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Following heart bypass surgery two weeks ago, the fantasy author David Gemmell passed away on Friday morning.
David Gemmell was one of my favourite writers. I've been reading his books since Legend was first published, since I was ten years old, so for two-thirds of my entire life. I remember that the first book that I ever loved more than Dr Seuss was a paperback of Oliver Twist that my mother gave me when I was nine. The second, and the one that made me first want to become a writer, was a library copy of Legend.
Prolific as hell (this September it'll be thirty-one books in twenty-two years), Gemmell managed to make practically every book sing in its own way. Early on, he developed the knack for perfect moments of character within the narrative that ended up defining his style throughout his career. The following may contain spoilers. And possibly traces of nuts.
Like in Waylander, when the brutal, amoral thug Durmast dies saving our hero from werewolves, no one ever knowing the reason for his sudden heroism, the murderer taking it to the grave with him...
Like in Winter Warriors, where the mortally wounded old soldier Bison takes the two demon swordsmen off the side of the mountain with him to save the child under his protection ("Did you know... I have wings? Great, white wings...")...
Like at the end of Wolf In Shadow, with a dying Jon Shannow riding off just like fucking Shane towards a Jerusalem that only he can see...
Like at the beginning of The Last Guardian, published two years later due to the immense outcry for more stories of The Jerusalem Man, starting with the simple sentence: "But he did not die." Cue a fourteen year-old Hellbunny punching the air like Judd Nelson at the end of The Breakfast Club...
Like Echoes Of The Great Song, where the psychotic Viruk, a member of a vampiric ruling caste that literally feeds from the lower classes that he despises, is ordered to take part in a council debate over whether his people should stand and sacrifice themselves against an unstoppable invader to save those same despised serfs, and, despite himself, enters a passionate argument on their behalf that wins the debate...
Like Lord Of The Silver Bow, with Argurios, the taciturn and inarticulate Mykene hero, forced to stand shoulder to shoulder with a man he has sworn to kill to defend the enemy city of Troy from his own sword brothers, dying on the steps of the megaron from a traitor's arrow...
There are too many more to count. One of the things that kept Gemmell apart from the ranks of other genre writers was his refusal to cling to his most popular recurring characters past their sell-by date, the desire to keep everything fresh. Waylander and Jon Shannow starred in three books each, and he crafted such a fitting, beautiful death for each at the last, probably so that he wouldn't be tempted to bring them back as much as anything else. Druss, the Legend (his favourite to the end, based on his beloved stepfather Bill), the huge axeman who died three-quarters of the way through Legend the novel defending the greatest fortress in the Drenai world against the greatest army that world had ever seen, the struggle itself an allegory for the struggle he was facing at the time against cancer, Dros Delnoch's reprieve as arbitrary as his own remission.
It wasn't just straight heroic, sword and sorcery fantasy, either. Sensing an editorial cul-de-sac following the success of his first three Drenai novels, he created an entirely new world, a post-apocalytic Western set in our own world centuries after the earth tipped on its axis, our culture preserved in small villages and frontier towns, a world where a desperate belief in the Bible and in a Christian God finds Jon Shannow, a half-mad gunfighter constantly searching for the lost city of Jerusalem, running up against the Satan-worshipping Hellborn cult in his quest to heal his broken heart. Lion Of Macedon and Dark Prince are historical fantasy ("History not as it was, but how it ought to have been", as he introduced the former), both dealing with the ancient story of Alexander the Great through the eyes of his great general Parmenion, skilfully using known history and actual figures in the legend as a jumping off point for a work of fantastic fiction, much as he had done earlier in his career with the re-imagining of the King Arthur legend with the story of Culain, the Lance Lord (which, by the way, ties into his Jon Shannow books, despite the events taking place nearly two thousand years earlier). Morningstar, a slim stand-alone novel, was a bit of a dark horse - his only novel written in the first person, it wasn't until re-reading it a year after purchase that I realised that it was the story of Robin Hood, seen through the Gemmell filter.
Along similar lines, his last books were devoted to the telling of the story of Troy, in Lord Of The Silver Bow and the upcoming Shield Of Thunder. The (possibly apocryphal) story goes that Gemmell, horrified by the anaemic telling of the story of Troy in the Wolfgang Petersen film of 2004, and equally horrified by the lazy critical response that bizarrely blamed all the gaping gaps and obvious faults in the narrative on the absence of the Greek gods in the story, abandoned the novel he was preparing and decided to show Petersen et al how it should have been done. Lord Of The Silver Bow is possibly the best thing Gemmell ever wrote. Every character, from the protagonists on down, bursts with an originality and a depth you rarely see in any fiction, let alone a re-telling of one of the oldest stories in the world, and all without any magic or gods as hooks to hang the narrative on. It's tight, controlled, passionate story-telling of the first order, and it's not even gotten to the war and the resulting siege yet. As usual, Gemmell turned the story upside down by pursuing lesser known elements and using them to centre his narrative. His hero is Aeneas, but referred to throughout by his nickname Helikaeon. Paris is a skinny, homely and sensitive boy obsessed with poetry and with the equally homely Helen. Hector is presumed dead throughout, and only actually appears at the end. Priam is a hard, arrogant bastard, but as usual Gemmell takes pains to show different facets of such characters, never content to give us merely two dimensions when three will do. Even the Mykene foot soldiers fighting the protagonists in the final act are fully fleshed out. The same is true of the rapist and murderer responsible for the butchery of Helikaeon's family, who is seen to be a good man with a genuinely happy family life at home in the chapter where Helikaeon seeks revenge (Gemmell could never see the point of creating a human character - even a minor character - who didn't feel like a real person, and so continually presents the reader with apparent contradictions in order to lead the reader to question their assumptions. One of his greatest heroes begins life as Waylander the amoral assassin, the man who killed the Drenai king. Three books chronicle the redemption and eventual heroism of a man most fantasy writers would throw away as a second act antagonist for the hero). The third, as yet untitled novel in his Trojan series would probably have been released in early 2008. On a purely selfish level, and knowing how quickly Gemmell was capable of writing when a story had him by the guts, I'm hoping that he'd finished it before he died...
There's too much more to write, and not enough time. On a personal level, my favourite two Gemmell stories are more about Gemmell, rather than by Gemmell. He relates in an introduction to a Drenai omnibus a story to explain the nature of his stepfather Bill, the man he based his most enduring creation Druss upon. Gemmell as a child was terrified of vampires, and one night awoke screaming from a dream in which he was convinced that a vampire was in his room. His stepfather hugged him as he wept, and young David told him about the monster, to which Bill replied, "I know, son. I broke its neck. Won't have no vampire scaring my boy." Gemmell never dreamed of vampires again, not with his hero protecting him. The other is actually something someone related in the comments section of the BBC website yesterday, about a starstruck meeting with Gemmell at a book signing. Not knowing what to say, and suddenly inexplicably terrified, the fan wordlessly thrust his book to the author for signing. Gemmell took one look at him, and as he signed his book, began almost apropos nothing to relate the story of meeting the creator of Spider-Man many years before in a similar situation, and the paralysing fear he had suddenly felt at being face to face with the man, with one witty and self-deprecating anecdote establishing a connection with the fan that he could never have made on his own.
David Gemmell, 1948 to 2006, often called the greatest living writer of heroic fantasy, made a living from making the personal heroic, and the heroic personal, from weaving compelling stories from basic archetypes, from utilising a compassionate understanding of human strengths and frailties to define, and redefine, and redefine again, the nature of heroism in its smallest acts, its greatest triumphs and its most petty of thoughts and deeds. To borrow a phrase from his Drenai novels - he was a man to walk the mountains with.
"The hero is just about the only worthwhile member of society. I'm not talking here about axe wielding warriors, but about people who take the tough path in life. The man [or woman] who witnesses an injustice and fights against it. The person who doesn't say: "Well, there's nothing I can do about it." The carers who sacrifice their independence to look after infirm relatives. The volunteers who risk their lives by working in the world's trouble spots. Acts of courage are always spiritually uplifting and inspirational. Self preservation is natural to us, and constantly seeks to make cowards of us all. Heroes remind us of what we can be if we find the courage."
Copyright © 2005 by Sandy Auden |
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