Subversive tendencies of William "the Wallpaper Guy" Morris

So I'm currently reading William Morris' The Well at the World's End. That's the wallpaper guy. Apparently he was also a hardcore socialist. So far there's little of that in the novel – I'm about a quarter of the way through – although relative to the romances it was based on and the high fantasies that followed it, it has a cool subversive character.

Yup – it's a proto-high fantasy, published in 1896. The introduction – by then-Ballantyne Adult Fantasty editor Lin Carter (this edition was published in 1970) – calls it the first modern heroic fantasy by virtue of its completely imaginary setting. tWatWE finds its precedent in the mixed real and imaginary settings of mediaeval romance, of which Avalon is the best-known example, and Carter also contrasts Morris' world with the romanticised versions of real settings, like the Middle East of the 1,001 Arabian Nights. I have two quibbles – first, that “world” isn't really the word for it. Although Morris sets his story in completely fabricated locales, the setting is not (at least not yet) well-defined as a unique world. I'm not looking for maps and appendices or anything, but the setting is generic mediaeval without any unique flavour. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing. In addition, Morris loses points for keeping the Christian religion and some romanticised (there's that world again) version of Hellenistic myth. This trait in particular causes tWatWE to lean more heavily on the mediaeval romance side of things than the high fantasy side. Second, that “Heroic fantasy” is a term that's fallen out of use, in fandom if not in editorial circles (who knows?), but even lacking a unique world, given the romantic mediaeval theme and the basic quest story, tWatWE strikes me as a clear high fantasy.

One hurdle here is language. I may have mentioned that I pretty well learned to read from the Book of Common Prayer. This is not entirely true – I learned to read from the same story books as the rest of you little buggers – but I did pick up on grammar and sentence structure therefrom, although not, fortunately, punctuation or capitalisation. Was that a run-on sentence? I can never tell. Anyway, despite this rather odd literary background of mine, getting into the deliberately archaic language Morris uses took a big of work. I'm fully into it now, though, and very little has been awkward, although there are some clauses that I swear go nowhere and sentences that seem to have insufficient verbs or subjects. I suspect the majority of readers today would have a real problem following the language... it's not a book you can jump into from, say, Terry Goodkind, despite Goodkind's debt, with the rest of the high fantasy club, to Morris' work here. Incidentally, you can see a lot of C.S. Lewis here, and according to the all-too-brief introduction, Lewis was another fan of Morris.

Given the above, while tWatWE is a romance that falls in the category of fantasy, it's certainly a prototypical high fantasy. It starts like a fairy tale or a romance, with the sons of King Pete riding out from their small kingdom looking for adventure. The youngest, Ralph, condemned to stay home and learn to run the family business (he literally drew the short straw), runs away the next morning. When he hears about the Well at the World's End, he immediately feels the urge to achieve it. This may be due to the fact that when people talk about it, they use CAPITAL LETTERS.

That's the plot so far, and so far Ralph hasn't come very close to the Well. He has, however, met some interesting folk, because what would a fantasy be without a supporting cast? Given the above characteristics of the book in terms of language, setting, and debt to mediaeval romances, I was expecting an old-fashioned quest romance. tWatWE really surprised me in that regard. Ralph is a well-drawn young man. Despite his Marty Stu tendencies (his main characteristic is that all women love him), he's ignorant and self-absorbed in the way that a young man often is, and he's constantly blushing, whether his ignorance is being politely pointed out to him or he's being hit on by a hot chick. Further, the romance is almost subversive in the casual sexuality Ralph and the two female leads display. He randomly makes out with the first (think Eowyn, if Eowyn were a barmaid) and the second shows up mostly naked, something Morris doesn't hesitate to describe, or Ralph to devour (think Deejah Thoris, if Deejah Thoris were... well, think Deejah Thoris). Unfortunately, neither woman can stop crying, which hurts the otherwise notable transcendence of their roles.

The straightforward sexuality of the book is one aspect of what strikes me as a subversive tone; another is a little less easy to quantify. In something as formulaic as a quest story, it's often easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys both from the narrative and their description. For instance, the good guys will be sympathetically described; at a certain point in the adventure, the hero will fall in with the bad guys. He will probably be fooled as to their intentions. In addition, there are rarely well-characterised neutral characters – they don't belong in this kind of good versus evil book. In tWatWE, characters who at first appear evil turn out to be the good guys; those who appear to be the good guys turn out to be morally ambiguous. Even the kindly old monk can't be trusted. Maybe I'm too easily impressed, but I find this kind of ambiguity and counter-formula exciting in an older, clearly romantic novel. To me, this subversive quality is the best part.

I bought this book at the White Cat, if memory serves, because it seemed like something I'd like. Ah, the simplicity of used book buying. I had a hankering for Lovecraftian horror at the time, and was probably hoping for something Dunsany-esque, so the book sat around for a while. I'm going through it pretty quickly, though. Next up is the backstory of the Deejah-esque character. This is going to cover something like six chapters.