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The Taborin Scale
In the Carbonales Valley, a remote region separated from this world by the thinnest margin of possibility, there is an ancient, incredibly large creature known as the Dragon Griaule. For twenty-five years, in stories ranging from The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule through Liar's House, Lucius Shepard has brought us extraordinary accounts of lives shaped by the dragon's undying influence. The Taborin Scale is the latest installment in this ongoing epic, and it is an astonishing and revelatory accomplishment.
The story begins when George Taborin numismatist, collector, and solid citizen travels to the valley on his annual vacation. There, he encounters a prostitute named Sylvia and acquires a tiny dragon's scale with unexpected properties. With shocking suddenness, George is removed from his everyday life and thrust into a primal world of violence and cruelty. In the course of an adventure that will change his life in fundamental ways, he is forced to bear witness to the gradual unfolding of a vast, implacable design.
The story begins when George Taborin numismatist, collector, and solid citizen travels to the valley on his annual vacation. There, he encounters a prostitute named Sylvia and acquires a tiny dragon's scale with unexpected properties. With shocking suddenness, George is removed from his everyday life and thrust into a primal world of violence and cruelty. In the course of an adventure that will change his life in fundamental ways, he is forced to bear witness to the gradual unfolding of a vast, implacable design.
233 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
28 people want to read
About the author
Lucius Shepard
296 books156 followersBrief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.
Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.
In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.
Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.
In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 10, 2010
The culmination of the “Dragon Griaule” series of American magic realism tales for which Shepard is probably best-known that include “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” “The Father of Stones,” and the original story in the series (though, chronologically within the tales' timeline, the one that immediately precedes this one), “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule.” All are marked by their Latin American magic realism influence and their milieu, featuring a 19th century culture ensconced in a pseudo-Central-American landscape that’s one step away from our reality. In this story, several characters are magically transported to their own near future to witness the enormous (think landscape-sized) dragon Griaule, allegedly dead, and under whose hulking sides and upon whose back entire villages are built, momentarily come back to life.
The story’s viewpoint character is George Taborin, a collector of dragon ephemera (who appears as a minor character and textual “source” in earlier tales in the series). Taborin and a prostitute acquaintance named Sylvia are transported to a low-lying plain where a jungle is regrowing over what they soon recognize as the Carbonales Valley, the site of the city Teocinte and the realm thought to be under Griaule’s previous influence. Apparently it is some time in the future, but within the bounds of this story, the plain becomes an existential landscape in which several human dramas are playing out. Taborin discovers others similarly transported. Griaule is keeping them all separated for several months, allowing each to proceed through a basic human moment of one sort or another in the process. Taborin rescues a little girl, Peony, from one of these groups. Peony has been horribly abused both physically and sexually, and Taborin, the battered girl and the prostitute Sylvia form a little semi-family where Peony is allowed to heal in a small manner. Eventually, they, and all on the plain, are herded back to an amphitheater to watch the ancient dragon Griaule’s final magical transformation unfold. Taborin finds, as he has suspected all along, that he himself has not escaped being part of Griaule's exercise in manipulation merely because he is aware of the dragon's propensities.
Shepard’s dragon stories revolve around fate and free will. Characters again and again think they’re acting in either a noble, a self-sacrificing or self-serving, or a merely free manner, when in fact they’re actually serving the dragon’s purposes all along. The stories raise the disquieting notion that there’s an alternative to a universe of supernatural fate or blind atheistic determinism. It may be that fate exists, but is actually EVIL and has a positive will to use us, abuse us, toy with us, and destroy us. The Griaule stories are kind of an anti-Tolkien take on the world: an immense, emotional will that has no care for human desires and needs (other than a positive intent to use them to its purpose) shapes our reality and the very landscape in which we move. We can’t escape it because we’re part of it, a thought in its immense mind, whether we like this fact or not. In this world, Griaule’s mere whims are a far greater force than the most complex human plan for happiness or salvation, and humans always make themselves, whether consciously or inadvertently, into means toward the dragon’s ends.
The beauty and subversion of the dragon stories is that Shepard always goes for the emotional experiences in which we WANT to surrender to fate, most notably love, and has Griaule twist these most basic human foundations for his dragonly purposes. Here, Taborin’s greatest desire is to have a family to care for, and Griaule gives him a parody of what he wants in the form of the blasted threesome of Taborin, the prostitute, and the battered little girl whom they both come to love.
Shepard suggests that all families are just that: a gathering of weather-beaten souls brought together by genetics, chance, historic forces, or what-have-you and that humans, desperate for love and meaning, make themselves into families in order to survive a little longer in the harsh world and find at least some temporary individual meaning in love and self-sacrifice. These basic urges (we feel we are “fated” to fall in love with our “soul mate,” say, or that, whatever moral reasoning we may employ, we have an existential urge to rescue the young from the depredations of evil people) are ultimately revealed as the powerful tools the dragon uses to get us to work its will. It’s at these emotional touchpoints with fate that humans are at their most malleable, putty in the hands of fate – but without these emotions and desires, without love, hope, altruism, humans are nothing more than dust moving through a dusty world.
But Shepard gives us a bit of dark hope in this morass of gloom. The dragon NEEDS us to think its thoughts and work its will. So while we can’t escape becoming means to an end, the harder we struggle to remain an end in ourselves, to make our individuality matter and mean something in the universe, the better tools we become for fate. It’s by resisting the urge to go along, by fighting against an inevitable smaller fate, that we most completely serve the larger purposes of the universe. Whether those purposes are good or ill, we can never know -- probably ill, Shepard suggests. But the dragon stories remind us that the purpose is there. We live in a teleological universe that perversely refuses to reveal what principle it serves, but makes liberal use of us toward its own ends, nonetheless.
In “The Taborin Scale,” we get a glimpse of Griaule’s ultimate plan, or at least the method he is using to spread his influence. In a manner similar to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (with which this story shares several thematic similarities), it’s an existential experiment for Griaule. The humans on the jungle plain serve as a sort of “test” group for the dragon to comprehend human drama under the most extreme and cut-off circumstances. We inevitably fall into family groups, some workable, some destructive. Taborin, who has had a loveless, childless marriage before, finally gets his greatest desire – a wife who sort of loves him and a child who is sort of his – and, in the end, he proves himself worthy of this love. This worthiness, Shepard suggests, may not mean squat in the larger universe – it probably doesn’t -- but it does mean something, and it has to be enough -- because these moments of doing the right thing in small ways, of showing and receiving the love of others, however mixed-up and tainted by self-interest and sexual desire, are the only meaning in life that we’re ever going to get.
The story’s viewpoint character is George Taborin, a collector of dragon ephemera (who appears as a minor character and textual “source” in earlier tales in the series). Taborin and a prostitute acquaintance named Sylvia are transported to a low-lying plain where a jungle is regrowing over what they soon recognize as the Carbonales Valley, the site of the city Teocinte and the realm thought to be under Griaule’s previous influence. Apparently it is some time in the future, but within the bounds of this story, the plain becomes an existential landscape in which several human dramas are playing out. Taborin discovers others similarly transported. Griaule is keeping them all separated for several months, allowing each to proceed through a basic human moment of one sort or another in the process. Taborin rescues a little girl, Peony, from one of these groups. Peony has been horribly abused both physically and sexually, and Taborin, the battered girl and the prostitute Sylvia form a little semi-family where Peony is allowed to heal in a small manner. Eventually, they, and all on the plain, are herded back to an amphitheater to watch the ancient dragon Griaule’s final magical transformation unfold. Taborin finds, as he has suspected all along, that he himself has not escaped being part of Griaule's exercise in manipulation merely because he is aware of the dragon's propensities.
Shepard’s dragon stories revolve around fate and free will. Characters again and again think they’re acting in either a noble, a self-sacrificing or self-serving, or a merely free manner, when in fact they’re actually serving the dragon’s purposes all along. The stories raise the disquieting notion that there’s an alternative to a universe of supernatural fate or blind atheistic determinism. It may be that fate exists, but is actually EVIL and has a positive will to use us, abuse us, toy with us, and destroy us. The Griaule stories are kind of an anti-Tolkien take on the world: an immense, emotional will that has no care for human desires and needs (other than a positive intent to use them to its purpose) shapes our reality and the very landscape in which we move. We can’t escape it because we’re part of it, a thought in its immense mind, whether we like this fact or not. In this world, Griaule’s mere whims are a far greater force than the most complex human plan for happiness or salvation, and humans always make themselves, whether consciously or inadvertently, into means toward the dragon’s ends.
The beauty and subversion of the dragon stories is that Shepard always goes for the emotional experiences in which we WANT to surrender to fate, most notably love, and has Griaule twist these most basic human foundations for his dragonly purposes. Here, Taborin’s greatest desire is to have a family to care for, and Griaule gives him a parody of what he wants in the form of the blasted threesome of Taborin, the prostitute, and the battered little girl whom they both come to love.
Shepard suggests that all families are just that: a gathering of weather-beaten souls brought together by genetics, chance, historic forces, or what-have-you and that humans, desperate for love and meaning, make themselves into families in order to survive a little longer in the harsh world and find at least some temporary individual meaning in love and self-sacrifice. These basic urges (we feel we are “fated” to fall in love with our “soul mate,” say, or that, whatever moral reasoning we may employ, we have an existential urge to rescue the young from the depredations of evil people) are ultimately revealed as the powerful tools the dragon uses to get us to work its will. It’s at these emotional touchpoints with fate that humans are at their most malleable, putty in the hands of fate – but without these emotions and desires, without love, hope, altruism, humans are nothing more than dust moving through a dusty world.
But Shepard gives us a bit of dark hope in this morass of gloom. The dragon NEEDS us to think its thoughts and work its will. So while we can’t escape becoming means to an end, the harder we struggle to remain an end in ourselves, to make our individuality matter and mean something in the universe, the better tools we become for fate. It’s by resisting the urge to go along, by fighting against an inevitable smaller fate, that we most completely serve the larger purposes of the universe. Whether those purposes are good or ill, we can never know -- probably ill, Shepard suggests. But the dragon stories remind us that the purpose is there. We live in a teleological universe that perversely refuses to reveal what principle it serves, but makes liberal use of us toward its own ends, nonetheless.
In “The Taborin Scale,” we get a glimpse of Griaule’s ultimate plan, or at least the method he is using to spread his influence. In a manner similar to Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" (with which this story shares several thematic similarities), it’s an existential experiment for Griaule. The humans on the jungle plain serve as a sort of “test” group for the dragon to comprehend human drama under the most extreme and cut-off circumstances. We inevitably fall into family groups, some workable, some destructive. Taborin, who has had a loveless, childless marriage before, finally gets his greatest desire – a wife who sort of loves him and a child who is sort of his – and, in the end, he proves himself worthy of this love. This worthiness, Shepard suggests, may not mean squat in the larger universe – it probably doesn’t -- but it does mean something, and it has to be enough -- because these moments of doing the right thing in small ways, of showing and receiving the love of others, however mixed-up and tainted by self-interest and sexual desire, are the only meaning in life that we’re ever going to get.
August 12, 2014
Unfortunately, the cover of this novella might keep some people from reading Shepard's weird, fascinating prose. The story takes place within Shepard's Dragon Griaule mythos, in which a 6000 foot long dragon lies paralyzed in the Carbonales Valley, with thriving cities on its back and in its shadow. The story lacks most of the tropes of a fantasy novel, instead growing into something much stranger.
The novella centers around George Taborin, a vacationer in Carbonales Valley, and Sylvia, the prostitute/guide that he hires for two weeks. They find themselves unexpectedly transported to a desolate plain in a time before Griaule was immobilized. Indeed, the dragon herds them and others in similar situations to separate plots where they're to live. Much of the story is concerned with the sexual politics of George and Sylvia's interactions as they try to survive, and their interactions with their morally bankrupt neighbors.
Shepard draws out his main characters with beautiful talent, including some of the most interesting metaphors I've read in a long time. The novella is at least partially dedicated to exploring man's inhumanity to man in a dark and dislocating setting. The last chapter takes place several years after the rest of the story, with the most important character changes taking place during the interim, unseen by the reader. That left me with a vague sense of "so what?" when I finished The Taborin Scale, but I was able to answer the question by remembering Shepard's original ideas and clever writing.
The novella centers around George Taborin, a vacationer in Carbonales Valley, and Sylvia, the prostitute/guide that he hires for two weeks. They find themselves unexpectedly transported to a desolate plain in a time before Griaule was immobilized. Indeed, the dragon herds them and others in similar situations to separate plots where they're to live. Much of the story is concerned with the sexual politics of George and Sylvia's interactions as they try to survive, and their interactions with their morally bankrupt neighbors.
Shepard draws out his main characters with beautiful talent, including some of the most interesting metaphors I've read in a long time. The novella is at least partially dedicated to exploring man's inhumanity to man in a dark and dislocating setting. The last chapter takes place several years after the rest of the story, with the most important character changes taking place during the interim, unseen by the reader. That left me with a vague sense of "so what?" when I finished The Taborin Scale, but I was able to answer the question by remembering Shepard's original ideas and clever writing.
May 29, 2012
His flesh has become one with the earth. He knows its every tremor and convulsion. His thoughts roam the plenum, his mind is a cloud that encompasses our world. His blood is the marrow of time. Centuries flow through him, leaving behind a residue that he incorporates into his being. Is it any wonder he controls our lives and knows our fates?
The Dragon Griaule collects Lucius Shepard’s six stories and novellas about Griaule, the mile-long 750-foot-high dragon that has been in a spellbound sleep for thousands of years. He rests in a valley where his body composes much of the landscape, creating hills and forests and waterfalls. Trees and other vegetation have taken root on his body and animals and parasites live in the habitat he produces. Griaule overlooks the town of Teocinte and another shantytown rests on his back. He’s angry about his situation and his negative... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
The Dragon Griaule collects Lucius Shepard’s six stories and novellas about Griaule, the mile-long 750-foot-high dragon that has been in a spellbound sleep for thousands of years. He rests in a valley where his body composes much of the landscape, creating hills and forests and waterfalls. Trees and other vegetation have taken root on his body and animals and parasites live in the habitat he produces. Griaule overlooks the town of Teocinte and another shantytown rests on his back. He’s angry about his situation and his negative... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
December 26, 2012
The protagonist is teleported together with a prostitute far back into the past. They have to get along to survive a hot and unpleasant place that is ruled by a Dragon.
I loved this dark story. It explores feelings that dwell deep within the heart of a man who tries to support a small group of two women and himself that one could almost call a family. The place demands a lot and the emotional strain is high. As so often men and women have different desires and goals and it's fascinating to see the relationship change in unexpected ways, forcing uncomfortable decisions.
The end is strong and makes you think for a while.
I loved this dark story. It explores feelings that dwell deep within the heart of a man who tries to support a small group of two women and himself that one could almost call a family. The place demands a lot and the emotional strain is high. As so often men and women have different desires and goals and it's fascinating to see the relationship change in unexpected ways, forcing uncomfortable decisions.
The end is strong and makes you think for a while.
August 3, 2014
Interesting concept but the shortness of the tale didn't allow for much character development. An antiquities collector finds a dragon scale in a set of coins he's bought. He buys a prostitute's 2 week services with it, but they discover that during polishing they are transported to a past when the dragon was young and the city they lived in isn't even built. The other people in the region have been similarly transported and are mostly creepy damaged criminals. They're all trying to survive and figure out how to get back. But the dragon wants to show them something. The hook isn't work reading the book. Maybe the longer tale is a better read.
November 5, 2010
I luurrrve Shepard, and the Griaule stories are some of my favorites, but there isn’t nearly as much heart in this one as there is in his earlier stories. It was a bit of a bummer, frankly.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews