Neveryóna by Samuel R. Delany (Book 2 of 4)

Yes yes yes… I thought this was excellent…

I thought this book – Neveryóna, Or The Tale of Signs and Cities (1983) – built on the themes, tones, and narratives of the first book (Tales of Nevèrÿon, 1978) in this series of four (Return to Nevèrÿon, 1978-1987), and elevated those themes while actually escalating and improving the storytelling that happens within…

Every chapter opens with an excerpt from a semiotic text … a text about semiotics … philosophical texts about semiotics … and the introduction and fictionalised appendices focus on these themes and the metaphorical ideas that are contained within the text, too…  however, this is done in a way that is far more satisfying than one might expect to happen in a project like this… the intellectual/theoretical ideas that Samuel R. Delany is discussing in this novel (explorations of meaning, meaning-finding and meaning-making) appears in such a way as to no not force the more traditional novelistic elements (narrative and characterisation and descriptive writing) to become secondary to a more intellectual pursuit.

This novel manages to be both an enjoyable and satisfying adventure text (“sword and sorcery”) describing a fantastical historicalised world, and a complex and stimulating literary exercise that explores the construction of narrative [slash] the construction of any kind of meaning, whether that is story or idea….

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Fun! Fun, fun! Fun fun!

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The story of Neveryóna concerns a teenaged woman called pryn (uncapitalised), who is introduced to us as she flies a dragon away from her mountaintop hometown.

pyrn has learnt how to read and write, which is a rare skill in this Fantasyland, and the first person she meets after landing the dragon is Norema, familiar to readers from Tales of Nevèrÿon, who teaches pyrn how to spell her name with a capital letter at the start, and from this point onwards Pryn’s name is spelt with a capital letter in the text…

The first half of the novel, then, follows Pryn as she has multiple adventures, journeying from her small town to the big city at the heart of the Empire…

Pryn meets many people who we readers of Return to Nevèrÿon have met before and, in fact, until around halfway through, Neveryóna feels like the text is merely an echoing of the earlier book, making Tales of Nevèrÿon feel even more like an introduction than it did while reading it (see my earlier blog post)…

Pryn meets Gorgik The Liberator (who is now a major political force and trying to remove slavery from the entirety of the country), she meets Madame Keyne, the older merchant who hired Norema to travel to the South, who is now exceptionally rich and funding the construction of an entire new market district… Pryn bounces between various characters Delany has written ablut before (e.g. Small Sarg reappears, though he is decades spurned by Gorgik and now an enemy of his, rather than a friend and lover, and his attack is thwarted by the ugliest man in the mine who was the initial offering to the horny aristocrat pervert in the first of the tales in the earlier book).

Yes.

So, we have intrigue, we have assassinations, there is the whisper of sex and sexuality – not quite as much within the actual narrative of the text as in the first book, as although Pryn is neither virginal nor chaste during her adventures here, the enjoyment of sex is not as central to her character as it is for Gorgik…

After Pryn has bounced between Madame Keyne and Gorgik’s various camps and circles of influence, she leaves the city, done with it, and soon falls in with a hunky smuggler and his less hunky smuggler friend, and that relationship doesn’t end well… after that she is in a situation where she has been essentially kidnapped and socially – if not physically – coerced into prostitution, but she leaves before she becomes unable to, and her travels and journeys continue…

The second half of the book (or the final third, it’s difficult to remember), is all set around and within the space and place in which Pryn finds a community and a job and a role, as a literary tutor and secretarial assistant working for the family that owns and operates a large brewery in the south of the land.

At the start of the book, Norema tells Pryn a story about the mythical fortune of a previous mad monarch that is buried in a sunken city and guarded by a dragon, and it is here in the South – after she’s invited to dine with the region’s aristocratic chief – that she realises maybe this fiction Norem told isn’t necessarily as clear-cut truth or lies, as she had hoped and presumed it was…

The novel ends with Pyrn choosing again to walk on into the world, alone, with hopefully more adventures soon to come…

So, yes, within that plot there is a pretty standard adventure narrative, with quest-like subplots, with recurring characters, with inventive and exciting places, lots of descriptions of localities, buildings, fictionalised, organisational structures and geographies, and within the text, as with the first book, many tales within tales, recounted mythologies, recounted personal histories and the like… Stories abound.

Delany plays with the fictionalisation of the mythologies in the text within the novel itself, but also metatextually (as with the first book in the series), by including a (fals academic appendix at the end that explores the “real world” inspiration for Nevèrÿon. All of this creates a very fun, but very 1980s postmodern, sense of never being able to forget that this is a novel written by a novelist who is aware of semiotics.

I don’t think, though, that these digressions and references and discussions take away from the pleasure to be found in the literary narrative, but – with all of the 1980s novels that do this kinda thing – unless you believe that it’s part of the responsibility of literature to never permit its readers to forget that they are reading a book, it’s easy to argue that it is fundamentally pointless.

But – tbf – here it is unobtrusive, in terms of these devices not ruining the shape and the experience of reading the story, but I would argue that these elements only add something if you’ve never encountered this before, or genuinely find yourself regularly forgetting that you’re reading a book while you’re reading one…

So, yes, it’s inarguably intellectual fantasy and genre writing with the additional presence of all of these semiotics themes written explicitly and engagingly, but whether you choose to ignore these moments or engage with them deeply, Neveryóna contains a satisfying, entertaining and very fun novel about adventure and exploration and mythologies and selfhood.

I enjoyed it a lot. I’ll be moving on to the third book in a week or so.

Thank you and good evening.

Nevèrÿon