Rating: 3/5, average
TW: rape
This book is either brilliant or stupid and I’m not sure which one… possibly both.
I saw this as #1 on a list of Weirdest Science Fiction some years ago and tried to read it, but only got about 30% in because there’s a pretty brutal rape scene that seemed to come out of nowhere and I didn’t know what was happening in the story. I decided to pick it up again after reading sections of Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. She discusses the idea of the chthonic (associated with the feminine, earthy, sexual, consumptive) and I thought it might make more sense to me now then it did back then. It did… kind of.
Chthon is about a young man named Aton who is sent to a prison (called Chthon) for a crime that is not revealed until the half-way point. A mysterious woman called Malice, a minionette (a kind of wood nymph), kissed Aton when he was a child, and now he’s obsessed with finding her. But Malice has a secret that isn’t revealed until the climax…
Aton meets a lot of other women on his travels and sees Malice reflected in them. This leads him to treat them… not well, because as much as he desires Malice he’s also afraid of her. Aton is pretty misogynistic but the women in this novel are admirable: Garnet holds social power in Chthon and Coquina is incredibly strong physically and mentally. I’m conflicted because both the protagonist and the narrative are very misogynistic but the female characters are actually really cool. It’s too bad they’re just used as plot devices to tell such a terrible main character’s story.
The biggest weakness of this book is that the main character, Aton, is flat. The plot is intricate, but it gets lost because Aton isn’t interesting enough to fully anchor it. At no point did I have any idea why Aton did anything (even though the author often just tells us Aton’s thoughts, but a lot of the time they still don’t make sense…). I guess Piers Anthony was trying to hide it because the way Aton’s mind works is kind of a spoiler, but it makes the experience of reading the book for the first time like, “Okay, I guess Aton did that… and then he did that… why? What is he going to do next?” Eventually I just accepted that Aton wasn’t good guy and watched him from a distance while laughing at the crazier stuff he does. He’s very much an old-school scifi protagonist that’s stoic and passionate but those qualities together can be confusing at times… repressed emotion that can only find its expression in sex and violence, leaving the reader wondering what motivates him.
The chapters jump back and forth in time from Aton’s childhood, to his time in Chthon, to his time after Chthon. This narrative choice allows the author to keep the connecting events hidden, to be dropped as bombshells later. It’s really confusing at the beginning, but it slowly coheres as it goes. The timelines of before and during prison don’t intersect until half-way through, so it’s hard to see how they’re related in the first half. There are a lot of things in the first half that seem weird or dreamlike on a first read-through, but make a lot more sense on a second pass. I was actually expecting it to be a lot more surreal based on that “Weirdest Scifi” title, but it didn’t have that surreal feeling that I get from a lot of literary fiction (Coin Locker Babies, The Vegetarian, Oreo). Its weirdness is mostly sexual shock value, with a lot of smaller novel scifi ideas like a space pandemic and some cool monsters and aliens. There are plenty of crazy things that happened that made me laugh and want to go tell someone or show them the passage, but it didn’t reach that level of sublime surrealness that makes you feel like you’re in an altered state of consciousness which is what I really look for in “weird” fiction.
There a lot of cultural references, but I wasn’t sure what they meant. Aton is named after the Egyptian Sun god Aten. Aten was the first Egyptian god to be worshipped as a single god (Akhenaten banned worship of other gods during his reign). Aten is a nurturer and giver of life… I didn’t get that impression from Aton. Sigmund Freud wrote a book called Moses and Monotheism in which he speculated that Moses was Egyptian instead of a Hebrew and that he was a follower of Akhenaten. There’s a lot more Freudian stuff in this book so there could be a Freud connection. Akhenaten was depicted as androgynous in Egyptian art and it’s thought that this was because Aten was supposed to be both male and female as a monotheistic deity, though I didn’t notice much androgyny in Aton.
Chthon is clear enough—it’s a garnet mine/prison and Chthon in Greek myth is the underworld and gods of the underworld. When Camille Paglia talked about Chthon, she connected it to the feminine. I don’t know if Chthon is feminine in Piers Anthony’s novel… it is cavernous and swallowing, but Aton is trying to get to Malice who is outside of Chthon. However, I think in general Anthony could be tying Chthon to the feminine because that’s the title of the book and the book is largely about Aton’s relationships with women. Aton’s obsession with Malice is portrayed as Malice having dark, seductive female power and that thematically fits with Paglia’s idea of the Chthonian.
There are also references to a lot of poets. Aton carries around a book called Literature of Old Earth. Malice tells Aton to remember the poem “Intimations of Immortality” by William Wordsworth and that poem and Chthon share the theme of nostalgia for the wonder and beauty of childhood. Wordsworth’s poem is about a man who misses the wonder of childhood, but by remembering, he can find it again. The image of the sun seemed to be tied with God, so maybe this poem is where Aton’s name comes from. There’s more references to the poem scattered throughout the book as well. There are also references to “Stars of the Summer Night” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” by W.H. Auden, so if you know your poetry you may get more out of it.
Mixed with these high-brow literary references are some oddly comedic scenes, like the one with the Laza, who are succubi in Chthon who exhort travelers, “Make love to Laza!” and then attack if they’re denied, only to collapse and then try to seduce the next one. After this book, Piers Anthony went on to publish humorous books in the Xanth series (he’s up to 30 now, apparently). I think a lot of this book has a comedic undertone beneath the over-seriousness of some of it, so I think the decision to switch to humor makes sense. He’s a good writer and his style appeals to me, but it’s a little stiff and the characters, though cool, don’t have much depth to them.
I would recommend Chthon to readers who like classic scifi, dark stuff, Freud, Greek mythology, poetry, and gothic fiction, but with the heavy caveat that it’s pretty sexist and most of its weirdness is just taboo sexuality.
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