Book Discussion: Night’s Master by Tanith Lee

Book Discussion: Night’s Master by Tanith Lee

“ONE NIGHT, AZHRARN Prince of Demons, one of the Lords of Darkness, took on him, for amusement, the shape of a great black eagle. East and west he flew, beating with his vast wings, north and south, to the four edges of the world, for in those days the earth was flat and floated on the ocean of chaos. He watched the lighted processions of men crawling by below with lamps as small as sparks, and the breakers of the sea bursting into white blossoms on the rocky shores.”

Tanith Lee -. Night's Master 

One is the real deal and the other is a cheap knockoff of the original. 

There is a Swiss Rolex and there is a Bangkok Rolex. There is Classic Coke and there is Sam’s Cola.  There is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and the one on Cousin Jimbo’s velvet blanket.

There is Tannith Lee and there is Neil Gaiman. 

This has become vastly apparent to me this weekend while reading Night’s Master. It’s a funny thing about writers, we all have that one writer that made us want to write for a living.  While learning the craft we discover our strengths and limitations.  Some of us will eventually discover that we have surpassed our masters.  In bitter truth, most of us will discover that we can’t due to the limitations of our innate talents but those who face this unpleasant realization do not resent the writer who inspired us. 

Mostly. 

Gamma males, on the other hand, live in a world blanketed by their resentments and can never bring themselves to give credit where it’s due. It’s too painful a truth to acknowledge.  How can I be the secret king when there is all too obviously a real king? John Scalzi has never given credit to Joe Haldeman for his influence on his early work, although it’s clearly there. Neil Gaiman’s disdain for Tanith Lee went all the way back to when he was doing literary reviews. By Lee’s account, (which I will take over Gaiman’s in a heartbeat), he was pleasant, fawning and even obsequious during his interview of her for the Guardian.  When he published his interview, Lee discovered that Gaiman had described her as “formerly attractive.”

While passive-aggressively insulting it was nothing compared to what Gaiman had in store for her.  Rank plagiarism.  It’s as clear as the sun on a cloudless day that Sandman is a Dollar Store generic brand made in China version of Tanith Lee’s ‘Night’s Master.’

I can’t claim I was a fan until this weekend.  I did pick up a copy of the first book in her Flat Earth series at my favored used bookstore when I was in college. Callow doesn’t begin to describe me back then.  My only excuse is that my tastes were as yet unformed in any seriously adult way. I probably would have preferred Thunderbird to a classic Merlot in those days.  Anyway, I do remember admiring her prose right up to the moment that it entered blatant homoeroticism. Done on the spot. I stopped reading and traded it back into Page Turner for who knows what.  I would say it was my loss but I was far too unread to appreciate it yet.  I knew nothing of Coleridge, or Wilde, or Sir Richard Francis Burton, but I do now and have for a while, long enough that my palette has matured to enjoy subtle tastes as well as ones I find bitter.

Night’s Master is a superb example of what the English language can be when it is forged by a master craftsman. The style of this book is told in the manner of Shaharazad who told her tales to keep herself from crossing death’s door for one thousand nights and a night. Each story touches hands with the next in this string of stories, and all of them are connected to Azhrarn, Prince of Demons, Ruler of the demon city of Vanashta. Now, ‘demon’ is not exactly an accurate term for Azhrarn or any of the ‘demonic’ entities in her book. These are very much Djinn from the Arabian Nights books. They are indeed wicked and cruel but they can as caprice takes them bestow gifts on Men. In this way, they are more like the fae of Celtic lore but they are their own thing.  They can also love, but it ends in tragedy when they do. 

Azhraran who is described as being tall, lean, and beautiful with blue-black hair, dressed all in black and coals for eyes. Who bestows wonders and atrocities on humanity throughout the thousands of years that these stories take place.  He is cruel and spiteful but can abandon his cruelty if his playthings have touched him in some way.  The sorcerer queen, who dared to trap him and whom he took as a lover.  The lovers who were two halves of one soul that he had split because their mother had refused his advances. He tormented them for years but when they found each other he was too touched to do them further harm. There is only one really good person in this book, or perhaps two.  Kazir the Blind, a poet who takes a literal flower child, Ferazhin, for his wife. She was created from a living seed of the Earth by Azhrarn for his own purposes and then abandoned in Underearth, weeping for the Sun.  Kazir learned of her fate, traveled to the demon city and won her freedom by singing the most terrible truth that Azhrarn had ever heard.  Kazir’s tale is rather close to that of Orpheus.

Which I am afraid brings up back to Neil Gaiman.  The obvious similarities between their work notwithstanding I suppose it’s close enough to legally distinct to pass muster with the courts but not among audiences.  The resemblances are too close to be a casual coincidence nor will they be viewed as such by any who have read both works.

Granted, differences, are distinct.  I can’t find any of Tanith Lee’s women among Gaiman’s creations. Heartbroken and loyal Ferazhin doesn't have an analog. And there is absolutely no version of the proud and appallingly beautiful sorceress queen, Zoryas, who re-conquered her father’s lost kingdom to be found anywhere in any of Gaiman’s works. 

Almost all of the women in Sandman were broken, humbled, or victimized for one reason or another.  One wonders why that had so much appeal to Gaiman.

The only one close to strong was Death.  Which was perhaps a regrettable necessity for Gaiman because Azhrarn’s brothers were the Lords of Darkness, first was Azhrarn, the second Uhlume Master of Death, the third, Chuz, Prince of Madness, and the fourth, Kheshmet, King Fate and a fifth Lord of Darkness whose identity is kept secret until the last line of the last book.   

All of the five Lords of Darkness have blatantly obvious doppelgangers among Gaiman’s seven Endless, there are only two without, and those two always felt like they were the odd ones out.  I am certain they were only included because Desire and Despair were closest to Neil Gaiman’s heart.   

There are people now asking, why didn’t Tanith Lee say anything? For the same reason, none of his victims spoke up, because she was up against the machine called, Neil Gaiman.  When he first started to rise, he hired publicists, and in a pre-internet world that mattered a lot.  As a Scientologist, he had golden Rolodex available to him as well as a means of stifling criticism.  According to Gary from Nerdrotic, everybody in the industry knew that he went after his young female fans.  And women can almost always smell when there is something deeply wrong with a man unless they are too blinded by something like fame to see it.

This does leave the question of why Gaiman never gave credit for his inspiration. Being a Gamma male was a serious component of that, but upon reflection, I think there was something more.  

There was always some snickering behind Gaiman’s back because appeared to be publicly presenting himself as Morpheus.  Unruly black hair, black shirt, black trench coat, black everything, it was an image he deliberately fostered.  It was the way that he wanted everyone to see him.  It wasn’t just an affectation to garner publicity. 

It was his stolen identity.  

He was still called Neil Gaiman, the child of an empty legalism that used to be a religion and born into a cult that believed a person could become super-powered by channeling former lives.  But it’s becoming clear to me that in his heart, he wanted to become not Morpheus (almost a public personae) but Azhrarn the Prince of Demons, the vastly cruel who could do whatsoever he liked with people. 

How could he possibly acknowledge Tanith Lee as creating what he had to view as his self creation?

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