VERGIL IN AVERNO
Vergil In Averno is the second volume of Avram Davidson's magnum opus, the Vergil Magus trilogy.
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Vergil In Averno was a 1988 Nebula Award finalist nominee for Best SF Novel of the Year.
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/Nebula1988.html
"Inspired by medieval legends about the poet Vergil, who was revered not
only as the author of the Aeneid but also as a powerful necromancer,
Davidson embarked on his Vergil Magus series in the '60s with the
intriguing novel The Phoenix and the Mirror. In this sequel, Vergil
answers a magical summons from Averno, both the wealthiest and the
filthiest of cities. The magnates there are worried about the waning and
shifting of the natural fires that have fueled their industries and
fouled their air. The bare skeleton of plot is fleshed out with an
eccentric, wide-ranging series of digressions, reminiscences, dreams and
cabalistic glosses, all in a rich, baroque, rhetorical style."
- Publishers Weekly
"The case of Avram Davidson offers a poignant example of what it is to be
caught in the ebb tide of literary fashion. Davidson's remarkable short
stories — whimsical, erudite and often highly mannered — belong to a
tradition that encompasses Saki, John Collier and Roald Dahl, one that
embraces the fantastic and cultivates verbal and narrative extravagance.
That the American short story has taken a different path is obvious to
anyone who traces its course over the past 40 years, from the age of
John O'Hara to that of Raymond Carver. Since the advent of high
modernism 60 years ago, this other strain has been tolerated only from
British writers — or, more recently and in a different way, in the
phatmasmagoria of "magic realism." For a writer of genuine talent to
work with such unpopular forms has been to invite neglect.
The fantasy novel has attracted more attention in recent years, and
despite the proliferation of shapeless sagas involving dragons and
quests, a few novels have ventured to explore the grounds beyond realism
with a measure of invention and artistry (John Crowley's
Little, Big is an outstanding example, as are the novels of Peter Beagle). In 1969 Avram Davidson published
The Phoenix and the Mirror, a rich and ornate novel that has become a small classic, and which inaugurated a sequence that
Vergil in Averno continues. Like its predecessor,
Vergil in Averno focuses on a half-legendary figure and period: the life and era of Vergil Magus.
Vergil was revered throughout the Dark Ages as the greatest poet of
the ancient world, a pious allegorist and foreteller of the birth of
Christ. In the beginning of the 12th century, however, a series of
legends arose portraying him as a magician or necromancer, and until the
Renaissance the poet was as widely known for his fabulous feats — he is
said to have built Naples upon three eggs, lived in a spinning castle,
and erected in Rome a statue of a bronze horseman that would point its
spear toward any province planning rebellion — as for the
Aeneid and the
Eclogues.
These legends — both Petrarch and Boccaccio mention them — project the
medieval universe back upon the ancient world, strangely conceiving
1st-century Rome by the lights of the Holy Roman Empire. It is this
never-existent world that Avram Davidson has taken as the setting for
his series of novels, a world whose anachronisms, like the knights and
tourneys of Chaucer's Trojan War, create a peculiar and complex beauty
of their own.
In
The Phoenix in the Mirror the mage Vergil was compelled to create a
speculum majorum,
a "virgin mirror" in which its first beholder may glimpse that which he
desires most in the world to see. The search for the pure ore from
which to fashion this device led Vergil across the face of the
Mediterranean world, affording Davidson the opportunity to display the
full range of his erudition and stylistic virtuosity.
Vergil in Averno
is set many years earlier, when Vergil is yet a young man without
reputation or means. He is given a commission by the city of Averno to
investigate the recent faltering of its source of natural gas, basis of
the city's immense wealth. Averno (in actual fact a crater lake 10 miles
from Naples, which the poet Vergil once described as an entrance to the
underworld) is an infernal city of forges and smoke, sulpherous,
noxious, and inimical to everything except commerce.
Vergil's dealings with the magnates of the Very Rich City, his
attempts to discover the nature of the Father Fire that smolders beneath
Averno, is story-telling of a high order, as suspenseful and intricate
as any fantasy novel published in the post-Tolkien vogue of the last 15
years. What distinguishes
Vergil in Averno, however, is
Davidson's voice. He adopts a faintly archaic diction and large
vocabulary of half-familiar terms to evoke the romance of an ancient
world, and succeeds without sounding affected or obscure. Davidson's
enormous research — he has reportedly amassed thousands of data over
more than 20 years — never obtrudes to slow the story.
Davidson's style has grown more idiosyncratic in the years since
The Phoenix in the Mirror was published, and readers unfamiliar with the sequence should begin there and not here.
Vergil in Averno,
a novel much concerned with darkness and constriction, lacks the
breadth of the earlier book, but its smaller compass suits the
oppressiveness of its theme. The chimerical world that Davidson has
created still shows through. He writes of imperial Rome as seen through
the wondering eyes of a civilization struggling toward the Renaissance.
In this, Davidson recreates the spirit of an age that remains moving for
all that the age never was, and achieves an alchemy of his own."
- Gregory Feeley in
The Washington Post.
http://www.avramdavidson.org/review1.htm
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"A sequel to the fantasy The Phoenix and the Mirror (1969), set in a
curious medieval alternate world where magic works and the Roman Empire
never fell. The city Averno, near Vesuvius in Italy, is a filthy,
malodorous, Satanic-mills sort of a place; built, you see, on ground
where molten magma runs near the surface, its heat, steam, and power are
virtually free. Goods can be mass-produced extremely cheaply, and thus
the magnates of Averno are very rich indeed. Vergil, a mage wandering
apparently without purpose (if you haven't read Phoenix, this one is no
help), receives an eerie summons and is drawn to Averno, where he spends
virtually the entire book discovering that the magnates intend to use
him in their scheme to locate and exclusively control the subterranean
fires that are the source of Averno's wealth. True, the writing is
highly textured, involute, and sometimes knotted, laced with reveries,
flashbacks, premonitions, and set-pieces."
- Kirkus Review
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"Avram Davidson,
Vergil in Averno
(1987), which like the better known
The Phoenix and the Mirror belongs
to Davidson's unfinished sequence 'The Vergil Magus Matrix'. Its promising basis
was to assume the truth of the medieval legends of Virgil as sorcerer; the kind
of stories which tended to attach themselves to learned men, most notably Roger
Bacon and Johann Faust. In this dark novel -- eccentrically paced, crabbed and
crusted with strange erudition -- Vergil Magus is obscurely summoned to the
'Very Rich Town' of Averno, where volcanic activity provides cheap power for the
arts of fire and metal, all under a thick haze of associated pollution. The city
magnates apparently want him to do something about their dwindling subterranean
fires; but secretly they 'know' what needs to be done, they have laid plans
which only begin with appointing a madman as King of Averno, and they make
appalling use of our hero's ingeniously salamander-researched maps of the
underworld. Despite many fine scenes and an apocalyptic climax, there is
something unsatisfactory about Vergil's ineffectiveness here -- forever
groping in fog, slow to understand the sinister motives and portents all around
him, saved only by a barely foreshadowed magical intervention. A very tasty
read, though, and I liked the irony that quite falsely weaves the ultimate fate
of Averno into Vergil's own legend, as the natural retribution for not paying
your hired magus. Also notable are brief flashbacks to a harsh school of magic
which makes Earthsea's look wimpish. One test requires the class of would-be
mages to compare two fungi for a set period ('the smallest of sandglasses, such
as the frugal housewife uses to time the boiling of a pigeon's egg') and use all
their carefully honed skills to identify and discard the specimen unsuitable for
the pot. Then, of course: 'That one which now remains in front of you. Pick it
up. Eat.' It is so characteristically Davidsonish to skip straight from this
line to a brief exchange which ends the flashback:
'Ser Proctor, was it needful that those who erred did die?' [...]
'Their
clients will not die.'
- David Langford, Ansible
http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/random06.html
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Even though Avram Davidson wrote "Vergil in Averno" after "The Phoenix
and the Mirror," Vergil is a younger, less accomplished mage in this
sequel.
Davidson's hero, the author of the Aeneid is also Vergil
Magus, the necromancer of medieval legend in this alternate history of
the first century Roman Empire.
The 'Averno' of the title was a
region in southern Italy known for its intense sulfuric fumes, caused by
volcanic activity (now extinguished), that supposedly killed the birds
flying over it. The ancient Romans regarded it as the entrance to hell
(as did the real Vergil), and Davidson's city could very well perform
that function. It is a noxious city of forges and dye vats, built above a
huge, meandering reservoir of natural gas that slowly poisons all who
try to live in Averno. However it is known as 'the very rich city' and
commerce at least, thrives. Much of this novel graphically details the
suffering of the workers in the forges, tanneries, dye-vats, and
abattoirs of Averno. Poison gases churn in their lungs. Their limbs
are crippled in the ceaseless production of cheaply dyed cloth and
coarsely forged iron. Everyone dies young, even the wealthy.
"Vergil
is lured to Averno by a half-dream. He meets up with a blind jeweler
and a mad king, among others, and finally contracts with a group of rich
merchants to investigate the recent faltering of the city's source of
natural gas--the underpinning of its immense wealth.
This novel
defies all of the stereotypes of the fantasy genre. There is very
little magic as we fantasy-readers know it. Averno is a dark, hellish
city constructed of greed and poison. Vergil functions more as a civil
engineer than a mage, and is constantly plagued by visions of
what-might-have-been or what-might-be. The Sibyl's prophecies are
impenetrable until after the fact, and the mannered, erudite narrative
is at times as impenetrable as the Sibyl's prophecies.
"Vergil in
Averno" is hard slogging, but a determined reader is rewarded with the
minutely-detailed depiction of a Roman Empire that could have been but
never was. Davidson sometimes swamps his narrative with idiosyncratic,
archaic-sounding language---he reportedly performed massive amounts of
research over a period of more than 20 years for his alternate
histories--and the world he evokes seems totally authentic, for all that
it never existed.
If you have the patience to work your way through
the phantasmagoric thicket of Vergil's digressions, visions, memories,
'might-be's, and 'could have been's, his story might solidify into a
structure of peculiar, intricate beauty found nowhere else, except
perhaps in the novels of Gabriel García Marquez and other magical
realists." - E A Lovitt
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vergil-Averno-Sequel-Phoenix-Mirror/dp/0385197071
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"When I first tried to read the second book,
Vergil in Averno, it reminded me of the first three
chapters of Joyce's
Ulysses – I've always been hugely proud that I read
Ulysses
as a high-school independent study, inspired by the kind and
tough-minded Mary Hollingshead, who believed in me enough to hand me
this difficult adult book and see what I could do with it. (I also
remember how Steve Tucci, my friendly but mentally uncomplicated lab
partner – co-captain of the football team – picked up
Ulysses
one day and said he'd heard it had dirty stuff in it. Whereupon he
opened the book and tried to find some dirty stuff – and soon retired,
utterly defeated by the style). Those first three chapters of
Ulysses
come before the book gets into the razzle-dazzle textual games of
later, more playful chapters; the first three are thorny, difficult,
intellectual, and not really fun – I'm still not sure how I got through
them at all.
Vergil in Averno is similar, in some ways, at least at
first: a dense, nightmarish landscape of a dirty, smoky 'Very Rich City'
where Vergil has found himself, the language is intricate and
elliptical, cultural and technical cross references fling themselves in
all directions, and the atmosphere is dark and claustrophobic. Because
this is very different than the tasks-within-tasks of the first book, or
the Odyssean sea voyage of the third – this is intentionally about an
evil city filled with evil people, which is experienced as a nightmare
that cannot easily be escaped. Vergil has to work through the project he
has been asked to complete – to come up with a plan to improve access
to the ancient volcanic fires that give the city its grotesque character
and major source of income; but he gets little help and much hindrance,
especially from rich brutes who seem not only incapable of
understanding sophisticated plans but are in fact capable of little but
cheating him of his fee.
And it gets, intentionally, ugly – there is a disturbingly eerie
passage as early as the third page where Vergil is taken to see the
torture dungeons (as in another city you might be taken to see the
municipal gardens), a sensually erotic vision of a handsome young man
who at first seems pitiable as he is being tortured – and then Vergil
realizes he is merely working hard
as a torturer, naked and
muscular and focused on pulling a system of chains that are causing
agony to a fat old man. The disturbing inversion, Vergil's
disorientation and confused repulsion, are a wonderful way of creating a
sense of this city where power and money barely even pretend to do any
positive good.
Given how impossible I found it a few years ago, I was surprised this
time that I found the book so readable – yes, I needed to slow down and
keep my balance in the denser sections, especially the
pseudo-dream/pseudo-magical hallucinations that take over two-thirds of
the way through the book. But I could follow it, and read it over three
days, fascinated and appalled by the nasty traps that were set, as well
as by the sense that this younger Vergil was still not in command of his
powers or his own self – he is trying to focus, trying to understand,
but has never faced anything this deadly or complicated.
(Perhaps I am more alert, perhaps more reading and writing and my
Jungian commitments have brought me back to thinking or working harder –
and in any case thinking and working hard seem more interesting to me
these days than they did for most of the past decade or so; perhaps
that's all it is. An inspiring possibility: that even at my age I can
change, can wake up, and life can get
more interesting rather
than less – that I could learn to be more aware of things, rather than
simply assuming that my limitations were set long years ago, and not
subject to change.)
Reading the book was fascinating, and satisfying – even the
realization that some characters would return in later parts of Vergil's
life (you meet his large gruff foreman from
Phoenix as a street urchin in
Averno,
and realize why years later they would trust each other utterly). And,
if you look up Averno online (as I did), you get a hint of where the
ending might be going – and that is indeed where it does go: the
surprises of the first and third books are here replaced by the grim
inevitability of a Greek tragedy, where what will happen is already
hinted as early as the first page, but it is still fascinating to see
the story get there.
A powerful experience, a powerful tonic, to believe again in books
and stories and thinking and understanding: and to see what it can be,
to become a magus...."
- In The Hall Of Mirrors
http://inthehallofmirrors.typepad.co.uk/in_the_hall_of_mirrors/2011/03/magus.html
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Excerpt from Vergil In Averno:
CHAPTER ONE
Whereas in other cities they had taken him to see the bears and
lions, the dancing girls and dancing boys, or the chambers with the
painted walls, all quite commonly done, and in one city they had done a
thing by no means common: they had shown him the treasury, crammed with
rubies of Balas and of Balas-shan, male spider rubies and females of the
same, diamonds and adamants and pearls the size of babies fists,
ancient golden anklets and amulets and silver newly brightly minted,
chryselephantine with turquoise and sapphire and stone of lapis lazuli
here they had taken him, with every mark of respect and favor, to see
the torture-chambers instead.
He had gone.
Had he not gone, would they not have tortured?
Besides: Are not the pains of the few to be preferred to the
pains of the many? Did not the distant Idumaeans say, Pray for the
welfare of the Empire, for were it not for fear of it, men would swallow
one another up alive? And yet the Idumaeans loved the Empire not.
But as for torture. . still. . In Rome, the Consul Pretorius, who kept the kings sword
(King!
as though the title had not long ago been subsumed into a vaster one!)
was able with his words and ways alone to wring secrets out of the most
forsworn to silence, and in Athens old Illyriodorus did as much with
dreams (though these were different secrets, clean different ones
indeed), but in Averno different ways were kept (and clean different
ones they were, too; if not precisely clean). They took Vergil to see
the torture chambers, as one would go to see the bears.
There were no such chill dungeon deeps as had caused the captive in the
Histories
to exclaim, How cold are your baths, O Romans! All was well warmed, all
along the deep stone steps (deeper, even, in the center of each, worn,
probably, by the passage of many feet over the passing of many years)
all along the deep stone steps and long stone corridors, and, indeed,
well lighted as well. His host had paused to take up a wax tablet which
stood upon a stand, as though he were taking up a menu; his host was the
Magnate Brosa Brosa. Hm, said he, this morning they have someone named
the name meant nothing to Vergil, whatever it was who stands accused
of conspiracy and interloping. He raised his eyebrows. Conspiracy
and interloping, he repeated thoughtfully with slight change of emphasis. Cant have
that.
He stood aside and gestured courteously, asked, Shall we go in, master?
They went in.
Vergil had gone in first, with some polite murmur, but he
did not at first go in very far; for, the door closing behind them with a
heavy thud that for some reason somewhat sickened him (as some sounds
do), it was at first dim-dark. But even before his eyes regained full
vision he had with him, always, of course, a source of light of his
own, but did not care always, or even often, to make use of it even
then he was able to see that, first, there was some glow of light from
somewhere; next he saw, in that dim glow, evidently the man being put to
the question horrid obliquity of phrase! a man, a young man, well
muscled and unclad and arms upraised and wrists in chains; but -
At least he does not barber his armpits, said the
magnate-host. . hanging, thus, that beautiful body, and face intent and
in pain, the young man naked and in chains: Vergil pitied him with all
his heart, what matter for the moment all philosophy and polity and
prating of the welfare of the Res Publica, the Public Thing: the State?
The muscles of the arms and breast and belly moved and played and
writhed, the upper body bent forward and moved, the chain moved
somewhat; somewhere near, a bellows sighed and sounded: and, gods! what
mattered where he shaved or not?
Else we had not hired him. The soft voice of the host in Vergil's ear. We want no perverts for this work, you know.
Light.
The young man all naked and all sweat was not the victim. He
was the torturer. The chains were not those of bondage, he had merely
wound them round his wrists for purchase as he forced the bellows to
force the fire, working it to heat his instruments. It was, of sorts, a
shock. The young mans pain was merely that of effort.
And when the actual prisoner, uncomely in body and in face,
was lifted forward and fixed upon the frame, white hairs crawling upon
bosom and belly even then attention and favor, even pity, certainly
sympathy, once fast-centered, moved and changed with difficulty. For one
long, unlovely moment it had seemed right to Vergil, and proper, that
youth and beauty should torture old age and ugly. . and, or. . at least.
. wrong that it should be obliged to tarry there to do so, for, clearly
(from the torturers straining muscles and concerned face scarcely
observed, the commencement of the question. . the questions. .
When
last did you conspire to admit interlopers unlicensed to the trade and
commerce of the Very Rich City of Averno in violation of its strict and
meritorious laws?) clearly, youth could take and took no pleasure in
this association with age, and surely beauty would prefer the sunlight
and the cooler air outside, the sweet smells of gardens and of fields to
this hot room, dark, and fetid with sweat and fear. Clearly, surely,
then (it seemed), age, ugly age, should at once confess and die and set
youth free, unchained, to go forth once more into the light and air to
play.
Then, suddenly,
simul and
semel with the first
groan and scream, it came to him, Vergil, that there was outside no
cooler air, no sweet smells, no gardens and no fields, little better
light, and certainly little in the way of play: He was in Averno.
The very rich city.
How came he there?
Master in Philosophy. Master in Arts Magical. Adept of
the First Three Grades at Grammarie. Passed Master on the Astrolabe.
Astrologue, West of Corinth, and
Astrologue, East of Corinth. The voice paused, continued. But not yet
Incantor et Magus. The voice ceased. It had not asked a question; it had made a statement.
Vergil said, Not yet. Also a statement.
The man of the voice had entered the hot-wine shop a
half-moment ahead of him, and only in that half-moment had Vergil
half-realized (realized, that is, with half his mind) that the others
striped robe had already been in the wine-shop lane when he himself
turned into it. As for turning, the man had not turned up his face when
Vergil had come to stand next to him. . indeed, could have stood nowhere
much else, there being but that much little room at the small counter
where the wine-pots squatted in their hot-water baths above the charcoal
glow. Giving their orders as the dramster looked at each in turn, White
and sweet, said one, Red and spicy, said the other. Vergil was that
other, and this was no pre-arranged signal, to be responded to with some
phrase such as
I have the key to Memphis, countered with (perhaps)
And I to Mizraim,
such sports as boys employ to obtain entrance to clandestine gatherings
of boys who cannot yet get girls. Had the dramster stood a bit nearer
in offering the steamy cup with one hand and holding out the other for
the two groats an ancient buffoonery among street-players:
Spare two groats for the bath, boss? What bath?
The one in Lucus wineshop.
. Change the name for every street, it still drew its laugh from
loiterers had this dramster's stance not made it necessary for Vergil to
turn a bit to the left, he would not even have seen the other
wine-drinkers face in profile: no extraordinary face, say of not quite
three decades, with a sparse beard and large white teeth.
Vergil had raised his cup and lowered his face and, while he
blew and sipped, this other, this one in the striped robe, as though
murmuring a libation-prayer, began that recitation of titles which,
after a mere moment, Vergil recognized as his own. Had this other,
whoever he was, and no memory of this other moved Vergil's mind, not even
as the lightest of breezes moves the surface of a pool, had he expected
some show of surprise or even curiosity? None was forthcoming. He might
as well have been Vergil's aunt, asking Has your sister come back from
market?
Not yet.
It was a tiny dram-shop, Vergil had been in privies that were larger,
and it announced its wares with a reek as strong, though of course
different. He had, in a sudden urge, desired a cheap sip: as cheap in
quality as price, he could afford better now, but old tastes have a way
of returning. Though you expel Nature with a pitchfork, she will always
return.
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