Jeffrey Ford's THE PHYSIOGNOMY (Narr by Christian Rummell)

 Late last year the great Iggy Pop collaborated with Catherine Graindorge, an artist of whom I had not yet heard but of whom I am now a fan, on a song and a deeply affecting piece of video art called "The Dictator" which I think is useful to have in mind as we consider today's novel, Jeffrey Ford's The Physiognomy.

Like Graindorge's villain in the song, with "magic to turn the day to night," the dictator depicted in Ford's novel,  has magic to completely warp his citizen-slaves' perceptions of one another by having decreed that The Physiognomy, a species of phrenology in which it is the facial features more than the shape of the skull that is the Measure of All Things, is the only valid way to determine a person's worth.

Phrenology, which seems along with Flat Earth and Race Science and a lot of other odiously dumb beliefs we once thought safely Of the Past* seems to be making a bit of a comeback in our world, so it's perhaps a very good thing indeed that Cley, the physiognomist protagonist of the first book of Ford's Well-Built City trilogy is quite possibly the most immediately unlikeable narrators I've encountered since, well, the last student of phrenology whose story I read as one-half of Sarah Purcell's excellent The Poison Thread. Ford's creation, though, puts Dorothea in the shade early in his novel as, confronted directly with the appalling plight of one of his society's greatest losers, he shares very matter-of-factly with us a truly insupportable conclusion about the sufferer. 

The Physiognomy's narrator-character, sent on a mission to the back of beyond by the Master of the Well-Built City, has just seen a local yokel who has spent a life mining a substance called Blue Spire and is now in the final stages of being transmuted, while still alive, into the very substance the poor sap once mined**, which is the coal-analogue that makes the fabulous technologies that keep the Well-Built City running. As the pitiful figure, directly sent by the mining town's mayor to be observed first-hand by the Physiognomist, finally completes his stony metamorphosis before our protagonist's eyes, as the miner's own eyes startlingly shift to make contact in their last second of mobility before hardening forever, our guy says, right to the poor man's face, "perhaps you will heat my apartment this winter" and a moment later quips to a nearby worker that the miner needs dealt with as he "seems to have taken a stand." How droll.

The world Cley inhabits, though, is endlessly fascinating and a weird delight to explore. My favorite early example of this is Anamasobia's church, which sounds like... what if the fabulous Moria scenes from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring had been filmed on life-sized, practical sets and then used long after the filming is over and done as a vast and awesome temple to Aulë? And then used as a giant examining room in which to force a town's entire population to strip naked for minute inspection of their bodies, one by one?

Jeffrey Ford has a hell of an imagination, is what I'm saying. For this is a mere detail from a grotesque whole: the civilization that gave birth to Cley and formed his character is every bit as ugly as he assures us are the "inferior" faces and physiques he rejects. As in very. 

The Well-Built City is the creation in every way (even its currency is named for the guy) of the authoritarian, sadist mad scientist cum dictator called The Master, who deliberately sought out the most odious methods of social control he could find, turned them up to 11, and demanded that the upper crust of his society celebrate them constantly or risk his painful, even fatal, disapproval. Chief among these is "The Physiognomy": the only judgement worth making about a person (aside from their ability to toady up to the Master (but not so much as to annoy him, of course) is how closely they conform to an arbitrary ideal of physical Beauty. If you come reasonably close to it, you are judged intelligent, noble, moral, etc by virtue of your personal prettiness. If you don't conform, you are obviously stupid and criminal and possibly not fit to breed even if you're actually quite talented or skilled (not that you'd ever be given an opportunity to demonstrate or develop such talents or skills because you ipso facto don't have them if you're ugly). And yes, this means that the beautiful people in positions of power and responsibility are often incompetent morons. One way to make sure you're always the smartest guy in the room is to make sure no other smart people ever get to enter the room. 

And so our boy Cley, vain, shallow, cruel and arrogant as he is, wields a great deal of power via his calipers and nostril-width gauges and his bogus erudition about how the minute angle of one's eyebrow determines your ability to pour him a decent drink or whatever. His judgment determines all -- so the Master must hold some other power over such as Cley, which he does via a heroin-like drug called Sheer Beauty, a highly addictive hallucinogen that gives Cley hours of dreamy pleasure by making everything around him seem like an exquisite aesthetic experience only occasionally marred by imagined visits by, say, Cley's judgmental former mentor, whom Cley helped convict of a crime, the capital punishment for which was having his head exploded by means up a drug (invented by the Master, who is really a demented evil genius) that causes one's head to swell up until it bursts. Often this sentence is commuted by the merciful Master, though; most people who "should" have their heads blown up are instead sentenced to an exile at hard labor, though it's an exile with some almost pleasant aspects, as I'll discuss in a bit, as we discover when Cley runs afoul of the Master and gets the same treatment himself.

What's most fascinating about this world, though. is the ambiguity with which we must regard it, not just from sharing the point of view of a privileged and unreliable narrator given to long hallucinatory flights of fancy, but also when we try to assess to what degree this is a genuine fantasy novel in which magic is actually a thing, starting with, is the Physiognomy in any way real? By which I mean, is this a world in which its claims are actually true instead of being accidentally true through the force of belief? Has the Master some how made it actually true with his magic? Or has he just used his magic to convince everyone that it's true? Or, has he just successfully bullied everybody, the mundane way, into behaving as if they believed it until (fake it 'til you make it!) they actually believe it?

These questions become even more interesting when we learn that the Master literally created the Well-Built City from the ground up -- or, at least we learn that this is the dogma in which Cley and all of his fellow citizens believe. Or pretend to believe so they don't get their heads blown up. Can the Master actually blow up people's heads, though? He seems always to commute that sentence, at least within the confines of this narrative.

Dude sure blew up my head, anyway?

As for how the Master's sentences are commuted, it doesn't seem entirely terrible, though it, too, has some bizarre aspects that we can't be sure are real, coming to us as they are from Cley's skewed perspective. The person to be punished is banished to an island where he is to be set to work mining sulfur for the rest of his life. But this isn't a gulag like we might expect if we've read, say, Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. For one thing, the accommodations seem kind of nice; the exile gets a room to himself in the island's only inn, with clean linen and privacy and a nice view, and he may, once his work shift is done, relax in the inn's bar, where he gets to enjoy the company of an incredibly intelligent and adept monkey who, among other things, "likes to play bartender" in the words of the only other inhabitant/inhabitants of the island that Cley meets, a guard who may or may not be two identical people, one vicious and cruel and the other friendly and kind. The cruel one plants an interesting narrative seed that some readers might already have noticed but I did not until this point, when he keeps telling Cley as he beats the tar out of the physiognomist that "the mine is my mind, my mind is the mine" -- suggesting that the Well-Built City might as much be a figment solely of the Master's mind and Cley just a figment within it, something that might be explored more in the book's two sequels.

There's so much more going on in this book, by the way. So much more. A bartending monkey is maybe the least weird thing we encounter. There is a representative of what may be a separate humanoid species, whose features both do and do not conform to the ideal Cley is charged with upholding to such a degree that they drive him a little bit crazier than he already is. There is a beautiful young village woman who is as ardent a student of The Physiognomy as ever there was, with whom Cley falls in love and then, Incel-style, punishes horribly when she is revealed to have a life and goals of her very own that don't include Cley. There is a giant of a man, Caloo, who falls into another punishment scheme of the Master's that reminded me of China Mieville's Punishment Factories in the city of New Crobuzon of which the Well-Built City was already reminding me before poor Caloo gets most of his internal organs replaced with clockwork/dieselpunk horrors. And there's the story's McGuffin, a mysterious White Fruit, the theft of which was Cley's original mission to solve. Supposedly the fruit conveys immortality to those who eat it, but does it really? The people who wind up eating it in this story don't fare too well after doing so.

There are, of course, two more volumes in the Well-Built City trilogy, but for reasons I haven't really been able to determine, I'm not rushing to read them the way I usually am. I do know that part of which is because The Physiognomy tells a perfectly satisfying self-contained story, with little to no pointing ahead to greater issues or further adventures the way, say, Ada Palmer's or the Dyachenkos' series did from book one. Its conclusion is open-ended enough to allow for continuation but isn't a cliffhanger, nor is it particularly a downer ending in need of uplifting by its sequels. I suspect that, really, though Cley definitely undergoes a great deal of character growth as he negotiates his new perils, he's still a thoroughly unpleasant person with whom to spend my time; while I feel for the little people in whose oppression he colluded for so long, I haven't been allowed to get to know any of them, trapped as I've been in Cley's repulsive head. Do I care about them enough to see how they fare in the aftermath of The Physiognomy? Right now, only in theory. I'm more intrigued, still, by their world, by the quest to find out how much of it as presented in this first book is "real" and how much is just Cley's addled understanding of it. Will the world as it really is be as interesting, though? I suspect that this is the question that may draw me to read Memoranda some day, and maybe even The Beyond. 

But, you know, I have an awful lot of other books waiting in a pile in my sitting room, on my e-reader, and in my audiobook library, and I don't at present feel inclined to postpone any of them to spend more time with Cley. Jeffrey Ford, yes, but not really Cley. Unless the Big Dictator someday forces me to.

*I imagine that even now some poor kid is enduring instruction in the art, though; it seems very much to be the sort of thing that The Indicted Guy might someday try very hard to promote as a means of regaining or holding onto power. He has already written off half the human race as useless except for intimately grabbing if we meet his standards of decorativeness.

**We have already been told, with chilling breeziness in audio book narrator Christian Rummell's perfectly supercilious tones, that miners whose families can afford to keep their stony blue bodies around as monumental decor, referred to as "Hardened Heroes"; our guy's hotel suite even features the owner's brother as a sort of human vanity stand. If a miner's family is less well off once the miner can't mine, though, the miner becomes a more consumable commodity. Hey, times are tough even in fantasy novels, man.