Review: Lazarus #8
Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Greg Rucka and Michael Lark’s Lazarus. As before, if you’re keen on an insight into the creative process, you can find our three-part catch-up with Greg himself here and our two-part catch-up with Michael here.
As always, spoilers abound for the current issue within! Enough chit-chat! On with the book!
Lazarus #8
“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically, to those who hardly think about us in return.” – The Once and Future King.
To kick this off on a high concept note, art is intrinsically iterative. Every story is written in the context of those that came before, using the latticework of concepts, assumptions and conceits as the field in which they plant their own work. It is the very best writers who can reference another story in such a way as not to overwhelm their own work or to rely on that reference too heavily but to add, for those who know the reference, additional layers of meaning. For those, like us, doing annotations, such references yield a rich crop.
The Once and Future King is a collected series of earlier novels by T. H. White, a unique form of the Arthurian legend, renowned for bringing new life to the characters with crisp, beautiful and evocative prose. It is perhaps most familiar to comics fans as the favourite book of Charles Xavier, most familiar to the general audience in the form of the Disney version of the first book, The Sword in the Stone. Whilst the Disney movie retains much of the whimsy of the novel, it deliberately eschews much of the emotional heft in the metaphors that underpin the magical lessons of young Arthur’s childhood, instead utilising the standard format of the movie musical to leave the audience on a high. The books become increasingly tragic as they move onwards, and the lessons that the young Wart learns, and fails to learn, take on a melancholy contrast as he watches his dream of a better world crumble around him.
It is, likely obviously by this point, one of our mutual favourite books. Each of us have fondly re-read copies, are prone to use it as a source of casual allusion and are deeply affected by its philosophy.
When Forever opened her gift then, the moment struck like a bolt of lightning. There was something powerful, and powerfully sad about Malcolm’s gift to Forever.
Certainly, on a surface level, there are arguments in favour of the gift. The text certainly deals with a mentor attempting to convey the essentials of rulership, and an adopted member of a noble family coming of age and coming to power. The text also, however, specifically decries the use of force and the pursuit of power, even where it’s sought to be channeled to righteous ends and advocates the removal of national boundaries and aristocratic honour systems. Only right makes right, says the book, and trying to force force, or channel the urge to compete into goodness will ultimately fail. The Once and Future King, in fact, for all its gentle comedy, concerns itself heavily with failure in the true tragic vein.
Knowing all this, are we to assume Malcolm has less than a full understanding of the text? Is Malcolm tacitly supporting the book’s message? Is his melancholy in his interactions with Eve and his biological children regret over the world he’s made? Is he an aging Arthur, presiding over an empire doomed to violent destruction, despite its best intentions? If so, does he know it? Or is Eve the Arthur, the unknowing orphan being taught the lessons needed to try undo the injustice of the entrenched powers?
We don’t have the answers to these questions, but the gift raises them all at once. It also subtly brings to mind questions of honour, duty, loyalty and love. In particular, Issue 8 brought to mind the quote we opened with above, brimming as it is with examples of people failing to consider, or to care about, the effects their actions will have on other people.
Emma, Angel, Dose and Bit
The clearest, and most immediately destructive example of a character putting their self-interest before that of their compatriots is Emma’s acquiescence to the deal Johanna offered last issue. Unwilling to crack to avoid torture, she was nevertheless willing to betray her fellow freedom fighters in return for the promise of a better, more glamorous, life for herself.
Emma’s seemingly heroic willingness to be tortured for her comrades suggests she cares deeply for the welfare of her Free counterparts, yet this issue takes the time to show just how personal and absolute her betrayal is.
There’s an elegant craftsmanship to Bit’s steadfast determination to assist Emma and absolute belief that she would never betray them being strongly articulated immediately before the catastrophic events resulting from her turning informer play out. The bitter sting of the irony of “Emma would never roll on us, Dose” being said just as the shooting starts means that it’s not just the audience who become aware of the irony of that statement, it’s the characters themselves. Almost certainly the last thing to pass through Dose’s brain, before the bullet. Bit’s face is an excellent piece of artistic work, capturing the emotional fallout when Forever makes her aware that Emma has rolled on her. The moment saps her of her anger, replacing it with fear, hurt and despair.
We should take a moment to ensure, in focusing on the emotions of the torturer, we don’t downplay the impact of the tortured. That’s particularly critical where torture happens off-screen. Torture is, in fact, a notoriously unreliable means of information gathering. This was alluded to by Eve herself last issue. Torture victims tell their torturers anything and everything, certainly, but not with any degree of accuracy. Torture as a mechanism is prone to confirmation bias, to the torturer giving up only when they have extracted the answer they believe is true. The assertion that on being ‘broken’ Bit “told them everything” should give us pause, even in a science-fictional setting in which interrogation techniques, like everything else we’ve seen, are likely scientifically advanced. Like anything in a fictional setting, creators make a fundamental decision about both the ethics and effectiveness of torture, and torture off-screen runs a particular risk of being egregious. It’s important not to stumble into the pitfall of depicting that the emotional fallout of torture on the torturer is a sacrifice that the torturer has to make. The ‘hard (wo)man making hard choices’ myth has negatively affected our political discourse and justified so many mediocre seasons of 24. Anyone familiar with Greg’s work, of course, knows those politics are not his politics. We have to trust that Bit’s special devotion to Emma (and Bit remaining alive) is a loose end that may come into play later, and we will have an opportunity to have the full impact of torture (particularly when contrasted with positive inducement) to be explored. So far (as again, discussed below), no-one whom we’ve spent significant time with is incidental to the main story. No characters are throwaways. Is Bit a lover? A sister? A best friend? We know that she’s been “broken” by the interrogation, but not what’s been done with the pieces?
Malcolm, the Denver Lift and the Waste
The scene between Johanna and Eve poolside indicates the emotional toll this assignment is taking on Forever. Despite our desire to see more of the impact on Bit, it remains true that torture on the institutional level is known to be psychologically ruinous for everyone involved in it, perpetrators and victims. Most find coping mechanisms, but many, like Eve find it difficult to rise above self-disgust and terror. Eve’s been made to use pain to peel back a human mind, and this has a doubly terrifying set of implications for her: firstly the monster that she can see she might be, and secondly the degree to which the human mind can be made to change shape by circumstances and conditioning. In discussing Issue #7 we talked about how Eve saw some similarities between herself and Emma, and following that train of thought to its conclusion must surely cause her to consider how the carrot-and-stick approach of conditioning has allowed the Carlyles to rapidly reshape people, albeit crudely, as needed. How much deeper and subtler could long term influence be?
Look at Eve’s slight hugging of herself after Malcolm terminates the call. Johanna seems to be offering genuine emotional support, her face in the poolside scene, when she is standing behind Eve, not being observed, remains filled with pity and concern. Eve, however, can’t get past how awful this situation is making her feel. She is not liking the methods which have purchased the limited degree of success she’s had so far, and Malcolm is demanding even faster and more conclusive results. If, however, she does not achieve them, thousands of lives in her hands are snuffed out.
The quote which began this review pertains to Queen Morgause, the “Queen of Air and Darkness” who is the title character of the second volume. The quote references the emotions of her children, who love and respect her deeply. Morgause is intermittently capable of aping affection, but her interests are ultimately only in herself. She runs ramshod over the emotions of the Orkney children in order to advance her own ambitions. Sound familiar?
If the opening is careful to establish that, on some level, Malcolm cares about Forever, it also makes clear that Malcolm demands a Lazarus that cannot fail. Malcolm’s priority for Eve, first and foremost, is to continue the betterment of “the Carlyle Family”. An entity, it should be remembered, considered separately from its individual members – if it is embodied by any individual, to Malcolm’s mind it is doubtless embodied by Malcolm himself.
To say that Malcolm doesn’t care about Forever at all seems directly contradicted by the story so far, but the irony is that it is Malcolm’s own decision to hide his affectionate side from Eve. As Eve comes to question her role and existence, is it Malcolm’s own hubristic emphasis on his role as a detached commander which will be the breaking point?
Similarly, Malcolm’s refusal to countenance cancelling the Lift directly contradicts the role of paterfamilias for the extended House of Carlyle. Michael in our recent interview talked about how the Carlyles see themselves, to some extent at least, acting with good intentions, the butchers and shepherds of an unruly and unreliable flock. Here, Malcolm’s decision to proceed despite her recommendations shows how readily he is willing to hazard the lives of his own people. Under that mindset,the Carlyle reputation is the highest good, worth gambling the lives of the Waste, but Eve is at pains to point out that sworn Carlyle liegemen are there. Serfs, as the back matter of the issue discusses, are highly skilled, highly trained individuals, but more than that, they are people who have pledged direct and higher service under the Carlyle banner. Malcolm is willing to gamble them away on a mission of which Eve is unsure.
Now, of course, it can’t be denied that Malcolm may well anticipate Forever will succeed, despite her misgivings, but the degree of serene severity with which he makes this decision belies a true appreciation of the value of the lives he risks. Further, by sending Forever into the site where the bomb is intended to go off, Malcolm hazards his daughter’s life – not an unusual situation, certainly,but this time one where it is expressly against Eve’s wishes.
Michael and Altruism
If the ultimate consequence of disregarding the welfare of the people who love you is the ruin of you or them, then Michael Barret offers us a necessary thematic counterpoint: the benefits of taking an interest in the welfare of strangers.
It’s apparent from Michael’s initial reactions with the Sisters that he has not been doing this in the hope of attracting positive attention. Indeed, he fears that the personal consequences for him may be negative. Nevertheless, when complete strangers have come to him with needs and concerns, Michael has done his utmost to assist them. He has refused compensation (we see him do so with the knife for barter) despite his family’s absolute poverty because he considers it the right thing to do.
In return, he is recognised. He has an opportunity to gain further training and skills, skills that may assist him in the upcoming Lift. The Sisters themselves may represent a force for recommendation or influence – but even if they don’t, they present a potential future career path and alternative even if the Barrets remain unLifted. It would be trite to chalk this up to karma (though fictional providence has its own rules as we discuss below). If the Barrets’ story thus far tells us anything, it’s that the good do not always get what they deserve, anymore than the cruel. Nonetheless, though the Lift may end, Michael has been shown to have marketable skills, and though the Barrets have lost their land and a family member, there is, of course, the possibility that they haven’t entirely lost a future.
This is all pretty rosy for Michael: he gets approval from the Sisters, he gets a path to a more promising future, he even manages to earn some pride and smiles from his otherwise (justifiably) devastated parents. There is a note, though, that gave us some pause. Michael makes a request at the end of his section of the story for some new glasses. Spectacles untarnished by the duct-tape classic, a small thing to ask in return for what is being offered. Something that can be given as an afterthought. This moment plays initially as triumphal, Michael is getting a little benefit that we know he well deserves after everything he has gone through, certainly nothing that comes close to evening out the incredible losses the Barrets have suffered to get here. The fact remains though, that Michael has taken what he previously offered for free and commodified it. Admittedly to the smallest potential amount, and to an extent less than the direct benefits of board and safety offered by the Sisters in return for his assistance, but unlike those instances where the assistance was freely offered, here it has been demanded. Michael has done nothing wrong, now, but if the remainder of the issue focuses on the price others have to abandon their principles in return for self advancement seeing Michael commodify anything strikes a vaguely ominous note. He hasn’t done anything wrong here, but does that first little sale represent a potential future in which Michael is willing to sell more than we’d think him capable of doing? Only time will tell.
The Sisters themselves – as a sidebar – are an interesting concept. Many writers have postulated a return to the primacy of the church as a centre of learning and service following an apocalypse – Walter M. Miller, Jr perhaps more than any (people enjoying Lazarus should run out and get a copy of A Canticle For Leibowitz at the first opportunity – another influential and brilliant work we suspect might be on Greg’s mind here). Though the world of Lazarus shows a gradual reshaping from the world of today (with some specific “flare-up”incidents of immediate upheaval), the primacy of the Church isn’t something we’ve spent much time with previously. It seems surprising in some ways that the Carlyles, or any of the ruling Families, might permit affiliation to an organisation which might hold alternate directives to their governance, or might tempt its denizens to hold allegiances that cross Family boundaries. This is particularly true given Pope Nicholas VIII’s “condemnation”of the Macau Accords described in the Issue 3 backmatter. That being said, seeking to strip people’s faith from them unwillingly might be (and throughout history has proven to be) too much for a populace to bear. Malcolm has met privately with the current Pope, Honorius VI, so there will likely be more to the story of Church and State.
We suspect that upcoming issues, dealing with when the various Powers That Be get together, will shed some light on this subject. We did find it notable that the guards young Forever is slaughtering in her virtual training exercise at the start of this issue bore a strong resemblance to the Papal Swiss Guard, and that a white cross against a red background and laurel wreath was in the symbol shown in one panel. Though the Swiss cross and laurel is folded into the Bittner symbol (a principal Carlyle rival, and a family of the appropriate regional origin) it may well be that religious interaction is being very carefully considered by the Families as a whole. Is the Pope in the pocket of Carlyle, Bittner, or something else entirely?
Casey and Angel
We talked a little in respect of Issue 7 and in respect of earlier issues about the Western and here is Casey, clearly in milieu. The poncho is flicked aside on horseback to reveal a deadly looking knife, a steely eyed threat is issued to a pimp from below a hat-brim and they back away. Pure outlaw.
But the horse opera genre immediately gives way to the meet-cute. From Wild West to Billy Wilder. Casey’s horse blunders into Angel and knocks him to the ground. She seeks to apologise, a bond is formed and a relationship begins.
The meet-cute is normally reserved for romance, but not here (though teenagers have been known to do stupid things, even when they’re otherwise attached to someone else). Here, the ironic tension where the audience knows more than the character lies elsewhere.
Casey’s western typology indicates that somewhere along the line there’s more blood likely in her future. She’s just seen dozens of people lose their homes to the indifference of the ruling class. Might she prove a sympathetic ear to Angel? Might she be the hawk-eyed sharpshooter that brings him down, knowing that his plan likely involves blowing up her foster family?
More likely, we suspect, is that the answer will lie somewhere in the middle, that the meet-cute set up will engender just enough trust in Angel to prove unfortunate, even if Casey is able to rectify it in time. In an issue that concerns itself with people unconcerned with other people, this brief interaction takes on concerning further scope.The brief exchange with its final focus on the suitcase would always be ominous, but the broader themes of this issue lend it just that extra element of danger which serve to render it a watershed moment for the series.
Indeed, this is the moment that proves there is no A-plot and B-plot to Lazarus, at least thus far. The story is all one story, and we’ve been following the Barrets because they have always been destined to come together with it. That brings us to our final point on this issue.
The Clockwork Universe
The Clockwork Universe originally takes its origins from the contrast of deism and science, the idea that the world itself is a series of events set in motion long previously, in which each action is a direct result of the action before it, all of them kicked off by the hand of a master clockmaker long before any of the constituent pieces could be aware of it. The clockwork universe, in a sense, postulates that EVERYTHING is a single result of an overall first cause, and that as a consequence of that no further causes are needed. It is distinct in many respects from “providence” which is a slight religious twist on good ol’ fashioned destiny, that there is a higher force that moves things into the place where they need to be.
When we talk about the Clockwork Universe in terms of storytelling, what we’re often saying is that the story is such that every piece of it moves into place to move a single story forward – and, importantly, only to move the story forward.
This isn’t necessarily a flaw, but it often can be (Todd VanDerWerff of the AV Club wrote an excellent piece on Breaking Bad and how it managed to escape the problems of the Clockwork Universe in the context of the tragedy and the morality play). At its worst, the Clockwork Universe can lead to the deus ex machina, to a contrivance which allows events to resolve themselves in a way that supports the themes of the story by bending the rules of its universe beyond all recognition. Real life, as we’re so commonly reminded by living it, can be messy and sloppy, filled with unexplained exits and entrances, important conversations which we promptly forget and people with orthogonal and unrelated goals nevertheless upsetting the balance of each others lives without ever realising it.
A certain amount of “clockworking”(neologism!) is inevitable in all writing, after all, in any piece of fiction, there are divine hands on the tiller moving the characters from point A to point B. Indeed, it is often one of the best elements of economical writing: not wasting space on subplots that don’t serve the main story. As Michael and Greg have emphasised in back matter and interviews (and not just interviews with us!) the story is Forever’s story, and necessarily we’re going to spend the most time dealing with the characters that directly impact her life. In long form storytelling, the problem is often not so much the hand of the clockmaker, it’s finding a way to keep all the pieces moving whilst new cogs and sprockets come into play. Keeping everything relevant without losing psychological realism.
Forever is now on a path to meet with the Barrets. Six degrees has moved to two. This doesn’t mean, however, that the Barrets exist only as cogs in the machine, however, because Lazarus itself serves the relatively unique double function of working as a systemic drama and a bildungsroman.
The systemic drama is a subset of the procedural drama, a story in which the principal character is not the protagonist, but the system itself in which they function. A war story in which the characters are changed by the specific battles in which they were sent to fight, political dramas which concern themselves with the manner in which all characters are swallowed up in the larger forces that control governance, a legal drama in which the impact of running a major case is shown on the people who involved with it. Think of The Wire, Broadchurch or even The Thick of It. Every character interaction is along a common path, because the story isn’t about the lives of the characters per se, it’s about the function of the system, and their character is only relevant to the extent that it serves to depict an aspect of that system.
The bildungsroman, on the other hand, approaches the Clockwork Universe from the other extreme. A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, and the principle point of the plot is to develop the principle character’s understanding of the world. In a bildungsroman, regardless of the many plot happenings that can and do happen, these are fundamentally incidental, background pieces to the “real”plot of the piece: the change in a character’s perspective in response to those events. Character development is the story. Because of this, all characters, regardless of their impact on the events of the tale, still serve that clockwork function: they serve the main story by illustrating or changing some element of character belonging to the protagonist.
Both of these genres use aspects of the Clockwork Universe as a strength, not a weakness. By drilling down on their essential themes, they can explore their points without sacrificing the intricacy and realism of character, because character fundamentally serves to demonstrate the effects of growing up or participating in a system. There are no unrelated incidents, because a system is too large not to be touched on by everything within its immediate radius, or because character is a function built out of a person’s perspective on everything they encounter, and perspective is a function of living by which all things are made relevant to an individual’s experience.
The particular rarity, of course, is doing both at once. Mixing the bildungsroman and the systemic drama is rare, often because those people who interact with complex systems the most don’t tend to be people in the process of growing up. (Some forms of the scholastic drama are an exception to this, but even they tend to focus on the adult participants in the education system, not the children’s participation in that system as a whole, even where the child is the axis of the story).
Forever, of course, is a person coming-of-age who is nevertheless directly interacting with a complex system that makes up her world on a number of levels. She’s sitting with the highest power in the land one minute, and down amongst the dirt poor breaking skulls in the next. Her character is being formed and reformed by these interactions, and she’s trying to shape (and being shaped) by forces that touch a multitude of individual lives.
As we said, stories like this are rare. One of the best examples we can think of? The Once and Future King, in which young Arthur comes of age against a background of trying to understand the mechanics of power, how it influences all ranges of human interaction, and how the desire to have it can run a complex gamut from sadism to chivalry. If there was ever a story of a child growing into an adult, and in so doing coming to realise the restraints a complex system places on human interactions, it’s that one.
King Arthur’s story, of course, ends in tragedy. The system he has been caught up in, that he has tried to have a hand in steering, brings him down in the end. In T.H. White’s version, however, King Arthur has a moment of astonishing grace. The book closes with: “The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.”
Only time will tell us if Eve can avoid a tragic end, or even receive that moment of clarity. By drawing the parallels though, we can only smile and consider that the very best of stories can offer us hope for the future, even when things seem at a necessary bleak point.
Rex quondam, rexque futurus. King once, and king to be.