Elizabeth A. Lynn’s 1980 award-winner Watchtower opens her Arun trilogy as a literary-fantasy of low magic and gender-fluidity. If E.M. Forster and Edith Wharton collaborated on a fantasy novel, Watchtower might be the result. High on the list of feminist and gay fantasy, Watchtower arrived at a pivotal moment.
Usual suspects
Ryke, a watch commander at the wintery northern castle of Tornor Keep recovers from battle to find the old lord overthrown. Surprisingly, the upstart southern conqueror Col Istor makes Ryke commander in his new watch, which Ryke accepts to keep the heir, prince Errel alive.
Messengers from a mysterious clan of unbreakable oaths and extreme prejudice toward oath breakers arrive offering a truce with another keep. Errel and Ryke escape Torner to plot their revenge on a long journey to the hidden, summer valley of Vanima.
Feminism, gender and identity
Lynn’s quietly understated novel contains little action, and much meditation and self-reflection. You’ll find no-tech, faux-medieval cultures along the never-ending journey. Inspired by Northern and Eastern Europe through Asia and the Himalaya, Vanima instantly evokes Shangri-La. Fortune telling and card reading is about the extent of magic in this world.
The messengers, Sorren and Norres (spot the palindrome) are ghyas, sometimes referred to as hermaphrodites.
The lesbian couple necessarily hide their gender in the face of Tornor’s unenlightened prejudice, where men are outraged by female fighters. Alluding to their same-sex relationship, their undetermined gender identity sparks debate among the repressed men of Tornor. Ryke and Errel’s uncertain, evolving sexuality add poignancy to the journey.
Lynn is bitingly critical of war and sexual violence. But that doesn’t stop Ryke and Errel recruiting former soldier Van to their cause. A warrior monk teaching chea, or balance, Van combines shaolin budhism with aikido, capoeira.
Critical reception
Lynn’s characters divide readers. Layered with ambiguity, some say, flat and dull, insist others.
Ryke is the fish-out-of-culture, shocked and disturbed by revelations of alternate lifestyles and the questions about himself that he struggles to answer. For all that, Ryke is the least interesting character in the story, perhaps in the whole of fantasy. Which is an issue, since the whole thing follows Ryke’s close-third person perspective. Worst of all, he lacks curiosity. He tosses questions aside without ever trying to gain answers. Is it because he’s so repressed, a bi-curious man in denial, a man set in his ways, or just a simpleton?
The world lacks context or history beyond the few locations the characters visit. Normally a pass, there’s little hint of the iceberg of lore and detail below the narrative waterline. Lynn’s grim, medieval fantasy might easily take place during the crusades or the many wars of medieval Europe following the fall of Constantinople. Only the place names make this ‘fantasy’ at all.
Finally, Lynn’s prose is considered slow, languorous and beautifully descriptive by some, choppy and inconsistent by others. That makes for a looonng 225 pages if you’re not having fun. Significant for its subversive gender-politics, it opened the door to more interesting and more overt works in the rest of the series.