As a fully paid-up (and largely burned-out) footsoldier of the countercultural 1990s turned aspirant sf author, when I first heard about Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love series (of which Castles Made of Sand is the second volume of five), I was kinda furious. Not because I’d had a similar idea for a story myself, exactly—though sf that moved close to the musical bones of British culture had been in the air for a while by then, ever since Jeff Noon’s Vurt went and burned itself into the synapses of rockers and ravers alike—but because it was a conceit so simultaneously simple and ambitious that you couldn’t help yourself being envious of it: in a near-future Britain, economic and ecological collapse leads to the ascent of the country’s most feted musicians to political power.
As Adam Roberts notes in his introduction to this Masterwork reissue, reviewers at its time of first publication (circa 2002) pointed out the conceit’s improbability, though it seems to me likely that reviewers in the music press just a half-decade earlier might have treated it as something closer to prophecy. Roberts notes the influence of the 1960s counterculture on the series (which it wears with pride) and connects that era back to the first flowering of Romanticism, which was in some respects a sort of dialectical counterpoint to the Enlightenment. But for me—being not only of a certain age, but having also by the standards of sensible middle-class convention very much misspent my youth—these books carry the unmistakable chemical tang on the mid-1990s, those wild and heedless days preceding the damp squib of the Millennium itself, and then the tragic and traumatic inflection point of September 11th 2001, a moment not at all unlike the moment the lights get turned on by the police at the end of a long and decadent house-party… the end of The End of History, if you like. During that long decade, Jones’s conceit would have seemed perfectly logical to a lot of us—and all the more so from the vantage of the ersatz stone circle above Glastonbury’s Greenfield site at dawn on the summer solstice, as the various tribes came together in the blur of comedown to consider the possibility that no one could ever really force us all to leave, if we determined ourselves to stay.
And while the Sixties are Jones’s template, the music and media and Millennial yearnings that form its superstructure—the context, the texture—is recognisably Nineties, right down to the po-mo mix of rock and techno, smart drugs and dumb politics. I don’t know that we understood it at the time—I certainly didn’t, but the late Mark Fisher and others surely sussed it out in the immediate aftermath—but we really were trying to re-run the Sixties, in a way, like a young band unwittingly rewriting hits of the Beatles and the Kinks and the Stones, having grown up with them as part of the cultural furniture, glowing niknaks of a period so successfully bowdlerised in the public imagination that they’d been sanitised down to almost nothing, but nonetheless still carrying that ineradicable spark of romanticism and revolution, the dream of doing things differently, the utopian form of the lazy hazy Sunday afternoon that never turns to Monday…
You must forgive my nostalgia—for if the Nineties had a common thread, for all its fixation on futurity and utopian bacchanalia, then nostalgia for a time we had not lived through for was surely it. The improbability of the plot of Jones’s series makes more sense when you realise she’s drawing on a narrative template from that first Romanticist revolution, namely the “rediscovery” (which was something closer to a nigh-wholesale confection) of the mythology of Olde Albion: y’know, Arthur and Merlin; the Round Table; questing knights a-tour around a fractious and as-yet-unincorporated archipelago that was yet to become a nation, let alone an empire; all that jazz. Oh, we may have been nostalgics, sure—but we were far from the first generation to surf a surge of technological and infrastructural change and see in its utopian horizon not just novelty and newness, but also something ancient and lost.
And should you think that the Arthurian myths might make for a pretty sappy template, then you likely only know the versions that sit afloat the sluggish tide of mainstream British popular culture, so thoroughly sanitised in the service of post-imperial narcissism that the more recent reduction of the Sixties to cliches looks like a mere handwave by comparison. While the Matter of Britain in Arthurian myth is no more historical than the current practices of the Druidic orders, it nonetheless draws upon a similar and primal well of atavistic symbolism and drama: those myths are full of incest, betrayal, murder and rape, deceit, contempt, self-doubt and self-regard, and—crucially, perhaps—quixotic quests of the soul for ideals so numinous they can only be expressed through the metaphor of magic.
I must confess, though, that my first reading of Bold as Love (the first book in the cycle) was hampered by my taking it far too literally, much like those reviewers Roberts mentions in his introduction to this volume. It was only with my realisation of that Arthurian template—which, in a damning indictment of my readerly sophistication at the time, is clearly and repeatedly telegraphed throughout the series by its principal characters—that the conceit of a rock’n’roll royalty started to make sense. The ultimate (and perhaps original) form of politics-as-performance, theatrical stagecraft in a necessarily crude and vernacular style, in which larger-than-life legends stride the land, characters fully aware of their status as self-actualised fabrications… it’s a story about living stories, people trapped within the tales they’ve told (and sold) themselves into, and the desperate need for those stories among those who lack the brilliance and/or cussed warpedness to create themselves anew from scratch in such a way.
Or, to put it differently: the stars of Jones’s Rock’n’Roll Reich are medium and message rolled into one. We joke a lot about politics as theatre these days (though it’s increasingly gallows humour), but it’s no joke, and it never was. Those Arthurian legends of Britain, however notionally based upon some flimsy layer of factual events and persons that they may once have been (which I am given to believe is “not very”) were always-already a morality play written by proto-Victorians swimming against the sociotechnical and political tide of their time. Those events and characters were taken up much like the time-worn (and equally sanitised) tropes of a Punch and Judy show, their old shapes rearranged (consciously or otherwise) to better reflect contemporary concerns, the ghosts of an almost unimaginably place-bound past conjured up against the backdrop of a revolution in communicative connectivity—turnpikes, canals, railways, forsooth!—the impact of which was arguably more profound than even that of the internet upon our own times. (Jury’s still out on that one, obviously.)
The Romantics saw what they had believed (or perhaps just hoped) to be a stable present being swept away by the new, and turned to the flotsam of the past as something to cling to for a sense of continuity. For every revolutionary utopian future is also to some extent an antediluvian past retrieved: a narrative dyke of notional tradition raised up against a terrifying tide of technological change, intended to prevent that tide sweeping away everything familiar, but also intended to channel its onrushing power in some useful way. And because such stories are written on the fly and performed by living players, and because those players acquire an aura on the basis of their simultaneous familiarity and fictionality, the lives of the players become an integral part of the story, albeit perhaps unintentionally at first. But then they become aware of their own doubling, and that very real and (self-)destructive power becomes folded into the narrative as well, and we the audience soon willingly suspend our disbelief and pretend to forget the distinction between player and character. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, in this age of tweets and influencers and reality televison? And with the benefit of hindsight, that’s pretty much how it worked in the 1990s, and in the 1960s, and very probably (albeit less quickly, and to a smaller audience) in the 1810s too. As is evidenced in this series and her other work, Jones understands that the line between people and the roles they play publicly is fuzzy and mutable, and that whether we strive for stardom or have it thrust upon us, we do not always get to choose how we shine, or for whom. Like the journalist in that old western, Jones knows that when the legend becomes fact, you go ahead and print the legend.
It’s no comforting legend, either: while Castles may not be quite so action-packed as Bold as Love, at least until its final crescendo of violence on scales both small and large, there’s all the horror and jeopardy of a crumbling and fractious medieval state in here, plus more. You want a plot summary? If you’ve already read Bold as Love, you really shouldn’t need one… and if you haven’t, well, do start there first: while there’s a bit of backfilling in this second of five novels, there’s not a lot of it, and you’ll get more out of Castles if you come to it with a grasp of the context and the numerous principal and secondary players. That said, Castles ups the ante a fair bit from that first instalment, and opens with the two male leads making out on Brighton beach, which is a mere prelude to the bisexual threesome relationship—rather ahead of its time, at least in sf/f—whose ups and downs provides the intimate emotional core of the novel. The braid of Ax, Sage and Fiorinda is tugged and yanked and woven through the political struggles of the Rock’n’Roll Reich: a fractious alliance with the quite literally starving and pestilential masses of Britain against the blood-washed atavism of a Celtic “revival” whose preference for secretive blood sacrifice over live music events may explain its attraction to the remaining corporate bigwigs and the “real” politicians for whom the Reich forms a useful way of distracting the proles while the statecraft gets done. Throw in a techno-entheogenic Grail quest, a solo tour of an equally troubled US that turns into a lengthy and botched kidnapping, and an end-of-level baddie showdown in a medieval Irish castle turned rock-star retirement pad, complete with swords and sorcery and gloriously over-the-top scenery-chewing drama, and there’s the bare bones of this chewy, thoughtful, sometimes disturbing but frequently fun (and funny) novel.
Plus it’s all written with that trademark Gwyneth Jones deftness, defined (at least for me) by her unusual fondness for an unpredictable but always impeccably controlled hybrid of the omniscient and objective third-person points-of-view—which here seems a particularly ideal medium for the stage-managed chaos and high drama of magic-infused tech-enabled rock’n’roll theatrics. I wouldn’t say Castles, or the series as a whole, is exactly an easy read—whether in terms of the content or its delivery—but good things aren’t always easy, and easy things aren’t always good.
However, Gwyneth Jones is very bloody good indeed.