Bright Air Black by David Vann
Earlier this year, I read the hugely popular Circe, named for a demi-goddess who becomes a witch. A witch who sometimes turns men into pigs. Once, in a fit of jealousy, she turned a nymph into a hideous multi-headed swamp beast. Reading this reminded me that Greek mythology isn’t pretty.
Well, Bright Air Black makes Circe look like a child’s bedtime story. Medea, niece of Circe, priestess of Hekate, is the witch to rule all witches. Shakespeare’s weird sisters have NOTHING on her. Eye of newt? Please. Medea puts balls of king into her cauldron. Medea stands naked in a hot, steaming room, tending to her gory soup, thinking of the time she chopped up her brother and then lay next to his rotting parts on the ship as her father followed in furious, close pursuit. All the while she has her eye on the prize: to be subject to no one, especially a man.
While Circe is baroque in its readable, elegant prose, Vann’s novel is more poetically charged. Many a sentence would alert the grammar police, but it doesn’t much matter. Somehow this distinctive, lyrical voice suits the grim premise.
I believe this story was told with a lot of love — that is, Vann does his utmost to ‘humanise’ Euripedes’ Medea in an effort to sculpt her into a woman of three dimensions. There is more to her than a heartless, power-hungry monster. She’s a woman who rages against the patriarchal machine, against a history that erases females after they serve their biological function. However, Vann can’t help but also show in equally vivid dimensions how little compunction she has to strike with violence in order to get what she wants. While it is thrilling to watch Medea’s wild, witchy ways, this ruthlessness doesn’t make her much different from the male power figures she resents so much.
Besides power, the next most important thing to Medea is Jason. Jason is the weakest part of this story for me. It doesn’t quite compute that such a single-minded, independent woman would need a man so desperately. Especially when Jason is so bland a character as he is depicted here, so blank a face. Vann crafts such a loving portrait of Medea that he neglects her husband, and as a result, I want him swatted away like the fly he is. I never understood why this strong and complex woman would sacrifice everything for such a man.
Maybe though, that is what feeds her black rage. Her desire to dominate being drowned in her own dominating love. Perhaps the result is not so important as the struggle, the scream.
This is a particularly savage book. It’s written in blood, reeks with the stench of death, echoes with the wails of the damned.
She will not be mastered. If it is natural to be a slave, she will be unnatural.
