Customer Reviews

Witness of Gor (Gorean Saga)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

The last of 25 books in the "Gor" series, "Magicians of Gor", by John Norman was published in 1988. I have waited 14 years to read the 26th book in the series, "Witness of Gor", which was recently published in book form this August. It is difficult to describe the feeling of pleasure and anticipation when I finally held this new book in my hands.

The book is told from the point of view of Janice, an earth girl who has been kidnapped and brought to Gor. She has been enslaved and trained to the collar. She is then sold to the City of Treve, which is secretly located in the Voltai mountains. Terrence of Treve assigns her to duties in the sub-terranean prison pits deep beneath the city. There she befriends the Lady Constanzia who is being held for ransom. Janice has been bought for special duties. She is to look after a mysterious prisoner who is chained alone in one of the deepest and most isolated cells in the pits. The prisoner is Marlenus, Ubar of Ar, the largest city on Gor. He has lost his memory and believes himself to be one of the caste of peasants. Every day he asks the pit master, a deformed ugly monster of a man with honor and kindness in his heart, if is it time for planting. On Gor the harvest can mean life or death for peasants. Every day the pit master says "No".

One day 200 warriors arrive from Ar in a surprise tarn attack to try to free Marlenus. All are killed in the attempt. The Ubar of Cos the enemy of Ar decides not to risk further attempts to free Marlenus. He pays a team of assassins to come to Treve and execute Marlenus. They have permission from the rulers of Treve for this but Terrence and the pit master do not think that being murdered while chained in an underground cell is an honorable way for any man to die. When the assassins enter the cell, Marlenus once more asks the pit master if it is time for planting. This time the answer is "Yes". A primeval urge is awaked in Marlenus and he must do whatever is necessary to escape.
I cannot tell you what happens next without spoiling the book for you. If you are a John Norman fan, this book is for you. It is over 700 pages long and some would argue that it should have been shorter. After a 14-year wait, I was glad for every page.

Perhaps John Norman needed to warm up after his 14-year hiatus from the world of Gor, because the first 400 pages of Witness are nearly interminably dull. Whether the talk of the "natural domination" of men over women thrills or offends you, 400 pages of it is certain to bore you to tears.

However, once you hit that 400 page mark, the book becomes classic Gorean adventure, with all of the skill, daring, courage, and honor Gor fans have come to love. The slave girl Janice, from whose point of view the book is written, is caught up in intrigues in the prison pits of Treve. There, she is given the task of administering to a mysterious prisoner, Marlenus of Ar, who is suffering from amnesia and believes himself to be only a peasant. A Cosian team of assassins is sent to find and murder him, and the adventure begins when Janice's master, the deformed pit master, finds the assassins' task to be less than honorable.

If you have read all 25 of the previous Gor books (in which case you will probably read this one whatever the reviews say) you will get something out of "Witness of Gor".

If you have not read any, or even most, of the previous books in John Norman's Gor series, do not touch this one with the proverbial barge-pole.

And if you like those books in the lengthy "Gor" series which feature the anti-hero Tarl Cabot, but have had enough of Kajira (e.g. slave girl) books, skip this one and the following book, "Prize of Gor" and go straight to number 28, "Kur of Gor" in which Tarl Cabot makes his return.


This story is set on the planet Gor, which supposedly shares the orbit of Earth but on the other side of the Sun so that our astronomers cannot detect it. Most of the action takes place in the Gorean cities of Treve and Ar, and appears to overlap several of the previous five books. Tarl Cabot does not appear "onstage" at any time, though he is mentioned once or twice.

The narrator is a slave girl from earth, who at various times of the book is given the names Janice or Gail, or at other times is not allowed a name at all.

The narrator has been planted in Treve in the hope that she will be able to identify whether a particularly important prisoner is there. She has no idea who the prisoner is, and it turns out that he appears to have lost his memory and doesn't know himself. Norman obviously intends the reader to work out the prisoner's identity for yourself: he is not named at any stage in the book. However, most of those readers who have previously seen the rest of the series may begin to form an idea what is going on.

There are some quite good parts of the book: one is the development of the pit master character, who is horribly ugly but also honorable and intelligent and about as kind as Norman allows a Gorean male to be (which after about book eight has meant "not very"). You meet again an old enemy, Doorna the Proud, who attempted to usurp the throne of Tharna in book two, Outlaw of Gor. Naturally she has never forgiven Tarl Cabot for frustrating her ambitions, and Norman may be setting up something here for a future book.

The most nerve-wracking scene comes towards the end of the book when an entire hit squad of assassins comes to dispose of the prisoner, only to find that he is still much more dangerous than anyone had imagined.

No mention at all of the Kurri or "Others" in this book - those of us who have been wondering to what extent they were behind the Cosian invasion and war which raged from book 20 to book 25 are still wondering.

The heroine & narrator of this book gets a brief cameo in book 27, "Prize of Gor" when she will meet the heroine & narrator of that book at Ar's equivalent of the public laundrette, where both slave girls have been sent by their masters to wash the household's dirty clothes. By that time her new master will have renamed her Corinne.

Norman's greatest strength is not that he is a particularly good writer, and the prose in this work is sometimes quite impenetrable. It is his ability to set your own imagination off, and at times this book does do that.

The catch is that to get to those moments you have to wade through reams of very undistinguished filler, and particularly the most turgid "women should be slaves" tosh. It is one thing to fantasise about things which you would never want to do in your real life, but the endless repetition of arguments for enslaving women eventually gets quite boring and almost makes you wonder if Norman actually means it. There was rather too much of this sort of thing in books 14 to 25 and Witness of Gor is worse. From this 700 page book you could cut out at least 250 pages of male supremacist lectures without losing any of the essential plot or action, and still have quite enough left to annoy any feminists or politically correct people who for some strange reason are reading it. And it would be a much better book.

Witness of Gor, is in my opinion, the best Gor book to date. It constitutes a return to Norman's early adventure style of writing (which, to me, is lost in the middle chapters of Magicians of Gor), a more clearheaded and judicious representation of his own philosophy of human nature, and the introduction of both a new setting and a new slate of characters, while bringing back earlier ones and letting the reader know of their fates. The treatment of the protagonist, an earth woman brought to Gor as a slave girl, as having no name, and for all practical purposes, no earth identity, accomplishes a stroke of genius. That is, this device lets even the male reader see through her eyes as the "witness of Gor". The reader shares her naïveté in this new world precisely because he or she lacks her history and is thus unable to see her from a distance, critically. Instead, the reader must view things and learn things as she sees them and learns them.

Further, Norman goes beyond the usual philosophic discourses on dominance-submission as the paradigm, which governs male-female relationships, and uses instead a critical ethical dilemma to present honor as an ethical issue. And indeed, the story itself turns upon this ethical issue, in a day when soft politicians, diplomats, public servants and the philosophical ethicists who advise them renounce the very concept of honor, precisely because honor is not negotiable. In this book, Norman emerges not only as a first-rate storyteller-once again-but as the deeply insightful philosopher of human nature and morality that he is.

This latest offering in the Gor series has several further characteristics that make it exquisite. First, he sets the story in the Voltai Range, in the impregnable city of the robber-Ubar, Rask of Treve, a part of Gor of which readers have heard, but never experienced. Second, he pulls the series out of the morass that was "Magicians of Gor", and sets it once again on the road of heightened suspense and adventure to an epic climax in the struggle for dominance of the great city of Ar by the Island Ubarates, Tyros and Cos. Setting the story against that backdrop itself ties up a major loose end from Magicians of Gor and brings the series back to life for those who suffered through the loss of Ar's legions in the delta of the Vosk, the disappearance of its mighty Ubar, Marlenus, and the crass and treacherous rule of his daughter, Talena, as the proxy of Cos. Third, Norman shows here the best character development of any of the books. The figure of "The Tarsk"-the "depth warden" or pit master, he who governs Treve's deep and cavernous prisons-is the deepest, most thoughtful, and most sensitively developed character of the entire series. This massive twisted figure, deformed from birth, but of high intelligence and great cunning and strength, a master of the board game Kaissa as well, becomes the most sympathetic character of the story. Thus the reader suffers with the depth warden when he violates his oath of honor to preserve his integrity in another matter of honor. One actually finds oneself hoping long before the possibility arises in the plot that this great and grave figure does not commit suicide over his actions in the midst of this dilemma. And I note: only someone who himself has a profound sense of honor recognizes that violations of honor necessarily result in one's death, even if that means at one's own hand. Fourth, only an exciting and improbable twist of fate brings the heroine (and the reader) from the dank and dangerous depths of Treve's fortress prison to a surprise, nail-biting conclusion far from that setting. I cannot wait for Prize of Gor, the finale, or at least the sequel.

To sum up, this Gorean tale contains the greatest depth of character development and philosophic thought to which the author has yet risen. He also tells a great story, one that I could barely put down.

John Norman as his best when he is romantic. The romance was done badly in this most recent Gor book.

Please don't be surprised if I class these BDSM books as romances. What makes a book a "romance" is that the girl always, by contrivance of the author, ends up in the arms (and the chains) of the one man in the world who is Meant For Her.

In Norman's earlier books, the girl would at first hate and resist, flee or betray, be caught by, and surrender to, the man Meant For Her.

Despite the sick and savage elements of whips and chains, there is still a version of romance in Norman's writing, a true love that conquers all obstacles.

But in WITNESS, the viewpoint character, a slave-girl kidnapped from Earth, doesn't fall in love, does not flee or betray or hate, and is not found and conquered again by her one and only True Love.

Instead, as an afterthought, in a very late chapter, she does end up with the clerk or guard that first opened the crate she was shipped in and stamped her papers, but this fellow is clearly a nobody.

He is never given a name or a description, and has nothing to do in the plots or adventures of the planet Gor.

My impression is that Norman was near the end of his manuscript, decided he needed a love interest, flipped through the pages near the beginning, and picked a male character by closing his eyes and stabbing a page with a pin. It was a slap-dash and careless ending.

She could have fallen in love with someone else. In one scene, the main character was supposed to be sent to torment the mysterious prisoner of the Pits of Treve with her allure, a half-mad creature whom she fears and hates. I anticipated scenes where the girl would come to pity the prisoner, hate yielding to human sympathy; pity then yielding to admiration as she detected his hidden strengths. This would culminate in a love affair (which, on Gor, involves utter surrender on the part of the girl). Ah! That would have been a satisfying scene, showing that love can be found even by a brain-damaged mad peasant in the deepest dungeon (or is he a peasant, really?).

I was disappointed that nothing of the relation between the slave-girl and the prisoner she is supposed to be serving (and tempting) ever takes place. She spends weeks or months in the cell with this guy, but not a single line of dialog between them, not a single onstage scene, is shown.

Had she been the love-interest of the mysterious prisoner, her (and our) interest would have been engaged during the action and intrigue surrounding his escape attempt. As it was, the whole book seemed a little flat and detached.

It would have been easy to convince me that the slave-girl was pretty damn impressed with the brain-damaged peasant after he offs half a dozen trained killers. Or I might have been convinced she was impressed with the hideously deformed Master of the Pit, once she saw his humanity and wisdom behind his gruesome face. I might have even been convinced she could fall for the Warlord of Treve, a kingly figure whose troubled inner nature she glimpses. These were the characters that were onstage, doing mighty deeds, and these should have been the ones attracting the heroine's reluctant love. I was not convinced that she could have fallen in love with the receiving clerk in the slaver's warehouse.

This welcome formula (girl hates guy, girl caught by guy, girl falls for guy) is followed in the secondary characters, told with the proper Dickensonian coincidences and plot twists. The ghastly and deformed Master Of Pit finds love, as does the haughty captive free woman the main character is sent to guard. But the main character's tale has neither romance nor passion in it.

What is the point of writing about a love slave if she doesn't fall in love?

Also missing from this book were descriptions. Earlier books had vivid visual descriptions of the wild and strange world of Gor, her peoples and their civilization. The writing here lacked that vividness.

This is not to say there is not a good scene in the book once in a while. My favorite was one where the secret prisoner, apparently brain-damaged, turns out to be tougher than he looks, and is trying to escape from a squad of Assassins sent to kill him. This is exciting action and well done (particularly well done is that bit of business with the dead urt in the water).

I can give it two stars for the occasional action scene.

Nicely bound hardcover, an acceptable cover illustration, and expedited shipping (paid for of course). I finally had it in my hands after all these years! Unfortunately, that's where the good news ends.

What a disappointment on a grand scale! Vintage Gor? Hardly. Norman has gone in a direction that only his most ardent critics would readily accept, and that too with glee. 15 years after `Magicians' and this is what he gives us? Over 700 pages of which more than 70% are devoted to his warped, inaccurate, downright false view of human relations. A male fantasy gone horribly wrong? From an initially marginal (and appealing) presence of scantily clad females to a progressively deepening obsession with female slavery, Norman has brought this series to a tragic demise through his now obsessive focus on his bizarre 'female dominance' philosophy that I don't know how he can believe so fervently. Has he become delusional after all these years? What has he been doing since 1988? Doesn't he realize that what he now so feverishly promulgates is not only absurd but is just plain factually, biologically, and socially in the wrong?

What do we do? BDSM cheers, feminist outcry, publication mainstream ostracism, true sci-fi lover groans...this is the way I see it. What happened to the Gor I love? Where is the absolute masterful adventure writing that made Norman famous? From a world so exacting in its detail, so exotic yet realistic, so alive you could almost taste it with longing... from an immensely appealing cultural presentation to the overwhelming thrill of some of the best action writing I have ever read, Norman's characters were alive with a depth and vitality that one rarely sees elsewhere. The thrill, the adventure, the imagery, it was neurotic to an extreme; warring city states, political intrigue, tall towers, exquisite swordplay, screaming tarns, exciting beautiful women, thrilling and bold warriors. From the rolling hills of Ko-ro-ba to a dusty side lane in Ar, from the deck of a galley on green Thassa to standing outside the walls of lofty Turia. I wanted to be everywhere. Honor, masculinity, action, combat, beauty, it was absolutely awesome. Along with that a digestible amount of fantasy in the form of luscious women, all of whom were initially or eventually, willing. Exciting...I just never told my Dad about it, that's all.

To my mind, this decline began to take serious shape from the 14th novel onwards I think, getting progressively worse as we went on (and as Norman got older by the way) it seems. Luckily though, even the 25th novel, `Magicians' had a lot to keep one going, temporarily climaxing (i.e., for 15 years) the heightening global war for political dominance with Tarl's meeting with Talena in Ar...what a culmination of a drama begun long years back in the `Tarnsman'!

What 'Witness' gives us is precious little of the above. Page after page of monotonous and nauseating slave gibberish. It became insulting, boring, even laughable. Seemingly every effort is being made by the author to desperately force this nonsense down our throats, as if his impending mortality at the age of 72 (sorry no stabilization serums here) is staring him in the face. I was left (as a lover of Gor's essence), confused and frustrated. I actually began skipping pages (in a new Gor Book...aaargh!!!) to try and find some morsel, some semblance of the old magic. There are a few glimpses, of underground adventure and previous character reunion, which I desperately clung to, but even they are a shadow of the classic Norman as seen in `Nomads', `Raiders', or `Hunters'.

He has faded, and with him, in his spiraling descent into the abnormal and delusional world of female dominance, he has taken what was truly a jewel in the world of science fiction.

After the long, meandering detour through Magicians of Gor, Witness of Gor is the best Gor book to date. It constitutes a return to Norman's early adventure style of writing (which, to me, is lost in the middle chapters of Magicians of Gor). In addition, Witness of Gor offers a more clearheaded and judicious representation of Norman's own philosophy of human nature, as well as the introduction of both a new setting (the Fortress Capital of Rask of Treve), and a new slate of characters. At the same time, Witness of Gor brings back earlier characters and lets the reader know of their fates.

The treatment of the protagonist, an earth woman brought to Gor as a slave girl, as having no name, and for all practical purposes, no earth identity, accomplishes a stroke of genius. That is, this device lets even the male reader see through her eyes as the "witness of Gor". The reader shares her naïveté in this new world precisely because he or she lacks her history and is thus unable to see her from a distance, critically. Instead, the reader must view things and learn things as she sees them and learns them.

Further, Norman goes beyond the usual philosophic discourses on dominance-submission as the paradigm, which governs male-female relationships, and uses instead a critical ethical dilemma to present honor as an ethical issue. And indeed, the story itself turns upon this ethical issue, in a day when soft politicians, diplomats, public servants and the philosophical ethicists who advise them renounce the very concept of honor, precisely because honor is not negotiable. In this book, Norman emerges not only as a first-rate storyteller-once again-but as the deeply insightful philosopher of human nature and morality that he is.

This latest offering in the Gor series has several further features that make it exquisite. First, Norman sets the story in the Voltai Range, in the impregnable city of the robber-Ubar, Rask of Treve, a part of Gor of which readers have heard, but never experienced. Second, he pulls the series out of the morass that was "Magicians of Gor", and sets it once again on the road of heightened suspense and adventure to an epic climax in the struggle for dominance of the great city of Ar by the Island Ubarates, Tyros and Cos. Setting the story against that backdrop itself ties up a major loose end from Magicians of Gor and brings the series back to life for those who suffered through the loss of Ar's legions in the delta of the Vosk, the disappearance of its mighty Ubar, Marlenus, and the crass and treacherous rule of his daughter, Talena, as the proxy of Cos. Third, Norman shows here the best character development of any of the books. The figure of "The Tarsk"-the "depth warden" or pit master, he who governs Treve's deep and cavernous prisons-is the deepest, most thoughtful, and most sensitively developed character of the entire series. This massive twisted figure, deformed from birth, but of high intelligence and great cunning and strength, a master of the board game Kaissa as well, becomes the most sympathetic character of the story. Thus the reader suffers with the depth warden when he violates his oath of honor to preserve his integrity in another matter of honor. One actually finds oneself hoping long before the possibility arises in the plot that this great and grave figure does not commit suicide over his actions in the midst of this dilemma. And I note: only someone who himself has a profound sense of honor recognizes that violations of honor necessarily result in one's death, even if that means at one's own hand. Fourth, only an exciting and improbable twist of fate brings the heroine (and the reader) from the dank and dangerous depths of Treve's fortress prison to a surprise, nail-biting conclusion far from that setting. I cannot wait for Prize of Gor, the finale, or at least the sequel.

To sum up, this Gorean tale contains the greatest depth of character development and philosophic thought to which the author has yet risen. He also tells a great story, one that I could barely put down.

ok, I admit it-I have all the books, I've read all the books. Yes, they should probably come with warning lables: 'caution, known to brainwash', but, I couldn't put it down. Yes, John does tend to repeat himself, but (again) the story has it all: mystery, intrigue, honor, love, hate, sex. It's told from a woman's point of view, like several others in the series. I miss Tarl, I'm not sure who 'prisoner #41' is..but then it's been a long time since I read the rest of the series, maybe it is Marlenus....I really thought it was Tarl/Bosk of Port Kar. (ouch, showing ignorance here...huh)(hence anonymous-sorry). Read some of the other books reviews, you'll get a good idea of the controversy and the emotions attached to the books and yes, they do change, they evolve, maybe he does go 'too gorean', you have to make that call for yourself... But, again, Hello! this is sci-fi, maybe he did start out with an idea from ERB...maybe it was a joke...but you don't get 26 (27-'Prize...' is in the works now) books printed without the demand, interest, passion to possess, now do you. John has an eye for detail and an ability to express emotion, the peoples of Gor are varied, vastly different, but also familiar, the creatures complex and strong. I wish we lived as one with our world as they do...wish there were not the lies we live with everyday.

After finally reading this book I was somewhat disappointed by Mr. Norman's writing. He had "Janice" repeating things numerous times throughout the entire book. I own every single Gor book in the series and have to say that this was the worst one as far as keeping the readers attention to what happens next. I can normally finish one of his books in 2-3 days but this one took me a month! I certainly hope the next one is much better written. One neat thing that is in the book is the Gor website. Definately for the Gor fan wether you are the master or kajira.

I have been a fan of the Gor series since the beginning. I have all original paperbacks with dustcovers intact. My favorite being Magicians of Gor; I waited and waited for number 26 to surface, wrote the author numerous times and just simply forgot about it. Then one day, email arrived: Witness of Gor is available for purchase. Woot! Book 26...Boy o boy was I ever disappointed. The female slavery-bondage, ok, fine. toss it in, but this book is so similar to the other one: Slave Girl of Gor. I wanted to see what happened to Tarl and his one true love Talena, his adventure with Marcus, Vela his 2nd true love..
I was disgusted with this book. It sits on the shelf beside the other 25, but I won't read it again. Once was enough. Actually, once was one time too much.