Dragons Den John Bricklayer
Lynne Pruskowski
This book packs more ethnics than Ellis Island. They have emigrated from all the melting pots of story, and here they are in Babel, which is very much like the Manhattan of 1910 (and other years) transfigured into an enormity of Edifice: diced, braided, mirrored, eschered, bigger inside than out: pure urban fantasy. Here is the final list of some of the inhabitants of this Edifice that Michael Swanwick gives us, just a few pages from the end of The Dragons of Babel, which shares the same technofantaflux world as The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993) but very little else, beyond chutzpah and cunning alarums:
Up and down the seventeen boroughs of Babel Will [who is the protagonist of all he surveys] let his consciousness flow from haint to troll and dwarf to stickfella, through hobthrushes, nocnictas, and night-gaunts, street-corner wise guys, traffic cops, kitty-witches, milchdicks, a russalka pretending to hump the pole in a titty bar, cynocephali, onis, a cluricaun dying in a small room above a bar, mawkies, coin clippers, pastry chefs, rogues and innocents, opportunistic weaklings, corrupt lawyers and saintly plumbers, clabber-snappers, vodniks, longshoremen-poets, a street-sweeper spending his last thirteen dollars on lottery tickets, igoshas, itchikitchies, muggers and remittance men, red-diaper babies, bricklayers, heartbreakers, commodities brokers, a desperate klude changing to her dog form before raiding a restaurant dumpster, haberdashers, fishmongers, bouncers, lexicographers, a korigan dreaming of bygone days on the Broadway stage, Ukrainians and Ruthenians, laboratory inspectors, proud hags and war-scarred battleaxes, nixies, nymphs, heiresses, kinderofenfrauen, foolish virgins, doting grannies, hopeful monsters.
Will le Fey is born and raised in a country village as war looms between the West, where he resides, and the East, whose war dragons enthrall him as they shatter the air overhead on the very first page. One of them is brought down by a basilisk and the crippled creature/weapon takes over the village. It selects Will to be its voice, infiltrating his mind (as a very nasty drug might) and addicting him to its imperious inner voice. Any reader of modern fantasy wrought to its uttermost may assume, safely, that the inner voice of the dragon will literally inhabit Will for the rest of his life, uttering itself and him in various contexts with a suddenness and complexity of consequence far too complex for metaphor.
After morally debasing experiences as numinous factotum of the dragon, Will begins his long escape (or immurement) and climb (or descent) to the throne of the empire of the East, which is centred in the Breugelesque angelcake of Babel: that upended, phallic, ratking Manhattan. There is a lot of Berliny cabaret sex spooking the nooks and crannies of the story (any integration of sex into personal growth, or any other YA implications of the first pages of Babel are soon scrubbed, and we soon lose any sense that he is any age in particular) and a lot of death and betrayal, but any synopsis of a tale whose surface is so seamy with riches, and whose inner structure is so learned about the worlds of story it knits together, might lose itself in fractals. So dazzled at times is Will himself that he suffers overload, like an overfull memory stick, and at one point experiences "a profound desire to be rewritten that was so strong as to almost be a prayer: Great Babel, mother of cities, take me in, absorb me, dissolve me, transform me. For just this once, let one plus one not equal two. Make me into someone else. Make that someone everything I am not."
John Clute (cl...@midcoast.com) has been writing SF and fantasy criticism since the 1960s, and has been involved in writing encyclopedias since the 1970s. His novel Appleseed (2001) was a New York Times Notable Book in 2002. His most recent book is The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror. He is currently working on a third edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and preparing a volume of reviews, Houston Do You Read.
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