M. J. Engh and the Premises of Fiction

reviewed by Kent Chadwick

Engh has a gift for premises: assume a Central Asian conqueror of the American Midwest, in Arslan; assume a group of men who have cloaks of invisibility, in the children's novel The House in the Snow ; assume an Earth researcher lost on a small planet and caught up in a pre-industrial, egalitarian society of human-like giants, in Wheel of the Winds. Starting with such intriguing premises, she builds taut stories of action, suspense, and speculation.

Engh has explained that she doesn't write "space-opera science fiction." The strengths she draws from the genre are the daring to speculate and the compulsion to detail those speculations. These are the bedrock strengths of great science fiction from Jules Verne and H.G. Wells through Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein to Ursula Le Guin and Russell Hoban.

Premise is not plot but the spring that drives a story's plot. For example, Mark Twain's masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn, has a steel-coiled premise: assume a boy abused by his father fakes his own death and lights out for the territories. Twain's enchanting but less gripping Tom Sawyer does not.

Engh's strong fictional premises create stories with enough dynamism to allow her to explore important questions about human motivation, action and uses of power. Her moral seriousness gives her books a lasting importance. But she has yet to attract the larger audience her work deserves. Arslan was originally published in a paperback edition in 1976 and "It flopped," she said bluntly. Rediscovered by science fiction writer Algis Burdys, Arbor House editor David Hartwell republished it in 1987 in hardback.

Arslan is a 25-year-old heir to Tamerlane in ancestry and lust for conquest. He is a twin to Pol Pot in genocidal social experimentation. And he has just marched his world-conquering Turkistan army into Kraftsville, Illinois. This outrageous premise launches a political novel of realistic brilliance.

At first the premise seems merely absurd. And it is. As absurd as it was for Vietnamese farmers to discover teenaged Americans in their rice paddies, as ludicrous as the day Hernando CortŽs' small army of Spaniards conquered the Aztec's capital Tenochtitl‡n. But with each page Engh smooths away disbelief; every new revelation about Arslan builds a story as logically credible as a think tank scenario. Engh's speculative fiction passes the history test - the novel's conception of an independent, expansionist Central Asian empire arising from within the Soviet Union, inconceivable when first published nearly two decades ago, has become quite plausible.

How does Arslan achieve such a victory? "If the lever is long enough, it doesn't take much force to move the world."

Arslan does not diffuse into a saga of world war. With adept writing Engh limits her focus to the experience of an American small town under foreign occupation and thus creates a story of permanent merit. Arslan has conquered the world, but the question Engh is pursuing is how his triumphant presence will change the people of Kraftsville over a period of twelve years.

Franklin Bond, the principal of the Kraftsville grade school, narrates the first section of the book. Bond, a stoic, small-town man of integrity, is Arslan's intellectual and moral rival in Kraftsville, the rock to Arslan's violent storm. Master of people and animals, Arslan describes his method as, "First the rape, then the seduction."

The book's portrait of Arslan is so vivid and troubling that one reviewer took M. J. Engh to be a man and criticized her as sexist. Even more disquietingly, Arslan is reflective as well as violent. His confrontations with Bond are an argument about modern barbarism. Arslan explains to Bond that his conquests are for a purpose. The complacent happiness that Kraftsville has known is an aberration in a world of hunger and overcrowding. Arslan's dictatorial solution is horrifyingly the same as Pol Pot's in Cambodia: the destruction of urban civilization and the forced redistribution of the world's population. And that is Arslan's optimistic plan; he holds a more irreparable one as an alternative.

Bond, despite the name, is not a romantic hero. He chooses to protect the people he is responsible for, his wife, his students, and by default the people of Kraftsville. He chooses collaboration over suicidal struggle, and he builds a subdued resistance movement. He leads the town into the new era of deindustrialized self-sufficiency; he does his duty and preserves Kraftsville as a community. But the price is high. The high school students are abducted, children are raped, the townswomen stop giving birth. This is not how Americans would care to imagine their response to foreign occupation. But it is the common historical pattern.

Bond, however, remains unaware of the full price he and Kraftsville have paid. He has adapted readily and seems to thrive on his new authority under the occupation. His bad stomach improves; yet his wife works herself to death. Arslan has broken Bond in a very subtle way, with the power of articulate evil. After 12 years of mortal struggle, Bond still wishes he could respond to Arslan's friendship. With Bond as narrator through much of the book, Engh is unable to provide the detached perspective necessary for showing Bond's change.

Midway through the book a new narrator begins to speak and thrusts Arslan to the heights of excellent fiction. Hunt Morgan, a Kraftsville teenager publicly raped by Arslan on the first day of occupation, has been kept at Arslan's side and employed to read continually to his master. Hunt has been beaten, confided in, toured through the new empire, degraded and reformed. He has been filled with the words he has read to his conqueror.

Through Hunt we see Arslan's charism and his past. We taste the elixir of power that Hunt has clung to after refusing a life of humiliation with his own people. Hunt has become the transitional man, an acquired son, who knows the beauty of the old civilization while possessing the strength and amorality needed in Arslan's new one. When Hunt closes the book, it is clear that the society Bond had sacrificed so much for is gone forever.

Engh's second novel, The House in the Snow , is a gripping discovery and action story for young people. Benjamin, an orphan put to work at an inn in a preindustrial village, has run away from his master into the wintery forest. With no place to go, he cannot resist the circumstances that bring him to the House in the clearing, feared by the villagers as a home to demons. He discovers that his help is needed - there are other boys in even more desperate straits than he is. Benjamin's response makes for a suspenseful tale of bravery and moral choice.

Engh's premise here is invisibility, and her subtle questions are: What do men do with extraordinary power? What would children do with that same power?

As Arslan is a novel of conquest, Wheel of the Winds, Engh's third, is a novel of contact and exploration. Interplanetary contact, to be precise, and geographic exploration.

A male stranger, adult but no bigger than a child, has been captured and brought to the castle on the Sollet river. This Exile escapes from the prison but blunders into its Warden on board a small sailing ship and sets in motion a desperate journey to circumnavigate the planet, which the ship's Captain, almost alone in her culture, believes possible, though it had never been done. To the Exile and to us, his Earthling ancestors, the Warden and the Captain are giants, their society preindustrial and without sexual distinctions in occupations, and their planet a small one, half always light and half dark.

Engh's excellent decision to not tell the story from the Earthling's point of view creates a sense of pure discovery on a journey across a completely unknown world.

The moral issue in Wheel of the Winds is an extension of Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to the observation of new worlds, that outside observers, whether of atomic particles or of civilizations, change the thing observed. Engh slowly reveals that the Exile is a weather scientist on a research mission gone terribly wrong. He is touching this small planet's civilizations too hard, he explains at the climax of the story,

"One thing we've learned is that it's dangerous to touch a world. It's not like a little rock you drop into the Soil; it's like a knife you stick into a sail, and when the wind blows, the cut tears wider and wider. Everything changes, before we can find out what it is. Everything changes, and we've set somebody else's ship adrift."

This novel's characters are strong and active, but curiously shallow. They have little past and undeveloped emotional lives. There is a hint that Engh intended the giants' culture to be an nonemotional one, but that absence is the one thing left unexplored in this richly detailed adventure.

Look for Engh's next book, Rainbow Man, a science fiction novel that will be published in May by Tor Books. She promises it will be, again, completely different from her past books. Expect surprises.

Kent Chadwick's NORTHWEST BOOKS is a regular column about writers and books from the states and provinces of the Northwest. Kent lives on Bainbridge Island with his wife Kathy and son Luke.

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Contents on this page were published in the April, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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