Reading Piers Anthony's novel, FIREFLY

After reading the initial trilogy in Piers Anthony's Xanth series, I really wanted a more thorough exploration of his work ... something to help me understand just how badly underappreciated he has been. So, for this project, I wanted to avoid fantasy as "been there, done that." I also wanted to avoid novels that I'd read as a teenager. Eventually I settled on the three notable titles:

• Macroscope (1969), his best-known SF novel
• Firefly (1990), a horror thriller about sexual abuse and domestic violence
• Tatham Mound (1991), a historical novel about Native Americans that Anthony considers his best.

Basically, for someone who's written 150+ novels, it seems like a sad stroke of misfortune that critics -- usually hostile critics -- seemingly know only Xanth, which Anthony himself dismisses as popular entertainment. Overall, critics have simply never made the same transition for Anthony that they afforded Michael Moorcock, who began as a pulp author who ended writing "serious" and critically respectable fiction. One charge against Anthony, which he addresses in Firefly's Author's Note, is clearly false: "I was accused of writing for nothing but money, of writing trash, and of not putting my heart into it" (461). Whatever we think of the novel, however, it displays extensive research, some deftly handled psychological nuance, and more than a little writerly skill.

Anyway. Originally, I intended to discuss these three novels in a single blog post, but then my thoughts on Firefly spiraled out of control, so now I'll focus only on Firefly.

Firefly (1990)

When I first approached this novel, I did so with great curiosity ... and some trepidation. I already knew it involved a sexually "curious" 5-year-old girl -- a topic that Anthony first encountered, apparently, after several long correspondences with troubled fans (most often female, but sometimes male), whom he collectively calls "Ligeia" in How Precious Was That While, his second autobiography. Obviously, this is uncomfortable subject matter. On one hand, the theory of childhood sexuality is nothing new -- it's why Freud initially caused so much social consternation and revulsion. On the other hand, as all faithful viewers of Law & Order: SVU know, pedophiles always say the same thing when first getting caught: "But she seduced me!" 

And lo and behold, the five-year-old girl in Firefly does, in fact, explicitly seduce her male neighbor, who later goes to (and then dies in) prison for child abuse -- almost unfairly, Anthony seems to suggest.

It would be a misreading of Firefly, though, perhaps even an egregious one, to suggest that Anthony is somehow advocating or excusing childhood sexual abuse. Not even close; I just can't see that. As faithful viewers of Law & Order: SVU might realize, young children who've been sexualized early in life, particularly by parental guardians, can sometimes later exhibit intensely unhealthy sexual behaviors as adults. That's exactly what happens to Jade Brown (aka "Nymph"), whose predatory brother and father have warped her completely. When Anthony depicts certain troubling scenes in Firefly, he depicts them from Jade's perspective -- the perspective of someone who's been severely damaged. Authors do not equal their characters. However, Anthony also recognizes, perhaps too late, the negative reactions that telling these scenes from Jade's point of view can cause. In his Author's Note to the novel, he acknowledges how sexual predators might use something like Firefly, or even Nabokov's Lolita or John Irving's A Son of the Circus, as an excuse for their crimes. Notably, Stephen King allowed his novel Rage to go out of print because it was associated with real-life school shootings. 

Anthony's novel, though, also aims to point out that our social and legal definitions of right and wrong can differ widely depending on cultural norms or historical situatedness. What he's partly suggesting, I think, is that while absolutist moral principles might be politically easy, they can cause their own forms of injustice -- something we know from the draconian anti-crime bills of the 1990s. Foucault can be read in this way, too. Indeed, postmodern feminists often tend to love him on everything except his views on sexual assault. So I suspect Anthony would also refuse to condemn people like Mary Kay Latourneau or Woody Allen in absolute terms.

Anyway. How good is Anthony's novel? Well, Firefly certainly held my attention throughout. It's a straight monster story, a non-supernatural thriller, and I can understand why some readers would dismiss it as mass market paperback fiction. Still, its central monster is hardly the novel's most remarkable aspect.

First, let's talk style. For a writer often damned as a bad prose stylist, Anthony's sentence-level prose is ... fine? Really, as much as readers complain about Anthony's style, it's perfectly serviceable here. Sure, nobody will confuse it with Cormac McCarthy or Ian McEwan. In all his books, Anthony likes relatively basic sentence structures, tons of exclamation points (!), and the occasional 10-dollar thesaurus word mixed with some truly clunky dialogue. But overall? Firefly is an intensely erotic novel, filled with explicit sexual acts, and Anthony successfully composes several difficult scenes that would have broken lesser writers. Plus, I instinctively distrust rants against an author's prose style. All too often, they're polemical fall-back justifications for hating on an author whom the critic already loathes -- critics who hate Tolkien do same thing with his work. At any rate, Firefly is as well-written as anything composed by pulp SF writers such as Philip K. Dick or Chip Delaney, and probably a bit better.

True, the plot's not perfect. For instance, there's no explanation for how May Flowers's abusive husband finds her, and I was surprised at how readily everyone starts calling the Firefly a "monster" despite no concrete evidence. Still, Anthony handles Jade Brown's multiple personalities, plus her adult obsession with sex, with empathy and finesse, and Geode Demerit is just as well crafted. Anthony also tries to sincerely examines issues of child abuse and domestic violence (i.e., May Flowers) -- important themes that belie Anthony's reputation as a writer of light-hearted entertainment fantasy.

Also emerging is a powerful environmentalist theme where, basically, Geode paves the way for animals to replace home sapiens as Earth's new dominant species. In that way, Firefly is a proto-Anthropocene novel.

Yet a pleasantly surprising range of literary reference also pervades the novel. Jade Brown and Geode each love George Bernard Shaw, for instance. The most-often referenced text is Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma, but I also imagine that Anthony would embrace Shavian liberalism and Shaw's unique understanding of feminist empowerment. But the one literary reference which I thought especially dazzling for its subtlety and applicability comes in the following fictional story that Jade Brown tells: yet another of her sexual fantasies about a woman destined to die:

She knew they were in the public view of the camera, but it couldn't see under their clothing. "Yes, yes, I will, yes!" she whispered, quoting from James Joyce, and of course he recognized and understood the reference instantly. (334)

As any PhD in English literature knows, the reference comes from Molly Bloom's final lines in Ulysses, and it's remarkably appropriate for what this passage is trying to accomplish.

All in all, Firefly is not a masterpiece ... but it falls firmly into the wide, wide category of "good fiction." In its way, it's remarkably ambitious, too, but I suspect two things have driven the brutally harsh Goodreads reviews of the novel: 

1. (1) the disturbing pedophilia scene between Jade and her neighbor, of course, which readers have misconstrued as excusing pedophilia; and
2. (2) that Piers Anthony wrote this novel. 

Beware, authors: if you go beyond your publishing niche, you begin to tread dangerous waters. I'm furthermore struck by how many readers on Goodreads take out their anger at Firefly on Anthony's other novels, including Xanth. This may partly help explain Anthony's dismally low critical reputation. According to ISFDB, the year 1989 -- one year before Firefly's publication -- is the last time Anthony was really nominated for any award, for any novel, and I've certainly read a few unrelated "pedophilia" comments in contemporary commentary on Xanth. (And some on Firefly, of course.) Can it be that this single novel -- and not Anthony's famous battles with publishers and the SFWA -- that has caused his critical fall from grace?

Nonetheless, I think Firefly, for all its faults, qualifies as a novel that analyzes violence against women without exploiting such violence. In a sense, Anthony has been damned and misread for his ambition, plus his willingness -- like Frank Tishner's in the novel -- to stubbornly advocate for what he believes right, regardless of the consequences. Yet Firefly deserves a special place of mention in Anthony's career: a sign that he's much more than just Xanth.