King of Morning, Queen of Day reviewed by Brian Stableford

Review of King of Morning, Queen of Day by Brian Stableford. Originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction #41, January 1992, page 19. Reprinted with permission.

Bantam 1991, 390 pp, $4.99.

In a delicately ironic afterword to King of Morning, Queen of Day Ian McDonald quotes David Langford's sarcastic observation that "in Fantasy...all stories must run to three volumes and include a mention of the Wild Hunt". The reader, on reaching this afterword, will wryly recall that the story he or she has just finished was indeed distributed into three parts, albeit accumulated within a single weighty volume, and did indeed contain a mention of the Wild Hunt--but he or she will also be in no doubt that the casual insult has been utterly defused, because these things were done with the utmost propriety; there is absolutely nothing formularistic about King of Morning, Queen of Day.

A much shorter version of the first part of King of Morning, Queen of Day appeared under the same title in McDonald's collection Empire Dreams. The story in question compares and contrasts the experiences of a romantically-inclined teenage girl and her father; while the former discovers the Land of Faerie in close promximity to their home and sets out to photograph the fairies, the latter deduces that an apparent comet is actually an alien spaceship and sets out to communicate with them by means of powerful flashing lights. The girl produces something very like the infamous faked photographs of the Cottingley fairies which fooled and beguiled Conan Doyle, but her father bankrupts himself trying unsuccesfully to prove his point in the face of public ridicule.

The short story revolves around its neat climactic twist, which overturns the expectations of rationally-minded science fiction readers, whoe reflexive sympathies automatically enlist them to the cause of the astronomer. The stereotyped fairies are, indeed, delusions of a sort--it is the power of the girl's imagination, reaching out by way of a capricious wild talent, which has brought them into actual being--but so are the aliens, who have been produced by exactly the same means to a similarly seductive end. This desciencefictionalising move is, however, taken up very carefully as a premise for investigation in the longer version of the story and its two "sequels". This further exploration is conducted with the aid of a thoroughly scrupulous sciencefictional conscience, but is no less bold for that, and the author provides an excellent exemplification of the way that a sciencefictional method, when applied to the substance of fantasy, can make considerable adventurous headway into literay terra incognita.

The version of the original story contained in part one of the novel is much richer in detail, inquiring much more closely into the conscious and subconscious motives of the cenral character. It provides a little more information about the vengeful "seduction" which she unwittingly inflicts upon her father in order to punish him for his lack of sympathy for her girlish fantasies, and a good deal more about the dangerous seduction which she blithely shapes for herself. It is this self-seduction which becomes the prime mover of the unfolding plot of the novel. McDonald carefully lays down the metaphysics which permits it to happen, inventing a realm of potential energy called the mygmus which responds to the myth-making activities of humans in general, but can be manipulated much more dramatically by the particular (hereditary and sex-linked) talents of rare individuals. He is equally careful in developing accounts of how the two subsequent inheritors of the talent learn to cope with and choose to deploy their gift--a process made very much more complicated and hazardous by the continued otherwordly existence of their ancestor.

The spirit of the short story is maintained in one vital and productive respect: the modern mythologies which produce such icons as first contact with alien beings are treated in King of Morning, Queen of Day in exactly the same way as ancient Celtic mythology, and a central theme of the novel as it progresses through the generations is the way in which our nascent myths and our perception of the mythologies of the past are altered and renewed. This not only permits some spectacularly melodramatic plot-twisting--especially in the final section when the up-to-the-minute-mythologies of teenage mutant ninja heroes, Space Invaders and slasher movies mingle and cross swords (literally) with Nimrod the Hunter & Co--but allows an extraordinarily intimate interweaving of the fantastic materials of the plot with the texture of everyday life. McDonald seizes these opportunities with avidity and panache, and makes such pyrotechnic use of them that this book establishes him in the very highest rank of modern fantasy writers. Just as John Crowley's Little, Big--which also appeared as a original paperback, thanks to the reluctance of publishers to invest heavily anything truly innovative--was THE fantasy novel of the eighties, King of Morning, Queen of Day will surely prove to be THE fantasy novel of the nineties. It is a masterpiece, certain to attain the status of an acknowledged in time, although it might have to get there via the cumulative support of a cult following if this paperback version proves to be as ephemeral as the majority of modern midlist paperbacks.

McDonald has already shown himself to be a stylish writer with a prolific imagination in the marvellously colourful Desolation Road, a work which did not suffer at all from being a sprawling patchwork of vignettes. His second novel, Out on Blue Six, was far less succssful, mainly because the future society framework which was supposed to contain and constrain the elements of its plot was not up to the job. King of Morning, Queen of Day also has an abundance of fabulous freestanding vignettes--the first time we meet Tiresias and Gonzaga in part two is beautifully bizarre, and it will be a very clever reader who figures out there and then just who and what and why they are--but the ideative framework is sturdy enough to contain them all. Indeed, the true beauty of the exercise is that the ideative framework not only justifies but requires an elaborate array of stylised scenes and descriptions in which the minutely naturalistic jogs elbows with the flagrantly exotic. McDonald has such a love of words and their rhythms, coupled with such careful control of the logic of extrapolation, that he is able to work wonders in meeting this requirement; no other contemporary writer could have risen to the challenge with such elegance, wit and charm.

King of Morning, Queen of Day is a novel which brings the very best out of the three-part structure which so much modern heroic fantasy employs simply as a pastiche device. Here, each of the three parts adds a new layer of complexity and a new dimension of revelation to the unfolding vision. To cap all this with a climax which is satisfactory without being trite, and properly conclusive without there being any hint of deus ex machina about it, is a considerable feat--and one entirely worthy of the flawed superheroine who provides the culmination of the myth-sensitive line of descent.

It is difficult for a British writer--especially one who has remained curiously without honour even in his own divided country--to win awards whose voters and juries are predominantly American, but McDonald does have a following in the USA (Desolation Road topped the Locus poll for best first novel two years ago) and there is every reason to hope that King of Morning, Queen of Day will be widely read, and that it will in consequence reap its just reward sooner rather than later. No devotee of intelligent fantasy can afford to miss it.

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