I’ll admit it, what initially drew me to this almost uncategorizably cool novel was this cover, evoking as it does a Renaissance playbill in Technicolor. It didn’t actually show me much of what the story was about, but it sure made me want to know. Plus, anything at the end of the world is probably pretty interesting. And what’s up with that bird?
Stevan Allred has brought us, in The Alehouse at the End of the World, what amounts to a novel-length fable, its plot enacted by a Balinese fertility goddess, some anthropomorphic bird-demigods with uncanny powers (also, I believe, an element of that region’s mythology), and a fisherman who’s seen better days even before getting swallowed by a whale and deposited on the shore of the Isle of the Dead.
The poor fisherman (he doesn’t get a name) has, moreover, arrived just in time for a coup d’etat — not that he cares. With the hopes of Orpheus but none of the talent, all he wants is to rescue his beloved from the Isle and take her back to the world of the living.
In a lot of ways, though, one of the bird beings, a frigate bird (see that cover) who is six feet tall, usually armed (despite having no arms) and something of a pirate, is as much a protagonist as the Fisherman is. It is the Frigate Bird who spies on the powerful and vaguely cephalopod Turropsi* and takes special interest in what they choose not to allow to become real, and the Frigate Bird whose interior life is more fully explored, though that of the nefarious Crow, who has deposed the Raven to become King of the Dead, gets some attention, too, as does the goddess, Dewi Sri — one of only a very few characters in the novel with a proper name.
If all this sounds weird and uncanny and archetypal, well, it is. Fables are like that.
Alas, for this reader a lot of the fun is nearly spoiled by too much sex (this may sound an impossibility to some, but it can be and is a thing), misogyny and crappy sexual politics generally. Dewi starts off interesting but soon becomes a caricature of the lustful and duplicitous female, with a strange fixation on the idea of straddling birds’ beaks to get off; the beloved has no agency until she decides to sleep with somebody else… And I don’t even want to start about the actual sex scenes, which would be tiresome even without all the weird euphemisms for genetalia. Cauliflower. God damn it, Allred.
Nonetheless, I struggled through this, as it wasn’t annoying enough to kill my curiosity about how all this was going to end (befitting a tale in the godpunk genre, the stakes wind up being the fate of the entire world). The story kept its mythic force throughout, and had a suitably epic ending in which courage, brains and self-sacrifice are pitted against mindless greed in a way we could only wish might happen in the real world. The end result is pretty satisfying, and I’m glad I read to the end.
If you’re looking to end your reading year on an interesting and original note, you could do much worse than giving this epic bit of ribaldry a try.
*Basically the Fates, who swarm “just beyond the edge of the story of all that is” and filter through their massed fingers what they choose from all the possibilities that wash towards them in waves. They can fly, have many wispy jellyfish-like tentacles as well as more substantial octopus-like ones, and are the one thing I couldn’t really think of an analog for in mythology unless you want to bring in Lovecraft. But that feels inaccurate.
