Reflections on beauty, nature, and ideology in The Works of Vermin

It's not subtle that The Works of Vermin is asking if there's something fundamentally toxic about beauty. In the hyper-commodified city of Tiliard, the answer seems to be: yes. Tiliard is a city that is intertwined deeply with the natural world. It exists on a giant tree stump, each ring functioning as a street, but despite the ubiquity of plants and flowers, nature is not romanticized. It is instead denied the vocabulary and grammar of beauty. Plants do not bloom; they blight. The river is teeming with nightmarish monsters. Fungus and rot appear on almost every page. What is, on the other hand, considered beautiful are the effects of ecdytoxin, an oftentimes-lethal substance that remakes everything it touches. It causes corpses to turn into bouquets. It causes living humans to turn into masterful artists. Everyone becomes convinced that the purest forms of beauty cannot exist without this toxic substance.

I don't think it's a coincidence that ecdytoxin can be cultivated and sold by the people with the power to set standards of beauty. It also don't think it's a coincidence that the environmental features of Tiliard, which can't usually be cultivated and sold, are very rarely portrayed as anything other than scary and gross. If it can't be made profitable, then it's in nobody's interest to consider it beautiful, so the river is nightmarish, and the animals are monstrous, but the ecdytoxin-enhanced spectacles at the Opera are considered “Revivalist” masterpieces, even if these performances usually involve killing actual human beings onstage. If this definition of beauty isn't toxic, then I don't what is, and I haven't even touched on how the Opera is really just used as an instrument of the Chancellor's control.

'Living proof,' Aufhocker wrote of his longtime friend and once-commander, 'that Beauty exacts a price.'

Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin

Beauty, in Tiliard, serves power, and it comes at the expense of artists who are exploited for their gifts. Ballerinas are auctioned like sex slaves. The best artists have all been exposed to dangerous amounts of ecdytoxin. It's no wonder that in response to this extremely dark arrangement, a new movement known as Extemporism positions itself as resistant to exploitation and ownership. Extemporist art is designed to be difficult to buy and sell. An example might be an embroidered cloth that falls apart over time or an improvisational band. This type of art tends to be more temporary, more collective, and more difficult to reproduce at scale, the kind of thing that is only truly experienced once before it disappears. It cannot be nefariously appropriated by those in power, because there is nothing to co-opt, which is its formal triumph, but it also leaves no legacy, builds no alternative structure, and offers no blueprint for what comes next.

The Extemporist movement unsurprisingly claims to be leaderless, and this horizontalism is genuinely admirable, but ironically, at least some of them still seem to rally behind making a dancer and duelist named Demetrius Prophet the new Chancellor. Demetrius does not envision a new way to organize the city after revolution. He only envisions a better person at the top of the hierarchy. Extemporists, at the end of the day, are reacting to the exploitation of art and artists, but they're not attacking the system at its source. If they want art that can never serve as a tool of power, the solution is not necessarily to make a new type of artwork. The solution is to abolish power, which might also be part of their philosophy, but not if they're going to hand authority over to Demetrius Prophet. If the Extemporists don't fundamentally restructure things after they overthrow the current Chancellor, then they risk discovering that history can be cyclical.

Historicity, like everything in Tiliard, depends on what's playing at the Opera that season.

Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin

One of the most impactful aspects of The Works of Vermin is the big reveal that there are two timelines in the novel. There is one section that focuses on the “overcity” -- the upper classes. There is another that focuses on the “undercity” -- the working classes. These two sections feel like simultaneous perspectives. Even though the stories are so different, it is entirely plausible that they are portraying different experiences of the same Tiliard. One shows the city's wealth, while the other shows the poverty. It's expected that most cities have both types of people, so despite the two plotlines feeling so incongruous in register, there's no reason to question whether they can coexist.

The twist is that you should have questioned: a whole revolution, known as the Great Revival, has occurred between the overcity and undercity sections. The twist works as intended because of how natural and inevitable wealth disparities feel to most readers. It's easy to assume that the only thing separating the two plotlines is money. It takes no suspension of disbelief, because our own world is similar. Wealth and poverty are both real phenomena, often appearing in close proximity, and it's a normalized feature of most cities. Some of us might be intellectually opposed to such disparities, claiming to be repulsed by it on some level, but not enough to truly question it when we see it. The fact that it is surprising, at least to me, to learn that time -- not just money -- separates the two plotlines exposes just how complacent I have become. It reveals what questions I'm often failing to ask. It reminds me that I should be questioning more. We all should be questioning it still, whether in fiction or reality. The status quo should not go unchallenged.

The twist also reveals that the Great Revival may not have been particularly successful. The old regime has been overthrown, and there is a new leader, a new culture, and a new mode of discourse, but the two timelines look fundamentally identical for a reason: the rot -- sometimes literalized by the fungus that permeates every layer of Tiliard -- persists beneath whatever surface is painted over it. The system hasn't changed all that much. The takeaway here is obviously a little bleak. The Extemporists have plans to bring about the next revolution, but whether their vision is going to be any more successful than the Great Revival is left as an open question. They may do enough to change the underlying systems. They may just usher in the next round in a seemingly endless cycle, ultimately reproducing the structures they are trying to overthrow.

Though the novel acknowledges Extemporism's limits, it still tries to be generous to it as a practice to resistance. In one of the last scenes, we see the Grand Marshall, a brutal enforcer of what is essentially a fascist regime, with his weapon raised at a pair of brothers he once shared a bunk with in the undercity before the Great Revival. Prior to his rise in power, the brothers were almost like family to the Marshall, but since then, he has become an instrument of the very hierarchy that exploited him and his bunkmates. In this moment, with his finger ready to pull the trigger, it is obvious that the Marshall cannot be anything other than a tragic figure. The book spends a lot of time on his corruption arc, and there just aren't enough pages left for him to get a redemption. For a second, it's easy to fear that in a narrative that wants to emphasize just how far he's fallen, he might pull the trigger, but in the end, he decides not to. It's not redemption. It can't be. He has done terrible things, and he cannot be rehabilitated in a single second, but in that final scene, there is something very pure about his love for the two brothers. He sees something good, and he chooses not to destroy it. No one knows that he made this choice. It is not recorded. It cannot be leveraged, cited, or turned into a symbol of his redemption. He's not going to earn the brothers' love or forgiveness for this act, even though he's wanted those things for most of the novel. The gesture is, in a sense, an act of Extemporism. It is fleeting. It is experienced for a moment, witnessed by no one who matters, and disappears, refusing to be turned into anything other than what it is: a man who has committed atrocities seeing the face of someone he loves, and deciding, for once, not to do something unconscionable.

Synesthetic, uncapturable, uninterpretable, irreproducible. A beauty as fleeting as it is destructive, it is without doubt the first real masterpiece of Extemporism.

Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin

The best version of Extemporism wants to forever preserve chaos and instability in order to prevent the coherence of any organized power that can institute steep hierarchies. The worst version of it refuses to build structures, leaving a vacuum. If the bands are always improvising, then the musician who plays the loudest effectively sets the terms. This vulnerability can easily become a problem in the political sphere, allowing the loudest voices, the strongest warriors, or the politicians with the most social power to take control. It conjures up a lot of old debates about the limits of postmodernism. The novel doesn't really take a side. It never explicitly tells us what happens after the Extemporists show up. The final chapter shows the two brothers as they leave Tiliard. Perhaps skeptical that the city can be fixed, they abandon the system entirely in search of something better. It's reminiscent of the ending of Ursula K. Le Guin's “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a short story about a utopia that only works by imprisoning a child. At the end, some people leave in search of a better way. The Works of Vermin was written over fifty years after “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” but all it can do is offer something similar: a story that exposes the problems with capitalism as it begs people to walk away from it. I suppose in the last fifty years, not enough people have walked away. (History is a cycle.)

I don't mean to accuse Hiron Ennes of being unimaginative. They're just being honest. The ones who walk away from Tiliard are not portrayed as purely heroic. Their decision does not solve anything, but at the same time, in a closed system that has already cycled through at least one revolution without results, there may be no better option. The open ending may be Ennes's attempt to create something in the style of Extemporism, though I can't say they succeed, not completely. The Works of Vermin has been sold for money, given a (stunning) cover to frame it, and assigned an ISBN. The story is also structurally organized like an opera, the very form it spends four hundred pages indicting. The Works of Vermin might critique Revivalism, but the novel's very structure emphasizes that it is aware of the fact that it hasn't freed itself from it completely, so it can't truly be considered an Extemporist piece, unless the point being made here is that Extemporism also isn't fully liberated from what it's responding to.

On the other hand, I think the novel's opera structure is supposed to serve as more than just grim irony about the impossibility of true liberation. The most important librettist in Tiliard is Olaf Aufhocker. Though not his intention, his operas are twisted into a tool for fascism, and by the end, all he can do is sit in the balcony of his own shows, wine in hand, and wait for the Extemporists to finally burn the whole building the ground. In the book's final chapter, Aufhocker says he wants to transition to prose. The Works of Vermin can perhaps be framed as what he writes next. At the very least, the novel seems deliberately designed to function like Aufhocker's operas -- forced by the powers that be to sit comfortably inside an ideology that no one involved actually subscribes to. The novel is built from the same materials provided by our current system: inherited forms, genre conventions, and the publishing infrastructure that decides what reaches readers and what doesn't. There is no position outside the system from which to write a book like this one, and the novel doesn't pretend otherwise. What it does instead, to its credit, is turn its own formal conventions into a trap. Because the novel meets all the usual standards and conventions, the audience comes in with certain expectations and normalized assumptions. Ennes uses those normalized assumptions against us, most obviously when it comes to the plot twist. We fail to demand an explanation about why wealth and poverty can coexist, and knowing we aren't asking any of the right questions needed to see the twist coming, the novel uses our complacency as a structural device. As a result, the twist lands as a big (if heavily foreshadowed) surprise in a way that implicates the reader in the same system it critiques.

She can only pray that she ... will be lost in the smoke, if only for a moment -- cockroaches small enough to escape the crushing notice of history.

Hiron Ennes, The Works of Vermin

There's also the title to consider. The vermin in the title is likely a reference to the monstrous bugs and pests needed to create the ecdytoxin that produces masterful works of Revivalist art. At the same time, the title also implies that the book itself was written by vermin. While it's not an Extemporist piece that can burn the Opera down to the ground, it can still try its best to avoid being used as a weapon by the fascists. Fascists, after all, hate vermin. Fascists, much like the Tiliard's Chancellor, often categorize their human enemies as vermin. They are not likely to laud a book that declares itself to be a verminous work. If the book claims kinship with pests and other undesirables, then it does end up taking a rather strong stance, perhaps a stronger one than any crumbling and insubstantial Extemporist work can take. It might not be an Extemporist work of art, but this novel still resists being Revivalist. To put it in more familiar terms, it is committed to disavowing fascism.