Wild at heart and weird on top
May 12, 2005
The Cup of the World
by John Dickinson
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them...that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd. — Camus
In a valiant effort to pin down the essentially elusive, science fiction author Bruce Sterling once labeled as “Slipstream” the kind of writing that:
...simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.
It's not a very useful definition, but it does bring up an element of fiction that receives less attention than it deserves: the ineffable quality of strangeness. The strangeness that marks Wolf's Book of the Long Sun, but also Woolf's The Waves; L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time, but also Winterson's Art and Lies. Frequently surreal, often numinous — a near-physical strangeness particularly rare in children's fiction. Used well, it can keep a book alive in the mind long after plot details have faded.
The Cup of the World drips with strangeness, thanks to Dickinson's formal and often lovely prose.
The book’s real riches are hidden beneath the façade of a medieval teen gothic novel; its consistently uncanny tone is more important than the specifics of our heroine's adventures. This lends a blurriness to the flow of time and the protagonist's emotional states as she makes a series of dubiously motivated choices and spends the remainder of the novel coping with their consequences. Which leads to the book's second great strength: cleverness of plot.
Now that I've said that, you'll be expecting plot twists or a shockingly original storyline. In truth, The Cup of the World offers neither. Dickinson's cleverness emerges in his treatment of the gothic convention.
To recap for those of you who didn't grow up reading bags full of 1970s gothic romances, the modern gothic novel typically follows the heroine through her arrival at a gloomy mansion-cum-castle where she discovers a series of increasingly menacing clues about the lord of the house that lead her inexorably to a dramatic conclusion in which she discovers — just in time — that the dangerous man in her life is actually quite nice, though tragically misunderstood. For reference, Hitchcock’s film of duMaurier’s Rebecca perfectly illustrates the gothic story arc.
The questions at the core of the gothic novel (“Which instincts should I follow when both fear and attraction speed the heartbeat?” “Why are masculine suffering and cruelty so attractive to so many women?” “Why have you stopped loving me?”) cut to the gruesome heart of human sexual relationships.
When the brooding-but-sweet vampire lover on Buffy the Vampire Slayer literally lost his soul after Buffy had sex with him, viewers understood — just as Rebecca's readers recognized the ache of a lover's inexplicable emotional withdrawal.
The Cup of the World, for all its fantasy trappings, turns on the same fundamental human problems, and Dickinson achieves some beautifully eerie moments made all the more chilling by their emotional familiarity.
And damn, that's a lovely cover.
Readers interested in slipstream or the examination of otherworldly wonder may wish to visit this related thread at Chrononaut.
Those more inclined to ponder the fuckupedness of sex as expressed by fictional teenage girls may prefer this Salon article.
Research on Amazon, buy from Powell’s.
