SHORT TAKE: Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion by Paul Kincaid: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion, Paul Kincaid (Palgrave Macmillan 978-3031715662, $37.99, 86pp, hc) November 2024.
For the past couple of years, Palgrave has been publishing a series of short “critical companion” monographs each focusing on a single title of what it calls the “new canon”; books covered so far include The Last Unicorn, Dune, The Hobbit, Neuromancer, Neverwhere, The Stars My Destination, The Wizard of Earthsea, and Ancillary Justice. Paul Kincaid, one of the most consistently illuminating and clear-headed of SF critics, earlier contributed an informative volume on Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, and now he turns his attention to a work which has long been widely regarded as among the defining masterworks of alternate history, but which seems to have largely faded from view: Keith Roberts’s Pavane, a novel in the form of interconnected stories (sometimes called a “fix-up,” a term that some writers find annoying). As Kincaid points out, Roberts is barely mentioned in recent histories of SF, and died “in poverty and isolation” in 2000, a decade after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The novel seems to be in print now only as part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks series in the UK.
Kincaid makes a persuasive case for Pavane not only as Roberts’s masterwork, but as an essential text in SF history–particularly British SF, since Roberts’s love of landscapes drew on earlier traditions such as Hardy or Kipling. The novel’s basic premise – that, after the assassination of Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada successfully conquered England, eventually leading to a Europe dominated by Roman Catholicism for centuries – has been echoed in novels by Kingsley Amis, Phyllis Eisenstein, and probably others, but seldom with the deeply textured society that Roberts evoked. This leads to a suppression of technological and economic progress, reflected in various ways in stories of individual characters. (Apparently Roberts later had second thoughts about making Catholicism such an obvious villain.). As with the other slim but expensive volumes in the series, Kincaid’s approach is very much that of critical analysis rather than cheerleading, drawing on reviews, academic scholarship, and personal letters from Roberts, and it won’t be of much use to anyone who hopes to avoid actually reading Pavane (in fact, a brief overview at the beginning would have been helpful for those of us who last read it decades ago). A monograph like this doesn’t really seem likely to renew interest in Roberts as a writer, but for those who have long known about the reputation of Pavane without fully grasping what makes it a classic, this is as persuasive an answer as you’re likely to get.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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