The Shocking Truth Behind Happily Ever After

"And they lived happily ever after." Isn't that how Sleeping Beauty ends, after the Handsome Prince kisses her out of a magical slumber? In the twisted caverns of Orson Scott Card's mind, of course not.

The boy Ivan Petrovich Smetski, nicknamed Vanya, suddenly, when the Soviet Union begins allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel and his family owns up to their Jewish heritage, is supposed to call himself Itzak Shlomo. After the usual interminable delay, the family finally gets their exit visa, and Ivan's father promptly takes them to America.

But on the way, they make a stopover at Cousin Marek's farm in Poland. Ivan, who has always loved to run, runs through the near-primeval forest surrounding the farm, and stumbles into a clearing full of leaves. Magically, the leaves part for him as he enters, and only because they do so, he narrowly avoids stepping into a chasm that was completely camouflaged.

In the center of the clearing, the unbroken carpet of leaves rise in a mound that is shaped curiously like a reclining woman. On the far end of the clearing, the leaves churn as something underneath moves toward Ivan. Being a young boy alone in a strange location, he imagines a horrible monster and flees.

In America, after growing up and becoming a track star and a scholar of ancient Russian legends and Slavic languages, Ivan has the opportunity to return to the former Soviet Union for research. Near the end of his academic pilgrimage, he visits Cousin Marek again, and remembers the haunting experience he had in the forest as a boy. He can hardly believe it ever happened -- just the wild imaginings of a frightened boy. But his curiosity gets the better of him, and he seeks out the clearing.

To his distress, he finds it was all true: the leaves that magically part, the chasm with the woman's shape, and the churning leaves that move toward him. This time he stays, and ends up in a deadly confrontation with a giant bear, which he realizes he cannot win. So he draws on information every child know from the fairy tales:

     As the bear heaved its chest up onto the pedestal, Ivan knelt beside the bed, leaned down, and kissed the woman's lips.
     They were soft and alive. She kissed him back.
     Her eyes opened. Her lips parted. She gave a soft cry, drew her head away from him.
     He knelt up to look at the bear. Its hind legs were now scrabbling for purchase on the pedestal.
     She stammered something in some language. A Slavic language, but very oddly pronounced. He knew he should understand it.
     After a moment, it registered on his brain. Though the accent was unfamiliar, she had to be speaking a dialect of proto-Slavonic, closely related to the Old Church Slavonic that he and his father had spoken together so often. . . .
     He understood now -- easily, in fact: Ask me to marry you.
     This was hardly the time for romance, he thought.
     But her gaze was fixed on the bear. It towered over them, its arms spread wide, its mouth open as it brayed out its triumphal cry. Ivan realized that she wasn't proposing a romantic relationship, she was telling him how to vanquish the bear.

Of course, they end up marrying. They live happily ever after. Except that Ivan learns the Shocking Truth behind Happily Ever After. Kissing Sleeping Beauty is only the beginning of his troubles.

Enchantment is an absolute delight to read. Card makes the old fairy tale come to gritty life, starting with the darker and more violent Russian version of Sleeping Beauty. The leaf-covered clearing is an isolated patch of land suspended in time, with magical bridges that reach to Ivan's modern century and the early days of European Christianity that is the home of Katerina (the princess). The two spend time in both centuries, and the way Card contrasts the two is where this novel gets much of its enchantment (pun intended). Throw in the sociopathic witch Baba Yaga as the ruthless villain, who makes Hannibal Lecter look like a choir boy, and you have vintage Card storytelling at work.

Card doesn't sugar coat anything in this fairy tale of magical realism. The world of Katerina has none of the Disney romance that Western culture imagines for such settings. The clash between ancient and modern culture never lets up: the presuppositions inherent in the two are irreconcilable, and Card avoids the chauvenistic temptation to have his modern protagonist "enlighten" the ancients. Indeed, it's the modern protagonist who must become enlightened as he learns how the mindset of this early tribe of Slavs is necessary for survival in their harsh times.

The way Card handles magic in his otherwise realistic novel must be comparable to the way mystical Christians see Mormon theology: gritty with literalism. Magic-users seem to be everywhere in Card's book, even in modern times, but they also farm and bake cookies and their husbands become college professors. Witch Baba Yaga must hijack a modern airline jet to magically return to her own time. One gets the impression that, if magic really did work in our world, this is how it would have to work.

And do the Handsome Prince and Sleeping Beauty finally get to live happily ever after? You'll have to read Enchantment to find that out.

-- 
D. Michael Martindale
dmichael@wwno.com