|
July 2007
Touched by Venom by Janine Cross
Lynda Williams writes science fiction set in the "Okal Rel Universe." Recurring themes center around culture conflict and the moral and social impacts of radical changes in technology, including re-written rules of gender relations as a consequence of bio-engineering. She is published by Edge Fantasy and Science Fiction of Calgary, Alberta and Windstorm Creative of Seattle, Washington. She is producer and co-editor of Reflections on Water, an online journal which features writers and artists of the northern interior of British Columbia, including special theme issues that strive to represent the diversity of writing interests in the north.
Connoisseurs of dystopic and brutal realities will need to add Touched by Venom to their collection, the first book of a planned series called the Dragon Temple Saga, by Janine Cross. Humanity is spared no humiliation in the novel, from the indignities of illness to the enslavement of addiction. Life is cheap and rape is commonplace. Cross is particularly hard on her young protagonist, Zarq Darquel, who begins the story in a life of grinding poverty and progresses through a series of traumas, including her own sexual mutilation, to a state in which she is sustained primarily by her hatred of one man and her passionate addiction to the ecstasy induced by dragon venom. I have to note here that addiction fiction is far from being one of my preferred genres, but despite the rather unremitting darkness in the story the reader is swept along by very readable prose, fascination for the bizarre cultural backdrop, and the lively flow of action. Zarq is a gritty heroine who clings hard to life in the face of bitter adversity and even manages to take pleasure in human companionship where possible, although her relationships are always mixed blessings, beginning with the bond between her and her spirited mother. So it isn't as if the reader can blame Zarq for succumbing to an empowering addiction, given how little else her life has to offer her. Zarq's mother, Kavarria, is the one character who might have been an anchor for Zarq, emotionally, but her obsession is to rescue Zarq's older sister, Waivia, from a life of sexual slavery, because Waivia is the child of a man that Kavarria loved passionately in her youth before winding up with Zarq's father. The mother's preference for Waivia over Zarq extends as far as the use of magic to enslave Zarq to her will, beyond Kavarria's own death, in a desperate attempt to keep Zarq focused on Waivia. Spirited but self-absorbed, Waivia herself is obsessed with the desire to achieve greatness by becoming the favorite of a powerful prince named Kratt. Waivia gives neither Zarq nor the reader much motive for desiring her rescue outside the magical imperative inflicted on Zarq by their mother, although the tension created over her is one of the threads that holds the story together. The other is Zarq's hatred of Kratt, who in addition to being the object of Waivia's desire is the aristocrat who symbolizes the oppression of Zarq's serf-like social class and the destruction of everything good in Zarq's life—what little there was of that. Zarq, too, is driven by an obsession to achieve power that contains little to admire beyond her gritty determination to thrive in a hostile world. An interesting analysis would be to look at how her ambition and Waivia's differ morally, if at all. Both sisters basically want out of the cycle of downtrodden misery that is their lot in life, one by aspiring to the traditionally female and class-appropriate route of becoming a favored concubine, and the other by aspiring to usurp a prerogative that is normally reserved for males of the ruling class. Sex is a tool for both sisters. The world of Touched by Venom is a hard-fisted theocracy in which dragons are the well-springs of power, especially the fertile male variety. Zarq aspires to command her own bull dragon and through him to be master of her own estate. Every indication points in the direction of sex with dragons being key to that goal. Cross's dragons are the stars of the book and magnificently different from the usual examples of the species found in fantasy. They smell, suffer, slay and generally project a potent presence. Their status as sacred beasts controlled by overlords is played off hints that there may be more to them than meets the eye and one hopes that the back story explaining how things came to be the way they are might be revealed down the line, in later books. Cross has also created a vocabulary and verbal cadence to go with her culture that might irritate some readers although I had no trouble taking that aspect of the book in stride and found her use of language to express the pervasiveness and importance of dragons in the culture she creates both inventive and internally consistent for the most part. Culturally, my main quibble was the lack of positives to justify any sense of decency or shared moral values worth speaking of. Cross often refers to a sense of what is proper or "seemly" in a world where the templates and exemplars of such standards are hard to locate. There are a few claims in the tale that fail to work for me and might be stumbling blocks for others, also. First, it is hard to believe that Zarq's father is as obsessed with his women-folk as Zarq claims, given how little contact he has with them and how unimportant such dependents are deemed by his culture. If Zarq's early life had been a bit more positive, and her bond with her father more personalized, her hatred of Kratt for destroying it might be more potent, too. As it is, the contrast between her childhood suffering and adult suffering, while present, does not seem crisp enough to justify her outrage at the butchery Kratt oversees during the transition between the two. Second, I found it necessary to suspend disbelief in connection with the orgasmic descriptions of the temple women's experiences with their aging dragons given that all the women are female eunuchs. Perhaps the intent is to expand on the power of dragon venom, delivered in this case via a dragon's thrusting tongue, to induce ecstasy by other avenues than a conventional sexual response. In any case, the clitorectomy forcibly imposed on Zarq and the other temple women as the price of membership in their order seemed oddly lacking in importance given how commonplace physical suffering is in Cross's dragon world and the absence of any tangible evidence that the loss of Zarq's normal potential for sexual pleasure was a problem for her. As the first book in a series, Touched by Venom succeeds in introducing ideas with the potential for elaboration and development later on. The background story of the dragons has already been mentioned. Also in the line up are the secrets of the enigmatically powerful Djimbi race, to which Zarq's mother belongs, and the entanglements of Waivia, Kratt and Zarq. One hopes to learn more about dragons and the theocracy they support, in future books, and to see characters achieve enough power to be able to afford a greater range of self-expression beyond the imperatives of grim survival. |
||
|
|
||
