Book Review: Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber, today best known as the author of the excellent sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, died in 1992, at the age of 81, of "organic brain disease".  I have no idea what that means.  He was the son of the Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber, Sr., who is actually in the picture; I found this a lot more compelling than most photos of Fritz Jr.

Conjure Wife is the first of Leiber's stories that I've read which is set in the then-modern world.  That it was published in 1953 (according to the copyright information), or 1943 even (when it was serialized), goes a long way toward explaining some of the book's more... politically awkward moments.



To go back a step or two: the basic premise of the book is that most or all women are practicing witches, totally unknown to men.  And haven't we all thought something like that at one time or another?  We men, at least.  The plot follows Norman Saylor, a sociology professor at a small university, as he discovers that his wife (Tansy.  Yes, that is really her name) has been protecting him, with charms, amulets, etc, from magical assault by the wives of three of his colleagues.  The story itself is great, and Leiber makes really fun use of Saylor's inevitable turn-around from skepticism to belief that what seems to be happening can't be explained by mass psychosis.  My only complaint about this part of the story is two-fold, and paradoxical: Saylor comes around over the course of about a week, which seems to me, as a real person in the world, to be astoundingly fast; but after all, this is a book, and as a reader I often found myself grinding my teeth at the sluggish pace of his conversion.  I felt like the opposite of a loud horror-movie fan: "Go in the basement!  Go in, Norman!  Can't you see it's really interesting in there?"

Now, I mentioned the book's various publication dates with forethought, because there are a lot of head-scratchingly sexist opinions expressed in this book.  I'm aware that the characters are not the author, but nonetheless I spent a lot of the first half of the book wondering if Leiber was being ironic or not.  I wasn't overly concerned at first, because it seemed obvious that it was all setup for the big reveal that women secretly have all the power and run the world, muahahaha and all that.  That reveal happened, kind of, but all that the women were running from behind the scenes was their husbands' careers.  Okaaaay?

There were two places specifically where I felt like the ball got dropped, sexism-wise.  First, once all the cards are on the table, Tansy mentions that the three witches who are out to get them are the first organized group of witches.  Ever.  Ever ever.  And this just seemed like a really neat opportunity to tie the story in to folklore in some way; the main character is a friggin folklorist after all.

The other comes very near the end of the story; some business was made of Saylor trying to get at the underlying science behind magic, and getting his mathematician friend to manipulate various formulas using the rules of symbolic logic to find some simpler laws.  This part was pretty neat, though more could have been done with it, but here's the bad part: near the very end the evil leader of the coven, referring to this work, says, "He's made some of the most fascinating discoveries.  It seems there are laws governing the things that we women have been puttering with.  Men are so clever in some ways, don't you think?"  The conceit here is the no woman has ever been taught logic, I guess; it's probably important for the men vs women theme, but that line really pulled me out of the story for some reason.

So in the end, I'm not sure how to feel about this book from an enlightened liberal perspective.  I still can't tell whether the sexism is ironic and hilarious, or not.  There is a lot else to love about this book, though, not the least of which is a longish section about Prince Rupert's Drops.  Overall, it is a good read.  I'd like to see the three movies that have been made of it, which look like they'll vary widely in both quality and hilarity.