When I think of the UK’s best writers of science fiction, absolute best that is, since the days of the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926… I suspect some of my choices would be disputed by other people. For one thing, three names which would definitely appear in my top five are Gwyneth Jones, DG Compton and Mary Gentle. Compton has not published anything since 1996; Jones since 2019, although I hope to see more from her; and Gentle has been quiet since 2012, but apparently has a new novel due out later this year. (I’m looking forward to it.)
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye (2006, UK), however, is over fifteen years old — and I’ll admit I hadn’t realised how many years had passed since I bought the book and eventually started reading it. Given how much I admire Gentle’s work, you’d think I’d have cracked open its covers somewhat sooner… But, like Ash: A Secret History (2000, UK), this novel is a pretty hefty hardback, so much so it was, again like Ash: Secret History, split into several volumes for publication in the US. (For the record, Ash: A Secret History clocks in at a whopping 1120 pages and Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is around half its size, at 663 pages, but still quite substantial.)
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is also set in the same alternate history as Ash: A Secret History, although some fifty years earlier.
The title refers to a hermaphrodite who, as the book opens, has recently been manumitted by the king of Taraconensis, a Spanish kingdom — where he/she* had grown up as Court Freak. He/she travels to Carthage, after an attempted murder by his/her mother. In the fifteenth-century of the novel, Carthage is ruled by the Visigoths, and North Africa is in perpetual darkness, known as the Penitence (the novella Under the Penitence (2004, UK) forms, I believe, the opening chapters of Ilario: The Lion’s Eye).
(* Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is a first-person narrative, but Ilario is referred to throughout using both male and female pronouns — and indeed presents as one gender or the other at different times.)
Ilario travels to Carthage to learn a new way of painting, the New Art (ie, the introduction of perspective). Within hours of arrival, he/she is sold back into slavery, but is fortunate in being purchased by an Egyptian book-buyer. Pharaonic Egypt is now based in Istanbul, called New Alexandria, and, yes, the famous library is there too. And Rekhmire’ isn’t really a book-buyer, but a spy for the Alexandrians. He is also a eunuch. And he treats Ilario pretty much like a free person.
Ilario’s mother makes another attempt on his/her life, prompting the Carthaginian authorities to send a warning to Taraconensis… and kicking off a political crisis prompted by Carthaginian designs on southern Europe. Ilario provides a convenient excuse. Ilario and Rekhmire’ flee Carthage for Rome, where he/she gets to study under a — the — master of the New Art. But Ilario’s past catches up with him/her, and everyone decamps to Venice. Assassins are now on their trail — and, just to confuse matters, Ilario is also pregnant.
Much of Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is a travelogue — Carthage to Rome to Venice to New Alexandria — and the history of the Mediterranean, and its differences to the history we know. There’s also the political situation behind the assassination attempts on Ilario. And his/her motherhood. Plus a romance, of sorts. It’s perhaps not the most exciting mix, but it’s a fascinating world Gentle has built. And Ilario is a singular protagonist.
I’m normally a bit of a purist when it comes to science fiction and fantasy, but I’m not entirely sure in which genre Gentle could be said to be writing. Her fiction — most of it, at least — seems to displays characteristics of both. The world of both Ash: A Secret History and Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is rigorously worked out alternate history, yet there is magic of a form present in it. The same is true of Gentle’s White Crow novels — both Rats and Gargoyles (1990, UK) and The Architecture of Desire (1991, UK) are based around hermetic science, but Left to His Own Devices (1994, UK), the third book of the sequence, is near-future cyberpunk. It’s one of the reasons I consider Gentle such an important, and good, genre writer.
Ilario: The Lion’s Eye is not a great novel — its pace is somewhat uneven, some of its jeopardy seems a little too easily resolved, and it seems weirdly ambivalent about slavery (I don’t think Gentle holds that view, but the novel, in the person of Ilario, defends slavery several times) — but it is a very good novel. It’s also a talky novel, surprisingly so given the amount of background it’s carrying. But, perhaps most surprising for a twenty-first century science fiction novel, it ends happily. It is, essentially, hopeful. There are compromises and deals that need to be made, and are indeed made, but the novel ends with a conclusion that gives its cast, for the most part, what they desire or need.
Ash: A Secret History’s nested narrative structure was a thing of beauty, but the straightforward linear narrative of Ilario: The Lion’s Eye does make it seem the book is little more than an exploration, a working-out of some of the details, of the world Gentle created for the earlier novel. It is, as mentioned previously, fascinating in its own right, but there’s something about Gentle’s prose which lifts her fiction above that of most of her contemporaries. It’s not only detailed, it’s also visceral, with an uncommon focus on the senses. Gentle also has a trick of slipping between past and present tenses, which gives her prose an enviable immediacy.
It’s true, I admire her books as much for the quality of her prose as I do the originality of her world-building. But isn’t that the thing about genre fiction? World-building is a feature of science fiction or fantasy, it should not be its only metric of quality. Piss-poor prose should not be ignored…
Even if it has been for many of the genre’s past greats.
[I like to format my posts so the book’s cover art is aligned to the left and the text wraps around it. Medium, like every other US tech company, however, recently decided to “improve” its users’ experience by removing functionality, specifically the means to align pictures. That is not improving user experience, FFS. I stopped using Wordpress because they implemented a new editor that had half the functionality of the old one. It looks like I may have to look for yet another platform…]
