Book Report: Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers

March 24, 2010 at 12:48 pm (Book reports)
Tags: character development, gender, Jay Lake, Trial of Flowers

I didn’t want to make this into a “where are all the women?” post. I like other work of Lake’s that I’ve read, so I’ve been struggling not to let the dearth of female characters in this book color my reading of it. But it’s been hard for me to connect with this book.

Sure, part of that has to do with there not being anyone of my gender to relate to, but mostly it’s that Lake hasn’t created likable characters. That’s the point, and he does an admirable job of creating more sympathy than I would have expected for these deeply flawed men who are each trapped by their own personal nightmares.

The three main characters are all dealing with their own pasts, though sometimes it seemed like those pasts were only there only as place markers for characterization. Jason, for example, must be twisted because he seems to get a kick out of torturing people (I know this because it was mentioned once or twice), and he lost his father in a public, humiliating way (BUT WHAT THE HELL ARE SOUL BOTTLES AND WHAT DID THEY HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING?). Imago is a debtor who has a mother he doesn’t like for some vague reason. Bijaz, for all the degradation of soul and body, is understandable in part because he’s forced to deal with the fact that his entire life has been twisted by ideology. He’s a true believer who is crushed out of his belief, which is a character type that I always find compelling. Each find their redemption by the end of the book, breaking out of their own selfishness for the greater good.

The crux of the novel is the intrusion of the “noumenal,” the magical and paranormal, into the everyday world. It is a novel of politics, of fat landed politicians doing nothing while the people are daily terrorized by their Old Gods. Invading armies are rumored to be marching on the city (although the reader isn’t certain for the first 2/3 of the book whether or not they’re coming or just rumors), and a self-important debtor decides to revive the office of Lord Mayor in order to escape debtor’s prison.

Eventually this compiles itself into an allegory of light and darkness and sacrifice. The book is compared to Perdido Street Station (crazy painfully good), City of Saints & Madmen (haven’t read it yet) and The Etched City (among my favorite books). Yes, it has the same flavors of a brutal decadent world that these books do, but to me the comparison seemed more like eating sugar-free peach Jell-O instead of climbing up the tree and eating a fat sun-ripe peach fresh off the branch with the juice so sickly sweet and running down your elbows….

So, where are the women?

No, not every novel needs to be an equally balanced feminist manifesto, but Lake has created a world that is extraordinarily hostile to women. Why are there no women in power? Because in the world of the City Imperishable women are silent, they are not expected to be anything more than mothers, sisters, barmaids, and blow-up dolls. The main characters reactions to the women around them shows this–Jason almost laughs to find that the woman who just treated him considers herself a physician, because women just aren’t doctors. Fortunately she’s extremely self-effacing (I hope ironic?) “I am no one, a woman of shadows” (118).

I actually picked this book up a couple of years ago and read the back, only to think that it looked way too “Manly Men do Manly Things” for my tastes. When I got around to reading it this time I was at least thirty pages in before I realized I hadn’t been introduced to a single female character. Not one word had been spoken in a woman’s voice, and not even one single barmaid had stepped into view.

Like I said, Lake has created a world in which women are systematically silenced, and I like to think that in a way he’s doing it deliberately. He calls attention to this without making it a talking point of the book, which I appreciate,

The first female character shows up on page 43. She’s not pretty, and hardly feminine: “She was hard to look up at–too tall, too thin, clad in dark gray leather, with hair the color of rotten iron and a lined face with eyes as gray as her clothing” (43). She’s Biggest Sister, the leader of the shadow women’s crime league called the Tribade. Lake gives her a quick feminist speech on page 51 (my favorite line is “But you swing meat between your legs, which is the first requirement for bearing a chain of office in this city.”)

This is a woman who falls more into the category of “strange, unbalanced antisocial fighter character with deeply unsettling powers that are impossible to put a finger on” rather than “woman.” She has deliberately worked against her femininity by cutting off her own breasts (though she still wears little fake-breast bags of sand for some reason?), and by her actions. She flits in and out of the novel, coming out for some dominatrix action and generally making the men uneasy with her shark-like, knife-blade, malicious grin.

The next female character to walk onstage isn’t until page 144. I’m not counting the (to my memory) two females with quick speaking lines and two or three women who briefly crossed the street behind the main characters or served them coffee or whatnot, because if these women existed in the novel it was only in the mind of the main characters. They were evaluated, for the most part, solely on the basis on their looks and fuckability. “She would have been pretty in a fragile way as a full woman, (163)” Imago thinks of his female boxed dwarf assistant.

Jason’s sister appears on page 144, having long ago sold herself to a Tokhari trader, and now returned triumphant as their leader (sounds like it was a good deal for her to leave the City’s repression, if the Tokhari are egalitarian enough to be led by a woman). After her appearance, other women begin to come out of the woodwork for bit parts.

All in all….

I wasn’t the biggest fan. I often felt like the plot points were clutching at straws (though I get that impression from a lot of “The Essence of the World is Out Of Place and We Must Make It Right” novels, and I doubt I’ll read anything else in the City Imperishable world. I’m looking forward to reading something else by Jay Lake, though, because I really liked his prose. I’ll be sure to report back.