The Cronnex
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The Cronnex is a series of fantasy novels with gay protagonists written by Trewin Greenaway. Published online since 2004, the first three novels in the series are complete and the fourth began serialization in December 2006. The PDFs and website have high production values and include additional materials such as a map and illustrations. Downloaded by more than eighty thousand readers, The Cronnex has built a loyal and enthusiastic following across demographic lines.
The first volume of The Cronnex is titled Jessan in homage to Jessex, the protagonist of Jim Grimsley’s Kirith Kirin. The second volume, Niccas, is told from the point of view of Jessan’s twin. The heart of the tale is a bildungsroman in fantasy robes, a coming of age story told in stereo. The protagonists’ progress to maturity and sexual quickening provide a microcosm for a richly imagined world and skillfully rendered plot. The stories have as a starting point the fantasy archetype of a youth of humble origins whose coming of age is complicated by the revelation of a weighty destiny.
Jessan and Niccas are marked as avatars of a benevolent goddess in a kingdom where her purpose has been perverted by a monomaniacal rogue avatar and which is governed autocratically by its human apologists and collaborators. Jessan is revealed as the Nithaial Galgaliel, master of air and water; Niccas is the Nithaial Elimiel, liege of earth and fire, moon to Jessan’s sun. As soon as the mysterious mark of the Cronnex appears upon their maturing bodies, both are wrenched from childhood homes where they were barely tolerated and thrust upon quests only the staunchest Pollyanna could expect them to survive, let alone complete.
As protagonists, Jessan and Niccas, are cut from the same cloth but dyed in different vats. Jessan’s story, though fraught with loss and danger, is a sunnier tale, thematically true to its fantasy roots and enlivened by a progressive sexual awakening enviable in its variety and joyfulness. Frank and earthy, Jessan’s sexual experiences are more than erotic interludes; they move the plot, develop character, and introduce one of the more innovative elements of The Cronnex: the concept of twerë. The state of twerën is widely recognized within the world of The Cronnex as a committed friendship that may or may not have a sexual component. An individual may consecrate alliances with multiple twerë of either sex.
A darker and more complex tale than Jessan, Niccas extends the cosmological elements hinted at in Jessan and builds narrative tension as Niccas’s story unfolds parallel to Jessan’s. Captured and exploited by multifarious enemies, Niccas is unluckier in love and more deeply challenged as he pursues his quest. Whereas Jessan finds champions and boosters among soldiers and mages, Niccas forges uneasier, more dangerous alliances with demons and dragons and assassins, even the dead. While Jessan ends with its protagonist succeeding in his initial quest to restore the holy sites associated with his powers over water and air and evade the rogue avatar, Niccas closes with the job half done, and the silkily sinister antagonist fully engaged.
The third volume of The Cronnex, Wisferon, is told in five-chapter fascicles alternately in Niccas’s and Jessan’s voices. While Niccas strives to complete his quest and vanquish the rogue avatar, Jessan struggles to locate Niccas and bring about the convergence of their powers. The unusual narrative structure throws the contrasts between the two Nithaial into sharper relief, develops secondary characters as agents of the plot, and intensifies the cosmological and cultural characteristics of Greenaway’s expressively inventive world. The author’s impressionistic style and psychological depth are stronger and stronger elements of his writing as the series progresses. Many of the set pieces of fantasy are present in The Cronnex, though readers come to expect wry treatment and sly fillips of humor. When Wisferon concludes on a dark but paradoxically satisfying note with part of the twins’ quest achieved but their own union missed by a hair’s breadth, we understand that a simple solution is impossible, and a unitary approach unsuitable.
Dionis, the fourth volume of The Cronnex, unfolds in a near future in which the role of the Nithaial is ambiguous and contested. So, too, is the destiny of a child, purportedly Niccas’s son conceived without his consent. The boy, Dionis, is raised as a girl and expected to become a girl by arcane intervention at puberty. Questionable motivations abound, both among the priestesses who raised Dionis and among the strangers who proclaim their allegiance to the Nithaial and who whisk Dionis away on the eve of his transformation. Dionis is slated for completion during 2007.
Unabashedly gay in a genre whose print canon has rarely done more than wink in the direction of same-sex pairings, richly imagined and skillfully executed, The Cronnex is a natural addition to must-read lists that include Samuel R. Delaney, Lynn Flewelling, Jim Grimsley, Ellen Kushner, Ricardo Pinto, and Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett.
