alveston starts with a game of chance and ends with a game of chance, and poker metaphors pop up throughout the bright sparkling intense pages of Sean Stewart's best novel yet. In reality, however, chance hardly gets a look in. More than once, Stewart has his characters reflect on the fact that, in any game of chance, the house always wins. If a novel can be thought of as a house, then Galveston always wins.
This is good and it is not good.
What is not good, all too clearly, is clarity. It is a bit like a classic studio-made Hollywood movie, where nothing is ever left to chance: everything heard by or visible to the viewer is a prop, and sooner or later every prop will be used in the story. This sounds fine, except that it depilates the depicted world. There are points when Galveston is altogether too knowing, too neat and tidy, for the good of the yarn.
All too neatly, an array of conventions out of the lore of the Family Romance binds together, separates and reunites the three young protagonists of the book. The main protagonist, young Joshua, for instance, must heal his father, whose luck (Galveston is a book full of highly dangerous magic) has seemingly destroyed his family. This works well, and Family Romance traditions demand it; but when the ghost of Josh's mother blesses her offspring and fades redemptively into the gloaming at the end of the book, it is all too much like an obvious closing couplet in a bad sonnet.
All too neatly, the underlying premise--that Magic, once unleashed, is a trompe l'oeil within the whole of Reality--locks every action of the book into place, without a word mussed, and without, at times, a sense that Stewart has actually pushed himself, pushed Galveston, to the limit. Part of the threat of great novels (great novels are always threatening) is that they look as though they have been hauled back from the very brink of the chaos they explore. Galveston, too often, gives the impression that its author has rigged Chaos's cards.
And ... and ...
And, in the end, none of this much matters. Galveston may be just slightly too calculating, too much in control of its generic material, to count as one of the ten or so fantasy novels one might fairly describe as the greatest ever written; but it comes awfully close. It is bigger than the neatest of its parts. It is bigger than the pages that it takes (as any great novel must be).
And it ends on a burn: the brilliant last pages of Galveston slingshot out of the cat's-cradle of Stewart's foreknowledge of the story he is telling, rewrite our knowledge of the main characters, make us love them finally. In the end, Galveston is a book that signals the growing maturity of one of the two or three best authors of fantasy now active. Sean Stewart is coming into his pomp.
The world awash in dreams
Much of Stewart's recent fiction has been set in a world either feeling the first fever chills of a reawakening of magic in the 20th century--Resurrection Man (1995) and Mockingbird (1999) both take place before the millennium--or attempting to come to terms with a catastrophic "Flood" of magic in the 21st. The Night Watch (1997), set in Vancouver and Edmonton, and Galveston are dramas of adjustment in which Family Romance intricacies mirror and affect the governance of the cities under threat. Both tales take place after the
cascade reaction began, magic kindling magic, the world awash in dreams. The bright rational day of the twentieth century was eclipsed, passing into a long night of spirits, where ghosts walked and a house or tree or road might wake to find its voice and will.
The Flood is densest wherever magic had been half-believed in before the cataclysm. In Galveston, which had been in the middle of its Mardi Gras, magic adheres to the fantasy worlds exemplified by the various Krewes (a Krewe is a kind of club responsible for mounting a particular float in the annual Mardi Gras parade). Several Krewes dominate Galveston. Chief among these is the Krewe of Momus, who is a Moon-god, and whose Carnival now underlies and undermines the fragmented daylight city.
Momus is a Trickster, and anything but benign. Young Sloane Gardner, whom Joshua loves in vain, and who is the heir apparent to her dying mother's benign rule over daylight Galveston, enters the nighttime Revel of Momus's realm to ask him for her mother's life. He agrees, but only to the letter of her request (as every folk tradition agrees, gods always cheat). Horrors ensue.
Sloane returns to the Revel to try to make Momus play fair, using a mask which turns her, magically, into Sly. As soon as she has twinned herself into Sloane/Sly, daylight becomes Revel, and the real world underlying the 21st century shows its face--a face that mocks the century we have just departed, mocks human order, mocks the pretense that human lives can beat the house odds. The face of Momus's Carnival Galveston is (perhaps) the true face of history. And Sly seems briefly to rule her double self.
All-revealing masks
The rest is cleanly told. Josh is falsely accused of murdering Sloane (in the Revel, Time-in-Faerie rules apply, and the hours Sly has spent there have taken days in the world above); he is exiled, returns swiftly after a great storm to find that Sloane has finally returned and exonerated him, and begins to doctor the poor.
Josh himself, extremely intelligent and bitter, needs all the redemption he can earn to become a full human being, a human face in a world of all-revealing masks (masks are windows; they let history in). And it looks, for a while, as though Galveston the city (and Galveston the book) will be too much for him.
In the end, though, in the glorious release of the final 20 or so pages, Josh does wing free of his internal agonies, which reflect the external crisis of the city itself. The 21st century may be very terrible, as he sees clearly through mature eyes. It may force us surviving humans to look upon the last century or so with eyes as changed as Josh's, eyes we may not wish to look through.
He knows the risks are great. But he will try.
The book says all of us are going to have to try.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has
been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
