I have just finished re-reading Tanith Lee's The Book of the Beast (1988) for the latest innumerable time. It's the second of her Secret Books of Paradys; it concerns a sexually transmitted demon of Assyrian origin, its introduction to the fifth-century Roman fort of Par Dis, and its outbreak after generations of dormancy in sixteenth-century Paradys. Each book of the quartet is themed by color: this is the green-and-purple book, relating recent events under the title "Eyes Like Emerald" and the late Roman backstory in the chapters "From the Amethyst." It has never been my favorite of the series, because I imprinted very heavily on the gender-bending primary colors of The Book of the Damned (1988), but the classical elements and the birdlike, lizardlike, shape-changing demon itself have always made me love it. It is also very weird about Judaism.
It's taken me years to be able to look at any of these books critically, because they weren't an influence on me so much as a wide-eyed rewriting: they were like reading fever dreams, smoky, liminal, transgressive, possessing. I read them my senior year of high school; I had just felt sexual desire for someone for the first time, and for a woman instead of the boyfriend I had agreed to go out with for what were classic stupid high school reasons, and I believe we talked once about the genderqueer vampire novella "Stained with Crimson" and my brain blew a fuse. (And I adore the covers by Wayne Barlowe: they look like the stories they come from and they look like dreams.) It does not surprise me that Lee's Jewish characters are exoticized, because almost everyone she writes about is. I'm wondering, though, if some of the ways in which her portrayal of Judaism strikes me as weird are not only because I'm Jewish,1 but because I'm American.
( There, too, other than the Jewish mezuzah, his door was guarded by a Grecian head of Hermes. )
Thoughts appreciated. I know I didn't get around to discussing Lee's depiction of the Assyrians, who appear only in the dreams of a Roman soldier who doesn't know what he's seeing. There are other doublings I would want to mention if this were a paper. I may need to do some more reading no matter what. First I need to sleep.
1. And therefore, among other reactions, pretty confident that I don't have an inherited racial antipathy to the Assyrians, because otherwise grad school would have caused me to explode.
2. Normally I can figure out where Lee gets her not-quite-historical names, but "Haninuh" has been puzzling me since high school. I expect to feel like an idiot when someone finally tells me what it's very slightly tweaked from.
3. It is evidently an important symbol of the Semitic East for Lee, because it appears as well in the short story "Sirriamnis" (1981), played by a Carthaginian slave-girl in a Greek port city: "I considered the harp, when I should have been considering my first move of the game, and after a while it came to me that there had been a bar across the lower body of the harp. It was more like the kinnor of the east—and then I remembered that Skiro had mentioned Ishtar in his praises, the Semitic Venus . . . The hands at the window went on and on, tirelessly dancing to the moon over the sea, as they had tirelessly skimmed the kinnor at supper."
4. Who converts to Judaism on the last page of the book, in a paragraph that actually annoys me in a way that the Orientalism doesn't appear to: "For themselves, the Jews were kind to him. Even in Paradys, in their hearts, they reckoned their way was the only one, and had grown used to the insults and cruelties this knack provoked. For the gentile who approached them from the night, innocent, quietly asking, they could not help but feel some wondering affection. And as he grew in stature among them, they came to speak of their foundling with pride." Tanith Lee, Jews don't have a monopoly on thinking their culture is best, and it's certainly not the reason anti-Semitism exists. That feels, in fact, like a form of genteel anti-Semitism itself: well, if they didn't make such a point of it, there wouldn't be any trouble. Otherwise the ending of the novel is quite sweet.
It's taken me years to be able to look at any of these books critically, because they weren't an influence on me so much as a wide-eyed rewriting: they were like reading fever dreams, smoky, liminal, transgressive, possessing. I read them my senior year of high school; I had just felt sexual desire for someone for the first time, and for a woman instead of the boyfriend I had agreed to go out with for what were classic stupid high school reasons, and I believe we talked once about the genderqueer vampire novella "Stained with Crimson" and my brain blew a fuse. (And I adore the covers by Wayne Barlowe: they look like the stories they come from and they look like dreams.) It does not surprise me that Lee's Jewish characters are exoticized, because almost everyone she writes about is. I'm wondering, though, if some of the ways in which her portrayal of Judaism strikes me as weird are not only because I'm Jewish,1 but because I'm American.
( There, too, other than the Jewish mezuzah, his door was guarded by a Grecian head of Hermes. )
Thoughts appreciated. I know I didn't get around to discussing Lee's depiction of the Assyrians, who appear only in the dreams of a Roman soldier who doesn't know what he's seeing. There are other doublings I would want to mention if this were a paper. I may need to do some more reading no matter what. First I need to sleep.
1. And therefore, among other reactions, pretty confident that I don't have an inherited racial antipathy to the Assyrians, because otherwise grad school would have caused me to explode.
2. Normally I can figure out where Lee gets her not-quite-historical names, but "Haninuh" has been puzzling me since high school. I expect to feel like an idiot when someone finally tells me what it's very slightly tweaked from.
3. It is evidently an important symbol of the Semitic East for Lee, because it appears as well in the short story "Sirriamnis" (1981), played by a Carthaginian slave-girl in a Greek port city: "I considered the harp, when I should have been considering my first move of the game, and after a while it came to me that there had been a bar across the lower body of the harp. It was more like the kinnor of the east—and then I remembered that Skiro had mentioned Ishtar in his praises, the Semitic Venus . . . The hands at the window went on and on, tirelessly dancing to the moon over the sea, as they had tirelessly skimmed the kinnor at supper."
4. Who converts to Judaism on the last page of the book, in a paragraph that actually annoys me in a way that the Orientalism doesn't appear to: "For themselves, the Jews were kind to him. Even in Paradys, in their hearts, they reckoned their way was the only one, and had grown used to the insults and cruelties this knack provoked. For the gentile who approached them from the night, innocent, quietly asking, they could not help but feel some wondering affection. And as he grew in stature among them, they came to speak of their foundling with pride." Tanith Lee, Jews don't have a monopoly on thinking their culture is best, and it's certainly not the reason anti-Semitism exists. That feels, in fact, like a form of genteel anti-Semitism itself: well, if they didn't make such a point of it, there wouldn't be any trouble. Otherwise the ending of the novel is quite sweet.
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