Ink and Steel

[sawyl]

As part of my on-going journey through Elizabeth Bear's novels, I've reached Ink and Steel, the first of the two novel that make up the The Stratford Man. Set in Elizabethan England, the book is partly a period novel, partly a faerie story, and partly a Shakespeare/Marlow slash fiction — all of which sounds like it shouldn't work, but somehow Bear holds it all together in a way that makes for a compelling read.

With the apparent death of Kit Marley in a tavern brawl in Debtford, a group of Gloriana's supporters — including Oxford, Burghley and Francis Walsingham — find themselves in want of a playwright who can weave the myths needed to sure up the queen's rule. Fortunately, an obvious candidate is available: Marley's friend and sometime collaborator, Will Shakespeare. Thus Shakespeare finds himself caught up in a conspiracy to support Elizabeth, allowing himself to be patronised by the Earl of Southampton in order to get close to the followers of Essex, whilst also writing plays, failing to visit his wife in Stratford, and digging into Marley's murder.

But Marley, it transpires, isn't as dead as might seem; rather he has been transported to the faerie court to play the role of playwright to the Mebd. Here he finds himself caught up in a machinations of Morgan le Fey and her son Merchaud, as they try to bring an end to the practice of paying a tithe to Hell every seven years. But Kit also finds himself unable to leave affairs in London alone and, using the Darkling Glass, flits back and forth between his current and former masters, trying to solve his own murder and to reconcile himself to the tortures inflicted on him by the Inquisition during his time in Rheims.

Ink and Steel is a dazzling, clever story that blends elements from Shakespeare's and Marlowe's lives with the established elements of Bear's Promethean Age setting. Ideas and quotes from both playwrights are judiciously deployed and used to support the story. Shakespeare's sonnets are used to give support to the affair that develops between the two poets during Will's sojourn in faerie after an unsuccessful attempt to incriminate Robert Baines.

Despite using established historical figures as its principal characters, the book develops their motivations and responses in way that make them feel like real people. Marley's cocky confidence is a facade that he uses to cover the psychological damage inflicted on him by during his time undercover in Rheims, when he was silenced with a scold's bridal and his body burned with branding irons as part of a piece of ritual magic.

Shakespeare, meanwhile, initially appears uncertain, struggling to finish Titus Andronicus to his own satisfaction. But during his time working for the queen's supporters, his confidence in his writing abilities grows and he becomes increasingly assured, to the point where the words seem to flow out of him with little in the way of conscious effort. Bear also strengthens the her portrayal of Shakespeare as a man like the rest of us by giving him a series of additional worries. His health bothers him constantly, he suffers many minor aches and pains, he develops a limp and palsy in his right hand, and believes that he is succumbing to the same ailment that troubles his father. He frets constantly about Annie in Stratford, where his children are growing up without him, and his stricken when Hamnet is killed falling from a tree — something that Bear neatly melds into the faerie side of the plot. He also spends a great deal of time worrying about his romantic feelings for Kit and, when he meets her, Morgan le Fey, and what this means for his marriage.

Like the other Promethean Age novels, Ink and Steel is profoundly aware of its own metafictional underpinnings. As Marley points out to Shakespeare, the magic of the writer is the magic of Platonic forms:

The plays — your plays — have the power to make people believe... It's Plato's magic, you make an ideal thing, and if the people believe that thing, the world itself must be beaten to form.

Likewise, the faerie realm is a direct reflection of the beliefs and myths of the human world. Thus the bier containing the sleeping body of King Arthur, conjured by a myth created many years after the death of the real Arthur, has a reality in faerie that dates back to the time of the king himself regardless of the apparent contradiction. And where the Tudor Morgan in Ink and Steel is described as being dark-haired, in Blood and Iron, which is set in 2004, her appearance has changed to match the Pre-Raphaelite conception of her:

Morgan was as fair as her sleeping half brother, as her legended son and her sister's four were remembered to be fair even fifteen centuries later.

Not a continuity error, but rather an indication of the way that the faerie characters are at the whim of contemporary tastes and ideas.

Just in case it's not yet apparent, I loved Ink and Steel which, I think, might just be Bear's best novel to date. I loved the Tudor setting, which felt suitably gritty and grimy, the use of real historical figures like George Chapman and Ben Jonson in supporting roles, and the way that Bear re-purposes bits of history, such as Jonson's duel with Gabriel Spencer, in order to use them to support the fantasy parts. All of which leaves me in breathless anticipation of part two, also known as Hell and Earth.