Re-visiting Piers Anthony's Xanth "trilogy"

In my quest to avoid working on my monograph, I've recently wandered down a Piers Anthony-sized rabbit hole. At some point, I might comment on his two fascinating autobiographies, but for now let me focus on his first Xanth "trilogy" -- A Spell for Chameleon (1977), The Source of Magic (1979), and Castle Roogna (1979). Of course, these three books are no more a trilogy than my cat, Sawyer, is a trilogy. That designation was a Del Rey/Ballantine marketing ploy, pure and simple, and today nobody would question that Xanth constitutes an open-ended series with stand-alone novels that feature, especially after Bink and Dor, brand-new protagonists for each new book.

Still, last month I accidentally re-read these first three book as a cluster, so let me mention some general thoughts on this "trilogy" before offering more specific commentary on the books.**

General Remarks -- Xanth, Oz, and World-building

As a teen, I never realized how closely the world-building between Anthony and L. Frank Baum paralleled one another, since I didn't read the Oz books until my late 30s. Still, both authors have a lot in common. To begin with, let's just mention the pink elephant in the room: both authors are obsessed with puns -- Anthony famously so, but Baum, too, who liked to indulge himself in wordplay like a kid left unsupervised at the candy store. His Oz books are absolutely chock-full of terrible puns, sometimes for pages on end, and they almost make Anthony's own puns seem the pinnacle of wit ... although neither Baum nor Anthony, let me add, had the least little bit of shame over their love of punditry (see what I did there?), which is something I can certainly respect.

But too, there's the sheer whimsical invention rife within each fantasy world. With Baum, every chapter seemingly witnesses a wondrous new fantasy character or race of people. The cumulative effect can be numbing, especially for an adult reader like me, but Baum's relentless invention shows up in the difference between Baum's early and later maps: the land of Oz gets very cluttered towards the end.

Same with Xanth. While Anthony isn't quite the devil Baum is with random ad hoc inventions (i.e., he's more comfortable at creating only modestly episodic plots), Anthony's additions still pile up. Early maps for Xanth, for instance, are sparse. Not so the later ones. Rampant additions and inventions also tend to insert a fair bit of magical randomness into both Oz and Xanth. Unlike world-builders more interested in building internal world consistency, such as Tolkien, both Baum and Anthony enjoy adding things just for a giggle or two. Creating a "believable" storyworld doesn't matter so much. As early reviewers often noted with A Spell for Chameleon, Anthony injects pretty much every fantasy creature he can think of into Xanth. Yet, despite their mutual sense of humor-infused whimsy, both Baum and Anthony oddly share a strongly rationalistic approach to their fantasy. Magic might be wholly illogical, but their books each often feature characters trying -- often temporarily -- to understand their worlds.

Anyway. I doubt that Oz directly influenced Anthony (although he did read all Baum's book to his daughter -- twice), but it's nonetheless pretty amazing how closely their approaches to world-building mirror one another.

More Specific Remarks on Anthony's first Xanth "Trilogy"

Readers often categorize Xanth as young adult fantasy, but this is a slight exaggeration. Certainly, Castle Roogna is young adult -- Dor's a 12-year-old magician just hitting puberty. And maybe A Spell for Chameleon is young adult. Although Bink is a 25-years-old man, his lack of magical talent dooms him to a perpetual adolescence. He cannot fulfill the normal obligations of citizenship, such as marriage, and he's continually resentful of being mothered or infantilized. His lack of magical talent makes him insecure in his masculinity -- an adolescent male kind of thing, to be sure. In The Source of Magic, though, Bink's happily married, and he has a child on the way. There's nothing recognizably YA about that book at all.

At the same time, during my re-read I was impressed with just how well-written Anthony's three novels are. Mind you, none of them are what we might call "literary," or even exceptionally ambitious. Still, Anthony does grant each book a specific theme all its own, which his scenes and invention often highlight and deepen. A Spell for Chameleon features Bink's quest for a magic talent, for instance, but his journey is also a quest for self-knowledge as he grows slowly into a fully independent adult. He likewise begins to understand his own political ideals, including why he resists -- usually at great personal cost -- the grabs for power by Trent and Iris. In a way, A Spell for Chameleon reminds me slightly of The Catcher in the Rye.

In The Source of Magic, the novel's conclusion has Bink struggling to answer moral questions involving his moral principles against more utilitarian ethical demands ... and the theme of caring, which is Humphrey's answer to Grundy the Golem's question, is a firm leit motif.

Finally, Castle Roogna is about an adolescent's developing sexual morality as Dor works through his youthful crush on his babysitter, Millie. One of the more remarkable chapters in this book involves Dor's night with the fauns and nymphs, who can remember nothing from one day to the next. As such, they can never develop a sense of communal solidarity or ethical principles, and they can form no enduring personal attachments. It's a criticism of pure hedonism, and Anthony has Dor reject it instinctively. His friendship with Jumper the giant spider, too, is a clear rejection of racial prejudice, another frequent theme in multicultural Xanth.

Today, it's fashionable to lament Anthony's alleged misogyny (although I'd argue that he's much less toxic than people think), but early reviews of Anthony's Xanth novels, tellingly, never mention "sexism" or anything else in that ballpark. Instead, the criticisms usually focus on Anthony's prose style, which is replete with simple sentence structures, awkward diction (especially the "insults" in The Source of Magic), and way too many exclamation points (!). As one might expect, Anthony's sense of humor also come under fire.

Still, I strongly suspect that the reason Anthony has never gained the same reputation as other pulp SFF of his generation lies in his talent at pissing off publishers and Other Important People, particularly within fandom. In Anthony's real life, his concern with firm moral principles in his fiction translated into Anthony always asserting -- consequence be damned -- his own personal rights as an author. This led to Ballantine blacklisting him in the late 1960s, for example, which in turn led to Anthony bitterly revoking his membership in the SFWA because it implicitly sided with the publisher. Anthony's first autobiography alleges, too, that the magazine Locus has held a decades-long animosity toward him, which directly impacted his access to awards like the Hugo and the Nebula. Overall, Anthony is basically Harlan Ellison without Harlan's firm (and mitigating) friendships within the SFF community. We also can't overlook how the mind-boggling financial success of Anthony's Xanth novels. This came at a time when academic SF criticism was learning to despise fantasy, and it seems to have worked firmly against Anthony's later reputation.***

That's it for now. Soon, I'll embark on some of Anthony's most important non-Xanth novels ... and part of me is curious to see just how far Anthony, who has been one of the 20th-century's most prolific and successful SFF authors, has been under-appreciated.

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**Early reviewers of these novels, by the way, followed Ballantine's lead and misnamed them a trilogy, too.

*** In an article under review, I also suggest that certain hostile (yet unfair, in Anthony's case) paradigms of reading and interpretation have become common.