From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: Re: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Saturday, May 12, 2001 11:27 PM Twenty-third post Metamorphosis: Pliocene (part 3 of 3) The last half of this chapter has the third barbarian dream. Note that this is one of times when formal structure tells you something. One of the good points about formal structure is that when you break it, even slightly, it puts sudden emphasis on that section of the work, which can be used to great effect. On the other hand, sometimes you just break it because you can't think of anything to put there that fits the structure. This feels like one of those times. The "meta" chapters have a certain structure: dream first, then Orr's experiences. In Metamorphosis, Orr has been dreaming about the narrator's real life, so the structure is inverted: (dream of) narrator's real life first, then Orr's experiences. So this part should be about Orr. But it's not; it's a barbarian dream. Why? Well, absent some insight by somebody else, I suspect that the truth is that there really isn't much left for Orr to do. Once Orr decides to leave the Bridge, his purpose for existence is really over. Yet his lifetime was extended so that Banks could fit in the ODV. Now that that's over, all that is left is the wrapup -- but Banks has more of the narrator's life he wants to write about first. So, rather than create some other Eye-of-God-like new dream place for Orr, Banks gives us more of the barbarian. I'm glad he did; the barbarian was always pretty interesting. Still, this screams editing failure to me. So. Now the barbarian is 300 years old, but he still wants to live. He's still with the familiar; the familiar is still trying to save him, because when the barbarian dies the familiar will vanish into a puff of dust. When they got back from the Underworld, the familiar had a big battle with the sorcerer who had sent the barbarian there. The barbarian was frozen by a spell that the familiar cast during this battle, just as he was frozen by the witch. The familiar won, but found that he couldn't take over the sorceror's body like he wanted to; he could be brought out of the Underworld, but had to stay in an inanimate object. From this point on, the barbarian and familiar really were stuck with each other. (I think this means that when the narrator wakes up, i.e. leaves the Underworld, his mind and body are no longer going to be able to be seperate.) The familiar had advised the barbarian to get back together with the young witch who gave him the knife missile, Angharienne. She was suspicious, but the familiar made an agreement with her, and told the barbarian that they were going to have a trial troilistic arrangement. The barbarian said OK, as long as there's nothing dirty involved. (A troilistic arrangement is not simply a menage a trois, but a relationship in which one of the participants is dependent on observing their partner having sex with a third person. This describes the familiar, barbarian, and witch pretty well if the relationship is really between the familiar and the witch. If the familiar represents the narrator's mind, the barbarian his body, and the witch, obviously, Andrea, then this could be an allusion to the time on the hospital bed, where his mind had to just watch his body.) That was long ago, the barbarian and familiar are now in their flying castle (space ship), with lots of mixed magic-technological things like enchanted submachine guns, video screens and invisible platinum, the familiar has dismissed the guards, sent off the grandchildren, and given away half of their gear, giving people the impression that they were about to die. It found new batteries for the knife missile and put it in charge of security. The barbarian is trying to get it up, to see if he can anymore; he asks the familiar to magic up a houri or put in a dirty video, but the familiar won't because the barbarian might die of a heart attack and the familiar still has a few irons in the fire. The barbarian was really attached to his wife, the witch Angharienne; she stayed young till the end but she was really about 1000 years old, and she died some time back. She became a small wooden statue and left instructions to be planted in a forest near where she was born; the statue will become a small and shrivelled tree, grow big, and then shrink like it's going back in time until it becomes a seed. I'm not sure what this story means. The familiar is sad, telling the barbarian about the witch's tree, because when it dies it'll just be gone. When the barbarian dies, he probably won't be allowed in the Underworld because after he destroyed Charon down there last time they had to put in a whole new regime and a couple of characters named Virgil and Dante took over. So he's worried about showing up at the pearly gates and having them let him in but with something really nasty arranged for him. Anyways, the familiar says "Ah-ha", and the old barbarian sees a young, strong barbarian in the video screens, coming towards the castle. The young guy is really impressive looking, and the old barbarian is scared; he's all stiff now, and his hand shakes, and he needs glasses. (Note: the narrator complained that he was getting old at the end of the first half of this chapter; his needing glasses was one of the signs.) The young barbarian is wearing a wolf helmet. Anyways, the new guy walks through the flying castle's defenses (most of which are used as Culture pseudoscience in later books); a total exclusion field fails to put him to sleep because it's screened by the helmet, a laser is blocked by some sort of mirrorfield in the guy's sword (he has some sort of limited prescience, from the helmet or something, that lets him know that the laser's about to fire on him), he cuts through monofilament reinforcement in the airlocks with blade-fields in his sword, the knife missile won't attack him because it's not a real (Culture) one that can think for itself, it has an IFF circuit that the helmet feeds a fake Friend signal. The barbarian is yelling at the familiar for letting all the guards go. Now the barbarian is in the exact same position that all of the people that he used to attack were in, he's an old guy, surrounded by the treasure he's built up, and a young guy is marching through all his defenses and coming to kill him. The old barbarian really doesn't want to die, he wets the bed, screams "Mammy, Daddy!", and tries to promise the young barbarian anything he wants. It's an oddly affecting scene, actually. But the young barbarian just walks up and kills him in a really impersonal way, the old barbarian has asked "Wh- wh- what's yer problem, big filla?" and the young one says "Now problem moy son" and raises his sword. But the familiar has planned for the whole thing. As the sword comes down, a transference (machine, probably) goes into action, reading what would in the Culture be called the familiar's and old barbarian's mind states and putting them into the wolf helmet and the young barbarian's brain respectively. Basically, the familiar has arranged to lure a young barbarian here so that they can steal his body (and the helmet for the familiar) and avoid death. The barbarian's confused about the whole thing, but the familiar gets him going, the castle's circuits won't accept that the barbarian is the rightful owner of the place because he's in a new body, so a thermo-nuclear explosion is going to be set off, and they have to leave. (These "fidelity circuits" are just like the ones used later in _Consider Phlebas_.) The barbarian feels great, like he's had a dream about being an old man like the one in the bed but had just woken up. They didn't get any treasure, but he's sure that there will be more castles and magicians and old barbarians -- "What a life, eh? This is the gemm!". Parts of this are just a fun story, like parts of the Underworld one, but there are some symbolically important ones too. The old barbarian being killed, and then being reborn young again, is exactly like any one of lots of death-and-resurrection, cycle-of-life, harvest legends that you can find in any Joseph Campbell book; I'm sure that there were Scottish varients of it. They used to put the old king to death so that the earth would be renewed, and the young king would mystically be the same person reborn; later the custom became more symbolic and less literal. Banks very typically takes an ancient myth form and dresses it up in Culture pseudoscience so that nothing literally mystical happens, everything is "rational", but that the myth itself is reenacted. This is a good storytelling technique for someone who insists on strict rationalism and atheism, because the ancient myth forms still resonate better as stories than most others. The symbolism for this book is less clear; significantly, the barbarian feels that his time as an old man in the bed has been a dream, just like the narrator's time in the hospital bed has been spent in dreams. Something about the vigor of youth renewed is going to be critical in getting the narrator out of bed later, as we'll see. The barbarian will appear one more time in the book and I'll try to go into this further then.