The Wall Street Journal-20080123-His Mortal Life- Mortal Heroes
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His Mortal Life, Mortal Heroes
When David Gemmell complained about back pain in the 1970s, doctors ran tests and said he might have cancer. So they performed a biopsy. Gemmell, who was in his 20s, took sick leave from his job at a British newspaper and waited for an answer. He grew so restless that he started to write a fantasy novel about a mountain fortress besieged by a barbarian horde.
He wrote everything but the ending, choosing to tie the fortress's fate to his own. If he had cancer, it would fall. If he didn't, it would survive.
It turned out that Gemmell didn't have cancer -- but he decided that his manuscript wasn't very good and tucked it away. A few years later, a friend encouraged him to try again. In 1984, the novel was published as "Legend." The main character is Druss, an aging warrior with a bum knee. At one point, he shouts into an empty valley: "Where are you, death?" As the echo fades, Druss continues: "I defy you!"
"Legend" became one of the best-selling fantasy books ever written. About 30 more novels followed, up to Gemmell's death in July 2006 at the age of 57 (from a stroke). His last book -- "Troy: Fall of Kings," the third installment of a trilogy based on the Trojan War -- has just come out. Gemmell was working on it the night he died, and his widow, Stella, finished it from his notes and their conversations.
The time may be right for Gemmell to keep on defying death. The culture is always hungry for stories of imperfect men and women who face long odds and perform feats of martial courage. Whereas antiwar films flop at the box office, those that celebrate military heroism, such as last year's "300," ring up sales. If Hollywood wants to find a new book-based, war-filled fantasy franchise that repeats the success of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" -- and avoids the disaster of "The Golden Compass" -- it may want to look to Gemmell for inspiration.
A person who already has looked to Gemmell is Conn Iggulden, a historical-fiction novelist who co-wrote the can-do sensation "The Dangerous Book for Boys." Mr. Iggulden recently described Gemmell as "the author who has meant the most to me," singling out "Legend" for special praise.
Gemmell himself found inspiration in classic tales. "If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young," he told Britain's Independent newspaper a decade ago. Gemmell bemoaned the modern compulsion to tear down larger-than-life heroes and expose them as small-minded and self-interested. He certainly wouldn't have cared for the recent movie version of "Beowulf," in which the Anglo-Saxon warrior is transformed from the old poem's monster-slaying gallant into a lying adulterer who swaps sex for power.
The fantasy genre provides a refuge from such harmful deconstruction. "Societies need heroes," Gemmell once said, according to an obituary in London's Daily Telegraph. "So we travel to places where the revisionists cannot dismantle the great."
When Gemmell was a boy, a teacher read "The Hobbit" to his class, turning Gemmell into a lifelong fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose characters became his role models. On a train platform one evening, Gemmell -- a big-and-tall fellow who once worked as a bouncer -- saw three men beating up a fourth. As he told the Independent, "A voice inside my head said, 'What would Boromir do?'" He jumped into the fray and fought off the assailants.
Years later, Gemmell told a New Zealand newspaper about receiving a letter from a fan who had gone out for a walk with his dog when he saw two men attacking a woman. He charged in and they ran off. "He said he did not think he would have done it if he hadn't been reading one of my books about heroes," said Gemmell. "That's the kind of thing that I shall carry with me, not making millions or whatever."
"Legend" is probably the best-loved book in Gemmell's corpus. It's a gripping story of standing up against near-certain defeat, but it also bears the marks of a first-time novelist. The narrative's point of view often shifts from one character to another in the same scene. What "Legend" lacks in technical skill, however, it makes up for through the raw power of a page-turning plot.
Over time, Gemmell improved as a craftsman of fiction -- and arguably he was at the height of his powers as he wrote the Troy trilogy. The gang's all here: Achilles, Hektor, Andromache, and so on. Gemmell tinkers with Homer's story, with an eye toward making the characters feel more authentic. Amusingly, Helen doesn't own a face that will launch a thousand ships, as Christopher Marlowe had it. Instead, she's "plain" and "thickset."
There's a method to Gemmell's makeover. In Greek legend, Aeneas is the son of the goddess Aphrodite. In Gemmell's retelling, the future hero's mother is said to have swallowed opiates, hallucinated about herself as Aphrodite, and jumped off a cliff, thinking she would float to Mount Olympus.
The achievements of Aeneas, then, aren't divine gifts but the earned products of mortal talent. This allows Gemmell to explore his favorite themes. In the trilogy's first book, he describes how Helikaon (his nickname for Aeneas) joined the crew of the Penelope, captained by Odysseus, as a terrified boy. The grown-up sailors treated him as an equal: "They loved him and expected great deeds from him. He in turn supplied those deeds, living up to their expectations," writes Gemmell. "The frightened boy became a fearless man."
In composing roughly half of "Troy: Fall of Kings," Stella Gemmell performed her own act of bravery. When her husband died, she had never written anything longer than a 3,000-word magazine article. "I was daunted. How could I not be?" she asks. "But I felt I had no choice." She set a deadline, got to work, and finished on time.
In "Legend," when Druss delivers what amounts to his St. Crispin's Day speech from the battlements of a seemingly doomed stronghold, he bellows: "Life is nothing unless death has been faced down."
The Gemmells -- both of them -- faced it down, leaving behind a set of books for a world that will always need heroes.
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Mr. Miller writes for National Review.
