Book Review: 'Well of Shiuan' by C. J. Cherryh
‘Well of Shiuan’ (253 pp.) was published by DAW Books as book number 284 in April, 1978. The cover art is by Michael Whelan. This is the second volume in the so-called ‘Morgaine’ trilogy from C. J. Cherryh. The first volume in the trilogy is ‘Gate of Ivrel’ (1976), and the third, ‘Fires of Azeroth’ (1979). These three volumes are available in the DAW omnibus ‘The Morgaine Saga’ (2001).
Cherryh produced a fourth and final book in the series, ‘Exile’s Gate’, in 1988.
As ‘Well of Shiuan’ opens, our hero Morgaine, and her dutiful servant and man-at-arms Vanye, have traveled through a star gate from the world of Andur-Kursh, the setting of ‘Gate of Ivrel’, to the world of Shiuan. There, Morgaine aims to make her way north, to the star gate located near the eponymous Well, in the hopes of destroying the gate and thus preventing the villainous Roh from manipulating said gate for his own purposes.
Entropy was a very fashionable theme in sci-fi published during the New Wave era, and in ‘Well’, author Cherryh suffuses her setting with plenty of entropy.
There is much exposition on the entropic state of life in Shiuan. The land is beset with rising sea levels, earthquakes, and torrential rains, and its bedraggled populations of serfs, and degenerate aristocrats, are beset with apprehension. Sodden and surly in their soaked and crumbling villages and castles, they pin their hopes on a Deliverer – who just may be Morgaine - to open the gate at the Well, and allow the people to escape to a world better than Shiuan.
The problem with 'Shiuan' is that Cherryh's prose never rises to the level of that of Michael John Harrison, a master at invoking the atmosphere of entropy, as he does (for example) in this passage from his 1983 'Viriconium' novel 'The Floating Gods' :
…….Strange old towers rose from a wooded slope clasped in a curved arm of the derelict pleasure canal. About their feet clustered the peeling villas of a vanished middle class, all plaster mouldings, split steps, tottering porticos and drains smelling of cats. Ashlyme trudged up the hill. A bell clanged high up in a house; a face moved at a window. The wind whirled dust and dead leaves around him.
Moreso than the other two volumes in the trilogy, ‘Well’ suffers from indolent pacing. Much of the narrative is preoccupied with documenting melodramatic exchanges between Vanye and Morgaine, and between Vanye and various residents of Shiuan. A plot device employed in all the Morgaine novels, in which the dimwitted Vanye is captured by his enemies and must use cunning and guile (related in lengthy passages of stilted dialogue) to escape and rejoin Morgaine, lends little momentum to the narrative.
Things become a bit more action-centered in the closing chapters of ‘Well’, when the interminable journeying over waterlogged terrain, through mean and miserable landscapes, comes to an end. But the fact that this is the middle volume of a trilogy means that the denouement necessarily can’t get very adventurous.
The verdict ? ‘Well of Shiuan’ is the weakest of the three volumes of the Morgaine trilogy. It’s best approached with a large measure of patience, and the awareness that it is designed to propel, in an unambitious fashion, the narrative into the third, and final, arc of the storyline.
