Spiderlight

Spiderlight picks a classic fantasy story – the hero’s journey that revolves around the battle against a dark lord – and subverts it to shed light on how its tropes are rooted in a binary worldview. With strong characters and a great discussion on the dehumanization of the “other”, the novel, written by Adrian Tchaikovsky, offers a thoughtful and self-aware adventure.

Spiderlight shines when it’s working with different points of view and it starts by following the perspective of what would usually be considered a classic fantasy villain: giant spiders. In their eyes, men are painted in dark colors: they disrupt the natural order of the forest with their uncontrolled anger and thirst for destruction. When the perspective shifts from the spiders to humans the judgment shifts alongside it. If the weapons of men were full of “potent displeasure” before, now they are filled with “purity” and “light”. If spiders were part of a balanced ecosystem before, now they have a “dark nature.”

Spiderlight is constructed on top of this clash of perspectives. The plot falls into your typical hero’s journey, but the hero, who has his normal life disrupted and so needs to leave his home and venture forth to save the world, is a giant spider. The spider is called Nth, and he has to team up with a group of humans to defeat the dark lord Darvezian because a prophecy says so. Nth, therefore, has no say in the matter.

Nth is the hero, but also a prisoner. His companions don’t see him as a being worthy of respect, but a necessary evil to accomplish their goal of defeating the dark lord. Nth is the “other”, the “outsider”, a figure of alterity. His companions dehumanize him all the time – after all, Nth indeed isn’t human – negating his dignity in the process: pronouns mean everything and Nth is an “it” or a “that”, not a “he” or a “she”: “That, Nth realized, was he himself. He was beginning to think more clearly now, and to disentangle something of the net of dealings within the world of Men, and between that world and its newest and most unwilling immigrant.” To his companions, Nth is a “thing”, which means that even his name gets to be twisted, as they call him Enth on the rare occasions they decide to dignify him with a name.

The leader of the group is a priestess called Dion. She’s a woman fueled by righteousness, which is sustained by an unbreakable binary worldview: “When Dion considered the world, her chief question was, Is this of Light or Dark?” It’s no wonder that it is exactly when we are following her point of view that we get descriptions that could belong in any Tolkien-inspired fantasy. For Dion, the armies of good are “gallant” while the armies of evil are “hordes” composed of “creatures”: “Since he came to power, the armies of his creatures, the slaves of the Dark, had spread and conquered, corrupted and suborned. Some kingdoms had fallen to his hordes, their gallant armies smashed.” Being a priestess, Dion is very sensitive to the suffering of others, but she also shows that empathy, more often than not, can be quite selective.

In your typical Tolkien-inspired fantasy, Dion would be the moral compass of the group, the bastion of light, the unshakable leader. Here, she’s a fearful force of oppression for the protagonist. When she’s nervous, Nth immediately gets scared for his life, as Dion, being the bastion of light, controls the discourse of what’s right and wrong, having the power to make violence against him not just allowed, but justified. And the real horror is: there are a lot of Dions in the world. At some point, a priest says: “You cannot torture a thing of the Dark. It has not the sensibilities of those raised to the Light.” Dion couldn’t agree more.

Dion constantly desensitizes the situation around her because she’s afraid of her own morality. Here, fear is shown to produce dehumanization as a means of moral self-defense. Her religion makes her want to be good, but as her actions are violent, she needs to make the target of those actions an object – taking it out of the equation of her morality  – to protect herself from her own judgment. Dehumanization, then, becomes the fundamental pillar of her righteousness.

To make matters worse for Nth, when he enters Dion’s group, he’s transformed by their mage Penthos into a figure that resembles a human being. “Resembles” being the keyword here, since Nth is thrown into the uncanny valley: he’s not a spider anymore, but he’s also not human. His facial expressions disgust his companions; his many eyes frighten them; his composure makes them wary, and his voice makes them startle all the time. He becomes a figure that doesn’t belong anywhere anymore. Nth becomes more monstrous than he already was as a spider, because now he defies categorization:  “She stared into that face, trying to see it other than it was: human; monster; monster; human, until she found some squinting way of looking at him that did not make her stomach curdle.”

Penthos, in turn, becomes a sort of Dr. Moreau figure, since he sees in Enth only a successful experiment. He rarely expresses human feelings like compassion, regret, or fear but, because he’s human, the group still respects him: Penthos is not a monster; just a queer magician.

The paladin Harathes receives the same treatment. He uses the difference between “us” and “them” to justify his sadism. He’s a disgusting man clearly prone to Orwell’s doublethink and to sexism: “He was a man who could hold two thoughts in his head simultaneously, sometimes contradictory ones. He was currently admiring his view of her, and simultaneously thinking that, as a respectable woman in the heart of the Light, she should not just be slouching around.” Harathes is a man who tries to use his title and power – he’s a noble Knight of the Church of Armes – to oppress women and force them to sleep with him. Even worse, precisely because of his title he thinks he deserves to get the women he wants: after all, his so-call virtue “conferred a kind of entitlement.” He’s one of the most despicable characters in the novel, but, because he’s human and works for the church, he just gets sighs of disapproval from his companions.  “A shit. He’s a shit,” Dion concedes at some point, but then completes with “But he’s our shit, and a child of the Light.”

Nth gets that. He becomes increasingly angry about how things work. He knows the same bad action is going to be treated differently depending on the one that erred. One of your own is always going to be protected, always going to be given excuses. The other, on the other hand, must be severely castigated. Nth wants to change that much more than he wants to defeat a dark lord he never even heard of.

It’s no surprise that, of the whole group, it’s the thief Lief the one that shows the most compassion towards Nth, as he, being a thief, is the party member most close to being considered from the dark: he knows firsthand the problems of differentiated treatment. Therefore, it’s also fitting that it is Lief the one who enters a solemn and ornamented religious temple of light, which to his eyes looks creepy and dangerous, to find that righteousness is often a great justification for violence. After Nth, Lief is the most aware of how one’s worldview shapes the other. When he spots his enemies feasting on meat, he thinks “Human meat,” but then immediately wonders “if he was just finding evil because he was looking for it.”

The last member of the party is the archer Cyrene. She is the one, besides Dion, that has the character arc more closely linked to the main theme of the book, as she goes from completely despising Nth to getting that he’s a much, much better person than Harathes. But whereas Dion’s binary worldview gets broken by violent attacks, Cyrene’s is deconstructed by displays of kindness and love.

The whole story, then, hinges on their confrontation with the Dark Lord Darvezian. The whole thing reaches a thematic impasse: if Darvezian really is just a dark lord, the story falls into the same worldview it condemns. But, if he is a good guy, the story then becomes predictable and simplistic. Spiderlight’s answer to this problem is actually excellent: it presents a being defined by its own duality, which breaks everyone’s worldview while exemplifying – by its own personal tragedy – the problem of those same worldviews.

Spiderlight can be a very funny book, too. As it deconstructs fantasy tropes, it veers into satire and comedy, presenting characters and situations that border on the absurd. Penthos may be a menacing Dr. Moreau figure to Nth, but he’s also a pyromaniac wizard who has to be restrained all the time by his friends. Harathes may want to oppress women, but he’s constantly ridiculed by everyone around him because of that.  Dialogues are often witty, attacking genre tropes. A dark knight, for example, questions the assumption of Dion’s group that Darvezian lives on the top of his dark tower, telling them that would be very impractical. When Lief manages to reach this same dark tower and sees that it is adorned with spikes, he wonders “how many Ghantish masons were accidentally impaled during its construction.”

As Spiderlight satirizes its own genre, it produces a poignant discussion about alterity, trying to tear apart worldviews that divide people into “us” and “them” based on their nature. In Spiderlight, even giant spiders can be heroes, as the real villains are those who share an ideology based on supremacy and violence.

November 13, 2019.