Cast A Bright Shadow by Tanith Lee
01/07/2004 . Source: Jennifer Howell 

pub: TOR. 431 page enlarged paperback. Price: £10.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-4050-0634-X.

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Ah, Tanith Lee. The most surprising thing on opening her latest book was in realising quite how prolific she's been over the years: a staggering 78 books according to the title page.

The second most surprising thing was perhaps how much I was looking forward to reading this, considering that much of her back catalogue I just don't get. Having said that, the books of Lee's that I do like, I think are absolutely sublime. What can I say, it's a love/hate thing.

The trouble with 'Cast A Bright Shadow' is partly that it looks so good. Set in an icebound world that used to be tropical, suddenly frozen into a permanent Winter mockery of Summer with ice jungles and snowy deserts, it's full of lush and evocative imagery. Lee's writing is, as always, just as quirkily rich and strange: always readable, even if you don't quite click with what she's writing about.

That's really not the problem. Even the initial story is fine: Saphay, the barely acknowledged daughter of a king of Ru Karismi, is betrothed to one of the 'barbaric' Jafn leaders to the east to gain political advantage. What Saphay doesn't realise is that daddy dearest has no intention of her actually reaching her husband-to-be, preferring instead to arrange to have her kidnapped, raped and killed en route by the friendly neighbourhood Olchibe tribe rather than actually hand her over. Charming.

Dragged down into a frozen sea during the attack, Saphay is thought to have drowned. Cut to the home of her betrothed, Athluan, and Saphay washing up on shore alive, entombed in a giant ice pyramid. Athluan being a nice guy and fairly practical, decides to marry her anyway. Which was pretty decent of him, considering.

You'd think that they'd be a teensy bit suspicious at this point, but when Saphay is revealed to be pregnant, Athluan is convinced that the child is his. Except that something exceedingly strange happened to Saphay under the sea and her son was actually fathered by an unreasonably scary psychopathic god, who isn't exactly thrilled about the turn of events. With Saphay and her nameless child thrown out into a frozen wasteland, even they should have died...except that someone else is watching over them.

It's not a bad premise, as these things go: the only problem is that it covers only the first hundred pages. The three hundred pages that follow, mainly featuring Saphay's half-mortal son, Lionwolf, are where the story loses interest. By constantly telling us how charming and attractive the demigod Lionwolf is, Lee fails to actually convince the reader that this is actually so. There's much drawing on conventional mythology for this - the Ulster Hero Cuchullain especially, as he grows to twenty in just a decade and has an immortal side that could conquer the world.

The trouble with Heroes - which Lionwolf is conventionally supposed to be - is that they don't make for particularly engaging protagonists in this kind of story.

As strange as that sounds, it does make sense in this context. Tanith Lee is just stronger with female characters and with the centring so much of the plot on a male character who falls too neatly into the old groove of Heroic myth, she fails to add anything new to an ancient stereotype. As Brad Pitt and the hideously untalented screenwriters of 'Troy' can testify, it is incredibly hard to pull off the traditional Hero type today. They certainly didn't manage it from where I was sitting...

The key flaw overall must be the characters. Most of them - and Lionwolf especially - are just not likeable enough to hold reader sympathy and attention, over the course of such a drawn out plot. As a standalone, this would be taxing enough. I am honestly curious as to what Lee can do to her characters for the rest of the trilogy.

Curious, but not optimistic. Saphay, who could have been the linchpin holding it together, is not seen for ten of her most interesting years and afterwards is subject to some truly bizarre plot points that rob her character of its emotional integrity.

It's an odd book, deceptively easy to settle into at first perhaps. It's only later, when the plot slows and becomes far more linear, that the novelty of the setting palls and the sheer scale of the disjointed weirdness becomes far more apparent. The weirdness, however, only serves to disorient amidst a cast of familiar tropes. There are huge drawings on world mythologies, Greek especially, and odd influences that jar. Is it really as post-apocalyptic as it seems at some points?

In the end, it's the lack of cohesion that kills it for me. Characters jump in and out of the plot at random, not always where they need to be dramatically and the interventions of gods feel forced and uneasy, leading us towards a revelation that is not as dramatic as it needs to be. Technically, it's one of Tanith Lee's weaker books, despite some truly extraordinary descriptive writing.

It's hard to like, more than anything, and there's a chance it may not go far enough for fans of her more extreme fantasy/horror work. At the other end of the scale, there's none of the melancholy cosiness here that lends the ‘Unicorn Trilogy’ so much heart and it sits uneasily between the two. Wanting to be mythic, it sacrifices character identification, but it doesn't quite re-invent the myth enough to stand on that alone.

Ultimately a disappointment, then, but a heroic failure that delights in its language and quality of writing more so than its characters and plot. That's not something you can say about much in the fantasy field these days.

Jennifer Howell