The King in the Tree

The lord of black ink

The King in the Tree: Three Novellas 
by Steven Millhauser

Stephen Millhauser’s The King In the Tree is, without question, a tour-de-force. These are three novellas and each one is blindingly brilliant, dazzling. Millhauser writes like an angel: the language is taut, superbly controlled. There is nothing of the bludgeon in this writing — Millhauser is like a surgeon at the peak of his profession and he wields the scalpel of his writing with breathtaking virtuosity and skill as he dissects that most basic — and, in his conceptualisation, the most base — of all human emotions: love.

Millhauser’s forté is the gradual, but relentless, drawing of the reader into a web from which he cannot escape. The first novella, “Revenge”, perhaps not to everyone’s taste, skillfully avoids being banal and contrived which, given its thematic structure and content, was always a significant risk. It is conceived as a monologue as a widowed housewife shows a potential buyer around her house. The prospective buyer is her late husband’s mistress. It is masterfully crafted and Millhauser somehow pulls off what might, in lesser hands, been merely improbable. Here, just as we get slowly into the house, through its various rooms (finally the attic and the cellar), we get into the widow’s head and mind and heart. Each room is a metaphor for an incident or a chapter in her life, another dimension or facet of her existence and being. The house, as a whole, is her and she is the house.

The writing here is taut, spare, even sparse. We do not know if we are actually in the house or in the mind of the widow and perhaps that is just as well (“the cheap motel of my mind”). The story has the dark foreboding of Henry James, set in an utterly contemporary context. We do not, at the end, know for sure how much of truth there is in the widow’s reconstruction and deconstruction of her own life and its ruin. Was she responsible for her husband’s death, the ultimate act of revenge? You begin to want to believe this but cannot and that is where Millhauser leaves us: “You let me know. You just let me know.”

From this point on, the book shifts into a higher gear. The second novella, “An Adventure of Don Juan” is rich and luscious, like succulent fruit that, when you bite into it, is tart in the mouth with its sadness and melancholy, yet drips sweetly down your chin with its honeyed tongue. After conquering Venice in a delightfully musketeerish and cavalier manner, Don Juan finds himself bored and accompanies a quintessential Englishman to his country estate. The host, Augustus Hood, is that archetypal Renaissance man of England - builder, gardener, scientist, philosopher and, as it turns out, philanderer and adulterer. In a piquant variant, the legendary lover finds himself at the receiving end as he begins to fall in love with a woman he thinks he cannot stand; and only to find that the woman who loves him is herself betrayed. Deception springs from every page, slight, nuanced, like the subtlest sidelong glance that pierces and is gone.

The culmination has got to be the title novella, a retelling of the tragedy of Tristan and Ysolt. Here the writing assumes the richness of medieval tapestry and Millhauser catches all the atmosphere and spirit of the age with castles and hunts and horrendous punishments and wandering minstrels and incessant court intrigue. Through all this runs a powerful undertow of relentless, unstoppable desire, lust and betrayal and, again, Millhauser uses subtlety, metaphor and innuendo like a rapier. The story is narrated by Thomas of Cornwall, advisor to the King and, ultimately, a protector of love and of the king despite all his self-doubt: “I, Thomas of Cornwall, prince of parchment, lord of black ink, king of all space, summoner of souls, guardian of ghosts, friend of the pear tree and the silence of waves, companion to all those who watch in the night.” Is this a cameo of Millhauser himself? Certainly he is the guardian of ghosts, the lord of black ink, the prince of parchment and a summoner of souls.

This book is excruciatingly beautiful. It sets a standard by which, surely, all writing must be measured and most of today’s publishing can only be found wanting. Here is everything: craft that is not just impeccable but pitch perfect, thoughts and expressions of thoughts that are incisive and wounding, characters that, set eons apart in time, are real and palpable, perceptions and insights into the human psyche that leave you open-mouthed in awe.  

December 29, 2003 |  book reviews |   print