THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR
The Phoenix And The Mirror is the first volume of Avram Davidson's magnum opus, the Vergil Magus trilogy.
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"Most of all I want you to admire The Phoenix and the Mirror because Avram Davidson
was a literary genius who is today in danger of being forgotten. In
the Middle Ages, a body of legend arose around the error that the poet
Virgil was a magician. Avram built upon this fact the first volume of a
trilogy he never completed., rich in alchemical lore and literary as
all get-out.
Learned, brilliant, accomplished ... Dear God, this man could write! So well that I have not words for it. Honesty compels me to admit that TPatM was originally going to be the first volume of a series (Davidson started a lot of trilogies he couldn't complete), but it does conclude, and for those who love gorgeous prose, there's nothing to compare with it. Please do consider buying this book, reading it, and becoming a better person for having done so."
Learned, brilliant, accomplished ... Dear God, this man could write! So well that I have not words for it. Honesty compels me to admit that TPatM was originally going to be the first volume of a series (Davidson started a lot of trilogies he couldn't complete), but it does conclude, and for those who love gorgeous prose, there's nothing to compare with it. Please do consider buying this book, reading it, and becoming a better person for having done so."
- Michael Swanwick (http://floggingbabel.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-phoenix-and-dragon.html)
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"TO BE misunderstood, it seems, was Avram Davidson's chosen and
cherished fate. As a writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy in
the US from about 1950 on, he began several successful careers, but
truncated each one before his audience began to know what to expect. He
was an expert creator of baroque space opera, but abandoned the genre
suddenly, subsequently bestowing upon his bewildered readership several
fantasies of a sometimes daunting discursiveness. Each of these
fantasies demonstrated his great powers as a fabulist; but he never
finished any of them. His best novels remain half-told.
Davidson was vastly erudite, in a scattershot and medieval fashion,
sounding sometimes rather like a blind man trying to describe a dragon.
Raised as an Orthodox Jew, his best work was iridescently pagan.
Avram Davidson was born in 1923 in Yonkers, a dozen miles upriver
from Manhattan, and spent much of his life in New York. He served with
the Israeli Army in 1948-49. He began to write seriously in the early
1950s. His success was immediate, though typically scattered. He won
Hugo and World Fantasy Awards for short work, a collection of stories
and for editing the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He won an
Ellery Queen Award (he also published two novels as Ellery Queen) and
the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award. Several times he
was almost famous; several times he dodged the limelight.
His first novel, Joyleg (1962), co-written with Ward Moore, was an
exuberant tall-tale fantasy whose backwoods Tennessee protagonist is
kept indefinitely young by moonshine liquor; it was followed by several
fantasy-tinged space operas, the best of which - Rogue Dragon (1965) and
Masters of the Maze (1965) - tend to subvert the traditional heroics of
the genre while at the same time being engagingly energetic as stories.
But he stopped.
From the mid-1960s to end of his life, Davidson did not publish one
single 'normal' novel. It is the best of this late work - along with
short stories published in collections like Or All the Seas with Oysters
(1962) and The Redward Edward Papers (1978) - that has so deepened the
impact upon the world of letters and upon his fellow writers, of this
most perversely elusive of figures.
The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969) and its companion piece, Vergil in
Averno (1987), two typical late novels, are opulent, antiquarian
delights, redolent of the Arabian Nights any slippage into chinoiserie,
however, is balanced by a chastened wisdom about the ironies of the
mortal world. Davidson's masterpiece is probably The Adventures of
Doctor Eszterhazy (1990), a collection of linked stories written over
many years and set in a Ruritanian enclave haunted by history and death.
In these stories, genre fiction meets Umberto Eco.
Bearded and gruff and Talmudic, Davidson became a cantankerous old
man. In his last unwell years he tended to feel, not entirely without
justice, a sense of personal isolation. But his work had already sparked
the imaginations of many late 20th-century writers."
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"`The Phoenix and the Mirror’
by Avram Davidson was originally published in America in 1966. Davidson,
who died in 1993, was an erudite man who wrote in many different
genres. `The Phoenix and the Mirror’ was the first in his series of
novels and short stories about the Roman poet Virgil, who was
transformed in later tradition into a great mage and alchemist. This
novel is available in paperback, on Kindle, or as an audio download. The
`Fantasy Masterworks’ edition of `The Phoenix and the Mirror’ has a
perceptive introduction by Adam Roberts which suggests that this is a
novel which deserves to be read at least three times.
The story is set in a version of Renaissance Europe which is still
dominated by the Roman Empire. In the city of Naples, in a house guarded
by a Brazen Head, lives Vergil Magus. After an expedition into the
tunnels under Naples goes wrong, Vergil finds himself in the palace of
the Dowager Queen Cornelia. He allows himself to be seduced by the
beautiful Cornelia who steals part of his soul. She will only give it
back to him if Vergil succeeds in making her a virgin speculum,
a magic mirror in which Cornelia can disover the whereabouts of her
lost daughter, Princess Laura. Vergil has no choice but to agree, even
though he knows that this is an almost impossible task.
With the aid of his jovial friend the alchemist Clemens, Vergil
begins to assemble the materials he will need to forge the bronze
mirror. They must have tin ore, but this is only found in the mysterious
Tinland that lies somewhere beyond Tartis in the Great Dark Sea. Vergil
visits the gloomy castle of the Captain-Lord of the Tartismen, where
he meets a Phoenician sea-farer known as the Red Man. After he saves the
life of the Captain-Lord, Vergil is promised some tin-ore, but to
obtain pure copper ore he will have to get to Cyprus, which is `cut off
by the ships of the fierce Sea-Huns.’ The Red Man agrees to take Vergil
in his own ship. Guided by strange dreams and the ravings of a madwoman,
the Magus sets off on a dangerous voyage. When he reaches Cyprus, a
place of rival cults and dark secrets, his problems only increase. Even
when Vergil has all the materials he needs to make the magic mirror,
questions remain. Is Princess Laura truly lost? What does Cornelia
really want and who is the Red Man?
`The Phoenix and the Mirror’ is a short novel packed with original
ideas and fascinating details. Reading this book is rather like eating a
small slice of chocolate cake and finding that it fills you up because
of its rich ingredients. Davidson was a master of the Fantasy and
Science Fiction short story so perhaps it isn’t surprising that his
novels tend to be rather episodic. My brief summary may have made the
plot of `The Phoenix and the Mirror’ sound straightforward. It isn’t.
The plot veers off in unexpected directions and there are stories within
stories, some of them left tantalizingly open-ended. If Davidson’s work
isn’t as popular as it should be, this may be because he seems to have
taken an impish delight in breaking the normal rules of good
story-telling and baffling his readers.
`The Phoenix and the Mirror’ begins excitingly with a man lost in a
maze being chased by manticores `like great bloated weasels, hair a
reddish yellow..and shaggy as goats, eyes bulging and glowing and
rolling every way, showing an intelligence…far more than merely animal.’
However, it rapidly becomes less clear exactly what is going on.
Mysteries are raised about Vergil and his mission which are never
explained away. The reader has to guess what kind of man Vergil is from
small clues scattered throughout the book. Even Vergil himself doesn’t
seem to know. There are puzzling gaps in the time-line and important
things sometimes appear to have happened between the scenes. The pace of
the narrative is considerably slowed down by learned digressions:
lectures on alchemy and metallurgy (dismissed by Clemens as `tedious
recapitulation of details known to every apprentice’), strange anecdotes
about past events, and a wealth of information about magical texts and
objects. Sometimes you may wish that Davidson would just get on with the
story, but if you skip the apparent digressions you could miss
something vital. `The Phoenix and the Mirror’ is a page-turner, but you
will often be turning the pages backward, to try and make sense of what
you are reading. I probably ought to disapprove of this novel but I was
won over by its eccentric characters – such as Dame Allegra, the
ultimate in crazy cat-ladies, or Tildas, a Shaman who has been turned
into a bear – and by all the mind-boggling background detail.
The title of one of Davidson’s other books – `Adventures in
Unhistory’ could also apply to this one. Vergil is a citizen of an
Empire that is part of the Great Economium but don’t expect helpful maps
and family trees and appendices full of potted history. The reader is
bombarded with references to deities and doges, temples and castles,
tribes and kingdoms, and left to make sense of it all. The Renaissance
seems to be in full swing but there is still an Emperor in Rome who uses
the title of August Caesar – or there would be if he hadn’t
run off to Avignon with his new girlfriend. In this Roman empire, most
of the religions of the Ancient World are still flourishing, magic and
proto-science are hard to distinguish and monsters from Classical myth
(a four-armed cyclops) and medieval Bestiaries (a blood-orange eating
gargoyle) co-exist. Davidson obviously did an enormous amount of
research and then picked out his favourite bits from a multitude of
cultures and jumbled them together. This may not be the most logical
approach but it makes for a very colourful fictional world.
Horse-Jewelers Street, where Vergil lives, comes vividly alive, with its
traders in beads and bells to ward off the Evil Eye, its Fountain of
Cleo where women gather to fill their water-jars, its noisy wine-shop,
the Sun and Wagon, the hut of rubble and rushes where Dame Allegra lives
with her `covey of cats’ and the evening smells of wood-smoke, fish,
oil and garlic.
Talking heads made of bronze, like the one by Vergil’s front door,
were said to have been owned by many famous philosophers and magicians.
This is just one indication that Davidson knew a great deal about the
history of magic. As I know from my own research (see `Magic in Ancient
Egypt’ by Geraldine Pinch) real-world magic required a lot more effort
than simply waving a wand and shouting a few Latin words. Spells usually
involved assembling a range of bizarre ingredients and performing
ritual actions at propitious times, as well as speaking the right words
in the appropriate language. All this is portrayed in the immensely
complex process of making the magic mirror, right up to finding blind
men to do the final burnishing because only the first person to look in
the finished mirror can use it to see whatever they desire. The cost of
using magic is shown to be high. There is a chilling scene in which
Vergil reluctantly uses an homunculus made from a mandrake root – `it
might have been the tiniest of mummies ever seen’ to sniff out a wind.
He barely stops its fatal scream in time, is left with a `gray and
purulent spot’ on one finger and knows that he must never perform that
spell again. Throughout the book, Davidson reminds the reader that
alchemy wasn’t just about turning base metals into gold; it was a search
for hidden meanings and ultimate truths. `The Phoenix and the Mirror’
suggests that the same can be true of Fantasy fiction. There were two
sequels, `Vergil in Averno’ and `The Scarlet Fig, or Slowly Through the
Land of Stone”, but don’t expect a continuous story. Davidson didn’t
write conventional Fantasy trilogies, or conventional anything. `The
Phoenix and the Mirror’ may either infuriate or delight you. Surely
it’s worth finding out which?"
- Fantasy Reads (http://fantasyreads.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/fantasy-reads-the-phoenix-and-the-mirror)
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"Avram Davidson, in mid-career, wrote The Phoenix and the Mirror, a beautiful fantasy novel of a complicated, wheels-within-wheels task laid on his character Vergil Magus in the middle of his life.
There is a sense that Vergil, the hero of one of Davidson's largest projects that was never finished, was someone with whom he deeply identified – this was not exactly the Virgil of the Aeneid, but a complex intertextual/para-historical game of reviving the Middle Ages image of that Virgil as a master magician. So, strangely – but with incredible density, as Davidson collected and revised detailed materials for many years for a planned series of nine books – we have a linguistically and materially realistic portrait of this Vergil: a Vergilian world where the facts of everyday life, habits, religion, and government are derived from the height of Imperial Rome, but where there are also strange medieval inflections and interpolations that pass without comment.
The Phoenix and the Mirror
is complicated; there are dreamscapes and twists and turns in the plot,
hints that occur almost in passing (Davidson being one who didn't think
he needed to explain things to you, that you were paying attention and
had a good memory and weren't thrown by arcane circumlocutions), and
they all land in a strange but satisfying ending: we are reassured that
this Vergil, wise, knowledgeable, kind but strong in purpose, has to use
all his intellect to survive the tangled machinations of an age where
many have intricate knowledge and power, and use them to devious or
unpredictable ends.Davidson was so badly treated by publishers over the first book (although it is now respected, they wanted to pulp the first printing because it seemed impossible to sell) that he changed publishers for the second, which also had low sales despite being nominated for a major award. The third manuscript was left among boxes of papers – tons of papers, detailing notes for a vast array of scenes and activities – and only saw the light of day as a small-press hardback a few years ago; the other six books were simply never written. Clearly Davidson planned on different crises and episodes from this Vergil's life, and only completed the first on Vergil in middle age, the second on a young man on his first great adventure, and a third between those two; with some short stories that outline him as a boy and as an old man."
-In The Hall Of Mirrors
