Tanith Lee’s DISTURBED BY HER SONG

Disturbed By Her Song collects the work of Esther Garber and her half-brother Judas Garbah, the mysterious family of writers that Tanith Lee has been channeling for the past few years. Possibly autobiographical, frequently erotic and darkly surreal, their fiction takes place in a variety of eras and places, from Egypt in the 1940s, to England in the grip of the Pre-Raphaelites, to gaslit Paris and to the shadowy landscapes carved by the mind and memory. The themes of youth and age stream through these tales of homosexual love and desire. These stories recall, at times, the work of Lawrence Durrell, Colette, and Angela Carter.

Oh my god I had to review this. It’s an obligation. It’s a public service. Because you should read this. You should.

That is how good, intelligent, and beautifully written this is.

I’ll put down a caveat first: Lee is, as indicated by this interview at Lambda, straight. The fact that she’s “channeling” Esther and Judas, who are both homosexual, struck me as somewhat problematic. The interview however suggested to me that she doesn’t feel she’s–you know–channeling gayness (which would be skeevy and reek of the Minority Warrior); rather she’s doing that “I met my characters in a dream” thing, which is kind of wanky and lulzy, but not offensive. And given that there are Lee books I’ve found rife with issues (The Birthgrave is full of rape, Death’s Master bothered me with reams of misogyny), I was naturally leery. But I don’t feel she misstepped here, and the stories in this collection read as natural and organic, not the self-conscious efforts of a straight white writer getting on a soapbox and, chest thrust out, telling you that she’s here to make Profound Statements on what it is like to be gay and Jewish.

Esther and Judas are, foremost, unreliable narrators. Some of the stories are told from their viewpoints, laid down as fragments of their lives; others are fiction they wrote, which may or may not be autobiographical. Given this conceit, I assume that the stories Judas and Esther have authored contain elements of their own lives. Not that it really, greatly matters.

“Black-Eyed Susan” is a winter tale set in Paris, one of Lee’s favorite settings (either in its literal form or in analogue; see The Secret Books of Paradys). Esther comes to work at a gothic hotel filled with strange personae and possibly a ghost. Staff intrigues. Eccentric management. A love affair with another woman while she chases after an apparition of another, peering into one corridor to the next.

In “The Kiss,” Lee/Esther articulates exactly what it is that men find unpalatable about lesbians when they are real people and not fapping material: the male is excluded. And if there’s anything boys can’t stand, it is being told “no, you can’t play; no, this isn’t about you and we want nothing to do with you.” Angry men confront a girl who’s asked for the lips-print of the actress Lalage; they call her unnatural, a bitch, and might have assaulted her. Only after being told that the girl has asked for an actress’ kiss-print for her father do they let her go:

For she was a proper woman, as God had made her, putting their sex before her own, serving her father despite her own timidity. What a wife she would make – what a mistress.
…
They drew sheepishly aside to let her by. Deeply embarrassed, horrified. Not one of them would not draw parallels thereafter among his female kin. Not one would not be dissatisfied with himself… To help her father. She had risked it all. In pure and sweet and proper love. Their champion, and they had tried to dishonor her. For shame!

There’s no father.

“Death and the Maiden,” I felt, was the most striking of the lot. Like the others, it’s a love story between women; like “Black-Eyed Susan” it is gothic. But it’s also about a girl who, having been indoctrinated by her misogynistic artist father, kills off her own female identity, becomes a man Orlando-style, acquires a harem, and shoots her father. The story takes up just forty-six pages, but it engages with questions of gender–and women against a culture deeply patriarchal, and women who love other women–in a more nuanced way than most authors do in an entire novel.

I won’t bore you by going through each story, but rest assured they are also excellent, “The X’s are Not For Kisses” and “Disturbed By Her Song” particularly. I found Esther’s stories more enjoyable than Judas’, partly because she has more of a presence; certainly she commands more pages. For another, I find her to have more of a direction whereas her half-brother tends to drift, from childhood to old age. Oddly, while there are stories that are supposed to be co-authored by Tanith Lee and Esther Garber, no such equivalent exists for Judas and all of his stories are straightforwardly his, without a layer of fictionality to get between the reader and his private life. Lee “channels” Esther sometimes, but Judas is an imaginary person rather than an imaginary author.

Do read it. Besides, you’d get the satisfaction of supporting a small press. Now let’s join hands in a ritual to mind-control big publishers to reprint Tanith Lee.