The Standing Dead
Ricardo Pinto
Tor, 560 pages
Order this book The
Chosen, the previous volume in Ricardo Pinto’s The
Stone Dance of the Chameleon cycle, ends in
medias res with its hero betrayed, drugged and stuffed into a funerary
urn. The second installment, The Standing Dead, opens
immediately following that moment, and (apart from a “hinge” chapter providing
some broad retrospective and a few hints about what’s to come) moves forward
without any concession to what has gone before--no the-story-so-far preface,
no exposition shoehorned into the first chapter, no convoluted flashbacks.
Readers may find this frustrating (be warned: if you haven’t read The
Chosen, don’t pick up The Standing Dead until
you do); and I know from looking at reader reviews on Amazon.com and elsewhere
that at least some readers were irritated by the apparent cliffhanger ending
of the first book. But such reactions mistake the nature of this work.
It’s not a fantasy trilogy in the conventional sense, but a single novel
divided into three parts (Pinto himself describes it as a triptych).
In that context, the abrupt finish of Part One--which closed one phase of
the tale--and the equally abrupt beginning of Part Two--which launches the
next--make perfect narrative sense.
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon is
set in the world of the Three Lands, ruled with absolute and despotic cruelty
by the Chosen, also known as the Masters, a hugely tall white-skinned race
in whose veins (they believe) flows the blood of gods. It’s death for lesser
beings to see Chosen faces, which they protect with elaborate masks. The
Chosen regard the tributary peoples who serve them (the small brown-skinned
Plainsmen and the larger black-skinned Maruli) as debased savages, little
more than animals, and treat them, by divine right, as slaves.
In the novel’s first volume, Carnelian, son of one of the Houses of the Great
(Chosen society is divided by many nuances of rank and blood), returned from
exile with his father--who, long distant from the bitter factional struggles
of Chosen politics, was judged an appropriate choice to oversee the interregnum
between the death of the present Emperor and the election of a new. Raised
apart from Chosen other than his father (a man unusually compassionate in
his treatment of his servants, prone to neither the cruelties nor the excesses
of other Masters), Carnelian knew almost nothing of the Chosen’s Guarded
Land or of their opulent capital, Osrakum, and found himself both entranced
and horrified by the strange new world unfolding before him. In Osrakum,
Carnelian met and fell in love with another Master, Osidian; only later did
he discover that Osidian was really one of the Jade Lord Twins, rivals for
the Emperorship. Betrayed by his brother’s faction, Osidian was kidnapped,
and Carnelian along with him--both of them closed into funerary urns and
left to die.
As the second volume opens, Carnelian and Osidian are discovered by the legionary
in charge of disposing of the urns, who illicitly opens them in search of
goods to steal and sell. Terrified of these Masters, yet knowing himself
doomed for having seen their uncovered faces, the legionary decides to take
them south, beyond the Guarded Land, and try to sell them there. But the
slavers whom he persuades to help him are raided by a band of Plainsmen,
returning from escorting their annual flesh tithe to Osrakum; and Carnelian
and Osidian are set free. Though Carnelian could go back to Osrakum, return
would mean death for Osidian. To save Osidian’s life, Carnelian begs the
Plainsmen (who, by a miracle, speak Ochre, the language taught to him by
his childhood nurse) to bring the two of them along. Eluding Chosen pursuit,
they flee the Guarded Land, and move south into the vast expanses of the
Earthsky, where the many tribes of the Plainsmen live.
The Ochre raiding party (who were deeply divided on whether to carry the
two Masters with them, and did so mainly out of panic and extremity), bring
Carnelian and Osidian back to their tribe. Some of the tribal elders want
to kill them outright, but others, awed and terrified by the godlike aura
of the Chosen (and also by the birthmark on Osidian’s forehead--“as if the
Skyfather himself kissed his brow”) fear to shed their blood. Allowed,
reluctantly, to remain, Carnelian and Osidian are accepted into the hearth
of Akaisha, mother of ex-legionary Fern, with whom Carnelian has begun to
form a friendship. As Carnelian learns to know the Ochre, he comes to love
these people and their ways. But Osidian, a Master to the core, can’t see
them as anything but barbarians and slaves, nor is he willing to give up
his divine birthright. Darkly, he plots revenge, and begins a campaign of
violence, betrayal, and corruption designed to break the Plainsmen’s traditional
social bonds and forge these utterly unwarlike people into an army to challenge
the Chosen.
The Chosen introduced the reader to Chosen society, in
all its hallucinatory strangeness, beauty, and violence. Some critics found
the book too slow, too self-indulgent in its lavish detail; nevertheless,
it’s a hypnotic journey, a portrait of an invented world that’s not only
fascinating and magnificent (and occasionally horrifying) but truly alien.
One can recognize in Pinto’s setting the influence of various real-world
cultures, especially those of ancient South America; but there’s no sense
whatever of derivativeness, and the whole is genuinely unfamiliar. Any writer
who has ever attempted world building will know how difficult this is to
achieve.
The Standing Dead introduces a different part of Pinto’s
world, the Earthsky. There couldn’t be a greater contrast with what has gone
before. The Ochre are a gentle and loving people, who honor the earth and
sky as mother and father. Where the Chosen seek absolute dominance over their
environment, molding their surroundings to reflect their needs and certainties,
the Ochre’s environment dominates them absolutely, and their lives and beliefs
are controlled by its rhythms. This is a familiar set of oppositions, but
the way Pinto works them out is not familiar at all. The Ochre’s world, with
its vast fern plains, its enormous herds of saurians, and its violent seasons,
is as alien in its way as that of the Chosen; and their customs, which spring
organically from this environment, are just as fascinating and strange (and
portrayed with equal immediacy and vividness). Pinto takes care not to turn
the Ochre into conventional noble savages--they’re as prone to rivalry and
ignorance and ill-will as any group of people (and, potentially, as corruptible).
Their essential goodness also serves a thematic purpose, in its contrast
not just to the society of the Chosen but to that of the Maruli (whom the
Plainsmen encounter toward the end of the book) with their gruesome religion
of darkness and death.
As before, Carnelian is the camera through which all of this unfolds. He’s
both hero and narrative device, a player in the action but also a way to
convey Pinto’s complicated setting to the reader. A good portion of is devoted to demonstrating the Ochre’s lifestyle
through his experience of it; this is done, however, in a way that moves
the story suspensefully along, as the Masters’ presence creates strain among
the Ochre and the rift between Osidian and Carnelian grows. Too, this detailed
portrait of the Ochre’s customs is essential to what comes later, for when
Osidian finally puts his dark plan into action, he uses those very customs
to disrupt, corrupt, and finally remake the Ochre in his own image. The process
of this betrayal is powerfully portrayed, a journey from innocence to debasement
that has the weight and inevitability of real tragedy. It’s also a subtle
examination of the ambiguities of oppression--for as ruthlessly as they’re
manipulated by Osidian, the Ochre willingly participate in their own corruption,
and show little compassion toward the people that they, in their turn, destroy.
Though the previous book featured complex characterizations, the setting
was the star, and all the players were dominated by their circumstances.
In The Standing Dead, by contrast, character is the pivot
on which the action turns--particularly Osidian’s inability to see the world
except through the eyes of a Master, his dark obsession with revenge, and
the growth of his mad belief in a divine destiny. Other characters are also
very fine--Fern, the ex-legionary with whom Carnelian begins to fall in love;
Poppy, the orphan he befriends; Akaisha, the Ochre hearthmother who takes
Carnelian and Osidian in. Most central, of course, is Carnelian himself.
He’s an immensely sympathetic protagonist; his growing love for the Ochre
and his repudiation of his own kind are both moving and believable (and well-grounded
in the action of the previous book), as is his increasing repugnance for
Osidian’s behavior, complicated by the love and loyalty he still feels for
his one-time lover. However, he remains a somewhat passive character, acting
upon more than acting. While this made good sense in The Chosen,
by the end of The Standing Dead it has grown somewhat
problematic: his failure to take a firm stand against Osidian has begun to
feel like waffling, and his doubts (in the absence of action) seem repetitive.
Hopefully in the final volume he will start to act more decisively.
Readers who found the previous book slow may like this one better, with its
greater focus on action and tight plotting; while for those (like me) who
adored the shimmering, baroque detail of The Chosen, there’s
an equally entrancing feast of strangeness, wonder, and horror. Without doubt
this is one of the most fascinating and original series I’ve read in recent
years. If the final volume fulfils the promise of the first two, The
Stone Dance of the Chameleon will be a fine work indeed.
Copyright © 2003 Victoria Strauss
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