbid fascination) watch them working towards their tragic destinies, which concern mortality and immortality, love and hate, annihilation and redemption. Despite the many typos in the DAW first edition, like “heaving” instead of “hearing,” this was one of those rare books that I wanted to read more and more quickly, because I was so curious to see what surprising appalling thing the characters would do next, but that I ended up reading more and more slowly to prolong my immersion in it and its world, my pleasure in its prose and irony. To list the pleasures of the novel: 1. Awesome Lines… “To lie with any man is abhorrent to me... To lie with a dead one makes no odds, and may be better.” … Including Neat Conversations (at times reminiscent of Jack Vance) “Sorcery is a strong wine, and you are drunk on it.” “Do not anticipate I shall sober.” 2. Ubiquitous, Delicious, Wicked Irony Almost every page twists with wry lines and ironic flourishes, from small scale descriptions to large scale plot developments. Check, for example, this chapter ending: “And, being a dutiful descendant he bore the skull [mistakenly thinking it’s his father’s] home, and went without food that he might have built for it an expensive tomb just beyond the village. The tomb was the wonder of the district, and pointed out by parents to their children as the deed of a good son. Then, one morning, as chance would have it, the skull of the real father was washed up in the cove below the village. But, not recognizing it and reckoning it unlucky, the fisherfolk threw it down a dry well, and shoveled in dirt to obscure it, avoiding the area thenceforth.” 3. Fertile Fantastic Imagination with Teeth “His eyes, which had seen centuries snuffed out almost in a blink, were impossibilities—two things made of light which was black, two searing flames the shade of unmitigated darkness.” “Lylas the witch had forgotten she was dead. She turned luxuriously in her slumber and stretched out a languid hand to seize the collar of her blue dog. Her hand closed on air. She opened her eyes.” “And she grinned a hag’s grin with his own dead mother's teeth.” “Their eyes might have been made of glass. It was as if without knowing or being troubled by it, they were slowly calcifying, the calcification beginning with the topmost layer of the skin, creeping inward till it reached the organs and the mind.” “The motives of the demons were both complex and simple. What intrigued them, they permitted liberties and rapture. What was fruitless or insolent or unwary, they eradicated. What bored them, they overlooked.” 4. Plenty of Sex (the original DAW cover calls it “an epic novel of adult fantasy”) The sexy scenes often have an Arabian Nights-like earthy humor, but may turn sensually sublime, as Azhrarn demonstrates. And the sex is meaningful. It is a means to magical knowledge and power, as the mage who tries raping Narasen earned his by being penetrated by his master once a day. Or it is a way to work a great change in the world, as Simmu realizes. Or to companionably pass the time in a wasteland, as Simmu and Kassafeh find. And to fundamentally alters a relationship, as Simmu and Zhirem discover. 5. Messed-Up Characters “Narasen was brooding… like venom fermenting in a vat.” “Simmu began to laugh. And as he laughed his eyes were full of the tears of that utter panic-stricken loneliness a man feels who knows he will never be alone again.” “Death is all I ask, and all I may not have.” 6. Exquisite Prose (tight, poetic, witty, awful, beautiful) I reread, savored, typed up, reread, savored, etc. SO many passages, like-- “When she was fourteen, wandering home late from some orgy of an obscure sect over the hills and the hour before dawn, Lylas the witch had met Death. It was at a place where the ground was unloved, a place of thorns, and nearby three men had been hanged. Lylas had been well schooled, and she knew a thing or two more than most. She paused under the creaking gallows when she recognized the ebony Lord in his white clothes, and into her shrewd and youthful brain there came an inspiration. It was an inspiration of the sort to set heart banging, teeth jittering, hands cold and mouth dry. It was of the sort which comes only once, and must be hearkened to and acted on--or let go and ever regretted. Lylas chose not to regret. So she went up to Death and addressed him humbly.” I’m looking forward to Delusion’s Master (1981) View all my reviews
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