Love and Death in the Dream Forest

Crossroads of CanopyBy Thoraiya DyerTor, 2017 They're solid and rough, inviting both children and adults to climb. They shade us from the heat, as well as provide fruit and nuts. Ecosystems hinge on their health, allowing animal communities to flourish. Most importantly, their leaves make oxygen, so we cut them down at our peril. These are the facts about trees. Without trees, humanity couldn't have evolved into the miraculous—though deeply conflicted—species we are today.Trees also frame our grandest fantasies. Imaginative scribes from the Brothers Grimm to Lord Dunsany to Tolkien (and dozens of their present-day acolytes) have spun epic stories of heroism, romance, and doom within enchanted forests. And honestly, what fantasy is complete without the characters entering a Mirkwood or an Immanent Grove, where they'll encounter not just elves, faeries, and unicorns, but all things previously uncharted by the mind? Real world forests, such as those of Papa New Guinea, offer flora and fauna that we'd be hard-pressed to invent if they didn't already already exist—the dancing, caterwauling birds-of-paradise chief among them.Literary woodlands let fantasists breach the liminal strangeness of the genre and spiral toward the stuff of dreams. Forests can have their own music, their own hierarchies, and their own gods that ensconce us in the sublime. Australian author Thoraiya Dyer's triumphantly gnarly Crossroads of Canopy, set in a world that is all forest, is like a sun-splashed hermitage. When Dyer's teen heroine, Unar, leaves Canopy, the ultimate test of her fortitude is down through the dank Understory, past magical barriers where savages rule and the Floor eats the fallen dead.What's past the horizon of Canopy's thirteen niches—each one circling a fabulous tree, each worshipping a unique god or goddess—and what else comprises the planet, we don't think to ask. Dyer's flair for cultural invention is vine-like and inescapable. She keeps our imaginations roving alongside hers, tracking spells and deities that bloom not through dense exposition, but within the story's action. The vigorous pace of her world-building is reminiscent of Dune, with its spice, Bene Gesserit sisterhood, and Kwisatz Haderach mythos. While many science fiction authors flail at the base of Frank Herbert's creative monument, Dyer climbs.Crossroads of Canopy is also a fantastic coming-of-age story. When Unar is twelve-years-old, she overhears her parents arguing about selling her into slavery. They live in Audblayinland, subsisting on grubs chiseled from tree bark. Her mother says they'll get more for her as a slave than by marrying her off for a dowry. Her father wants to keep her. Unar's younger sister, Isin, already fell from Canopy to the hellish Floor, never to be seen again. Unar has higher hopes.Perhaps she's one of the thirteen deities reincarnated, who live to ripe old age and magically support their niche? When one of them dies, the worshippers must remain vigilant until their chosen manifests more than a decade later in a teenager of great magical talent. In this hope, Unar is like any real teen who's sung Prince in his room, dressed up as Captain Marvel, or harnessed passion of any kind. The desire to be the focus, to transform into the hero, often drives the best young adult fiction (like Jerry Spinelli's Stargirl). Dyer works wonders here, giving us an adult narrative that happens to feature a teen.The night of her parents argument, Unar visits the goddess Audblayin's Garden Temple. The decision to do so ignites an electric squirming inside her, “like she's swallowed a thousand candles.” On the way there,

the humming seed inside her seems to put out an added leaf whenever she takes a correct turn. The lower branch roads aren't lit. Bats scream about their fruit-feasts, and Unar startles an owl. She carries only her bore-knife, heavy at her waist, and the night is cold and damp through the holes in her knee-length, knotted tunic. She sleeps in her father's castoffs, too shameful to be seen by daylight.

At the Great Gates, Unar meets a young runaway from Ehkisland (ruled by the Ehkis, goddess of rain). He would rather serve Audblayin because, though his family is dead, she is the goddess of life. He speaks his willingness to serve and submit to the deities because, “Why else are we here? What else are we for?” Unar knows that each deity has an opposite sex Bodyguard. If she can't be a god herself, perhaps she'll protect one?By age 16, Unar is a Temple Gardener. She's graced by Audblayin's magic in and around the Garden—which helps plants grow and makes objects lighter—but that doesn't stop her from venturing beneath her niche into the Understory. When a baby named Imeris falls, the father offers a “huge food reward” for her safe return. Unar creeps down through the magical barriers, hunting with only her wits and physical prowess. She closes in on a bundle lodged in a tree. She also knows that someone's been following her. His name is Edax, Bodyguard of Ehkis.Edax is (by her estimation) twice Unar's age, with tear-shaped scars on his cheeks and the taloned feet of an owl. He offers to help her grab the bundle, then asks what she can exchange for it. “I have nothing but what you see,” she answers, “and what you see is owned already. Audblayin gives no gifts to the Servants of her rivals.” Edax rakes her with his eyes, reminding her that the Understory cancels not just their magic, but their oaths of celibacy.Yet the bundle, once retrieved, contains only withered seedlings. Unar returns to the Garden, unlawfully climbing the Gates in secret. So early in the narrative, the reader may already love or hate Dyer's coloring of Canopy in swift brushstrokes that never fail to serve the action. She doesn't compose page-length paragraphs of description, and much of the exposition belongs to Unar's thoughts and feelings. Here though, is her portrait of a Canopian niche, where

Delicate suspended bridges connected the two dozen smaller gardens, planted in lopped lateral branches, to the central circle of the main garden. Soil was cultivated in the hollows, providing foundations for ferns and flowering miniature trees from Understory and Floor. Open to the sky, except in places where peaked pavilions stood, the Garden was watered by rain during the monsoon. In the dry season, slaves carried water from pools in the crotches of leafy lower laterals by screw pumps and buckets on chains.

The narrative's slavery is not ornamental, not a detail to reinforce that Canopy is some kind of savage eden. It is a bristle against which Unar, who already feels destined for greatness, chooses to sculpt herself. She befriends a slave named Ylly, who becomes instrumental in our heroine's journey despite the fact that she'd been

raised to hate slaves. If they were dark-skinned slaves, Canopians who had been sold by their families to settle debts, they were weak and deserved to starve, and if they were pale Understorian slaves, they deserved to be pushed off the edge of the Garden for being enemy raiders or the descendants of enemy raiders.

When the elderly Audblayin dies, new Servants must be chosen from among the Gardeners. Unar and her best friend, Oos, travel to the edge of the moat that surrounds the Temple. They must swim the moat, among fish, to purify themselves before the ceremony. Unar, however, has never learned to swim because she loathes fish. She remembers a childhood incident when the runaway she'd met four years ago, Aoun, devoured a specimen raw before her eyes. Now, Aoun is also a Gardener who prepares to swim. Unar can't help noticing his “reddish-brown organ, like a tapir's trunk, nestling in the curls of [his] pubic hair.”Oos uses a bit of magic to float her friend cross the moat. Unar's own magic has been drained by the previous night's adventure with Edax. A living god or goddess can quickly recharge a Canopian's magic, but with Audblayin gone, Unar is about to be judged unfairly in the ceremony. She and Oos,

climbed out together beside the others, who had already been robed in red by waiting slaves. Twenty-eight Gardeners ascended the ivory steps into the egg-shaped Temple they'd pledged themselves to but had only ever seen from the outside.Sunlight penetrated the translucent white walls, making them glow, making Unar's eyes widen in awe. Inside, the promised white-and-purple banisters spiralled up to a ring-shaped platform that rested against the widest circumference of the egg, halfway up the sides of it.But the sky-coral and the birds had fallen. Broken shells, yolk-matted feathers, and honeycomb-structures made an ugly mess on the floor. The power of the goddess had held them suspended.The goddess is dead.

Strong magic in Oos and Aoun helps them become Servants, fated to spend years waiting for a teenage Audblayin to show him or herself. Unar is passed over—the more interesting fate, so far as we're concerned. She decides to prove to her clan that she's powerful by sneaking into a rival god's Temple. Her trip to Odelland, to steal the mythical chimera skin, initiates Dyer's blasphemous rocking of the Canopians' world. And while befriending slaves, having illicit forest sex, and fraternizing with those lost to the Understory, Unar reminds us why the Chosen One narrative is so rich.Audblayin's death doesn't just weaken the Temple's magic, it gives Unar deeper access to her own. She transgresses systematically, becoming something the Canopians haven't a name for yet. Canopy is a heady and mystical place, yes—but it's the author's daring deconstruction of this world that we've paid to see.Dyer's short stories have collectively won the Aurealis and Ditmar awards seven times. The best moments in Crossroads of Canopy illustrate why. Her debut novel would be superior entertainment, flaunting visionary oddness, even without a spitfire heroine. But this is only the first book of the Titan's Forest trilogy. It would be silly to use the word brilliant without seeing what's around the next shady bend.____Justin Hickey is a freelance writer, and editor here at Open Letters Monthly.