It has been amazing to watch women and men, gay and straight, black and white, all victims of sexual harassment or assault being given a real voice through the #MeToo movement, compelling society to finally have a very serious conversation that we’ve been neglecting. Who would have thought that it would be Twitter that would force our intervention, right? While many of the shared stories have been harrowing and heartbreaking, what truly has hurt my soul is the fact that society is just now staring itself in the mirror, facing this ugly side of itself and saying it’s going to do something about it, in 2018! People of all stripes and walks of life have been screaming at this reality to no avail for decades. With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to Anne Bishop’s masterful fantasy series, The Black Jewels Trilogy, the first book of which was initially published in 1998. While a trilogy, it is one continuous narrative and needs to be discussed as such.
As is the hallmark of all good high fantasy, the world Bishop builds is spectacular in its detail and imaginative in its history and politics; its three realms of Terreille, Kaeleer, and Hell interplay with one another the way nation-states in historical fiction or various planets in science-fiction are often depicted. Each realm has its own personality, from Hell’s ghostly, depressed visage to Kaeleer’s dreamlike, fairy-tale qualities. Terreille is depicted intimately in the first book, Daughter of the Blood, while the other two realms are given a more worldly, planetary feel. The tragic beauty of Terrielle is found in Bishop’s nuanced handling of gender politics taken to their extreme. On the one hand, you have the Queens that rule the realm (as is their birthright in the society of the Blood), often making slaves of males, which involves regular torture ranging from beatings and whippings to ‘shaving’ (having one’s genitals removed surgically or by other more violent measures) to sexual service and torment. On the other hand, however, you have the reactionary males who get together in secret places to regularly assault, torture, rape, and kill underage girls. With such a bleak societal structure, one that also includes a rigid caste system, Bishop is able to show the ways in which men and women will abuse one another if a society doesn’t view the struggle for power between biological sexes as a dance in which both partners will get to lead.
Whereas this kind of imagined world is typically enough for successful fantasy, Bishop makes her characters the actual focus of the story instead of the mangled universe she has settled them in. At its core, this trilogy is about the three-dimensional triangle consisting of father, brother, lover, and the woman at the centre who holds them all together. She upends this trope, however, by making the woman at the centre also the saviour of this severely broken reality. The text even begins with a prophecy of a Witch returning, though it takes hundreds of years to come to fruition and our main male leads have been alive (in some fashion) waiting, pining, for her. They endure untold suffering while they wait, knowing that, ultimately, everything has a price. As she plays with conventional or traditional views of sex, sexual identity, and consent between these four main characters and their periphery companions, Bishop demonstrates just what price must be paid for a society that has so utterly lost its way.
Bishop expertly crafts a narrative that goes far beyond its genre label to ask what it means to be a man or a woman, how a woman and a man should interact with one another, and what tortuous dangers can arise when men and women refuse to see each other as equals. We should applaud those who have come forward, to share their suffering so that others might not have to undergo the same treatment, to force a conversation that has been going on a lot longer than some of us want to admit. Anne Bishop was talking about it twenty years ago and her work deserves to be looked at in this context. While The Black Jewels Trilogy is a wonderful piece of fantasy, it is so much more than that, too.
Buy The Black Jewels Trilogy (Roc) here.
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