Tanith Lee made her appearance as a fantasy author in the 1970s with The Birthgrave trilogy, followed by the Vis trilogy (The Storm Lord, Anackire, and Quest for the White Witch) and on down the line. Her work was marked by what I call a “lunar” sensibility, a kind of dark, night-time sensuality that had been rare in speculative fiction, if it appeared at all. She has also written under the name “Esther Garber,” which leads us to her latest collection.
Disturbed By Her Song is billed as by “Tanith Lee, writing as and with Esther Garber and Judas Garbah.” The stories are credited to Esther or Judas, except for two written by Lee and Esther. In her introduction, Lee sets up the environment: this is not a collection of stories as told by an author who is using her characters to make the story, nor is it really “as told to.” As Lee puts it, “. . . I have never met any of these three in the flesh. In the flesh, so far as I can tell, they do not exist.” (There is another sibling, Anna, whom Lee has never met at all.) Lee is setting up what I can only call a metanarrative to encompass these stories.
The individual stories themselves are variations on a few themes — they are erotic without crossing the border into erotica, but they speak mostly of power, with a dressing of race and class. They are “queer” stories, both in the sense that both Esther and Judas are same-sex oriented, and in the sense that there are elements of the outré. “Black Eyed Susan,” for example, could be a ghost story. Maybe. And while Judas never mentions the word “werewolf” in “Ne Que V’on Desir,” the imagery is there, both in the snow-covered countryside outside the train on which he is traveling, and in the strange, lupine man with whom he has an encounter. But most of the stories are rather more mainstream than that, taking place in a time that might be between the World Wars, and in places that might be Paris or London or somewhere in the Levant. There is, not an unreality, but a surreality to the times and places — and events — that gives the stories something of an edge.
It’s that surreal quality that brings to mind Lee’s earlier work, distanced, dispassionate prose that at the same time is highly colored and more than a little sensuous, enlisted in the service of a narrative that is concrete, no matter how fantastic or seemingly normal the story itself. But this collection takes on a high degree of abstraction — it is really a “literary” exercise, with a focus on the storytelling as much as on the stories themselves. (A note: Looking again at the book cover, it seems to me that the image is in perfect sync with the stories. That should give you a hint or two.)
For Lee’s fans, and for those who take delight in the kind of conceptual playfulness that provides the basis for this collection, this is a must have. I’d recommend taking it in small doses though: Lee’s prose, as distanced as it is, is also rich and can become cloying if one is inclined to overindulge.
(Lethe Press, 2010)
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