I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons: A Brief Review
Dragonsphere Report
Spoilers follow
There’s something in the air lately. People are rediscovering how to be cruel. At a time of multiple genocides, extreme aggression across lines of class and race, and geopolitical upheaval, Peter S. Beagle’s release of I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons can only be described as timely. This is good news, because it contains themes that can only be helpful. It is bad news, because these themes are esoteric and thus destined never to change the zeitgeist, but only individual human beings.
The story follows a dragon exterminator named Robert as he gets caught in a much larger plot, first involving royal intrigue, then later an unresolved war between a wizard and a king. The characterization is very strong. This has always been true of Beagle’s writing, but it stands out to me sharply as most of my recent reading has been science fiction, which tends to be undercooked in this respect. The story also has a conceptual escalation, starting out light and simple, becoming dark, and finally presenting its most potent ideas in the finale.
Robert, despite killing creatures he loves, broadly represents virtue. The wizard of the story represents evil, as do the dragons he creates as an army in his conflict with the king. And the dragon who shows up in the finale, a behemoth as far removed from human habits as anything could be, represents a being beyond good and evil.
What makes this story important is that it recognizes good, evil, and surpassing both as all being matters of spiritual constitution. But it goes further in two ways: First, unlike any of our real world contemporaries who might fancy themselves as Nietzschean overmen, this story recognizes that to be beyond good and evil is not simply to go beyond good and stop. This is the mistake of our time: it is understandable, insofar as good is conceived as a telos, that people think moving beyond good and evil simply means being evil and lying about it. But it doesn’t, and this story clarifies that. One has to also move beyond evil.
Secondly, the spark of surpassing is synonymous with life itself. It is therefore everyone’s birthright, whether realized or not. This is what is clarified in the encounter with the final dragon. To be alive is to be a dynamic being, and trying to contort oneself into the fixed shape of an immobile and rigid morality is a death. The simple pursuit of power is no more an affirmation of life than a refusal to enact one’s will. Nothing fixed is life affirming. I hope this book helps even one other person who needs to learn this lesson. Heaven knows there are plenty at the present moment.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report