Not long ago, I was given a whole set of Piers Anthony’s Space Tyrant books by a well-meaning friend who thought my recently-decimated library could use a boost. (He cannot have read them). Being unacquainted with Piers Anthony as a writer, and ever a sucker for space-opera, I eagerly dove into the first volume, Refugee.  

Ye Gods. . .Where do I begin?

To pilfer a passage from Roger Ebert, I hated this book. Hated, hated, hated it. It is the worst book I have read in quite some time.  Worse than The Residential Tenancies Act. It is depraved. It is despicable. It is, at times, laughably amateurish. For all this, its author is highly successful, and continues to sell books to a devoted fanbase. This to me, is astonishing.

I was actually moved to write an Amazon review for it. Here’s what I put:

“What we have here is a character who: watches his sister raped, watches his mother raped, watches his father disemboweled, and only towards the end remembers that he has a laser pistol in his possession?

This is a book in which the plot largely depends on the idiocy of its characters. Whose staggering ineptitude and incompetence, painstakingly conveyed in three hundred pages of the most clumsy, leaden prose I've ever read, has one screaming at the pages in exasperation.  The only plotting Anthony seems to care about is piling miseries upon his characters, contriving ever worse ways for them to suffer and sadistically depriving them of any agency. It becomes apparent early on there will be no pay-off, no redemption, not even sensible action.

Don't read this expecting fun space-opera: what you get rather is a kind of pulp torture porn, replete with rape, cannibalism, incest, pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia references.”   

I’m not joking – each of those show up. Not all are portrayed as graphically as the near constant rapes, but they are alluded to, in passages so brief and so pointless, yet no less stomach-churningly nasty for it, one wonders why the author bothered with them, unless churning the reader’s stomach was exactly what Anthony wanted. Was it? To heap violence and depravity on the reader until they cry “Uncle”? I shudder to think what Anthony’s horror fiction must be like…

To be clear, the problem here is not that Anthony is sexually explicit, nor that he wants to bring up certain topics (though to no apparent purpose). For serious writers, no topic is out of bounds. But subjects like rape need to be handled with incredible sensitivity. Rape is real, and ruins who-knows how many millions of lives. It is not something to be trifled with. It is not a plot device. It is not motivation for vengeful characters. It is not a short-cut to gravitas, and it is most certainly not a subject of titillation.  It is not to be handled lightly.

Even if I grant Anthony the benefit of the doubt, and assume he wanted to write a serious book about a serious subject (albeit very misleadingly marketed by the publisher), an author who includes lines like “I’m here to keep you from getting raped – unless you want to” rather seems to lack the requisite sensitivity. Any male writer who presumes to speculate on the female reaction to the experience of rape – not just an individual character but the generalized universal experience – is taking upon himsel on an almost impossibly delicate task. Does this sound delicate to you?  The sheer ineptitude of this work keeps it from sounding anything but sleazy.

Which brings us to the laser-pistol. This is not a small detail. When fictional characters consistently, even insistently, fail to follow the most obvious course of action or even attempt the most basic solution to their problems, or when an author has them simply forget the options available to them. . .at some point you can’t suspend your disbelief anymore, you can’t believe in the characters anymore, you can’t give the author any more free passes.

In a bazaar reversal of Chekov’s law, Anthony’s protagonist is provided with a laser pistol, which, despite constant threats to him and his loved ones, it never occurs to him use. It’s not like he forgets about it either. On something like seven different occasions (I lost count) after each successive family member is raped, killed or mutilated, he laments “if only I had my pistol”. By which point the reader can only scream at the page:

“Well why the fuck don’t you???”    

 

Anthony provides no reason. There are any number of narrative devices he could have invoked – the charge was low, the kid was a bad shot, the pirates shot first – but he doesn’t bother. I can’t help thinking he’s just taking the piss; setting up audience expectation in a painfully obvious way, only to violate it. It’s all fine and good to violate audience expectation, except when it makes no fucking sense. It erases empathy for a character who won’t even attempt to defend his family. It’s a massive distraction. And, if it is a piss-take, then it’s not taking this most serious of subjects seriously is it?

How seriously can the author be taking things when he has the protagonist announce the death of thirty people with “there’s good news, and there’s bad news”. Could this line be anything other than a joke?

Or are we to believe that a small community of widows and orphans, having lost thirty of their adults on a dangerous alien planet, would send thirty more out after them? Really? Really???

Or when the protagonists mother goes missing on this alien world: does he really wait to refurbish his spaceship before going to search for her? (he has a skiff by this time – again, it doesn’t occur to this idiot to use the technology at his disposal).

 I could go on and on. Are there really no such things as radios in this world? Why can’t they lock their spaceship doors again? What the hell was the point of that fake but not really fake hijacking at the end? Just about nothing makes sense. Those are just the plot points – I haven’t even started on the prose style yet. I don’t to know how a hoverboard works, I only need to know if the bad guy fell off. . .

Bad plotting, bad prose and impossibly problematic subject matter form a kind of unholy trinity, feeding off and enforcing each other until it all snowballs into an avalanche of “yuck”. It’s not that good writing would have saved the book, but I can’t help thinking that a better writer might not have been quite so ham-fisted with it. The prose certainly makes it all the more cringe-worthy.  The plotting and sheer implausible idiocy of the characters makes it impossible to take anything within it seriously. And this fixation on rape and pedophilia only ever comes across as creepy.

There’s another thing too. Piers Anthony is not a nobody. He is (or was) a very big selling writer. And a significant part of his audience appear to be young people. I remember Piers Anthony’s Xanth books prominently displayed in my Grade 7 library, and eagerly devoured by the 12 and 13 year girls in my class.  So. . .an eager young reader relishes the fantasies of Xanth, spots this title in the bookstore, with an astronaut on the cover and her favourite author’s name in exciting Buck Rogers front. . . you see where I’m going here? There’s no reason writers who’ve written for children can’t cross-over into adult fiction, or vice-versa.   (Roald Dahl comes to mind). But when a book is marketed as space opera, a genre widely believed to be harmless and kid friendly, and there’s no attempt to represent the contents of this book accurately, it does feel like something sinister has gone down. A trojan horse if you will.

Perhaps Anthony can’t help how his books are marketed. But he did write the damn thing. . .

To what extent are we bound to artist intent when we adapt their work? 

I am inclined to think that our freedom here is not unlimited. It is very very broad of course, and we want to avoid slavish imitation, and of course we need to take modern sensibilities into account. But I do not think we can ignore context completely. It behooves us to understand what a work meant to it's own time and place, before we force our own tastes and values upon it. 

Context matters. Realism is all fine and good, but I'm not convinced a graphic gang-rape scene really enriched "the William Tell Overture". I think Rossini's intention here should have been more carefully considered. 

Performers of operas and plays do indeed need to try new things, and do indeed have a difficult task in making old works relevant to modern audiences, but I'm not sure they have tabula rasa. It can only be made so relateable. Let's face it: Opera, and Symphonic music, and ELizabethan drama are not immediately relateable to modern audiences. If they were, they would be filled with pop music, and spoken in modern English. At some point it needs to be acknowledged that these are older forms, created in different times for different audiences. Good art is eternal, but it is also of its time, and we ignore it at our peril. 

I suppose the issue comes up most often in adaptations of Shakespeare. Most productions these days I would wager (though it'd be a dangerous wager to make considering how often they're performed) opt for some kind of anachronistic performance, setting them in recognizably modern, or at least much more recent settings. I'm not sure exactly why - every director and set designer probably has a different idea, but I suspect it has something to do with Shakespeare's perceived universality (that, and the extreme ugliness of Elizabethan fashions). 

This raises all kind of issues. Some interpretations work, and some do not. I enjoyed Baz Lehrman's "Romeo and Juliet" but despised Julie Taymar's "Titus". I felt one respected the subject matter and the other did not.I had no trouble with the introduction of guns into a tale of gang-violence, but saw no point in the addition of arcade machines and disco balls in the latter. It would be absurd to suggest that every future production should be just like the Globe Theatre's strictly historical enactments (an argument applied by some Baroque musicians to their own art), but does that mean we can do absolutely anything we want with the text? Could Romeo and Juliet work in an age of texting? Could Henry V be set in Paschendale, Normandy, or Falujah, or the Star Wars universe? (Let's try it and find out!)

I suppose it depends. Let's look at two plays. "Hamlet" is almost always modernized. "Macbeth" far less so. (And don't be a smart alec and go on about some indie college production you just got back from. . .). I think it's because many people recognize that time and place is important to "Macbeth" in a way that it isn't for "Hamlet". Nobody cares that Hamlet is set in Medieval Denmark; it is generally understood that the core of the play lies elsewhere, in the psychology of the character. So Hamlet can be adapted to just about any setting imaginable and lose none of its power.

Macbeth though. . . I saw one updated Machbeth, (with Patrick Stewart) set in what looked like Soviet Russia. In grim bunkers and military hospitals. It looked like one of the "Hostel" movies. It didn't work. For one thing, the Soviet setting imposes on it a whole set of associations that aren't really supported by the text. I think that matters. 

Akira Kurosawa moved the action to feudal Japan in "Throne of Blood", and it was brilliant. THe Scottish play worked ideally amongst the samurai. So the "place" is clearly not what matters, but the "time" - it was still very much an ancient, historical, mysterious setting. 

Macbeth needs to take place in a world where ghosts exist, and where witch's prophesies are taken seriously. Hamlet saw ghosts as well, but Hamlet spends most of the play pretending to be insane, and is widely suspected to not have been pretending. Hamlet has been performed as a one act monologue by the schizophrenic inmate of a lunatic asylum. It's a modern interpretation, but the text does support this interpretation. Hamlet is so much about psychology and inner struggle that its ghosts can be easily brought into the modern era. But Macbeth's ghosts are actually ghosts, and need an age fit for ghosts. If psychology lay at the heart of Hamlet, superstition is the core of Macbeth, and does not lend itself to more enlightened ages. The Dark Age is the proper home for Macbeth. It could be Scotland's or Japan's, but either way should be in a time where such a tale could be believed, when the social constraints of civilization were that much weaker, and race memories of the caves and trees that much fresher. If it can be set in dark, misty forests, so much the better. You could never set Macbeth in a discotheque. Or, you shouldn't anyway.

When we we adapt a text, we submit ourselves to the will of the text, not the other way around. Hubris will not serve us well.

(Of course, the moment I post all this, no fewer than two major anachronistic Macbeths pop up in London, and I found yet a third in my local library. Well, I never said it never happened. . .)