The Dragon Griaule

Lucius Shepard The Dragon Griaule

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Introduction

 In a 2001 interview with the critic Nick Gevers, Lucius Shepard described how this book came about:

 The idea for a 6,000-foot-long dragon on and in which people lived occurred to me at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1980. One afternoon I went out onto the Michigan State University campus, parked it under a tree, smoked a joint, and started trying to generate story ideas. ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ was one of the ideas I came up with. I recall I wrote in my notebook the following words: ‘Big Fucking Dragon.’ Shortly thereafter I wrote, ‘Kill him with paint.’ Surely a moment that will be immortalised in the pantheon of under-the-tree-sitting moments, right up there with Newton and the apple.

 And so, when Shepard began publishing stories a few years later, one of the first pieces that made his name was ‘The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule’ (1984). From the start, he was an astonishing writer. He wrote elegant and graceful sentences; his fiction embodied a range of lived experience far wider than most SF; he was able to evoke a sense of place with precision and force; he was passionate and politically committed. Most of his early stories were set near to the present in the USA or Central America, with some fantastical intrusion heightening the story. So, for instance, his superb novella ‘R&R’ (1986) takes place in a near-future Guatemala where the US is waging a war whose geometry has somehow become mystical and beyond rationality.

 In this context, ‘The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule’ sat somewhat aside from the rest of Shepard’s work. It was told with the sort of formality associated with high fantasy, and was set ‘in a world separated from ours by the thinnest margin of possibility’. The vast dragon Griaule, stunned into immobility but not death by a wizard’s spell, dominates the Carbonales Valley and casts a baleful influence over the surroundings until the artist Meric Cattanay arrives to, as Shepard says, kill it with paint. The working-out of this premise is both detailed and unexpected. Cattanay’s vast, obsessive project comes to seem as much of a sickness as Griaule itself.

 Evidently, Shepard found that there was more to be mined from this setting, since he returned to it several times more; this book collects all he has written to date about Griaule. So, for instance, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’ (1988) takes us closer than the earlier story to perceiving Griaule’s nature. When the eponymous heroine ventures into the dragon, she discovers not merely an ecology of creatures surviving within the dragon’s body. She also, it seems, comes close to perceiving Griaule’s mind, the will emanating ‘from the cold tonnage of his brain’. ‘The Father of Stones’ (1988) also charts Griaule’s influence on the communities around him – and, indeed, the worship that has grown up to propitiate him. As one of the characters says, ‘Griaule...God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him.’