A review by mafiabadgers
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber

dark mysterious reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

First read 01/2025

I picked this up for the 'Dark Academia' square of the r/Fantasy book bingo; of course, they didn't have dark academia in 1942, so it was just a low fantasy campus novel back then. The way it plays with the question of whether or not witchcraft is real puts me in mind of Theodore Sturgeon's 'vampire' novel, Some of Your Blood, but it swings the real-ness in the other direction; I suspect I'm mostly making the connection because they both feel old-school to me.

Norman smiled. That had been an odd notion Tansy had let slip toward the end—that Evelyn Sawtelle and Harold Gunnison’s wife and old Mrs. Carr were practicing magic too, of the venomous black variety. And not any too hard to believe, either, if you knew them! That was the sort of idea with which a clever satirical writer could do a lot. Just carry it a step further—picture most women as glamor-conscious witches, carrying on their savage warfare of deathspell and countercharm, while their reality-befuddled husbands went blithely about their business. Let’s see, Barrie had written What Every Woman Knows to show that men never realize how their wives were responsible for their successes. Being that blind, would men be any more apt to realize that their wives used witchcraft for the purpose?

Leiber plays the 'all women are witches' gag fairly straight; he's not particularly trying to subvert it or find liberating possibilities in it. Nonetheless, there are moments with a definite tongue-in-cheek feel, as though to acknowledge that the whole thing is ridiculous, which go a little way towards ameliorating the sexism. It's mostly of the men=rational/women=intuitive variety, but the generally flattering depiction of Tansy goes some way towards balancing out the demonised desires of the other three witches. Given its age and subject, it could be so, so much worse. Same goes for the passing association of primitive magic with 'Negroes'.

The first two thirds of the book were clearly the strongest part. Norman Saylor refuses to accept the existence of magic, and even at the very end he doesn't entirely concede that it's real. Since readers are likely to be less skeptical than he, this gets a bit wearisome eventually, but in the meantime, it sets up some really good stuff:

It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realization that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analyzed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to him, an area plunged in darkness, acrouch with fear, blown by giant winds.

Big fan of "acrouch with fear". And there are moments of social reflection that have remained strong:

And what is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I’d welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.

Substitute 'superstition' for 'conspiracy' and I think he's pretty much hit the nail on the head. Yes, dear, I'm sure the vaccine really is out to hit you with 5G. There's also a somewhat lenthy spiel about how college students aren't as radical and sexually depraved as everyone thinks, but rather fawning hypocrites, rather conventional in their sexuality. Meanwhile, we're told, college educators are placed on a pedestal and expected to exhibit a morality unexpected of bankers and housewives. Nowadays, I think, educators are rather expected to be leftist radicals, because they make for such a nice target, but as an artefact of its time it's certainly interesting. Some sections on the allure of belief in and practice of black magic lend themselves well to commentary on fantasy and horror:

The strange thing was that these thoughts were not altogether unpleasant. They had a wild, black, poisonous beauty of their own, a lovely, deadly shimmer. They possessed the fascination of the impossible, the incredible. They hinted at unimaginable vistas. Even while they terrorized, they did not lose that chillingly poignant beauty. They were like the visions conjured up by some forbidden drug. They had the lure of an unknown sin and an ultimate blasphemy.

Anyway, Leiber can certainly write when he sets his mind to it, is what I'm saying. And then to top it all off, he goes and puts one hell of a twist in, the sort of thing that swings the book onto a new path, right when most other writers would have wrapped things up with a happy ending. Unfortunately, I almost wish he'd played it safe, because after that spectacular moment two-thirds of the way through, it loses all its intriguing reflections and becomes a simple adventure-horror about everything Saylor does to beat the women at their own game, mostly by applying his vaunted masculine logic and science to it. Technically the big finale is achieved by the cooperation of husband and wife, which feels like the least sexist ending possible, but much of the cooperation is off-page to maximise suspense, so in practice the focus mostly stays on Norman. Alright, so, it's a long way from perfect. But considering its age, and discounting the last third? It's pretty damn good.

For the interested, there's a good little piece on the evolution of the book's covers over seven decades available here.