Dusk > Books

"Alexios, walking beside Phoenix, remembered the still summer night when he had come that way, following the old Chief to his Death Place, the Clansmen sniping this way and that along the firmer ground between the winding waterways and sky-reflecting pools. The flaming torches and the mourning throb of the drums, and the lingering late northern sunset casting its golden cloud-streamers across the sky. He supposed they were on the same track now. He must suppose it; must trust to the men with the lime-daubs between their shoulders. 'When they join the Family, they bring their loyalties with them,' Gavros had said, but he felt how it might be with him, new loyalties pulling against old, if he knew the secret and sacred ways and was being asked to betray them to men of other tribes who did not."

At the time of the merger with Investigation, Toreth had been at the Interrogation Division for a year and he'd enjoyed his work. However, it hadn't taken him long to see where the brighter future lay. He'd worked hard to win a place in the first round of appointments for the newly created post of para-investigator, a job that theoretically combined the skills of both investigator and interrogator.

Interrogation was a profession that had certain basic requirements. Primarily, the ability to hurt people, sometimes kill them, and not care. Plenty of interrogators had applied for the conversion course, and few had made it. The successful ones were on the more socially adept end of the spectrum – those who could be let near citizens of the Administration without the precaution of a damage waiver. At the time, Toreth had heard the term "high-functioning" used.

Or, as Sara put it in her less tactful moments, the difference between paras and interrogators was that the former weren't quite so dead behind the eyes.

I have to admit that this trope – which was first popularized in the late 1970s through Mr. Benson, by John Preston, who in turn stole much of his material from earlier writers – is not my favorite BDSM storyline. Maybe it's because I'm such a realist that I expect the masters to be arguing over which master's protocol the boys should follow.

Syd McGinley, though, has done what I would have thought impossible: The Complete Dr. Fell, Volume 1: Lost (which was donated to me by the author) is a realistic version of this trope. It's not only realistic, but it retains Preston's admirable mixture of humor and pathos.

McGinley's novel actually reminds me more closely of Preston's I Once Had a Master, which Preston based on episodes in his own life. Unlike Mr. Benson, which nobody could describe as realistic (with the possible exception of the chapter set in the Mineshaft bar), I Once Had a Master sought to mold porn fantasy into something that could pass as literary fiction. McGinley has done the same. Amidst all the unlikely erotic passages – a cock ring made of hollies? – the novel addresses such topics as domestic abuse, immigration laws, illiteracy, and Robert's Rules of Order. "Jesus, he's spent too long in corporate land," the narrator says of another character. "I mean, it is important to discuss who is having what mark put on which boy, but do we really need a fucking agenda?"

In addition, to my very great relief, the dominant who narrates the story is not rich.

Dr. John Fell is an engaging protagonist: a scholarly curmudgeon who has a soft spot for abused and ill-trained leatherboys. I can't say that I agree with every decision he makes, not to mention his propensity for thrashing bare flesh with wild plants. (I winced during those passages, since I'm allergic to just about everything I touch in my garden.) But that's entirely the point: this is no Mr. Benson, no idealization of an infallible master. Instead, Dr. Fell is struggling with a personal demon: an inability to move beyond a past tragedy, which inhibits his relations with others.

Fortunately, he is surrounded by a loving and supportive community. (Dr. Fell describe this as a D/s group, though it reads to me as M/s, since all of the group's boys are owned and appear to have little say on how their lives are led.) Many BDSM stories zero in on a sexual pairing, leaving the reader with the impression that there's a solid wall between BDSM partners and the rest of the world. McGinley's approach is refreshingly different, presenting a network of BDSM relationships, and even hinting at what is taking place in the vanilla world. (The passage where Dr. Fell doms his students during a writing exercise is particularly amusing.)

Although Dr. Fell frequents a leather bar (how he got past the doorman before he bought himself a leather jacket is left an unanswered question), there's not much gay leather culture in the novel. On the other hand, there's a strong enough gay atmosphere that one doesn't feel that McGinley has stolen the plotline from yaoi manga. (In a tongue-in-cheek sequence, McGinley portrays a boy as harboring such manga.) Although the characters – in another realistic touch – range from bear to effeminate, Dr. Fell himself is very much a product of masculine culture: "We're saved from having to do awkward macho congratulations," he reports at one point. Thanks to the first-person narration, we get to witness his inner turmoil, but only occasionally are the other characters granted a glimpse of what lies behind his forbidding countenance.

The novel begins a bit awkwardly, with Dr. Fell subduing a recalcitrant submissive by sheer force and, it might be added, no condom. (The characters' attitudes toward condomless anal sex are frustratingly inconsistent; at one point, a boy prepares contributions for an AIDS foundation mere hours before barebacking another dom's boy.) In a wonderful divergence from the Mr. Benson tradition, however, the submissive turns out to be not quite subdued after all: "irrepressible" is how the long-suffering narrator describes him.

The next story in the novel takes a darker turn, and the author shows considerable skill at mixing tragedy with comedy.

Alas, McGinley, like most other BDSM writers, is better at describing naked bodies than at describing the characters' surroundings. Usually, I try not to quibble over such matters, but it's hard for me to believe that a Renaissance scholar who carries around a volume with phrases like this—

The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses . . .

What few descriptions of the cabin exist are slipped into the narrative in a natural manner, usually because one boy or another is doing domestic work. While the novel doesn't scrimp on scenes of sex and SM, McGinley is one of the few BDSM writers who seems to have grasped that doms occasionally emerge from their bedrooms and dungeons. The primary focus of the novel is on nonsexual training as Dr. Fell provides the boys with opportunities to expand their skills.

And not just the boys.

Twink slams in. "Dr. Fell, Laurie says he needs a doctor."

"A real one, not some PhD," hollers Laurie from the porch.

Twink and Dexter suck their breath in unison. I give them my cold smile.

"You two find something to do in the kitchen. I'll be busy for awhile."

Laurie is on the porch, unrepentant. His ass is a mess, but twink has done a good job of cleaning it. He looks me straight in the eye. I know a challenge when I see one.

I shut the door behind me. Laurie keeps his head held high.

"What the fuck are you up to, boy? Is your ass not sore enough?"

I can see tears glistening in his eyes, and I realize it's all bravado and he wants me out here in private.

He shakes his head. "I'm so scared, Dr. Fell. What I'm going to need is too much."

I stand next to him by the railing and put an arm around him. I've only touched to punish so far, and he whimpers in surprise.

"I don't think so, boy. Only if you fight it."

His back is rigid under my arm, and then after a second he starts to tremble.

"Stop being so proud. You know I need to bring you low before you learn better ways. But if you understand and work with me, it's easier."

I get a small sob from him, and then he puts his head on my shoulder and weeps.

"Why doesn't sir do that for me? He just ignores me; he doesn't care if I'm struggling."

"He sent you here."

He's still sobbing, and I'm rubbing his back gently.

"I know, but he never controls me, and he's having you do it, not him. I know it was wrong to use the credit card. I didn't even buy stuff I wanted."

I hide a sigh. Training Doms is much harder than training boys, but it's Laurie's doctor who is the real problem. Laurie is still babbling and his sad little remarks about how being a doctor's boy is lonely and boring confirm my thoughts. Poor Laurie. He, as I suspect are several of the group's boys, is a trophy sub. Cute, outwardly obedient, and bored out of his skull while his rich owner works on staying rich and not on being an owner.

I thought to myself . . . What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their friends?

After all, it's not like there's any conceivable way to stop people from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren't going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn't going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I'm a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier). . . .

I've had literally thousands of people approach me by e-mail and at signings and cons to say, "I found your work online for free, got hooked, and started buying it." By contrast, I've had all of five e-mails from people saying, "Hey, idiot, thanks for the free book, now I don't have to buy the print edition, ha ha!"

It's the twenty-first century. Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems). Hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won't get slower or harder to access. If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, *contemporary*.

"Being a top really is a deeper submission," the top narrator comments at one point. A lot of that can be attributed to the boy whom the top has chosen.

"I love you, John Fell, and I want what's best for you. Especially when you don't know what that is."

I kiss him and grumble, "Remember who the top is here, boy."

[He] smiles sweetly. "Just trying to anticipate your needs, sir."

She inspects the thermometer while I control a pout.

"One-oh-one. Better than it was. Stay right there. I'll get you some soup."

One-oh-one – introduction to pneumonia. I snigger. Oh man. I'm losing it. Oooh, my soup is full of stars! I'm sorry . . . I'm afraid I can't do that.

"Eat your chicken and stars, Johnny. Don't just stare at it."

I blink. Mama P is sitting on the end of the bed, waiting.

"Yes, ma'am."

It tastes funny, but I eat it all obediently. Mama P takes the bowl and asks if I want the TV on. Shit, it's been moved it into the bedroom while I was asleep. I growl. I truly hate TV in the bedroom.

Mama P just laughs. "I want you to stay sitting up for awhile, Johnny. You'll breathe easier, and besides, your tummy is full." She turns on the TV and hands me the remote. "Now relax. I'll be right back."

I do not throw the remote at her, but I deliberately find a kids' show to sulk through. That bites me in the ass as I end up cackling at a sponge wearing shorts.

The only mildly irritating aspect of the novel is that it began as a series of separately published stories, which weren't edited at the novel stage to take out the repetition, so the reader is told the same backstories several times. On the other hand, the stories' overlapping timelines are part of the book's charm. And the novel has humor and it has mainly-outdoors sex and it has poignant moments, especially in the chapters "Teacher's Pet" and "Back in the Day." What more could one want from an erotic love story?

When the Hood was with you, nothing could ever go wrong. Every man in the Royal Navy knew that.

And not only in the Navy. It is seventeen years now since the Hood died but none of the millions alive today who had grown up before the Second World War can forget, and will probably never forget, the almost unbelievable hold the Hood had taken on the imaginations and hearts of the British public. She was the best known, best loved ship in all our long naval history, a household name to countless people for whom Revenge and Victory were only words. The biggest, most powerful ship of the line in the inter-war years, she stood for all that was permanent, a synonym for all that was invincible, held in awe, even in veneration. For millions of people she was the Royal Navy, a legend in her own lifetime . . . But a legend grows old.

And now, with the long night's high-speed steaming over, the dawn in the sky and the Bismarck looming up over the horizon, the legend was about to end forever.

Shocked into comparative sobriety and hoarsely uttering the war cry of his clan, McCrimmon leapt back. A high-speed camera would have recorded but a blur as his hand streaked for his Stilson wrench. Wild Bill Hickok, at his best, would have stood in silent wonder. Alas for McCrimmon, the miraculous speed of his draw was grievously hampered by the plethora of assorted cutlery in his pocket. True, it caused but a second's delay: but it is a scientifically established fact that a heavy stool, impelled by the arms of an enraged Armenian, can cover a distance of four feet in less than half that time.

It was quite dark now and the Great North Road, the A1, that loneliest of Europe's highways, almost deserted. At rare intervals, a giant British Roadways truck loomed out of the darkness: a courteous dipping of headlamps, immaculate hand-signals, a sudden flash of sound from the labouring diesel - and the A1 was lonelier than ever. Then there was only the soothing hum of tyres, the black ribbon of highway, and the headlights of the Jaguar, weirdly hypnotic, swathing through the blackness.

Loneliness and sleep, sleep and loneliness. The enemies, the co-drivers of the man at the wheel; the one lending that extra half pound of pressure to the accelerator, the other, immobile and ever-watchful, waiting his chance to slide in behind the wheel and take over. I knew them well and I feared them.

But they were not riding with me tonight. There was no room for them. Not with so many passengers. Not with Stella sitting there beside me, Stella of the laughing eyes and sad heart, who had died in a German concentration camp. Not with Nicky, the golden boy, lounging in the back seat, or Passiere, who had never returned to his sun-drenched vineyards in Sisteron. No room for sleep and loneliness? Why, by the time you had crowded in Taffy the engineer, complaining as bitterly as ever and Vice-Admiral Starr and his bushy eyebrows, there was hardly room for myself.

"Do you know what it's like up there, between Jan Mayen and Bear Island on a February night, Admiral Starr? Of course you don't. Do you know what it's like when there's sixty degrees of frost in the Arctic - and it still doesn't freeze? Do you know what it's like when the wind, twenty degrees below zero, comes screaming off the Polar and Greenland ice-caps and slices through the thickest clothing like a scalpel? When there's five hundred tons of ice on the deck, where five minutes' direct exposure means frostbite, where the bows crash down into a trough and the spray hits you as solid ice, where even a torch battery dies out in the intense cold? Do you, Admiral Starr, do you?"

On board the Ulysses, men for whom death and destruction had become the stuff of existence, to be accepted with the callousness and jesting indifference that alone kept them sane—these men clenched impotent fists, mouthed meaningless, useless curses over and over again and wept heedlessly like little children.

Richard Vallery . . . hated war. He always had hated it and he cursed the day it had dragged him out of his comfortable retirement. At least, "dragged" was how he put it; only Tyndall knew that he had volunteered his services to the Admiralty on 1st September, 1939, and had had them gladly accepted.

But he hated war. Not because it interfered with his lifelong passion for music and literature, on both of which he was a considerable authority, not even because it was a perpetual affront to his asceticism, to his sense of rightness and fitness. He hated it because he was a deeply religious man, because it grieved him to see in mankind the wild beasts of the primeval jungle, because he thought the cross of life was already burden enough without the gratuitous infliction of the mental and physical agony of war, and, above all, because he saw war all too clearly as the wild and insensate folly it was, as a madness of the mind that settled nothing, proved nothing - except the old, old truth that God was on the side of the big battalions.

But some things he had to do, and Vallery had clearly seen that this war had to be his also. And so he had come back to the service, and had grown older as the bitter years passed, older and frailer, and more kindly and tolerant and understanding. Among Naval Captains, indeed among men, he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone. It was a measure of the man's greatness that this thought never occurred to him.

The ship scuttled before the wind; Hed grew small, blurred in the distance.

The High One's harpist had come to stand at the railing; his grey cloak snapped behind him like a banner. Morgon's eyes wandered to his face, unlined, untouched by the sun. A sense of incongruity nudged his mind, of a riddle shaping the silver-white hair, the fine curve of bone.

The harpist turned his head, met Morgon's eyes.

Morgon asked curiously, "What land are you from?"

"No land. I was born in Lungold."

"The wizards' city? Who taught you to harp?"

"Many people. I took my name from the Morgol Cron's harpist Tirunedeth, who taught me the songs of Herun. I asked him for it before he died."

"Cron," Morgon said. "Ylcorcronlth?"

"Yes."

"He ruled Herun six hundred years ago."

"I was born," the harpist said tranquilly, "not long after the founding of Lungold, a thousand years ago."

"I don't know why [Rudolph Valentino] stopped in Columbus [Ohio], but there he was, absolutely incognito, because he would have been mobbed otherwise. So I went down to the hotel, my autograph book in hand, and knocked on the door, and he signed it . . . [He had been showering and wore only a towel but] he took the book and sat down and signed it. For a long time [after], there was the imprint of his damp palm on the page [of the autograph book]. He stood up . . . and I was about to leave, and he said, 'Is there anything else you want? I'm very tired.'

"I said, 'Yes, I'd like to have you.' And then he really did smile . . . He reached over and pushed the door shut . . . and with the other hand he undid his towel."