Book Review: The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu
Where art and propaganda meet.
The Tangleroot Palace by Marjorie Liu. Narrated by Catherine Ho. Recorded Books, Inc. 2021. 9 hours (approx.).
The Tangleroot Palace is a collection of short stories by Marjorie Liu. The stories were written over an eight year period during which Liu lived in the forested American Midwest. This is made evident in the tarapsychology of the stories, as she masterfully captures the mysteries of nature in many of these tales. Her flowing prose is delicious and possessed of an old-world quality. Unlike other contemporary fantasy writers - such as Brandon Sanderson whom I could not get into - Liu managed to keep me interested.
However, something intrudes upon her writing that I find difficult to discuss. It begins in the introduction when she virtue signals that she was “An early adopter of [COVID-19’s] seriousness” and was living in Japan “close to the epicenter.” And later she boasts, “working for Marvel Comics, as perhaps the first woman of color writing for them.” The “perhaps” is an interesting qualifier. It indicates that she is unsure, yet felt the need to bring this (potential) fact into play.
All these are indicators that Liu is bringing a particular political ideology to the table. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Orwell warned the world against authoritarian socialism in 1984 while Huxley did the same for Utopianism in Brave New World. One of my favorite (and most influential) books is Gulliver’s Travels, which is political satire.
Even so, the critic is correct to ask if the ideology drags the art down into the dregs known as propaganda. In the case of Liu, the answer is no. She cozies up to the line that separates art from propaganda, and there were times I feared she’d cross it. Thankfully, she always pulled back.
What shall I call Liu’s ideology? Progressivism? Identity politics? Woke? Social justice? Critical theory? There are so many names. That is due to, in part, the political right’s weaponization of those names. But it is also a deliberate obfuscation by the political left. Confusion is a woke tactic.
For this review I will use the term woke. Woke takes the worst of postmodernism and pieces of Marxism and forces them together in unholy union. Theoretically, this is impossible; postmodernism rejects all grand narratives including Marxism. A woman cannot bear the child of a bull, yet there is something at the center of the labyrinth.
In her open letter Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness, Africa Brooke partially defines woke as a
…culture or movement that encourages groupthink, outrage on demand, fear and violence, revamped segregation, fabricating history, cancellations masked as accountability, self-centredness…
I do not wish to suggest that Liu takes her wokeness to this extreme, but I fear she is moving in that direction.
I have said that confusion is a woke tactic. It does not want to be pinned down. If it was, then it could be criticized. Its means of survival, then, is to stay in a constant state of indeterminacy. Watch a CRT video, for example. Or, listen to Michael Eric Dyson speak1. You will find both incomprehensible. Woke is like a hagfish constantly secreting slime so no one can get a grip on it.
Some may disagree with my (and Brooke’s) characterization of it. Fair enough. I don’t claim to be an expert in this field. But I have listened to many podcasts on the subject, and I believe what I have written above is reasonable.
Liu’s “The Briar and the Rose” is a really good story. It’s about a witch who possesses the bodies of younger women in an effort to stay beautiful and immortal. She currently resides in Rose. Rose’s lesbian lover, Briar, is the witch’s body guard trying to discover a way to free Rose. Ultimately, she does and the two live happily ever after in far, wild places.
This story is a rewrite of “Sleeping Beauty.” The possessed Rose is said to be sleeping. The dubiously gendered Briar awakens her. The story is told and retold until the truth is distorted. First, Briar becomes beautiful. Later, she becomes a man. Finally, she becomes prince charming.
The description of Briar's skin color, her masculine appearance and how those played a role in her transformation from lesbian woman to straight man by (presumably) cis male story tellers is indicative of the woke “oppressed vs oppressor mentality.” It is also a feminist line: men write history and erase the female contribution or, worse yet, take credit for it.
Feminists have been rewriting fairy tales and history since the 1960’s at least. Ursula K. Le Guin made women the first to explore the south pole in “Sur” (1982). An Antarctic expedition is not to be taken lightly, yet these women play guitar around a campfire and sing. One of them even gives birth. Whereas the stupid men perished, the women hardly make a mistake.
Liu more or less carries on this tradition. In “The Light and the Fury” (a magical alternate history piece) ex-Lady Marshall Xing MacNamara must kill her former lover to stop the British from colonizing the world. Colonization is also a woke theme, but the real shortcoming of this story is its convoluted alternate history and magical elements, which are not explained well.
Another, better example of fabricating history is the myth of The Burning Times created by feminist historians around the witch craze in Europe and colonial America. In her book The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations, Diane Purkiss dispels these myths. She says feminist historians are not historians but storytellers. They cherry pick facts to create emotionally charged and personal narratives. Feminists want women to identify with the witches.
The witch in “The Briar and the Rose” is not the one Liu desires her audience to identify with. She is a bad witch and deserves what she gets. “Sympathy for the Bones” is about an orphaned girl who is raised by a witch. They make “hoodoo” dolls used to kill allegedly bad men. The girl, Clora, is an unwilling participant, but she is more concerned with herself than that of the men she helps murder. In one instance, she attempts to warn a victim, not to save him but rather to exonerate herself from her own guilty conscience. Only when Clora realizes the misery inflicted on a victim’s wife does she take drastic action. She uses a spell to kill the witch that mentored her. Clora is the identifiable character here, not the witch nor the men she victimizes.
“The Last Dignity of Man” is about a CEO named Alexander whose company is contracted by the government to create toxic waste-eating worms. Of course the government screws everything up: that’s what they do. Alex’s lover, Richard, falls into a pit of hungry giant worms. Richard is saved, but Alex is severely wounded.
The use of homosexual relationships is a nice change of pace. I could throw a rock in a library and likely strike a book with a romantic subplot, and that romantic subplot will most likely be heterosexual. But I suspect Liu has woke motives for this, meaning she is simply checking off the diversity boxes.
The other stories are hardly worth mentioning. “After the Blood” is an unremarkable Amish vampire tale. “Where the Heart Lives” is about a girl thrown out by her cruel father and goes to live with a cemetery caretaker. Both are part of her Dirk and Steele series. Perhaps fans of that series will find these stories worthwhile.
Because these stories were written over an eight year period dating back to about 2009, the woke influence is small (that ideology came to prominence about 2014). The Tangleroot Palace is certainly not propaganda, but within it there is evidence that Marjorie Liu is being influenced by her ideology. While not inherently a bad thing, I fear her future publications will sacrifice good storytelling for woke didacticism.