A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder Book

The problem with most Utopianists, as game designer Ken Levine points out, is that they don't take into account the nature of humanity. Instead, they lay an ideal on top of humanity, and because it is a nice idea, just assume that it will just automatically smooth everything out. But, of course, the world has always been full of nice ideas, and despite that fact, greed, ignorance, brutality, and lust always end up getting in the way.

But then, the Utopianists were some of the first fantasists, authors who created and explored strange, false world of representational ideas, the world of Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, and Morris' News From Nowhere --but alongside these were the satirists, those who created fantastical realms because of how effective such creations are when we want to mock the arbitrary traditions of our own world: Lucian's Storia Vera, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, or Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. In the end, De Mille's fantastical world has too little to do with reality to make it really interesting.

The book starts off rather promisingly, giving us some amusing characters and then rushing full-bore into life-or-death adventure in a strange, new land--anyoine who has read Burrough's John Carter of Mars books or Haggard's Quatermain stuff will recognize it immediately: our hero must learn to survive amongst the unpredictable, alien culture. Of course, De Mille was the one who did it first, and there is something to be said for that.

Unfortunately, he can't keep up the pace, and by the midway point, we're completely stagnated in goofy worldbuilding: the hero speaking at length to the natives about their world, then turning and speaking directly to the audience for a further chapter where he repeats everything. Then we break off to the frame story--a set of sailors reading this mysterious manuscript out loud--as they sit around theorizing what type of extinct creatures the narrator was describing, and whether the Antarctic race he encountered were the tenth tribe of the Jews or a race of Red Sea troglodytes, complete with a discussion of Hebrew phonemes.

Yet this culture isn't particularly interesting, even though it sometimes gets close--the idea of a culture that idealizes the poor and downtrodden, that thinks fondly of death and sees wealth as an evil is not really all that odd. Eventually, De Mille has his narrators mention that it sounds like Buddhism or the Ascetic Christian tradition that sprung up from that Indian mystical influence. Unfortunately, De Mille doesn't take cues form these cultures and add in details that make his little world unusual enough to be interesting, nor does the culture make much sense: the system which he describes seems to have no way of supporting itself as it is explained. Instead, like the Utopianists, he merely sets up a world that is the opposite of ours and never bothers to question how it might come about or why human beings would follow it, once it were established.

Of course, if it were just a bit of background info, lightly touched upon, the setting for an otherwise rip-snorting adventure, I might not mind so much, but since he spends chapter upon chapter trying to explain its nonsensical intricacies to us, its silliness and flaws cannot really be overlooked. Once again, I am reminded of my own person writing rule that it is better to imply than to explain, to show the world as it is through the action rather than sitting down and trying to explain it. The only thing that achieves is revealing to your audience all the holes in your ideas.

Then we head back to the frame story where the characters all talk about dumb and poorly-written the book is, and how it doesn't really make sense, though one gets the impression that De Mille is doing it in an attempt to be funny and clever. Then they start talking about the thematic meaning of the book, that even though the people in this culture have all the things we want, that we think will make us happy, they still aren't happy, and in fact they want all the stuff that we despise.

I suppose that would be a somewhat clever premise, but it isn't actually how the action or characters are set up. Since the culture is arbitrarily set up and (despite a lot of discussion on the subject) there's never any clear psychological reason for the characters to behave the way that they do, the satire falls rather flat. De Mille evokes Swift by name, talking about representational satires that reveal something about our world to us, but he simply isn't funny or clever enough to pull it off, and so it just becomes the same allegory over and over, occasionally interrupted by some very welcome action scenes. Indeed, the book described by the characters in the frame story sounds vastly more interesting than the one we actually get.

The lesson of Lucian, Swift, and Carroll is that the reader is less concerned with complex explanations about the author's intentions than with story, character, action, wit, and insight. But then, their worlds were attempts to explore ideas through extended metaphors, whole nations and peoples that represented complex and unusual ideas--the truest definition of magic in literature being a metaphor, physically realized.

De Mille's is just an example of contrarianism: he has taken the world as it is and turned it upon its head without much rhyme or reason to account for it, and as Quentin Crisp points out in his introduction to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, being original is not the result of looking at what everyone else is doing and performing the opposite, but of finding a purpose that drives you, a philosophy that gives meaning and direction to what you write. De Mille possesses neither that purpose nor an exciting tale to tell in lieu of it, so I suppose that really does make this book the prototype of the modern fantasy tale.