Witness of Gor (Hardcover)

Please don't be surprised if I class these BDSM books as romances. What makes a book a "romance" is that the girl always, by contrivance of the author, ends up in the arms (and the chains) of the one man in the world who is Meant For Her.

In Norman's earlier books, the girl would at first hate and resist, flee or betray, be caught by, and surrender to, the man Meant For Her.

Despite the sick and savage elements of whips and chains, there is still a version of romance in Norman's writing, a true love that conquers all obstacles.

But in WITNESS, the viewpoint character, a slave-girl kidnapped from Earth, doesn't fall in love, does not flee or betray or hate, and is not found and conquered again by her one and only True Love.

Instead, as an afterthought, in a very late chapter, she does end up with the clerk or guard that first opened the crate she was shipped in and stamped her papers, but this fellow is clearly a nobody.

He is never given a name or a description, and has nothing to do in the plots or adventures of the planet Gor.

My impression is that Norman was near the end of his manuscript, decided he needed a love interest, flipped through the pages near the beginning, and picked a male character by closing his eyes and stabbing a page with a pin. It was a slap-dash and careless ending.

She could have fallen in love with someone else. In one scene, the main character was supposed to be sent to torment the mysterious prisoner of the Pits of Treve with her allure, a half-mad creature whom she fears and hates. I anticipated scenes where the girl would come to pity the prisoner, hate yielding to human sympathy; pity then yielding to admiration as she detected his hidden strengths. This would culminate in a love affair (which, on Gor, involves utter surrender on the part of the girl). Ah! That would have been a satisfying scene, showing that love can be found even by a brain-damaged mad peasant in the deepest dungeon (or is he a peasant, really?).

I was disappointed that nothing of the relation between the slave-girl and the prisoner she is supposed to be serving (and tempting) ever takes place. She spends weeks or months in the cell with this guy, but not a single line of dialog between them, not a single onstage scene, is shown.

Had she been the love-interest of the mysterious prisoner, her (and our) interest would have been engaged during the action and intrigue surrounding his escape attempt. As it was, the whole book seemed a little flat and detached.

It would have been easy to convince me that the slave-girl was pretty damn impressed with the brain-damaged peasant after he offs half a dozen trained killers. Or I might have been convinced she was impressed with the hideously deformed Master of the Pit, once she saw his humanity and wisdom behind his gruesome face. I might have even been convinced she could fall for the Warlord of Treve, a kingly figure whose troubled inner nature she glimpses. These were the characters that were onstage, doing mighty deeds, and these should have been the ones attracting the heroine's reluctant love. I was not convinced that she could have fallen in love with the receiving clerk in the slaver's warehouse.

This welcome formula (girl hates guy, girl caught by guy, girl falls for guy) is followed in the secondary characters, told with the proper Dickensonian coincidences and plot twists. The ghastly and deformed Master Of Pit finds love, as does the haughty captive free woman the main character is sent to guard. But the main character's tale has neither romance nor passion in it.

What is the point of writing about a love slave if she doesn't fall in love?

Also missing from this book were descriptions. Earlier books had vivid visual descriptions of the wild and strange world of Gor, her peoples and their civilization. The writing here lacked that vividness.

This is not to say there is not a good scene in the book once in a while. My favorite was one where the secret prisoner, apparently brain-damaged, turns out to be tougher than he looks, and is trying to escape from a squad of Assassins sent to kill him. This is exciting action and well done (particularly well done is that bit of business with the dead urt in the water).

I can give it two stars for the occasional action scene.

The author is clearly stuck in the '70s and '80s as he has yet to acknowledge that militant, anti-male, PC feminism peaked well over a decade ago and is largely regarded as the machinations of psychotic man-hating/envying lesbians (Andrea Dworkin comes to mind) by nearly everyone. As this sort of psychotic garbage exists mainly in hyper-liberal university campuses, his stories don't resound the way they used to as he pointed out the obvious fallacies of such political viewpoints of society. No longer do his books exists as roadmaps to claiming your masculinity in the face of oppressive "feminism" that sought to emasculate men and created such whining losers as the "sensitive new age guy" persona.

The story should have delved much deeper into the political landscape of the conquest of Ar by Lurious of Jad, the effects this had on Treve and the actions of Rask & Terence and other important figures. Also needing to be developed was the back story of Dorna the Proud, now the personal slave of Rask, Ubar of Treve. More insights into the society and history of Treve would have been appreciated as this has always been one of the more mysterious cities that he referred to in his previous novels. Finally, the story should have delved into Marlenus more than it did. Marlenus is one of the great underwritten characters of Gor, and this would have been a prime opportunity to develop him more and bring more insight into they character.

Further, Norman goes beyond the usual philosophic discourses on dominance-submission as the paradigm, which governs male-female relationships, and uses instead a critical ethical dilemma to present honor as an ethical issue. And indeed, the story itself turns upon this ethical issue, in a day when soft politicians, diplomats, public servants and the philosophical ethicists who advise them renounce the very concept of honor, precisely because honor is not negotiable. In this book, Norman emerges not only as a first-rate storyteller-once again-but as the deeply insightful philosopher of human nature and morality that he is.

This latest offering in the Gor series has several further characteristics that make it exquisite. First, he sets the story in the Voltai Range, in the impregnable city of the robber-Ubar, Rask of Treve, a part of Gor of which readers have heard, but never experienced. Second, he pulls the series out of the morass that was "Magicians of Gor", and sets it once again on the road of heightened suspense and adventure to an epic climax in the struggle for dominance of the great city of Ar by the Island Ubarates, Tyros and Cos. Setting the story against that backdrop itself ties up a major loose end from Magicians of Gor and brings the series back to life for those who suffered through the loss of Ar's legions in the delta of the Vosk, the disappearance of its mighty Ubar, Marlenus, and the crass and treacherous rule of his daughter, Talena, as the proxy of Cos. Third, Norman shows here the best character development of any of the books. The figure of "The Tarsk"-the "depth warden" or pit master, he who governs Treve's deep and cavernous prisons-is the deepest, most thoughtful, and most sensitively developed character of the entire series. This massive twisted figure, deformed from birth, but of high intelligence and great cunning and strength, a master of the board game Kaissa as well, becomes the most sympathetic character of the story. Thus the reader suffers with the depth warden when he violates his oath of honor to preserve his integrity in another matter of honor. One actually finds oneself hoping long before the possibility arises in the plot that this great and grave figure does not commit suicide over his actions in the midst of this dilemma. And I note: only someone who himself has a profound sense of honor recognizes that violations of honor necessarily result in one's death, even if that means at one's own hand. Fourth, only an exciting and improbable twist of fate brings the heroine (and the reader) from the dank and dangerous depths of Treve's fortress prison to a surprise, nail-biting conclusion far from that setting. I cannot wait for Prize of Gor, the finale, or at least the sequel.

To sum up, this Gorean tale contains the greatest depth of character development and philosophic thought to which the author has yet risen. He also tells a great story, one that I could barely put down.