BOOK REPORT: THE NIGHT OF MASKS BY ANDRE NORTON

The Gentle Fiction of Andre Norton: Understanding and Compromise

Andre Norton (Alice Mary Norton)

Born—Feb. 17, 1912

Died—March 17, 2005

I'D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THE LATE SCIENCE FICTION WRITER Andre Norton and a book she wrote called The Night of Masks.

I like Andre Norton. She wrote for over seventy years, dying in 2005 at the age of 93. She wrote science fiction, fantasy as well as historical fiction. Much of her work can be classified as young adult fiction, with many of her protagonists being teenagers or in their early twenties, who are often female. Her stories are replete with coming of age themes, self-discovery, awakening sexuality, and plots that challenge norms and traditional authority structures.   

Night of Masks, written in 1964 (she wrote nearly 130 novels and 100 short stories in her 70 year writing career), can be described as straight-up science fiction in the classic pulp tradition: A young man is recruited by a mysterious individual to journey to another planet on a dangerous mission. Along the way he encounters strange landscapes and even stranger creatures. By the end, he overcomes hardships and challenges, re-defines his mission, accomplishes his goals, and comes to better understand himself and his place in life. If only real-life had half so much to be said for it!

The major theme of the novel, “masks” is seen at the novel’s beginning with Nik, who is an inhabitant of “the Dipple”, a slum district on the planet Korwar. He is a “stack rat” living a hand-to-mouth existence since the death of his parents in a spaceship crash some years earlier. In the crash, Nik was horribly burned, leaving his face a distorted wreck that plastic surgery has failed to rebuild. Traumatized, he drifts into a life of petty crime; his only solace is when he can purchase “reading tapes”, that help him escape into the world of fiction and fantasy where he can forget his bitter and hard-scrabble existence. 
Nik’s face marks him as an outsider who is shunned by most people, and he will reflexively raise his hand to mask his scarred face with those people he does encounter. Norton's antagonist, the criminal Leeds, gains Nik’s trust and tempts him with a new type of reconstructive plastic surgery if he does what Leeds requires of him. And so Nik leaves Kowar and journeys to the distant planet Dis, a world that is shrouded in both clouds and mystery. (Well, it is pulp science fiction, after all!)

Compared to a lot of Norton’s stories, this one has a decidedly darker tone. It is set in the far future, where humanity has colonized many worlds, and has even physically evolved to better adapt to their individual ecologies. As Nik reflects: “Various branches of once Terran stock has mutated and adapted…” But internecine war has caused many to flee their homeworlds and become refugees, like Nik and his family, who are forced to live in crowded slums* called “Dipples” on other human-colonized worlds unaffected by conflict. As well, humans by this time have encountered a variety of intelligent alien races, and have learned to co-exist alongside them with more harmony, it seems, than with other members of the human race. It is a time of turmoil and social disorder, and young Nik must struggle to survive. In Night, we watch Nik as he comes to learn that strength of character and resolve are virtues that don’t come from behind a mask.

The world of Dis is a world masked in darkness—literally. Its sun gives off no visible light, resulting in a planet that is in perpetual night. In order to see, settlers must use special “infra-red” goggles and flashlights (which always seem to fail at the most inconvenient moments). Dis is one of the most hostile environments that Norton created, and contrasts with most alien worlds she describes. What I enjoy reading in a Norton tale is the adventure her characters have as they move across alien landscapes. What they encounter, the types of obstacles they overcome, how they interact with each other and how they come to understand the various plants, animals, lifeforms and terrain; these, for Norton, are the true tests of character for the people struggling to survive and live on their new worlds. Her plots are simple, with clear lines drawn between “goodies’ and “baddies”, and there is a compactness to her fiction as the contest between good and evil comes to a resolution, invariably in favour of the good. But it is the landscapes, the creatures that inhabit them, the plants and other living things, even the water and air at times, that are the important factors for resolving conflicts and perils that humans encounter, either by aiding them in some manner, or else challenging them to adapt, often in spite of the technologies, devices and practices they bring. 
Interestingly, Norton’s stories are often set in the land itself; cities and habitations are minor settings for her stories as a rule, and journeys to and from planets, for example are done with little story time devoted to the actual journey. For Norton, it is the arrival, the getting  there, that is important.

Most of her stories form plots relatively free from references to recent history or politics, and deal more with personal struggles, and immediate relationships and conflicts. On the other hand, ancient history and peoples, past civilizations, ruins and antique technologies are characteristic elements in her work. While recent storyline history and politics are dealt with summarily, ancient history has an appeal for her, and she will often add descriptions of the remote past. For example, as Nik surveys a dried-up seabed, which tells of climate change and massive ecological upheavals in Dis's past, he notes:

"This once must have been a wild place when the sea battered along those walls. Ahead and not too far away, an arm of the cliff stretched out to bar their present path with a wall of rock, which must mark an old cape dwindling to a reef."

The setting reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s early novel, Planet of Peril, where the city of Askatevar is linked by a causeway to “a strange black island among the sands,” standing like an imposing granite tower, but is actually a reef cut off from the mainland by powerful tidal currents that rush in each day. John Christopher’s  A Wrinkle in the Sun has a journey set along the drying seabed of the English Channel that has dispelled its waters after massive global earthquakes. They all share a common feature of revealing landscapes previously masked by water.

The importance of landscape, of what can be understood and revealed—for good or ill—is seen most clearly in her Witchworld stories (a series of perhaps fifteen novels or more). On Witchworld, there are places on the land which provide solace as well as entrapment, succor and despair. Certain rocks, plants, bodies of water, woods and so on are beneficial to humans, even endowing them with special powers and perceptions. Other places have a darker nature. And chance is a factor in how humans survive.

Dis, while a darker and less forgiving world, nevertheless has similar arrangements for Norton’s characters. On Dis, and as with so many of her stories, her protagonist Nik and his young charge Vandy must ‘unmask’ the landscape in order to survive its perils (and discover its hidden benefits). Ancient statues on a former headland are clues for Nik, telling him that the furry pack animals that earlier attacked them are in fact the degenerated descendants of once-intelligent, indigenous inhabitants, and are therefore more resourceful and dangerous than previously thought.

Nik’s increased knowledge of his environment alerts him to the dangers of an approaching storm, for example, and he hurries his newly-arrived companions to safety of a sheltering cave. 
The mask of Dis, though it shrouds them in darkness, yields more of its ‘light’ to Nik with each new experience. On the difficult, mud-choked journey back to find Leeds and Vandy, Nik looks upon the flooded landscape of the ancient seabed and the new lake created by the drenching rainstorm, and wonders whether it might, “in years or centuries to come, form the sea the [solar] flare had steamed from Dis.” As he approaches the “island hill” where he left his companions, he sees it has temporarily become “more truly an island than hill, for the lake water had risen to lap about its base.” Norton adds these images of a potential future Dis with its sea restored to suggest Nik’s own re-orientation to the future, something he has lacked until now. We now see him assessing his situation and making choices on how best to navigate the hazardous landscape. Nik is growing up; he is becoming Hacon [the fictional heroic persona he was commissioned by Leeds to adopt as part of his original mission to Dis].

The “Nik Kolherne” who originally joined up with the criminal Leeds in a pact to kidnap young Vandy, is not the same Nik who makes the dangerous journey to get food for the starving youth. And the Nik who leaves the unconscious Patrolman Barketh in the Disian storm is not the same Nik who is conflicted about leaving an injured Leeds in the tunnels along the shoreline. We see a progression from where Nik is originally motivated only by his own needs—for a new face, for Leeds’s approval, to trick Vandy and gain admission into the Thieves Guild—to instead becoming motivated more and more by the needs of others. This contrasts with most of the creatures on Dis who have what can be described as a ‘predatory individualism’, with each member of a group competing against the other, with little sense of community. The humanoid creatures Nik encounters practice cannibalism, hardly a good example of neighborliness! (Interestingly, they may be remnants of original Terran pioneers, of centuries past.) Ironically, the “furry hunters” who hunt in packs possess a residual sense of group ethic and cooperation; they are, as mentioned, descendants of the original native Disians, whose statues Nik viewed along the former shoreline, and stand as evidence of a once-high culture.

But even the most rapacious creatures Nik and Vandy encounter on the planet's surface pale in comparison to the otherworldly, subterranean-dwelling life form they encounter in tunnels beneath.

Nik describes the creature as, a “pillar of cold light”, and it is an extreme example of the self-centeredness found in Leeds and the other Disian lifeforms. The alien needs no ties with anyone or anything. Chillingly, it is complete unto itself:

"The cold radiating from that alien thing was eternal—alien as the rest of Dis, in spite of its weird life, was not. The hunters, the Disians, and their hounds were strange to off-world eyes, but this thing of the burrows did not share blood, bones, and flesh with any species remotely akin to life as Nik knew it."

Soon after their escape from the alien, Nik and Vandy are rescued by Vandy’s warlord father and returned to Vandy’s very sunny home world, where Nik discovers the plastic surgery he’d received earlier to disguise himself as the handsome Halcon is, indeed, permanent.  Nik has come to understand that the mask he wore in his disguise as Halcon to deceive Vandy (and like the 'masks' he encounters on Dis, such as the planet’s masking darkness; the ‘false-face’ of Leeds; the mask of seeming solidarity among the criminal Thieves Guild and the Space patrol; the camouflage some Disian lifeforms use to lure their prey, all of which act to inhibit group cohesion) has kept him from adopting the communal values Norton finds so important. It is in Nik’s uncovering of masks, including the mask of adolescence, where the reader sees his true character emerge. Nik has grown to develop compassion and caring for others and in Norton’s forgiving universe, just deeds bring just rewards.

In Norton’s fiction, her villains are bad but not so bad as to get in the way of good triumphing in the end, or of being so memorable to the reader that they overshadow the character development of her heroes. In the end she presents stories of good versus evil in an almost Manichean, black and white universe where moral struggles occur across landscapes that have perils as well as beneficences. Flowers, bodies of water, certain stones, certain places, antique technologies and structures left behind by ancient high civilizations long since vanished--all these have properties and functions that aid Norton’s characters as they move through alien lands she so loves to describe. The corollary, of course, is that there are places and plants, lifeforms and artifacts that are, for Norton, ‘evil’, and that act in some cases to tempt her characters into acts of anti-communal selfishness. Selfishness is a sin in her eyes. Whereas the necessity of compromise, finding ways to bring disparate groups into some sort of peaceful alliance are front and center for many of her protagonists and plots. In Norton’s universe, good is constantly in a struggle against the forces of darkness, and its triumph is in no way assured. For her, the struggle is all, but where goodness thrives evil withers and is more readily held at bay, though it never goes away entirely. It remains to grow again when vigilance lapses.

What is most striking is when Norton suggests there is a limit to the amount of compromise her characters can make. In Mask, we see Nik coming to an accommodation with the lifeforms, natural forces and people he encounters on Dis. for example, he comes to a better understanding of their intentions (some creatures do want to eat him, after all), their history (the “furry hunters” have an ancient “noble lineage”), or uncovering Leeds’s true reasons for sending him to the dark world.  Between Nik and the other humans who arrive on Dis and the current colonists, there is a clear compromise among all the groups in the end, if only to the extent of a live-and-let-live agreement. 

Where there is no compromise, no meeting of the minds, is with the alien they encounter in the cliffside tunnels, and in whom Nik senses a great and implacable “malevolence”. Norton suggests, as she does with the aliens in her short story, “The Toads of Grimmerdale,” that humans and this particular type of lifeform have no common ground, no possible way of understanding each other. Thus, "alien" is the operative word, here. Such creatures exist beyond the pale and are inimical to human life; they act only as hostile and dangerous predators. For Norton, there must be some way to understand the other in order to find that common ground she so cherishes. But sometimes such understanding is not possible. In Mask, as in “Toads”, the humans flee the inscrutable, unknowable aliens, denying them their goal of killing or taking control of them. These aliens remain a hazard, and are to be studiously avoided in the future. (I wonder what it would take to understand such creatures? With minds so different from the human, how is communication possible? Would it ever be possible to reach across such a gulf? But for Norton, some aliens will always remain "alien".)
..........

I like the fact that Norton often has her characters return across the same landscape they'd traveled through earlier, this time with a better understanding of what lay before them, what resources they can call on, where pitfalls and dangers may occur; how best to cope with the terrain, the lifeforms, the difficulties they encounter, and how to interact with any intelligent beings they may meet. I think this is in keeping with the theme of understanding through discovery that runs through her novels. 

The unknown, the alien (except the truly alien) can be understandable to us given enough time, as we can be to them. Mutually acceptable arrangements of compromise and living together are thus possible, given enough effort. Under the cloak of science fiction and fantasy, Norton wrote about racism**, homosexuality, challenging traditional authority structures, youthful coming of age stories, and the destructive divisiveness that comes when people and groups misunderstand or mistrust each other. Walls for Norton are meant to be examined, peeked over, and in most cases, dismantled. 

Perhaps reading Andre Norton should be part of every foreign ministry’s new personnel training program? Perhaps a number of our political leaders would like a selection of Miss Norton’s books for Christmas? 
What harm could it do? 

Cheers 

*I watched an excellent noir film from 1948, Drunken Angel, by legendary Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. It is set in post-war Tokyo, and while filmed on a movie set, the ruined neighbourhood, filled with people eking out a meager existence amid squalor, crime and bombed out ruins, mirrored the real-life destruction of many Japanese cities at the end of WWII, as it depicts many cities across the globe, today. I thought "The Dipple" centuries from now would look much like Tokyo c. 1945. Great film.
   
**Many of her characters, especially "spacers", have "dark skins", apparently a characteristic common among those who spend much of their lives traveling between the stars in spaceships—though what the rates of skin cancer must be among those tanning in the uncloaked solar rays aboard those spaceships, I couldn't guess!