Who Are You And What Have You Done With Orson Scott Card?

Sometime in the first half of the 1980's, a pod came down from space, made a carbon copy of Orson Scott Card, and passed itself off as him for the duration of writing Hart's Hope. Considering his subsequent work, Card must have discovered his evil twin and killed it, because his writing got back to normal.

This book has a strange structure to it. It's written as one character trying to convince another character of something, which device is revealed only gradually. The first fifty or so pages are told in a hybrid style, sort of a cross between Shakespeare, Spenser, and scripture. After that it gets normal. That beginning section is an elaborate setup for the real story, and gives an account of the doings and downfalls of kings and gods and wizards. Palicroval goes to war to become King after having that notion planted into his head by supernatural means, not unlike MacBeth. He marches with his army upon the current king and kills him. He then marries the princess Asineth and rapes her publicly to prove to everyone that he is her legitimate husband and therefore king. All this he does with great regret because it is necessary, not because it's his desire.

Palicroval's wizard counselor tells him to kill Asineth for his own protection, but he can't bring himself to do it. Instead he commands the wizard to take her away and raise her:

     "I have broken and humiliated her," Palicroval echoed, "and killed her father before her eyes, and taken away her kingdom, and to harm her any more would make me despise myself more than I can bear. [Apparently raping a teenage girl in public wasn't more than he could bear.] If I do not temper my victory with one act of mercy, even one that is dangerous to myself, then how will I look in the crystal and say to God that a better man than Nasilee now wears Nasilee's crown? . . . Take the little Queen and be kind to her."
     Sleeve enclosed her in the folds of his own robe, so that no one could see the naked body of the little Queen. Little Queen, thought Asineth. I will remember the name he called me, she told herself. He will know someday who is little, and who is great. Are you the strongest of all men, so strong that you can be merciful to me, a weak woman? I am not a weak woman. I am not a little Queen. And your mercy will be your undoing. You will regret leaving me alive.

Asineth studies arcane magic and learns how to attain the greatest magical power in the universe. In Card's world magical power is found in living blood -- blood must be shed to work magic. The more important the blood donor is to the magic-worker, the more powerful the magic. Asineth discovers that the greatest magic of all would come from a mother willing to kill her own child. She does this, and with power so horrifically won, she binds the King and the three deities of this world: the Sweet Sisters, the Hart, and the god who is called God.

The bound deities pool their remaining power and come up with one desperate attempt to thwart Asineth, who calls herself Beauty now because she has taken the appearance of the most beautiful woman in the world. The deities bring about the birth of a boy who is a magic "sink," someone in whose presence no magic spells will work. The boy's name is Orem (wonder where Card got that idea?)

There, now the story is set up.

The remainder of the book follows Orem as he leaves his stepfather's farm to become a priest of the Godsmen, then leaves that cloister to find his fortune in the world. He comes to the capital city of Inwit, formerly known as Hart's Hope before Beauty took over, and endures many harrowing experiences as a street child.

Eventually Beauty's power begins to fade, and she plots to renew it. She consults the Sweet Sisters to learn who should be the father of her next sacrificial child. The Sweet Sisters, being part of the conspiracy, direct her to Orem, who becomes Beauty's "Little King." His only purpose is to sire her child, and otherwise he is made to play the role of a buffoon in court:

     For a week, Queen Beauty presented him as her husband to all of the hundreds of visitors and thousands of courtiers in the Palace. She never spoke of him without some crude and clever jest, some taunt that set the courtiers tittering behind their oh-so-delicate hands. His thinness, his youth, his supposed stupidity, his genuine innocence, all were cause of much mirth.
     Yet Orem was wise, he heeded the advice of the Queen's Companions and bore it patiently and also laughed, and soon enough, though all despised him, all were used to him and content with his role. He had his name at last, and his place: Little King, and butt of jokes . . .
     But Orem did not stay away. He came, learning to be ever more regal in his bearing. This excited much laughter among the fops, who thought he was trying to rival them. They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be.

Orem has misunderstood Beauty's purpose for making him her husband. When he comes to understand it, in characteristically Card fashion, Orem must decide whether he will save the world with the most horrendous sacrifice a human can endure, a sacrifice that has Christ's atonement symbolically written all over it.

LDS readers will see all the Mormon earmarks in Hart's Hope that Card leaves strewn through his writings. The Messiah figure, the moral consequences of terrible choices, the power inherent in the shedding of sacrificial blood, and of course the embarrassing name Orem (embarrassing to those who know, anyway). But one earmark that may offend LDS and other Christian readers unnecessarily is the depiction of the Godsmen.

The religion of the god who is called God, with all the parallels between it and Christianity -- the moral code, the name of its deity, the organizational structure -- seems to be patterned after Catholicism, and it and its deity are not always depicted in a favorable light. But Card develops the Godsmen religion with such abandon, restricted only by the needs of the story, that if such a basing on an actual religion did occur, it was clearly nothing more than a starting point for his creativity.

Up to this point there is nothing un-Card-like about Hart's Hope, neither the complex structure, nor the formal language of the mythical elements, nor the symbolism, nor the cruelty that his characters inflict and the moral consequences of their actions. Certainly not the Messiah figure that permeates much of Card's fiction.

I would like to tell you what the un-Card-like thing about Hart's Hope is -- but I can't. To do so would be to reveal the ending. Because Hart's Hope has the most depressing, nihilistic, heartless ending Card has ever written. Neither the King nor the oppressed captives of Queen Beauty nor even the gods themselves react with any nobility to the sacrifice Orem attempts to make on their behalf. Whatever you may think of the works of Orson Scott Card, their is one thing that is irrefutable: he infuses them all with soul.

All except Hart's Hope, which ends as soullessly as the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Which is why I think one of them wrote it.

-- 
D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com
Worlds Without Number
http://www.wwno.com