Review: The Master And Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
Back at my flatwarming, Mike explained why he objected to 'literary works' being claimed as SF. I'm sure there's nothing you'd all like more than for me to relate this story, so his objection went something like this: Whilst it's true that (and I think this actually was one of his examples) Lanark is clearly SF, to consider it as 'an SF novel' is counterproductive, because the fact that it is SF is not the most important thing about it. Alasdair Gray did not set out to write a novel of speculative fiction; he did not write from a position within the SF tradition, nor did he write in dialogue with that tradition. Thus, goes the argument, there's no point analysing it from that perspective.
The relevance of this is that I've just finished reading Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (full text|annotations|film adaptation not to star Mr Depp after all), in which the devil and his merry band descend on Moscow, wreaking...well, about as much havoc as you'd expect, really. There's magic both intimate and extravagant, witches and demons and talking cats, decapitation and re-capitation and a really quite confused populace. In short, it is unambiguously a fantasy novel.
But: Bulgakov wrote the novel between 1929 and 1940, and he was writing in Soviet Russia. The Master and Margarita is a satire, amongst other things a reaction to the anti-religious government agenda of the time. Even though a fantasy, when it was written the novel was unpublishable. It didn't see print until the late sixties. Bulgakov, according to Mike's argument, was writing to an agenda, and happened to write a fantasy.
It's a complex sprawl of a novel, certainly, and a structuralist's dream. The rather nifty central conceit is that in addition to the devil-comes-to-town story, there's a second narrative strand running through the novel. It's framed as the work of the eponymous Master, and is the story of one Pontius Pilate. Yes, that Pilate. What's special about this telling of the tale, however, is that as much as the Moscow strand is exuberantly fantastic, Pilate's story is strictly realistic, strictly human. And the inversion is even more specific than that: Many biblical events make a distorted appearance in the contemporary story, and much that is typical of 1930s Moscow - the intrigue, the double-dealing - is displaced into the Pilate chapters. Both strands, however, take place on the same timeline, over an Easter weekend.
Moreover, whilst Pilate's story is relatively straightforward, the Moscow story confounds expectations by refusing to introduce the Master for the first third of the novel, and Margarita for a good deal longer than that. Because of this, and the fact that the omniscient viewpoint ranges across so many locations and so many characters, the novel has a truly widescreen feel (as overused as that description may be). There's a sense of scale that is rare. The effects of the devil's visit are felt by the city, and not just by a couple of protagonists. This does mean that the vast majority of the expansive cast never progress beyond caricature, and further that very frequently it seems the characters are being shuffled around by the author purely to make thematic points, with no regard for how actual humans might think or react...but these are not issues which have ever troubled me greatly. I grew up on Asimov, after all.
The Master and Margarita is hard going, however. Not because of the above structure, and I don't mean that it's particularly harrowing or bleak - in fact, it's quite the opposite - but that I literally found it difficult to read, on a sentence-by-sentence basis. It's hard to tell whether it was the translation, Bulgarkov's natural style, the fact that it is a translation and that I'm thus missing at least half the necessary cultural references, a natural aversion to omniscient viewpoint writing or some combination of all four of those factors, but I found the prose neither elegant nor easy to read. This is dense writing; it requires constant unpacking.
On the other hand, it's clever. It's rich. It's witty. And ultimately, it is rewarding. I'm glad I've read it, both for the story and for the cultural insight. Heck, I've even got a slight urge to re-read it; having made it to the end, I've got this crazy idea that I might now be able to understand the beginning.
And I can see Mike's point. The Master and Margarita is an intensely political novel, and any discussion of the text must perforce focus on that. The fact that it's a fantasy is part of what makes it fun, and it allows Bulgakov to play the imaginative tricks that he plays, but it's a means, and not an end. By Mike's definition, it's a work of speculative fiction but not part of the genre of SF, because the genre is defined by intent rather than content. I can now see more clearly why that's a useful idea.
But you know what? It's still wrong, or at least incomplete. A writer may be reinventing the wheel for his own purposes, but what he ends up with is still a wheel, and it's still going to be interesting to compare that with the other wheels in general currency. More importantly, genres aren't an either/or proposition. As far as I'm concerned, The Master and Margarita is a political satire and it's a fantasy. It's an argument, along with 1984, along with Brave New World, for the power of this storytelling mode.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's always a point worth making.
The relevance of this is that I've just finished reading Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (full text|annotations|film adaptation not to star Mr Depp after all), in which the devil and his merry band descend on Moscow, wreaking...well, about as much havoc as you'd expect, really. There's magic both intimate and extravagant, witches and demons and talking cats, decapitation and re-capitation and a really quite confused populace. In short, it is unambiguously a fantasy novel.
But: Bulgakov wrote the novel between 1929 and 1940, and he was writing in Soviet Russia. The Master and Margarita is a satire, amongst other things a reaction to the anti-religious government agenda of the time. Even though a fantasy, when it was written the novel was unpublishable. It didn't see print until the late sixties. Bulgakov, according to Mike's argument, was writing to an agenda, and happened to write a fantasy.
It's a complex sprawl of a novel, certainly, and a structuralist's dream. The rather nifty central conceit is that in addition to the devil-comes-to-town story, there's a second narrative strand running through the novel. It's framed as the work of the eponymous Master, and is the story of one Pontius Pilate. Yes, that Pilate. What's special about this telling of the tale, however, is that as much as the Moscow strand is exuberantly fantastic, Pilate's story is strictly realistic, strictly human. And the inversion is even more specific than that: Many biblical events make a distorted appearance in the contemporary story, and much that is typical of 1930s Moscow - the intrigue, the double-dealing - is displaced into the Pilate chapters. Both strands, however, take place on the same timeline, over an Easter weekend.
Moreover, whilst Pilate's story is relatively straightforward, the Moscow story confounds expectations by refusing to introduce the Master for the first third of the novel, and Margarita for a good deal longer than that. Because of this, and the fact that the omniscient viewpoint ranges across so many locations and so many characters, the novel has a truly widescreen feel (as overused as that description may be). There's a sense of scale that is rare. The effects of the devil's visit are felt by the city, and not just by a couple of protagonists. This does mean that the vast majority of the expansive cast never progress beyond caricature, and further that very frequently it seems the characters are being shuffled around by the author purely to make thematic points, with no regard for how actual humans might think or react...but these are not issues which have ever troubled me greatly. I grew up on Asimov, after all.
The Master and Margarita is hard going, however. Not because of the above structure, and I don't mean that it's particularly harrowing or bleak - in fact, it's quite the opposite - but that I literally found it difficult to read, on a sentence-by-sentence basis. It's hard to tell whether it was the translation, Bulgarkov's natural style, the fact that it is a translation and that I'm thus missing at least half the necessary cultural references, a natural aversion to omniscient viewpoint writing or some combination of all four of those factors, but I found the prose neither elegant nor easy to read. This is dense writing; it requires constant unpacking.
On the other hand, it's clever. It's rich. It's witty. And ultimately, it is rewarding. I'm glad I've read it, both for the story and for the cultural insight. Heck, I've even got a slight urge to re-read it; having made it to the end, I've got this crazy idea that I might now be able to understand the beginning.
And I can see Mike's point. The Master and Margarita is an intensely political novel, and any discussion of the text must perforce focus on that. The fact that it's a fantasy is part of what makes it fun, and it allows Bulgakov to play the imaginative tricks that he plays, but it's a means, and not an end. By Mike's definition, it's a work of speculative fiction but not part of the genre of SF, because the genre is defined by intent rather than content. I can now see more clearly why that's a useful idea.
But you know what? It's still wrong, or at least incomplete. A writer may be reinventing the wheel for his own purposes, but what he ends up with is still a wheel, and it's still going to be interesting to compare that with the other wheels in general currency. More importantly, genres aren't an either/or proposition. As far as I'm concerned, The Master and Margarita is a political satire and it's a fantasy. It's an argument, along with 1984, along with Brave New World, for the power of this storytelling mode.
And as far as I'm concerned, that's always a point worth making.