A Son of the Rock

Dell, 1978, 286p

Pangborn died over thirty years ago, in 1976. So it goes. This is a collection of short stories which he himself brought together just before his death. All are set in the post-catastrophe world of his novels Davy, The Judgement Of Eve and The Company Of Glory which I read soon after publication. His non-SF novel Wilderness Of Spring is virtually unobtainable and I only managed to buy a copy of Still I Persist In Wondering very recently.

A Twenty Minute War and a Red Plague in the late Twentieth Century, along with hugely risen sea levels, have left few human survivors. They struggle on in reduced circumstances, trying to make the best of them. The stories in the book span in sequence the centuries after the fall from a time when the inhabitants of Katskil still recall technology with varying degrees of fondness till the days when tales of the Old Time have achieved the status of myth and legend, alloyed with a kind of dread.

It cannot be said often enough that SF is not about predicting the future but merely to ask the question what if?……. So, despite the fact that the world Pangborn describes has not in fact come about – smallpox is still a killer here – these stories are alive in a way that verges on the transcendental.

Not much tends to happen in any particular story but that is almost irrelevant. When it does, as in The Witches Of Nupal, it occurs with a dreadful inevitability.

One in four births in Katskil and Adirondack Island is of a mutant. The Murcan Church teaches these “monsters” are to be killed. The growth of this faith can be traced interstitially through the book. We meet its progenitor, Abraham Brown, in the first story “The Children’s Crusade” where his forthcoming martyrdom is presaged, but he is a less than omnipotent figurehead. The new religion (same as the old religion?) comes into sharper focus in the next to last story “My Brother Leopold” the tale of the circumstances surrounding the sanctification of an itinerant dreamer/visionary, with a “Companion” only he could hear, tried for heresy and burned years earlier. Here is where the book’s title is found as Leopold’s brother Jermyn includes in a letter to his clerical superior the sentence, “And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis.”

This comes to the heart of what is instantly apparent about any of Pangborn’s writing; its humanity. His empathy for the characters is striking. Not that he is reticent about folly, tragedy or death overcoming them.

The last tale “The Night Wind” is quintessential Pangborn. Narrated by a homosexual, fleeing from a stoning after his proclivities have been discovered, he nevertheless tarries to aid a recently bereaved, bedridden near neighbour who assures him, “any manner of love is good if there is kindness in it.”

Pangborn’s projected world, like all the best fiction, is instantly believable in a way that is somehow beyond truth. You feel he is describing things just as they are – or would be. It is a pleasure to be immersed in his vision. That immersion, however, is never a cosy experience.