The Birthgrave: Tanith Lee’s first novel

Reposting to include Sandy’s new review.

The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee

Let me be clear: The Birthgrave has kind of a dumb plot. It’s repetitive, it’s all predicated on a prosaic twist that’s kept overly mysterious, and when the big reveal finally does come, it’s via one of the most blatant examples of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen. All the same, I’d still call this a good book. Maybe even a great one. That’s the magic of Tanith Lee: even her first novel, a work where she was clearly still working out her craft to an extent, feels like something you might find engraved on an ancient stone tablet under a forgotten prehistoric pyramid. She has remarkably rich prose, of course — it’s Tanith Lee, so that practically goes without saying — but she also makes the characters feel true in a way that so very few novelists can manage. The events paint the mind’s eye so clearly that they dazzled me, and ultimately distracted from the weaknesses of the narrative.

The story begins in an active volcano (I wish I got to write that phrase more often), with someone coming suddenly awake with no idea who or what she is. She appears to be a young woman with a weird, deformed face, but it quickly becomes apparent that while the protagonist is inexperienced and female, she may not be young and probably isn’t a human woman at all. As she wanders through the volcanic cavern, she encounters a trippy sequence straight out of a 1970s fantasy film where a bizarre, mostly-disembodied creature called Karrakaz — supposedly the embodiment of the evil of her race — offers a choice between two confusing options: the protagonist  may take up a dagger on Karrakaz’s altar and kill herself (which would, in the opinion of Karrakaz, be a mercy-death, sparing both the protagonist and the world great anguish), or she can go forth in search of a vaguely described solace or redemption referred to only as “the Jade.”

The protagonist elects to pursue the Jade, though without any real knowledge of what that is or where it might be found. Leaving Karrakaz in the cavern of her birth and potential death (so, yes, in her birthgrave), she flees the volcano before the eruption and sets forth on a very dreamy and episodic quest through the ruins of her extinct race’s empire. On the way, she is many things to the various human inhabitants of this world: sometimes a warrior, sometimes a bandit, sometimes a healer, witch, or goddess. The supporting cast changes nearly as often as the protagonist’s roles, and the final effect is a plaintively beautiful story of endless wandering in search of a destiny, like a very melancholy and lushly written version of the early Conan the Barbarian stories.

A nameless antihero on series of bleak adventures is hardly an original concept, and of course a magically superior “elder race” has made it into just about every fantasy novel ever; but Lee’s take on the ideas makes them feel fresh again. Our Woman with No Name is just as complex and morally ambiguous as any of her male counterparts I could name (more so, in many cases), and the fact that she remains so fascinating throughout the story despite her constant depression and general aimlessness is quite a triumph of characterization. Her various interactions with other characters — especially those with two prominent love interests — have a great deal of thematic heft, none of which slows the pacing or feels out of place in the world of the story. In these points at least, Lee is on top of her game.

The prose is mostly fantastic — I think Lee may be one of the most naturally gifted authors I’ve ever read — though in this, her first novel, I did find the occasional slip-up or bit of wonky styling, places where Lee’s imagery didn’t quite work as intended or her language became slightly muddled. It’s barely noticeable, but it is there.

The major point against the novel is still the plot, though. It’s not that it’s awful, but after a while the ongoing quest for the Jade becomes a bit grating when we get no further hints about how the journey might eventually be resolved. There are clues about Ye Olde Elfy Race once in a while, but Lee holds most of her cards close to the chest until the very end, which means that the cumulative effect of Imma’s adventures (Imma is only one of her many by-names, but it’s my favorite and I’m tired of “the protagonist”) might be wearying for some readers. Despite how entrancing I tend to find Tanith Lee’s writing, even I found myself getting a little worn down by the lack of apparent progression, especially given that a pattern is gradually detectable in events, making one feel as though the novel is trapped in a loop.

To be clear, this was almost certainly intentional, a representation of Imma’s self-destructive emotional state as she drives herself into the same mistakes over and over. That doesn’t make it easier to read, however. There are some truly thrilling moments — this is the kind of novel that has Ben-Hur chariot races, collapsing cities, and disturbingly large lizards as a matter of course — but someone reading along in search of easy fun and a nice three-act structure will be disappointed.

The troubling bit is that most of this is in service of concealing the novel’s big secret, which is fine and dandy but probably didn’t warrant so much effort. When the final reveal arrives (by means of, again, a very bizarre bit of deus ex machina that comes completely out of nowhere), one is left thinking “all right, yeah, that makes sense” but also with the sensation that though the resolution satisfies most of the remaining questions, the only one it fails to answer is why some of this couldn’t have been doled out over the course of the text. While I do think Lee’s conceit is effective in moderation, I’m also fairly certain that the necessity of hoarding so much information right to the end robbed the earlier text of some momentum.

Overall, though, I quite enjoyed The Birthgrave. It’s certainly unique, and features a protagonist whose voice is difficult to forget. While it shows some mistakes of the first time novelist, it also demonstrates Lee’s talent and affinity for painting with words. I recently recommended it (with some reservations) to a friend, and I think I’ll probably do so again should the opportunity arise.

~Tim Scheidler

I have long maintained that when checking out an author with whom you are not familiar, sometimes, the safest bet is to go back to the beginning. Granted, this is hardly a foolproof method, and very often a writer’s first novel is far from his or her best effort. Still, there is a certain neatness in this technique, and sometimes, when unsure how to approach a given author’s vast and imposing oeuvre, it can yield satisfying results. Case in point: my recent experience with British author Tanith Lee, and her first novel written for an adult audience, The Birthgrave. Now, I know that for most readers of fantasy, sci-fi and horror, Tanith Lee is hardly a new proposition (as usual, I’m a little late hopping aboard the bandwagon), and indeed, before her passing in 2015, at the age of 67, this remarkably prolific, London-born author managed to somehow come out with no fewer than 90 novels and 300 short stories! She was the first woman to be accorded the British Fantasy Award and was a two-time recipient of the World Fantasy Award, among other honors. Still, as I say, for this reader, she was an untried gamble, until recently, although The Birthgrave had been sitting on my shelf for decades. But on the occasion of the book’s 50^th anniversary, I decided to finally give it a try, and oh my goodness, am I ever glad I did!

As I just inferred, The Birthgrave was originally released in 1975 as a $1.50 DAW paperback (the edition that’s been browning on my shelf here at home for half a century), with cover art by George Barr. Previously, Lee had come out with three books geared for children: The Dragon Hoard (1971), Princess Hynchatti and Some Other Surprises (’72), and Animal Castle (also ’72). As revealed by DAW editor Betsy Wollheim, Lee’s habit was to write all her early books in shorthand, after which her mother would type them up on thin, onionskin paper. Such was the case with The Birthgrave … all 185,000 words, or 400+ pages, of it. DAW would later reprint the book in 1981, with a beautifully faithful cover by one Ken W. Kelly. Internationally, the book was published in the U.K. (’77), Holland (’78, ’84 and ’87, as Het Geboortegraf, or The Birthgrave), Italy (also ’78, as Nata dal Vulcano, or Born From the Volcano), Germany (’79 and ’96, as Im Herzen des Vulkans, or In the Heart of the Volcano), Belgium (also ’79, as Le Reveil du Volkan, or The Awakening of the Volcano), France (’84, ’87, ’91 and ’93, as La Deesse Voilee, or The Veiled Goddess, AND La Saga d’Uasti, or The Saga of Uasti) and, finally, Finland (2006, as Synnyinhauta, or Birthgrave). The Birthgrave would be nominated for the 1975 Nebula Award – a pretty impressive feat for a first-time adult novelist – ultimately losing to Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. A stunning amalgam of epic fantasy latterly joined to a surprising bit of science fiction, Lee’s novel, lengthy as it was, soon proved to be just the opening salvo in a series of books today known as THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY, its two sequels, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor and Quest for the White Witch, both coming out in 1978, three years later.

Now, as for The Birthgrave itself: The book is narrated to us by a young woman who awakens in the heart of a dormant volcano. She has no memory of her former existence, although as the book proceeds she has dreams/visions of her old life, in the palaces of a mighty race, now extinct, and today called by many the Lost Ones. A woman without a past or even a name, she learns from an evil spirit, Karrakaz, that she is cursed, and that if she ventures outside of the volcano, she will bring death and destruction wherever she goes … prophetic words, indeed. As is gradually revealed during her narrative, our young heroine here is no ordinary woman, and possesses an array of almost superhuman abilities: She can heal others, and her own wounds heal remarkably quickly. She can kill with a glance. She can understand other people’s languages and mentally dominate them. She can go indefinitely without food, water and even air. She can raise storms, and even earth tremors. And, it seems, she is virtually immortal, surviving a lightning strike, knife and sword slayings, even a cave-in. Just who is this woman? As she exits the volcano, seemingly causing it to catastrophically erupt, in search of her past and the Jade that Karrakaz mentions is her “soul-kin,” her journey of self-discovery gets under way. During the course of her tale, she will be called Imma (or “small one”), Uasta (“healer”) or Uastis (“goddess”) by others. Going veiled most of the time to cover her hideous visage, “unbearable to look on” (as one of the characters later says of her, “I call her a woman for want of a description vile enough to suit her looks”!), the white-haired, diminutive yet oh-so spunky woman will, ultimately, reclaim her past, and come to remember her true name.

Her story is divided into three lengthy sections. In the first, our narrator exits from that erupting volcano and enters a medieval-seeming world comprised of small villages and large city-states. In the first village she comes to, she is greeted as a goddess and a healer. She there encounters Darak, the leader of a bandit gang, and enters into a sort of love-hate relationship with him. When Darak’s band goes off to attack a merchant caravan, she accompanies them in the fighting, having already charmed three of his men – Maggur, Giltt and Kel – into being her protectors. When the bandit gang arrives at the city of Ankurum to sell their stolen goods, our heroine goes along with the ruse, and later enters a chariot race called the Sagare: a high-speed contest on an obstacle course with two-man chariot teams, the charioteer himself and the arrowman who shoots at the opposing vehicles. (Here, Darak is the charioteer, and our narrator the arrow slinger.) When Darak is later captured and killed, along with his men, our heroine takes vengeance on the person responsible, and then heads into the nearby mountains.

In the book’s second section, our narrator falls in with a group of wagoners heading for a snowy mountain pass. Uasti, the elderly healer woman of the group, teaches her more of the healing arts, and relates some of the lore she’s heard of the Lost Ones. When Uasti is murdered, our narrator becomes the group’s new healer. The band crosses an enormous inland sea and comes to a land of Dark People. When soldiers from the city-state of Ezlann arrive, conscript the wagoners to be forced soldiers, and murder our heroine with multiple stabbings, she rises from the dead and goes after them to effect a rescue. At Ezlann, she meets the city’s ruler, the teenaged Asren, whom she is forced to marry after being hailed as a goddess. After Asren is killed, most likely by the head of the Ezlann military, Vazkor, she is force to marry him and becomes pregnant with his child. Vazkor claims to also be a descendant of the Lost Ones and does wield superhuman abilities of his own. His goal, with his new wife’s help, is to unite the six cities of the White Desert – Ezlann, SoEss, Ammath, Kmiss, Za and Eshkorek-Arnor – with himself as supreme warlord, and then march forth to defeat the six cities of the Purple Valley and the 10 cities of Sea’s Edge. Our expectant narrator accompanies her husband on these campaigns in the Purple Valley, and then spends some months in the conquered city of Belhannor. With the assistance of her three newest protectors – Mazlek, Slor and Dnarl – she manages to escape from an uprising after the tide of Vazkor’s campaign turns. At the lonely Tower Eshkorek, she learns the truth regarding Asren’s death, has a showdown with her detested husband, and is buried alive when the tower is destroyed by opposing forces.

Finally, in the third section, our narrator is discovered in the rubble of Tower Eshkorek by a hill tribe of the east and is later forced to act as a sort of slave woman in the barbarous clan. There, she meets Ettook, the leader of the group; his pregnant wife Tathra; a blind nurse woman, Kotta; and Seel, a spiteful “holy man.” When Tathra’s baby turns out to be stillborn, our narrator leaves the tribe. She wanders alone in the mountains and lower marshes for weeks, half mad, before falling in with a group of marsh folk and traveling with them to the sea. With a trio of new protectors – Fethlin, Wexl and Peyuan – she discovers the remnants of a city of the Lost Ones, fights off an enormous lizard with them, and enters a mysterious “hollow star” recently fallen from the heavens. And it is there that our heroine finally discovers the secret of her history, and learns her true name at last…

Now, I realize that I seem to have given away a lot of the story line of The Birthgrave here, but trust me, what you’ve just read is merely the bare-bones outline of a truly epic journey; you wouldn’t believe how many plot details I haven’t mentioned! The book poses many questions along the way that help keep the reader fascinated and completely invested: Who is this unique woman? What is her background? Who were the Lost Ones, and what became of them? Why has our narrator been cursed by Karrakaz? Where did her powers spring from? Does her story transpire on Earth or on another world? (There are Earth animals such as goats, sheep, cats and horses in evidence, but who knows?) Why does our heroine seem to keep attracting trios of men to act as her protectors? (Not that she really needs them!) Our narrator makes for a truly fascinating lead character, at once strong, self-willed, sympathetic, pitiable, mysterious and tough; a warrior, archer and swordswoman, all in one petite package! While getting deeper into The Birthgrave, the thought that will most likely occur to most readers is that this really is an astonishingly fine first effort … especially since it was penned by someone in her mid-20s! It is a remarkably self-assured debut, and a complete success. Equally astonishing is the fact that numerous publishers actually turned Tanith Lee’s manuscript down before Donald A. Wollheim at DAW gave it the green light. And then, the book went on to earn that Nebula nomination. Go figure! This lengthy work is the type of fully realized novel that you can immerse yourself in for days; it is a terrific feat of world building, unnamed as that world might be. Marion Zimmer Bradley, in her intro to the DAW edition, claims to have read Lee’s manuscript in five hours (a rate of 80+ pages/hour), which strikes me as being way too fast a rate for savoring the book’s manifold fine qualities and delicious use of language. Still, I can well agree with MZB’s initial thought upon turning over the final page: “Wow! Oh, wow!”

I mentioned Lee’s wonderful use of language just now, and her lucid yet detailed prose, often poetic, is surely one of her novel’s major selling points. Thus, the reader might expect to encounter sentences such as these: “The sky was indigo, choked and bruised with hate; the air seemed filled with the wings of beating blue eagles.” “Like the numbed white snow that would not break for spring, so my life seemed hardened and numbed by a covering I could not break.” “…the trunks stood up like dim dark pillars irregularly carved, and supporting moonlight on their latticed arms.” “The night was sliding down behind the land on ruffled wings, and the bitter cold of the sea-dawn fastened on me.” And on and on, irresistibly pulling the reader in. My thanks to Ms. Lee also for turning me on to such words as “judder,” “veridian” and “fulvous.” And I love the Lost Ones’ term for any inferior people: shlevakin! Almost sounds like Yiddish, doesn’t it? I look forward to calling somebody that one day!

As might be expected, Tanith’s book contains any number of wonderfully well-executed action sequences, as well as moments of startling dramatic intensity and gasp-inducing revelation. Among them: the violent and bloody attack on the merchant caravan; the Sagare chariot race; the attacks on the Purple Valley cities of Orash and Belhannor; the frenzied escape from Belhannor; the discovery of Asren’s ultimate fate; our heroine’s battle to the death with her husband Vazkor; the births of Tathra’s and our heroine’s children, and what becomes of them; the exploration of the Lost Ones’ deserted city; the fight with the monstrous lizard; our narrator’s experiences inside the “hollow star”; and finally, the revelation of her past, and her remembrance of her actual name. What a spectacular TV miniseries or series of cinematic blockbusters this one book could be turned into! But it is the chariot race that I would like to pay special homage to here. It is a remarkable sequence that could have easily served as the action climax in most books, and yet that occurs at this novel’s one-third mark. In it, eight two-man chariots compete on a long, hazardous oval, replete with gateway obstacles, gushing water, pillars of fire, and deep, treacherous pits … run while the teams’ archers shoot arrows at one another! Amazingly, it is a chariot race that makes the classic one in the 1959 film Ben-Hur seem tame by comparison; an absolute tour de force for Tanith Lee, as she describes this eight-way contest both lucidly and thrillingly. Talk about your “Wow! Oh, wow!” Some truly bravura work here!

For the rest of it, The Birthgrave also offers up some pleasing moments of shocking grotesquerie, such as the sight of those merchant-caravan soldiers in their skull masks, and the scene in which three young women in the village of the Dark Ones are shown fornicating with a giant reptile (thankfully, not quite as large as the dragon-sized one that our heroine later encounters!). The book has a very high body count, and readers should be advised not to get overly attached to any single character in it! Lee’s novel also offers up some nicely done political machinations, and well-handled war plotting. Its introduction of the sci-fi element toward the conclusion may strike some as being shoehorned in, but is actually telegraphed and set up on at least three occasions during our narrator’s tale. Personally, I found that sci-fi segment pretty wonderful. And oh … in a bit of prescience 50 years before the fact, our narrator tells us, regarding Vazkor and his corrupt government in Ezlann:

…What other men he had set in high places, I did not yet know, but I guessed there would be many, all with a taste for command and for the good things it brought, very loyal to the man who had given them so much, and too stupid to see even further profit in overthrowing their benefactor…

Don’t those words seem more relevant than ever in the political climate of today?

If there is one single quibble that I might levy against Tanith Lee’s extraordinary work here, it is the nature of the psychological explanation employed to clarify our narrator’s mental state. Viewers of such wonderful films as Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil (also 1945) will perhaps be familiar with the kind of improbable psychological explanations I’m referring to here. Still, again, all those details were telegraphed all along the way, and do manage to hang together logically. For an author who supposedly just made stuff up as she progressed in her novels, with no definite idea of where she was headed, Tanith Lee’s work here shows a very clear through path from beginning to end. By the conclusion of her first novel for adults, all of our questions regarding our narrator have been answered, but many questions as to the world she inhabits remain. I suppose that I will just have to proceed on to Book #2 in the trilogy, Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, to find out more. Stay tuned…

~Sandy Ferber