"By an axiom of cultural anthropology, the more isolated a community, the more idiosyncratic become its customs and conventions. This of course is not necessarily disadvantageous."The Rhune are an aloof and eccentric culture. Lords of a beautiful, mountainous realm on the planet Marune of the Alastor Cluster, their extreme elegance and insistence on formality belie a nature so prone to aggression and martial conflict that they have been banned ownership of energy weapons and flying vehicles. The Rhune regard sexuality as repulsively decadent; they view the act of consumption as they do the act of excretion: as something vaguely shameful, to be done in private; hand-to-hand combat is considered an embarrassingly intimate act. All of this changes during the times known as mirk: shadows fall and doors are either bolted tight or left hopefully unlocked as men bare their chests, don capes and "man-masks" to roam the night, bringing violence upon each other and entering the chambers of women with a more mutually pleasurable sort of violence in mind.Jack Vance is well-known for his expertise in portraying a host of exotic cultures with an often ironic distance. He really outdid himself with his conception of the fascinating Rhune. Marune: Alastor 933 is the story of a young man who finds himself stranded, with no memory intact, slowly realizing that some villain has attempted to forestall his ascent to the lordly position of clan Kaiark, of the Rhunes. And so back to Marune he must go, to solve that mystery and many more. That's the plot, but as always with Vance, the plot is just one thing happening in the novel. This book is also a thoughtful and amusing analysis of "culture": how they create biases and often automatic responses in humans, how restrictive cultures often reject individuality, how an insular culture can be viewed from the outside as bizarrely narrow, and how that insular culture can in turn view the outside world as repugnantly alien. Vance portrays the Rhune with his usual detachment, but he is also clearly enchanted by his creation. As was I.The novel features icy, Machiavellian women and an art form based on scent-scapes and people willing to kill for the sake of propriety and a gothic castle filled with secret 'mirk-passages' that honeycomb its walls. Ah, mirk! So tantalizing. It also features standard Vance prose. And by "standard" I mean prose that takes me right to my happy place. Vance's elegance, his slyness and his artfulness and his dryness, his consummate ability to say so much with so little, his interest in using obscure words and his mastery in constructing the perfect sentence, his easy ability to make the most understated of dialogue come across as oddly sinister or charmingly humorous or intriguingly multi-leveled, or all of that at the same time... top-notch. He's one of a kind - his own sort of unique, insular, idiosyncratic culture. I read his books and I rarely stop smiling. Here was the milieu he loved: conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable.
Vance seems to use the Alastor series to explore societies and social systems. Here the fantastic is not in bizarre lifeforms or otherworldly technology but the endlessly ornate and outlandish cultures that humans could concievably invent.As such, the plot is almost secondary--this isn't a gripping thriller but a travelogue through a thought experiment. The Rhunes are a deeply contradictory people, warlike and yet fastidious in fashion and personal grooming (where the consumption of food is treated as the same sort of necessary unpleasantness as elimination is in most cultures), and deeply hidebound by ornate rules that depend upon the phase of the planet's suns.It's a tragedy that the Alastor series was left at three books.
What do You think about Marune: Alastor 933 (1981)?
reviews.metaphorosis.com5 starsMarune was one of the first Jack Vance books I ever bought. In fact, one of the first books of any kind I bought with my own money. I had no idea who Vance was, or what I was getting into. I don't remember what drew me to the book. It may have been the Coronet cover, which had virtually nothing to do with the contents of the book. Whatever it was that made me pick the book, I've never regretted it. It was the start of a lifelong fascination with Vance's writing. An amnesiac turns up at a spaceport. Who is he? What to do with him? In what I now know to be classic Vancian style, no one wants him, and help is offered only reluctantly. In the course of finding the protagonist's origins and past, Vance describes a society (the Rhunes) so unusual and compelling that their bizarre habits seem extraordinarily real. I remember to this day how my teenage heart was shocked and thrilled by the concept of 'mirk' (when all the suns are down).Simply put, Marune is Jack Vance at his best. Even many decades after first reading the story, it stands up. It has every element that marked Vance as a genius. Ingenious vocabulary, strange cultures, mystery, intelligence, and a good story. And while Vance's female characters weren't always strong, Marune features a couple who are and who have distinct minds of their own. All in all, one of the best books Jack Vance ever wrote, which is saying a heck of a lot. I don't give five stars very often, but this is one I'd give 5+ to if I could. If you've never read Vance, this is a great place to start. If you know Vance and haven’t read this yet, get it now.Highly, highly recommended for everyone. CVIE VI.
—Metaphorosis
