Normal People by Sally RooneyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Review: King of Shards
King of Shards by Matthew KresselMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
I didn’t expect to enjoy this book, but I read it anyway. So that’s on me. I didn’t enjoy it in ways I didn’t expect, though, so that’s another matter.
I read this one because I saw it referred to as a rare attempt at fantasy that draw on Jewish tradition, and that makes it worth thinking about.
To begin with, I’m ‘over’ much of what passes for ‘mainstream fantasy.’ There’s a ponderous quality to the Wheel of Time and Sword of Truth door-stop books – a ponderousness that comes not just from their size (my guess is most could be improved by edits that remove two-thirds of their bulk) but their lack of humor.
That’s my first complaint about this book. There’s nothing funny about it. And, really, how can something be truly Jewish without also being at least ironic – ‘funny’ in the sense that it asks us to look at the world from a strange angle if not in that it asks us to laugh at something.
But it’s the matter of potentially drawing on Jewish tradition for fantasy that intrigued me here. There are some significant Jewish fantasy works. If you expand the definition, there’s the figure of the Golem and the whole concept of secret identities that underlies everything in the (Jewish-dominated) imaginarium of superheroes. There’s also Kafka, and there are some fine Jewish-inflected works including Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, and Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
But if you define “fantasy” as growing out of Tolkien, it’s a mostly dry well. Tolkien himself, of course, understood much of his work as elaborating a Christian eschatology; for all that it draws on classical and Norse mythology, it deals with the promise of a literal kingly return. C.S. Lewis is even more explicit about it, with his Aslan so fully embodying a Christ figure that it’s impossible to interpret without that Christian skeleton key. Even J.K. Rowling, who begins with a different vibe, culminates her septology with a series of resurrections and Christ-inflected references. (Note that George R.R. Martin mocks and satirizes many of those same beliefs, not quite seeming to believe them but also not discarding them; maybe it’s a coincidence, but he does turn out to be a quarter Jewish even if the revelation came as a surprise to him.)
My point is that the idea of the Christ-story – of a figure called on to die and be resurrected – sits at the heart of what they call ‘high fantasy.’ So, I wanted to know what Tressel would do with his attempt.
I’ll say quickly that I didn’t expect some of the clumsy shifts in perspective that we get. I get having our two human protagonists serve as our eyes for most of this – Daniel and Rahma – but it just seems wrong to get the story through the utterly nonhuman Caleb/Ashmodai. I have a friend who’s orthodox in his belief that an author has to stay in perspective of a character. I’m a little more liberal about what I can tolerate in such shifts, but this caught even me off guard.
And there’s also a lot of questionable tone. We go from one character finding her murdered and flayed parents and then contemplating romance a couple chapters later. We go from supposed meditations on kabbalistic metaphysics to near-graphic sex. (It’s not the sex that troubles me – the kabbalists had a lot to say about it; it’s the awkward juxtapositions of tone, the sense that we’re reading a stitched-together set of chapters.)
But my main concern is that, in grafting the terminology of Jewish mysticism onto a fundamentally Christian form, we don’t get a Jewish fantasy at all. Instead, we get a cheapening of a tradition that might – though I’d still like to know how – inform a different generic way into fantasy.
We learn early on, alongside Daniel, that he is a lamed-vavnik, one of the 36 secret saints on whom the universe depends. In chapter one, he has no idea that is such a figure. By the two-thirds mark, he has no problem strutting, “I’m a lamed-fucking-vavnik.” (I can see that juxtaposition working, just not in the context we’re given here. It would have to be parody in a way that this very much is not.)
Now, the legend of the lamed-vavniks, one that’s derived from kabbalistic thinking mediated through the Hasidic folk process, has great potential. It’s just that Tressel doesn’t seem to understand its implications. The Hasids used the story to suggest that the greatest saints – or, since it amounted to the same thing, heroes – were not the best warriors or even the wisest sages. They were, instead, people so ordinary that they didn’t know their own worth to the world.
That’s a beautiful and powerful concept. It celebrates an immanence of spirit. It asserts that everyone has the potential for profound holiness. It calls on us to be charitable and merciful, to wonder at all times whether we are in the presence of someone whose goodness is essential to all we know.
In other words, lamed-vavniks are the opposite of superheroes.
Tressel, however, gives us a superhero. His Daniel has a power so consequential that multiple demons scheme to take control over him. What’s more, even as I’m troubled at what I see as a direct misreading of the legend, we never get an explanation for what his power is. Everything depends on him, but he has nothing to do other than simply to exist.
That’s not exactly the same thing as a resurrection-based story – though it says a lot that the entirety of this volume turns on his quest to return to Earth from a world of the dead – but it certainly feels Christian-inflected. His power derives from a conception of heaven rather than of the deeper Jewish concern for how to make this life on Earth more holy. Daniel is a saint because he is a saint not because of anything he does.
That – the inability to extract ‘high fantasy’ from its Christian framework is the disappointment I expected. The rest, I’m afraid, is commentary.
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Thursday, February 6, 2025
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