Here Be Dragons (32 page)

Numerous doors between the street zone and the undercity are mentioned in the narrative, most of them merely in passing. The door under the patch of sunflowers has already been discussed, but two other crossings are described in the text in detail. When Lydea searches for Mag, she enters through an old, dilapidated shop from which Faey takes her to an illusory chamber on the bank of the dark river. Not only are its walls “sprigged with painted violets,” the chamber is filled with potted plants (108). These plants become emblematic for the room, recurring in the text during Faey and Lydea's discussion there until, eventually, the sorceress disbands the illusion. During their conversation, Faey fans herself with leaves from the plants, nibbles them, and finally lets them wither when the illusion is removed (110–12, 132). Constantly, the reader's attention
is drawn back to the plants until they disappear, once Faey has made up her mind to let Lydea enter her house. In this way, the plants become associated with the liminal nature of the “leafy chamber” (131), highlighting Lydea's crossing from the street zone to the zone where Faey resides.

The tutor encounters a different border marker during his crossing with Mag. They meet

in a small, leaf-choked courtyard surrounded by empty buildings. A century ago they had been an inn and its stables and carriage house. Now, roofs were sunken under the weight of moss and rain; […] Those who needed Faey made their way through drifts of leaves and shadows and fallen roof beams to the cupboard door beneath the stairs. (203)

While probably not the most convenient of doors to Faey's undercity, it certainly suits the tutor's passion for history. The dilapidated buildings show the ravages of time; nature has gone feral, “choking” the courtyard and weighing down the roof. It is a place on the border between the zones, situated in one but only visited by those people who have business in the other.

Across the four zones, a field of power stretches between the two poles. Christine Mains remarks on how a split occurs between positive and negative power in Ombria. Domina Pearl wields power from the top of the palace above the city, just as Faey does from her mansion in the undercity. Mains observes how the two women are a catalyst-figure split in two: even if the regent has preserved the same appearance for generations and Faey changes hers several times a day, they are in many ways similar.
⁷⁸
Taking Mains's observation further, we can examine how their realms mirror each other. These two locales are “edifices,” a type of fantasy setting that dominates its landscape and to which there is always more than meets the eye.
⁷⁹
In Ombria, one edifice towers above the city, another lurks below, each hiding a labyrinth at its heart. Faey occupies the border between the city's present and its past; the Black Pearl can be found on the border between Ombria's present and its future. This future is split into the despair caused by the cruel regent and the desperate hope offered by the dark doorway at the top of the secret palace. The impenetrable gate cannot be opened through most of the novel, acting as a terminus rather than a border—the only future available remains one of despair. Through the doorway, Lydea springs into “nowhere” with Kyel (266); and when Ducon is cornered there, Domina Pearl offers him
the choice between the “quick predictable death here, or the long fall into the unknown or the palace cellar, whichever rises to meet you first” (283–84).

Once Ducon opens the gate to Ombria's shadow, the unknown becomes known; the terminus becomes a border across which Ducon's father arrives with his forces to save the city from the oppression of the Black Pearl. This border is similarly associated with nature. The doorway is “distinguished by painted irises twining up the carved wooden posts. One post was cracked, bent under the shifting weight of the ceiling, the paint long warped away. The other still bloomed irises in delicate greens and purples” (32; see also 212, 288). The differences between the doorposts hint at differences between the two worlds on either side of the gate. The shadow city is not simply a copy of Ombria, it is something other. Through the narrative, we are led to suspect that this other place is, in fact, better, and the similarity between
Ombria
and
umbra
suggests that real and shadow are not absolutes—the cities are shadows of each other. “The shadow world is your hope,” Ducon's father tells him. “When you no longer despair, you no longer need us” (286). The cracked and bent post signifies an Ombria troubled by Domina Pearl's misuse of power, while the delicate green and purple irises represent the hope of the shadow city. This tie to nature through representation is further strengthened by other sensations experienced at the black opening. Through the gate, Ducon hears the sound of rain, bird-cry, and wind soughing through tall trees, and sometimes the air on the threshold smells of grass, slow rain, and lavender (212, 32; see also 285). Just as the fragrance of
athelas
is used to evoke nature in Minas Tirith, the smells coming through the gate evoke nature in Ombria. It is not primarily the shadow city that is associated with nature in this way, however, but the doorway itself. The irises decorate the doorposts, and it is
on the threshold
that the fragrance of nature reaches Ducon (32).

Of the four cities examined in this chapter, Ombria is the most self-contained. The setting is concentrated on the city's four zones, with a city limit or surrounding wilderness barely present. Brief mentions are made of farm-and forestland around the city, but the focus is on the land's value as productive units (85, 219). The sea is of some importance to trade, and Domina Pearl's upsetting that trade—through piracy and, later, legislation—constitutes a minor plot element. The border between city and sea is down by the port, with its rotten piers, rough docks, and (implied) prostitution. From beyond the sea, strange plants and animals
with magical or poisonous properties come to Ombria, and they are used by both Faey and Domina Pearl (40, 142, 253). Moreover, it is to the distant islands that the tutor is banished when his powerful ally has been destroyed (296). The sea is also invoked as part of the scenery outside the city, but left just as nondescript as the palace gardens. In
Ombria in Shadow
, the sea is not even a backdrop against which action takes place; it is what Clute refers to as
water margins
, the “unmapped and ultimately unmappable regions which surround a central empire” and which “fade indefinitely into the distance.”
⁸⁰
The sea, to all intents and purposes, lies not beyond the city limits; it is the city limit.

When the enemy has been vanquished in
The Lord of the Rings
, the rightful ruler takes the throne in Minas Tirith. Aragorn as King Elessar introduces more nature into his capital, making it a meeting place of nature and culture. Just as in Gondor's capital, nature is wanting in Ombria. When Ducon lets his charcoal imagine what lies on the other side of the dark portal, it draws him endless woods and streets lined with flower-decked windows. Ducon considers these pictures to be wishes or dreams of a “prosperous, perfect world, a city of ceaseless delights” (213), suggesting that Ombria, without forests and flowers, is imperfect. The shadow city, the embodiment of hope, also embodies the hope for something better than the real city, something with more nature. In that respect, however, Ombria is never “transformed into its shadow” in the way Mains suggests.
⁸¹
Certainly, the city now has a place for those characters who, in Mains's words, “existed precariously on the margins”; but even when hope is fulfilled, Ombria remains a city dominated by culture. Ducon is more concerned with repairing the piers, making the streets safe, and catching, feeding, and educating the street urchins (293) than in any way bringing nature into the city, the way Aragorn does. Rather than being an interface between nature and culture, Ombria remains a place where nature leads a liminal existence. This is particularly true in the palace, where the thresholds between the zones—shadow/real, hidden/visible, palace/city—are in various ways linked to nature, but it generally holds true throughout the city. It is nature that is controlled, tame, or just a set of cultural representations, and it exists not outside, inside, or with culture but somewhere in between.

• • •

Minas Tirith, Newford, New Crobuzon, Ombria—four fantasy cities with four different relations between nature and culture have been examined
in this chapter. The range of differences suggests a great variety of relations between the two domains. Although Minas Tirith and Newford suggest a binary opposition, favoring nature, none of the cities implies that equating one domain with good and the other with evil would be possible. In New Crobuzon and Ombria, no opposition even exists between the domains; in Miéville's city, the domains flow into each other, and neither is promoted in relation to the other. In McKillip's case, nature is not even a domain—the cultural domain is all that matters.

What the four cities all have in common, though, is that with each, the nature–culture relation mirrors some central concern. In
The Lord of the Rings
, the pervasive theme of stewardship and how to relate to the natural environment is reflected in the way in which the rightful king introduces nature to the sterile, cultural environment of the city. The Newford stories show nature linked to two similarly marginalized domains, those of social outsiders and magical beings, and the three domains are brought into focus in the various texts. New Crobuzon and other Bas-Lag cities blur the borders between nature and culture in the same way that Miéville's texts blend and dissolve other categories, mixing humans, animals, plants, and machines, treating science as magic and magic as science, and erasing the borders between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The plot in
Ombria in Shadow
is centered on the passage between the various zones that structure its urban setting, each crossing in some manner associated with the natural world.

Investigating the relation between nature and culture, as we can see from the four examples in this chapter, offers insights into what lies at the core of a work or world. The obvious question is, why? What is it about this particular relation that appears to be so intimately connected to such basic aspects of works?

As has been observed, one could argue that there is no way to separate nature and culture, that they do not stand in any opposition to each other.
⁸²
However, for ten thousand years, ever since humans first decided that the plants on
this
plot of land were worth protecting and, eventually, worth replacing once they had been harvested—in short, ever since we started farming—we have seen the world in terms of “nature” and “culture.”
⁸³
In the beginning, it might have been only in terms of “our garden” versus “the thieving birds” and “the annoying weeds,” but over the ages, the idea that we control some things and not others has become deeply ingrained as well as quite complex. Today, it has become part of the way most people see the world, especially in “Western civilization.”
We may consider there to be a difference, and an opposition, or we may believe this opinion to be a fallacy and the reason behind our environmental problems.
⁸⁴
In either case, we accept that the nature–culture opposition is a dominant and deep-seated view in our society.
⁸⁵
As such, it is hardly surprising to find this opposition expressed in works of fiction.

Nor is it surprising that the expression is rooted at the heart of the works' respective worldviews. Miéville's world is one of ubiquitous hybridization, where dichotomies are deconstructed, theses and antitheses synthesized, polarities mixed, and borders blurred. On every level in his world, opposites meet, combine, become something greater than the sum of their parts. Blending nature and culture and turning them into new, impossible, and thus fantastic settings spring from the same underlying thrust that drives the Bas-Lag novels. Miéville offers a thought experiment that, if accepted by his readers, takes them to a world that is radically different from the actual world, as most of us are used to perceiving it. If Tolkien is right that fantasy brings “recovery” and allows us to see things clearly, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity,”
⁸⁶
then Miéville's thought experiment allows us to see the world in terms of combinations rather than oppositions.

The Newford stories offer a very different kind of recovery. Rather than ridding the fantasy world of opposites, these stories force the reader to shift focus, to pay attention to the part of the duality that is discriminated against. Like Miéville, de Lint creates a distinct worldview; but it is distinct in
what
we are looking at, not
how
we look at it. His world-view is politically motivated, and the recovery it offers is an awareness of how we, who are part of society and of culture, treat our opposites. These opposites are, in Newford, social outsiders and the natural world. The link between their domains and the domain of magic, fairies, ghosts, animal spirits—in short, of the fantastic—turns fantasy into social critique and social critique into fantasy, and the nature–culture relation thus becomes part of the political core of the stories.

In
The Lord of the Rings
, the narrative constantly returns to the question about the “proper” relation between nature and culture, and the answer is invariably stewardship. The natural world is subordinated to culture, whether hobbit, elven, human, dwarven, or entish; but culture is obliged to care for nature. Nature put to cultural use and kept under cultural control—tame nature—is the ideal; both wilderness and environmental degradation are problems that must be solved, faults that must
be rectified. The central battle between good and evil thus becomes a conflict between responsible stewardship and its absence. That this central theme expresses itself in a nature–culture relation that associates the right ruler with natural restoration simply goes along with the more obvious environmental themes, according to which evil means uglifying and destroying the environment (in Isengard, Mordor, or the Shire).
⁸⁷
Middle-earth may seem to offer a wilderness to explore, but the beauty it recovers for us is the beauty of a park or a garden, an orchard or a field of golden corn.