The Malacia Tapestry is set almost entirely in the city of Malacia, which is reminiscent of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast mixed with the Italian renaissance. Like Gormenghast, Malacia bears a heavy weight of age and tradition, with an authoritarian council that oversees (and most often vetoes) change and progress. Many of the vignettes are reminiscent of Gormenghast’s, with vivid descriptions of static scenes that are evocative in ways difficult to articulate. Generally bittersweet, at times romantic, occasionally tragic or even horrific, less intricate perhaps than Gormenghast’s but also more human, more dynamic. However, unlike Gormenghast, in Malacia there is a significant and fundamental drive toward change pulling against the stasis (Gormenghast did have a few characters who wished or worked for change, but they were necessarily aliens to the setting). It this drive we see the similarities to the Italian renaissance; Malacia is full of vibrant artists and deep thinkers, brilliant costumes and exotic trade, as well as dubiously effective diviners and soothsayers selling their visions and prophecies on every street corner. It is an age of decadence, in which the nobility oppresses the lower classes and social mobility is nearly unheard of. But for the roguish actor Perian de Chirolo, politics is a game for others.
The novel is told entirely in the first-person, and de Chirolo makes for a fine guide; though chronically broke and always looking for acting work, he is nonetheless content with his station in life, and when not acting he spends his time and money drinking, philandering, and exercising his wit, displaying remarkable skill in all of these activities. He is charming, if rather selfish, though as is gradually revealed he has depths that belie his habitually superficial demeanor. Unfortunately it’s difficult to go into much detail without setting sail on a sea of spoilers; but what I can say is that the book is not full of sorcery or swordplay or other typical fantasy action, and instead concerns itself much more with de Chirolo’s evolving relationships with his friends, his lovers, and himself. It’s one of those rare fantasy novels (again, like Gormenghast) that doesn’t use the invented setting as a tool to exaggerate moral conflicts into arenas where cartoonish heroism and villainy wage war or gritty shades-of-gray antiheroes experience existential angst; instead, Malacia is a city populated by real live human beings. De Chirolo deals with weighty issues we ourselves might be familiar with (love, trust, duty) and deals with them in familiar ways, though the true nature of some of these issues may not seem obvious at first. But don’t worry; these weighty issues are never approached ham-handedly. They arise organically and their complexity is respected; Aldiss does not sermonize from the mount, rather his characters work toward their own solutions that are, as in real life, unequivocally ambiguous. Aldiss’s moral authority is human and personal. I have heard authors of speculative fiction called “costumiers of ideas”, in that they take the same staid human issues everyone deals with and dress them up such that we do not recognize them; we are then led to approach these issues from a new perspective, ideally gaining insight otherwise denied us. Whether or not that applies to all spec-fic authors is, of course, debatable; however, it certainly applies to The Malacia Tapestry. While some of its themes are quite obvious, it is layered and some of the deeper concerns are easily overlooked (more on this in the second part). Aldiss does not spell all his mysteries out for the reader, and this is definitely a book that would reward re-reading. Highly recommended.
Spoilers ahead, proceed with caution.
On the surface we have Perian de Chirolo’s story, a drama with many familiar elements but told very well, with excellent characters. Read simply on that level, it is still a good book. But below that surface, it deals subtly and carefully with competing ideals of stasis and progress, reactionary and radical, in both politics and art. People crave safety and stability, yet crave novelty at the same time; society grows and changes over time, yet human nature never changes. Or does it? This well-trodden theme of “nothing lasts but nothing is lost” is exemplified by Otto Bengtsohn’s photographic “play” which de Chirolo is hired to act in at the beginning of the book. He dismisses the play’s plot as antiquated, and claims it is no longer relevant to the modern day. However, over the course of the novel, it becomes clear (even to de Chirolo himself) that his own life has begun following the plot of the play.
Similar ironies abound; in the play, he acts opposite Armida, the beautiful daughter of the rich man who has commissioned the play. Gradually they fall in love (or lust, at least), despite being from opposite ends of the social spectrum. De Chirolo is easygoing, impulsive, dramatic, superficial, and places little weight on money and the future, living squarely in the moment; these are qualities Armida’s own stifled life is sorely lacking, with her oppressive and ambitious father grooming her for a politically advantageous marriage. Unsurprisingly, she is drawn to the dashing de Chirolo as he embodies the idealized freedom she wishes she had. However, she is firm in refusing him traditional sexual intercourse (an intact hymen being of the utmost importance in political marriages, of course), and though they do find less traditional means to amuse themselves, de Chirolo, so used to easily having women in their entirety and discarding them just as easily, is tormented by this beauty he can never truly possess...unless they are married.
Thus begins his misguided quest to maneuver himself into a social position where he will actually be able to formally marry Armida, a proposition she goes along with; their secret betrothal never seems anything more than an amusing fantasy to her, but to him it becomes something of the utmost seriousness, something he idealizes to the point where his view of the relationship begins to utterly lose touch with reality. While he will never be rich and was not born into nobility, de Chirolo believes he can still win her hand in marriage through some act of great heroism; late in the book he does, in fact, save her life by slaying a ‘dragon’ (one of the large “ancestral animals” or dinosaurs that populate the surrounding countryside). In the process he accidentally uncovers what seems to be an affair between Armida and his best friend; de Chirolo ignores the obvious implications and chooses to give them the benefit of the doubt, thinking his jealousy unjust. This mimics the events of the play, but in Aldiss’s typical ironic fashion, de Chirolo is living out the role opposite the one he takes on in the play, the cheated rather than the cheater. After a lengthy convalescence from his dinosaur injuries, he confronts Armida and her father at a large party, naively believing that by having saved the princess from the dragon he has automatically earned her hand in marriage, as in a traditional fairy tale. In quick succession he learns that his dreams were in fact delusions; the social gulf between them is too wide to ever truly be crossed, and in the process of improving his own moral character and taking his love for Armida seriously, he lost the roguish characteristics that piqued her interest in the first place. A cruel and poignant irony, to be sure. Instead, she has in fact turned her affections to his best friend, who has remained an unrepentant rogue while de Chirolo changed; again there is irony, for earlier de Chirolo slept with his best friend’s mistress, a betrayal he hardly repented of himself at the time (and which his friend holds him blameless for). Earlier he cheated on Armida whenever he got the chance, something he thought secret but wasn’t; thus his subsequent internal, honest efforts to reform go unnoticed by Armida and are overshadowed by those earlier infidelities; thus she feels perfectly justified in cheating on de Chirolo with a man who is essentially an earlier image of himself. Over the course of the book de Chirolo’s morals have moved away from those of his friends, something they take as a poor joke or hypocrisy on his part, rather than recognizing it as a genuine change for the better. He is made to feel alone and in the wrong, though he is perhaps the most blameless in the whole situation. This crisis is the climax of the novel, leaving him broken and contemplating suicide.
Running alongside the tragic romantic themes, de Chirolo is regularly exposed to the radical politics of his employer Bengtsohn and his comrades, who seek to overthrow the Malacian status quo; though de Chirolo is clearly a member of the lower classes, he refuses to listen despite the progressives’ claims that he is a victim of oppression the same as them. He half-believes that he will find his own wealthy patron, and later that he will marry into wealth, and is largely ignorant of the plight of others, more or less content with his own poverty. After the climax has stripped him of his contentment and his illusions regarding the fairness of his world, he is finally convinced to attend one of the radicals’ political meetings. The ending leaves his actual political conviction in doubt, but given the momentum of his character development it seems clear that he will join the progressives in earnest. There is some debate as to this, but de Chirolo simply has no other recourse save suicide, an option he rejected earlier, or a return to his former life, which seems highly unlikely given his irrevocable break with his former friends.
As art imitates life and life imitates art, there are various hints that Malacia itself is a living work of art; a tapestry in a literal sense. The city’s founder, who cast the blessing or curse that promised that Malacia would never change, could be seen as an artist in this sense. Is the progressives’ quest to change the status quo thus doomed to failure? Does art change, either as a whole or in specific instances, perhaps through evolving interpretation? Can human nature change? I don’t know! Aldiss keeps his cards close to his chest on this one, and really The Malacia tapestry is a book that not only rewards a second reading but almost requires it. A very complex work that succeeds on just about every level, and I could go on and on about it for pages. Instead I’ll just say that if Aldiss never wrote anything else on this level, I’ll be sorely disappointed.
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