Subject: Review of IRON TEARS by R. A. Lafferty

From: Don Webb <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 16:52:04 GMT

R. A. Lafferty, _Iron Tears_
	Reviewed by Don Webb, Copyright (c) 1993

Biography: Don Webb lives in Austin, Texas with his sexy and beautiful wife
Rosemary.  His chapbook, _ The Seventh Day and After_ is now available from
WordCraft of Oregon.
 
When a good writer, who has been ignored by the commercial press, dies there
is always a good chance that someone in the commercial press will realize
his or her goodness and bring out a collection of the work, which for some
reason they were unable to do while the guy was alive.  This will happen to
R.A. Lafferty and I say in advance let a curse (perhaps cancer of the
genitals) fall upon the ghouls and their offspring to the seventh
generation.  In his introduction to Iron Tears, the always perceptive
Michael Swanwick points out that there is a whole cottage industry that
prints Lafferty, "Edgewood Press, United Mythologies, Corroborre, Chris Drum
Books, The Manuscript Press, Broken Mirrors and for all I know there may be
others."  The connoisseurs of Lafferty must be on their toes, being sure to
track down the right catalogs, the right stores, ever vigilant for a
chapbook here, a small volume there.  I doubt if any author in (I started to
say Science Fiction, but have decided to say) in the English speaking world
receives that kind of attention.  The question is why?  What special magic
does Lafferty offer?

The simple answer has always been his use of language.  Well what of it --
the field has many who can make a phrase sing or sing a phrase that's the
thing.  The true answer lies in that his stories sound like they're folk
tales.  Now I said something very precise there.  Lafferty doesn't use the
language of folktales, and only rarely uses their rhythm.  But he lives so
well within the langauge of his creation that his language -- particularly
in the combination of slightly archaic folk speech and outrageous
etymologies for his words -- sounds like language that some one has said
somewhere.  Yevgeny Zamyatin developed the concept of a "prose foot" as way
of internal pacing of fiction. He saw it as a kind of rhythmic device that
by causing the reader to remember an earlier part of the narrative became a
force for a choral (as in pertaining to choruses) cohesion that bound the
story together in a different way than plot mechanics.  This method, which I
can't detect in Zamyatin's works (since Russian is Greek to me) is the core
of Lafferty's work.  He has has invented the post-modern equivalent of the
Homeric epithet.  Now that I've told you what the magician's about to do,
see if you can catch the trick the next time.  Oops went past you!
 
Lafferty has two other methods to make his langauge appear to belong to
folktale.  The first is the constant use of children as seen through the
eyes of memory.  Unlike Bradbury who invokes some kind of Norman Rockwell
past by visual detail.  Lafferty invokes the very rapid sense of childhood
as we remember it.  His heroes in "Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope" Karl
Riproar and Emily Vortex are typical Lafferty wonder kids who do everything
very very fast.  His children as well as his hard drinking young men move in
a world that has been condensed by memory, and so we match with our won
perceived fast and fleeting moments of childhood.  The second narrative
technique is to take that which is obscure (at least to the conscious mind
but clear enough to the soul) out of Indo-european mythology and represent
it to us as a childhood story.  The title of the book refers to the tears of
Pluto mentioned in "Funnyfingers."  But the story itself refers to a much
more obscure myth that of the Dactyls, a group of makers in Greek mythology
serving the same mythic function as the dwarfs of the Northern peoples.  By
playing upon this notion which resonates with a mythic niche that speakers
of Indo-european languages have -- he invokes a spiritual nostalgia for this
magical tale set, of course in Tulsa.
 
This book of Lafferty's tales has one great plus and one great minus.  At
$10.00 it is one of the best buys I've seen in a long time.  The plain
non-glossy cover does not spring open after reading, and this perfect bound
volume of 219 pages looks as though it will stand up on the shelves for some
years.  The big minus is the number of typos -- mainly of the computer
approved variety (that is to say "and" for "an").

These reprinted stories derive from a number of sources.  The earliest, from
Future City edited by Rodger Elwood (1973) is "The World as Will and
Wallpaper." The latest, from IASFM (1987) is "You can't go Back." The last
named is something of a comment on the nearly thirty years of work, that had
proceeded it.  The Tulsa genius stared producing work (or I suspect started
sharing work in a language already long since developed) in 1960.  Next year
he will be 80.

%A R. A. Lafferty
%T Iron Tears
%I Edgewood Press, PO Box 264, Cambridge, MA 02238
%D 1992
%P 219
%O Paper: $10.0
--
--Alan Wexelblat, Reality Hacker, Author, and Cyberspace Bard
Media Lab - Advanced Human Interface Group	[email-masked]
Voice: 617-258-9168, Pager: 617-945-1842	[email-masked]
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of
government!