New York, Tor, 1999, $22.95

in New York Review of Science Fiction 131, July 1999

The body of myth that has come down to us from around the world is an inchoate mass shot through, as commentators as varied as J.G. Frazer and Joseph Campbell have told us, with certain recurring themes and images. Death and rebirth, for instance, fertility and infertility; all somehow seem to coalesce into one ur-myth. It is tempting, therefore, to pull all these myths together into a cohesive whole, to try to find the one story that is all stories. Malory attempted this within the relatively small scale of the Matter of Britain, and it is something that, knowingly or unknowingly, fantasists have been trying to do ever since. The quest, the descent into darkness, the realm in chaos, the return to light, order restored: though tricked out in coats of many colours and carried off with varying degrees of panache, these patterns shape the great mass of fantasy. Sometimes the authors pay specific homage to the culture whose myths they have plundered — Celtic myth and its off-shoot the Arthurian cycle seems to be far and away the most popular — sometimes not. Many times, they are simply borrowing routines from old stagers like Tolkien without even noticing how much further back these same tricks and tropes can be traced. More and more, however, self-aware fantasists are not only recognising such patterns but are making the conscious exploration of mythic archetypes the central purpose of their fiction. But the more one tries, the more myth there seems to be awaiting incorporation in this Grand Unified Theory, so that somehow the consequence of all this knitting together of loose threads is to end up following the all-too-familiar path already worn down by countless other fantasists.

Lisa Goldstein is one of the most self-aware and most daring of fantasists writing today. Her novels have regularly explored the nature of our mythology, and in Dark Cities Underground she is consciously tracing connections between Egyptian, Greek and British myth. The underlying pattern of the novel traces the story that begins when Set kills his brother, Osiris, and cuts him into twenty-eight pieces, which he scatters over the land. Infertility settles in, until Osiris’s sister and wife, Isis, gathers together all the pieces and makes him whole once more. The Nile floods, fertility is restored. It is a story that is told again as Ceres/Demeter descends into the realm of her brother, Hades/Pluto, to restore her daughter, Proserpine/Persephone, and to bring Spring back to the world. It is told yet again in the story of the Fisher King, whose wound to the thigh is a clear emasculation which cannot be healed until the perfect knight, Percival, is found to restore fertility to the realm. The cycle of the seasons is the oldest myth of all, and Lisa Goldstein recapitulates it here in several forms.

Even just this blending of mythologies is flexing the muscles of fantasy about as much as they have ever been flexed before. What makes Dark Cities Underground work is that the myths are infiltrated into the novel on several different levels. The core myth of Osiris and Isis and Set is presented straightforwardly (at one point our heroes actually find themselves on the banks of the Nile as it was at the dawn of time) but is also refracted through the children’s story, Jeremy in Neverwas, (in which the boy helps Iris restore her husband Cyrus) illustrating the way that raw myth is domesticated for modern consumption by fantasists. At the same time the core myth is shown to be still current, in actual terms (Set has been reincarnated as Barnaby Sattermole, whose malign presence casts a long shadow over the novel, and one of the quests to be fulfilled in the Underground is to find the Eye of Osiris) and as inspiration (the vogue for all things Egyptian initiated by Napoleon’s corps of engineers is the trigger for the building of Underground railways according to a mystic pattern which provides the second major strand in the novel). What’s more, although the habit of fantasists has always been to treat magic as part of our reality, commentators on myth have tended to see it as a reflection of psychological truths; and so, while Goldstein makes the story of Osiris into a history of real events, she also presents it as a echo of the psychology of her characters, particularly Jeremy. If the underworld was eternal in ancient times, then it must continue eternal today; but children are most likely to find their way through its secret portals and past its fearsome gatekeepers. It is their garbled, only partly understood accounts of the astonishing things they have seen there that provides the inspiration for most of the classics of children’s literature (Goldstein here neatly reverses the traditional image of a parent telling stories to a child and then writing them down in book form). Jeremy of course was one such child, inspiring his mother’s famous books; but the effect of becoming famous for being a fictional character, as well as the long-suppressed memories of what were in fact terrifying adventures in the underworld, has damaged him psychologically. Part of the pattern of the book is that Ruth must restore Jeremy just as Isis must restore Osiris.

Jeremy is part of that long line of real children who have been incorporated into successful fiction. One obvious model for the character is Christopher Milne. Before he was old enough to shape his own life, it was taken away from him. From that moment on, whatever else he might become, he was always Christopher Robin. He spent his life cursing his father for turning him into a story. Still, although this figment of a childhood overshadowed his life, at least he had a life; Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the brothers to whom J.M. Barrie addressed his stories of Peter Pan, would go on to commit suicide. It is a familiar story, the way that fiction steals from life (much as a photograph was once thought to steal the soul); Geoff Ryman touched on this in Was... (1992) when he revealed an elderly Dorothy, mind long gone, in a nursing home. This is also the story that Lisa Goldstein tells, the story of Jeremy Jerome Gerontius Jones (a name that sounds suspiciously as if it belongs in one of A.A. Milne’s poems) who was once the hero of his mother’s best-selling books and now, in middle age, lives in furious isolation, convinced that his mother has stolen his childhood.

This multi-layered novel begins slowly when Ruth, who is planning to write a book about E.A. Jones and her literary creation, Jeremy in Neverwas, visits the reclusive Jeremy Jones. At first he rebuffs her, but when the strange Mr Sattermole starts asking questions about Jerry’s childhood home, Jerry and Ruth find themselves making common cause. Although we realise quickly that the Jeremy stories recount genuine adventures in another world, the novel stays firmly anchored in this world for a long time, teasing out the character of Jerry while building up a subtle air of mystery and menace. But when a trip in the San Francisco underground takes them instantaneously into the London Underground, the change of location heralds a dramatic change of pace.

To suggest modern underground railways as a contemporary aspect of the underworld is a literalness that seems out of keeping with Goldstein’s usually subtle work, but there is far more complexity in this than may at first appear. The same impulses that once drove ancient man to conjure the shapes of gods in the random placing of stars today makes us trace the alien and the divine in otherwise random patterns such as ley lines. (Iain Sinclair, in his dark and mad prose-poem Lud Heat (1975), identified a cabalistic symbol in the placing of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s London Churches, while Peter Ackroyd, in Hawksmoor (1985), shaped contemporary life and death to its dictates.) However there is one far from random pattern that shapes London more intimately: the network of lines that make up the London Underground. It is already a system freighted with mystery and symbolism, from long-abandoned stations (I passed through one once, as a child, a grey, shadowy place where it seemed that yesterday had stopped) and service as a war-time bomb shelter. Neil Gaiman explored the Underground as a repository for ancient archetypes in Neverwhere (1996), but in Lisa Goldstein’s ‘Neverwas’ the symbolism has not just come to reside within the Underground, it was built into the system by its original engineers.

Three weird sisters (maid, matron and hag), tell stories about the building of the Underground and the contest between the two great engineers, King and Sneath. King, aided by Sattermole, set out to build a Circle Line with twenty-eight stations, which would echo the twenty-eight parts of Osiris’s body and so conjure a special power. Although the Circle Line eventually built has only twenty-seven stations, it still looks as though King has won his battle with Sneath — until Ruth and her companions venture into the secret parts of the Underground and find an entire lost community (populated, like Gaiman’s Neverwhere, by the homeless and the buskers who are otherwise unseen by society) where the war between King and Sneath continues unabated. Richard F. King suffers from a wound that will not heal, until Jeremy finds himself unwittingly playing the role of the Grail Knight, while the now-immortal Sneath is on the point of completing a perfect pattern underground which will give him control of life above ground (‘as below so above’ reads the ubiquitous graffito that provides a consistent theme throughout the book). Although the London Underground is the focus of all this activity, their struggle has already extended well beyond London to encompass every underground system in the world: on the very first page of the novel we learn that BART — the Bay Area Rapid Transit — was deliberately and significantly built in the shape of an aleph.

Once the action of the novel moves predominantly underground, the psychological insights which made the early chapters so arresting begin to be lost. There are moments when the various participants in this modern re-setting of one of the most ancient of myths are rushing around in our contemporary underworld, when thought seems to have given way to adventure, when coincidence and bravado and a last-minute snatching of victory from defeat seem to win out over conviction and character. All of a sudden, too many things seem to be going on at once: our heroes find themselves battling not one but two villains (representatives respectively of ancient myth and modern technology); they are caught in the midst of not one but two eternal wars (between Set and Osiris, between King and Sneath); they are playing with symbols from at least three different mythologies (at one point, Jerry is carrying the actual Holy Grail, their companion, Sarah, has the Eye of Osiris, while Ruth is unwillingly playing the role of Ceres as she seeks her daughter, Gilly, who has been kidnapped by Sattermole and hidden somewhere within this realm of the dead). If they are to rescue Gilly, Jerry must overcome demons from his own childhood; Sarah, meanwhile, is trying to bring back to life her murdered husband; and all the time they are trying to avoid being trapped within the mythic roles that seem to be destined for them.

All these various intricate threads of plot suddenly and inevitably spin themselves into a web of dramatic action, but as the book works itself up into its climax it does for that brief moment seem rather ordinary. Goldstein does regain control before the end, however. What seems like a traditional happy ending is rendered ambiguous as Ruth and Jerry unwittingly start to follow the pattern of the mythic roles they have had to take on to complete their quest. All at once, we are back with the quietly unsettling psychological novel we began with. The result is a good book, a daring book, a book whose ideas are extravagant and whose reach is bold, even if it cannot quite grasp all it might reach. It is a book made up of too many elements, the raw and the refined, elements that do not belong together. It is a book that should not work at all. That it does is a testament to Goldstein’s talent. That she has the vision to bring these disparate parts together and the skill to make it all so nearly a success is what makes her perhaps the finest fantasist writing today.