Clark
Ashton Smith’s The Isle of the Torturers
(1933) superficially resembles the early work of Lord Dunsany, with its exotic
place names and fable-like structure. Certainly
Dunsany’s pseudo-mythic stories—see his The
Gods of Pegāna (1905) and Time and
the Gods (1906)—were in part an inspiration. Yet Clark Ashton Smith has
made Dunsany’s verbal trappings a decoration for what is uniquely his own
work. Unlike other authors who emulated
Lord Dunsany, (most notably H.P. Lovecraft), Smith was successful in
assimilating the style of the Irish author into his own.
The Isle of the Torturers concerns the fate of the young
king Fulbra of Yoros, one of the few survivors of the Silver Death, a plague
that has devastated his kingdom. He watches
helplessly as his subjects succumb and become stiff, silvery cadavers almost
overnight. The plague descends from a
star, and though its appearance can be predicted by astrologers, it cannot be
avoided. There is no cure. Fulbra is spared because of a mysterious ring
that the court wizard has fashioned for him.
It is made out of strange red metal.
He must never remove the ring from his finger, for then he will suffer a
visitation of the plague, which is only delayed by the charm.
Shortly
before his own death, the court wizard had advised Fulbra to go to the southern
isle of Cyntrom, but on the way, a storm at sea diverts his ship to Uccastrog,
a land ruled by the cruel King Ildrac.
You can tell from the names that this is a very bad place to land.
Fulbra is shipwrecked there with a few of his surviving slaves. Another hapless ship has also landed there,
and its occupants, along with Fulbra and his party are swiftly captured. The people of Uccastrog delight in torturing their
visitors with inventive contraptions—it seems to be the most popular recreational
activity on the island. Hence the name ‘Isle
of the Torturers’.
Clark
Ashton Smith seems to have been preoccupied with torture and the Inquistion, at
least in some of his work. Torture
imagery and references to the Inquisition occur in such stories as The Beast of Averoigne, The Empire of the Necromancers, The Monster of the Prophecy, and others.
Fulbra
is subjected to various and prolonged tortures to amuse King Ildrac. The tortures are primarily physical, but also
mental and spiritual as well, for his captors are diabolically thorough. He is sustained by a girl named Ilvaa who
visits him periodically to offer encouragement and hope, but she herself turns
out to be an instrument of torment, in league with King Ildrac. Fulbra’s experiences grow ever more hellish,
and all seems lost, until he remembers the ring on his finger…
The Isle of the Torturers is another example of Clark
Ashton Smith’s mastery of symmetry in a story, which seems to involve an
administration of cosmic justice, a sort of ‘what goes around, comes around’
ethic. Stories end at the place where
they began, but with balance restored and characters irrevocably changed. The other striking thing about Smith’s
stories is the hallucinatory visual imagery, sometimes bright, colorful and
exotic, other times dark and gruesome. In
The Isle of the Torturers there is
disturbing graphic detail about torture, death, and decay—definitely a ‘bad
trip’.
Unlike
the work of many of Smith’s contemporaries, there is a happy ending of sorts,
(justice is done), and it is the result of one man’s self-sacrifice. Though the Silver Death is inescapable,
Fulbra is able to turn his disastrous fate into a weapon against evil. This is very different from the passive acceptance
of cosmic doom found in H.P. Lovecraft’s stories.
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