“We can’t trust our eyes or ears…”

Note: This post is the fortieth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 39. You can read the earlier installments here. 

As I’ve noted here many times before, a conspiracy novel is really just an extreme manifestation of the rage for order that drives so much of fiction, as well as life itself. Given a seemingly random string of symbols, we’re naturally inclined to look for patterns, and the same holds true for events or artistic works that lend themselves to a range of interpretations. This is why paranoid readings of art and history so often go hand in hand. We tend to associate this inclination with the likes of Dan Brown, in whose books the reading of a painting becomes inextricable from a larger reinterpretation of historical events, but the impulse is much older and deeper. The urge to impose meaning on a text and to find a pattern in history, if not identical, are at least manifestations of a common need. And it’s no surprise that the methods used in both cases—analogy, juxtaposition, substitution, selective emphasis and deemphasis—are so similar. A conspiracy theorist poring over the records of the Kennedy assassination thinks in much the same way as a literary critic constructing a new reading of Pale Fire.

Yet there’s something qualitatively different about applying conspiratorial thinking to real history and doing the same to works of art. In the latter case, the reader runs the risk of distorting the author’s intentions and missing the work’s real value, but whatever harm it does is localized and subjective. A work of art should be open to various readings, and while some may be more valid than others, it’s easy to treat the process as a game. When we turn to actual events, though, the fallout from conspiratorial thinking is more troubling. Even in ambiguous situations, we know that there is one version of the truth, however hard it might be to uncover, and misrepresenting it does a disservice—or worse—to the facts. This is particularly true for events that occurred within living memory. When a theory began to circulate within days that the tragedy at Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation, we were rightly horrified, but few of us blink twice at stories that construct conspiracies around, say, Jack the Ripper, or even the Black Dahlia murder. And if we’re confronted by conspiracy theorists who pick targets that are too close to home, it’s tempting to respond, as Buzz Aldrin once did, with a punch to the face.

I like reading and writing conspiracy fiction as much as anyone else, but I’m uncomfortably aware of these issues. At the end of The Icon Thief, I was careful to blow up the paranoid story I’d constructed around Marcel Duchamp and the Rosicrucians, even though I’d like to believe that Duchamp himself would have been amused by it. City of Exiles posed similar problems. Like many conspiracy novels, it consists of two threads, one literary, focusing on the Book of Ezekiel, and one historical, focusing on the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass. When it came to the merkabah, I didn’t feel the need to hedge my bets: Ezekiel’s vision has been a locus for elaborate interpretation for centuries, and I felt that my reading—heavily indebted to David J. Halperin’s work in The Faces of the Chariot—was as valid as any other. The Dyatlov Pass was a different matter. This was a real event in which nine people died, and for those directly affected by it, the memory is a living one. I had what I thought was a plausible theory that covered much of the available evidence, but I wasn’t ready to commit to it altogether, especially because I suspected that many readers were encountering the story here for the first time.

In the end, I pulled back, although this doesn’t become clear until the novel’s closing pages. In Chapter 39, the two threads meet decisively for the first time, with Ilya and Wolfe moving toward a solution to both mysteries. Their appearance here together is no accident; throughout the novel, the study of the merkabah—which was said to call fire from heaven upon those who embarked on it without the proper preparation—has served as a metaphor for the investigation of secrets that might best be left in darkness. Here, at last, we also see that there’s another level of connection: just as a divine vision can lead to madness or death, the hikers at the Dyatlov Pass may have died in a similar way. Ilya only hints at the possibility here, and the full story will emerge gradually in the following chapters. The result is an extended piece of speculation and conjecture, and to my eyes, it’s at least as convincing as any other explanation that has been proposed. Ultimately, though, I undermine it, out of what I can only call respect for a tragedy that resists any definitive solution. I have a feeling that a lot of readers may have been left dissatisfied by this. But I really don’t think I had any other choice…

“But the changes reveal more than they intend…”

Note: This post is the thirty-sixth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 35. You can read the earlier installments here. 

Yesterday, I alluded to the cartographer Arthur H. Robinson’s story of how he developed his famous projection of the globe: he decided on the shapes he wanted for the continents first, then went back to figure out the underlying mathematics. Authors, of course, engage in this kind of inverted reasoning all the time. One of the peculiar things about a novel—and about most kinds of narrative art—is that while, with a few exceptions, it’s designed to be read in a linear fashion, the process of its conception is anything but straightforward. A writer may begin with a particular scene he wants to write, or, more commonly, a handful of such scenes, then assemble a cast of characters and an initial situation that will get him from one objective to the next. He can start with an outrageous plot twist and then, using the anthropic principle of fiction, set up the story so that the final surprise seems inevitable. Or he can take a handful of subjects or ideas he wants to explore and find a story that allows him to talk about them all. Once the process begins, it rarely proceeds straight from start to finish: it moves back and forth, circling back and advancing, and only in revision does the result begin to feel like all of a piece.

And I’ve learned that this tension between the nonlinear way a novel is conceived and the directional arrow of the narrative is a central element of creativity. (In many ways, it’s the reverse of visual art: a panting is built up one element at a time, only to be experienced all at once when finished, which leads to productive tensions and discoveries of its own.) In most stories, the range of options open to the characters grows increasingly narrow as the plot advances: the buildup of events and circumstance leaves the protagonist more and more constrained, whether it’s by a web of danger in a thriller or the slow reduction of personal freedom in a more realistic novel. That’s how suspense emerges, covertly or overtly; we read on to see how the characters will maneuver within the limits that the story has imposed. What ought to be less visible is the fact that the author has been operating under similar constraints from the very first page. He has some idea of where the story is going; he knows that certain incidents need to take place, rather than their hypothetical alternatives, to bring the characters to the turning points he’s envisioned; and this knowledge, combined with the need to conceal it, forces him to be more ingenious and resourceful than if he’d simply plowed ahead with no sense of what came next.

This is why I always set certain rules or goals for myself in advance of preparing a story, and it often helps if they’re a little bit arbitrary. When I started writing City of Exiles, for instance, I decided early on that the vision of Ezekiel would play a role in the plot, even if I didn’t know how. This is partially because I’d wanted to write something on the merkabah—the vision of the four fabulous creatures attending the chariot of God—for a long time, and I knew the material was rich and flexible enough to inform whatever novel I decided to write. More important, though, was my need for some kind of overriding constraint in the first place. Knowing a big element of the novel in advance served as a sort of machine for making choices: certain possibilities would suggest themselves over others, from the highest level to the lowest, and if I ever felt lost or got off track, I had an existing structure to guide me back to where I needed to be. And really, it could have been almost anything; as James Joyce said of the structure of Ulysses, it’s a bridge that can be blown up once the troops have gotten to the other side.  (Not every connective thread is created equal, of course. Using the same approach I’d used for my previous novels, I spent a long time trying to build Eternal Empire around the mystery of the Urim and Thummim, only to find that the logical connections I needed just weren’t there.)

Chapter 35 contains the longest extended discussion of Ezekiel’s vision in the novel so far, as Wolfe pays her second visit to Ilya in prison, and it provides an illustration in miniature of the problems I had to confront throughout the entire story. The material may be interesting in its own right, but if I can’t find ways of tying it back to events in the larger narrative, readers might well wonder what it’s doing here at all. (To be fair, some readers did have this reaction.) At various points in this chapter, you can see me, in the person of Wolfe, trying to bring the discussion back around to what is happening elsewhere in the story. According to the rabbis, Ezekiel’s vision can’t be discussed with a student under forty, and those who analyze the merkabah without the proper preparation run the risk of being burned alive by fire from heaven, which turns it into a metaphor for forbidden knowledge of any kind. And my own theory about the vision’s meaning, in which I’m highly indebted to David J. Halperin’s book The Faces of the Chariot, centers on the idea that elements of the story have been redacted or revised, which points to the acts of deception and erasure practiced by the Russian intelligence services. In the end, Wolfe leaves with a few precious hints, and if she’s able to put them to good use, that’s no accident. The entire story is designed to take her there…

A vision of the chariot

Technically, you aren’t supposed to study the work of the chariot until the age of forty, but I first encountered it as a teenager, in the pages of The White Goddess by Robert Graves. At the time, I thought that this was one of the greatest books ever written, and although it’s still among my favorites, I’ve since come to regard it with a degree of ambivalence. In fact, it’s an incredibly evolved version of the sort of obsessive overinterpretation that we see among the characters in Foucault’s Pendulum, or even the novels of Dan Brown, only executed at a immeasurably higher level of sophistication. If anything, this makes me love the book all the more: it’s unsustainable as a religious or historical argument, but as an example of an unparalleled intuitive intellect exercising his talents on the whole range of poetic and mystical literature, it’s a delight, and there’s never been anything quite like it. I still think it’s a book that everyone should read, but with full awareness that it’s more like an ingenious magic trick, infinitely repeated, than a tenable work of religious history.

Not surprisingly, the parts of the book that have stuck with me most strongly are the ones that seem, at first, like sidelines to the main argument. Graves tells us, in an aside, how to untie the Gordian knot, and gives us practical solutions to the “unanswerable” questions from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial: what song the sirens sang, and what name Achilles assumed when he hid among the women. And he also deals, unforgettably, with the vision in the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, in a handful of pages that have haunted me for most of my life. Ezekiel is in exile, standing by the river Chebar, when the heavens open and he has visions of God. From out of a whirlwind, he sees four winged cherubim emerge, each with the head of a man, a lion, an eagle, and an ox, as well as the feet of a calf, and the wheels of a vast chariot—each “a wheel within a wheel”—that turn of their own accord. Above the chariot is the figure of a man, made of fire from the waist down. Ezekiel falls into a swoon, and out of the sky, a voice begins to speak.

The first point that needs to be made about this vision is that it was literally dangerous to its readers: the rabbinical tradition tells of students who studied the vision before they were adequately prepared, and were struck by lightning or consumed by heavenly fire. It was forbidden to be read aloud in the synagogue. Yet the very act of setting up warning signs around a text like this amounts to an invitation for certain readers to study it more closely, resulting in a vast tradition of merkabah, or chariot, mysticism designed to allow the initiate to experience a similar vision, even at the risk of madness or death. Graves, for his part, believed that the vision amounted to a religious revolution, initiated by Ezekiel, in which the cult of the mother goddess and her two consorts was replaced by that of a masculine creator set against the goddess and the devil. At least, that’s what I seem to remember—the argument here is even more convoluted than usual, although frequently spellbinding on the page.

And the story continues to fascinate me. Part of it, I suppose, is the idea of a text that can cause the death or madness of an unprepared reader, which might be taken as an extreme example of the power of secrets and the risks of incautious interpretation. As I result, I spent years trying to get it into a novel, starting with an unfinished manuscript I began in high school, and intermittently in the years since. When it came time to write City of Exiles, which also centered on questions of interpretation—and the dangers that come with its misuse—I finally had an excuse to delve into it more deeply, in the person of my character Ilya Severin, who I knew would take an interest in such things. And it wasn’t until recently, when I discovered the extraordinary book The Faces of the Chariot by David J. Halperin, that I began to glimpse a solution that made literary and dramatic sense. Halperin’s book is very hard to find, and I wound up devouring it in one sitting, taking copious notes, in the reading room of the British Library. Tomorrow, I’ll explain how I ended up there, and why I decided to set my second novel in London.