The Parliament of Rooks: Three Stories (One Corpse)
Baby Daniel falls asleep and wakes in the Dreaming, where Gregory, Matthew and Eve take him to the House of Secrets for tea with Abel. Everything is cozy and sweet (apart from Matthew eating a rat that’s a bit off) until Cain arrives and suggests they each tell Daniel a story. There was obviously also a bit of bitching about the boss going on, which is always a plus. And yes, they’re talking about Morpheus and Thessaly again…
The whole issue has three frames/the nested story-structure we already got in “Tales in the Sand”: Lyta and Daniel in the real world, everyone meeting at Abel’s house to tell stories, aaaand… Cain’s mystery (which has a slightly different function than Eve’s and Abel’s stories). Nevertheless, we get three storytellers, three different kinds of stories, and they’re all about the nature of storytelling itself. Narrative theory disguised as a bedtime story 😉
Cain: The Power of Not Knowing
Cain tells the title story: Sometimes, rooks will gather in a circle around a single bird that makes specific calls. Then either the entire flock flies away peacefully, or they turn on it and peck it to death. No one knows why it goes one way or the other.
Matthew immediately asks for the explanation which Cain obviously refuses to give.
“It’s the mystery that endures. Not the explanation.” That’s what he says after killing Abel for giving away his mystery at the very end.
It’s his style of storytelling, and probably that of many other storytellers and writers, too: Some stories are more powerful unexplained and not a puzzle to be solved, because the mystery is the whole point.
And Cain is the keeper of the House of Mystery for a reason: He understands that we’re drawn to unanswerable questions, and that an explained mystery becomes trivial while an unexplained one keeps on letting us obsess over it.
I mean, just think about us idiots (affectionate) and the Sandman as a whole. There are enough things left unclear, like: What exactly happened to Delight/Delirium? How and why did the first Despair get killed? And these are just the most obvious ones. But people will keep on speculating about them until the cows come home, and that’s part of the fun.
When Abel reveals the mystery at the end of the issue, Cain kills him (again). And of course that’s just what he does, but this is also about certainty ending a story and hence taking away a little bit of its magic. And he will not let the story end. Because the mystery is the thing that keeps it going, as simple as that.
Eve: Truth in Contradictions
Eve’s story is a retelling of the mythology of Adam’s wives (not just Eve). She’s talking about three of them, drawn from Jewish midrash, apocrypha and centuries of feminist revision. But she’s also constantly hedging: “That’s a matter of opinion,” or, “Some say...” She won’t commit to a single version because some stories have multiple true forms, and forcing a single one onto them isn’t a thing to her:
Lilith was the first wife, created equal and split from an originally hermaphroditic Adam. She refused subservience and to lie beneath him. So she was ultimately expelled from Eden and, in some accounts, mated with angels/the sons of God and/or demons to birth the Lilim (hello Mazikeen). She was the wife who was too equal and too strong.
The second wife has no name. God made her from nothing while Adam watched. He saw what she was made of and couldn’t look at her because of it. She was either destroyed by God or simply cast out (the accounts differ). She was the wife without any mystery about her, too real and therefore also too horrifying.
Eve was the third, made from Adam’s rib while he slept (so he didn’t see her “construction”). She was the wife who was just right (if you subscribe to a patriarchal view): not too equal, not too repulsive in her realness, with enough mystery left.
(Of course, she and Adam still ate from the Tree of Knowledge and were cast out anyway.)
Eve concludes that it’s true Adam had three wives, but that it’s also true that he only married once. She tells her own origin story here, and she positions herself as one part (but really all three) of a maiden-mother-crone trinity. Of course there’s an implicit critique running through it all: Lilith was rejected for being too strong. The unnamed wife was rejected for having no mystery about her. Eve was initially only “accepted” because Adam was asleep when she was made, so he didn’t have to see what she was “made of”. It’s about the male fears at the basis of patriarchy (especially female autonomy and embodiment).
Eve’s storytelling is relational rather than absolute. The three wives are separate women, but they’re also three aspects of the archetypal feminine that runs through The Sandman like a thread. But most of all, they’re three versions of the same old story of a power-over-dynamic that has been the truth for women since time immemorial. They all coexist without cancelling each other out.
Abel: How Death (of the Author?) Makes a Story
Most of us know how the biblical story of Cain and Abel goes (and Cain has told it previously in “Preludes and Nocturnes”): Cain killed Abel out of jealousy over whose sacrifice God preferred. But if we’re trusting Abel’s secret, that’s not all there was to it. Obviously, Abel met Death after Cain had killed him (although Abel calls this “finish fighting” for Daniel’s sake). And both Death and Dream were kind to him: Death because she let him go with Dream instead of taking him to the Sunless Lands, Dream because Abel was lonely (well, it could be argued that neither of them were kind, especially not Dream, because Abel said he was lonely and wanted a friend, not that he wanted the brother who killed him. But Dream was always interested in a good story I guess, great “surprise” 🙄).
So Dream brought both brothers to the Dreaming and gave them purpose: Cain to keep the House of Mystery, Abel to keep the House of Secrets. Of course Cain would proceed to kill Abel over and over again, and they’d come to re-enact the first murder/victim story (!) for all eternity. But we’re not told so, Abel just finishes with “…the two hugged each other joyfully and they lived next door from that day to this…”
And if we look at everything through a lens of storytelling, I also think that the distinction between mysteries and secrets matters. Mysteries can be shared and collectively sleuthed over. In a way, they get more powerful through being repeated and pondered. But a secret must be kept because it loses power the moment it’s revealed. Plus, secrets are often so much more personal (which makes it meaningful when someone shares them with you), and that also applies to Abel’s story: It’s specific and full of love for someone who has killed him and will kill him again 🥺
But the true twist comes after all three stories have been told, because Abel solves the mystery of the parliament of rooks (or does he give away a secret? 🧐):
The lone bird in the centre is a storyteller. If the story is good, the flock leaves peacefully. If it’s bad, they kill the storyteller.
Cain is furious and kills him for it (although he probably would have found another reason just for shits and giggles anyway).
The Meta-Structure
And that’s where #40 becomes about structure, because the frame inside the frame inside the frame is the parliament of rooks, and the story enacts its own metaphor: It’s what people do every time someone tells a story. They either walk away satisfied or they attack the storyteller (through criticism, dismissal, or by simply ignoring them/showing them the cold shoulder).
And it hits even harder when we think of it this way: Cain kills Abel for destroying the mystery, so the violence comes from within. He’s essentially the gatekeeper who punishes. And that’s the sometimes ugly truth about creative communities: Artists and writers often criticise each other’s work more harshly than any external audience does.
Jill Thompson’s Art
I have to yap about this a bit because Jill Thompson is one of my favourite Sandman artists, and “The Parliament of Rooks” was her first issue before she utterly broke us all with “Brief Lives” (which comes next—yay to pain! 🙈🤣).
I think the reason why I love her work for #40 is because it needs so many visual shifts: There’s domesticity in the frame with Daniel and Lyta, then there’s “fantastical but still somewhat cozy” in Abel’s house. But we also need a bit of horror later on, and a lot of archetypal imagery in Eve’s story, and OF COURSE the chibi Little Endless Thompson chose for Abel’s story. And I mean, that last choice is quite something if you think about the fact that Abel takes the story of the first act of violence in possibly the entire universe’s history, and it’s getting told in the visual language of cute cartoons with oversized round heads on tiny bodies 🙈
But essentially, Abel takes his own trauma and gives it a form he can cope with (it comes in handy he tells a story to a toddler I guess, but Cain and Abel were far less selective in that department), and Jill Thompson is translating that visually for the reader, too.
Jill Thompson does horror, whimsy, mythology, and structural meta-commentary within one issue and doesn’t make it feel jarring (not in my view anyway, other people’s mileage may vary), and this is something I also live about her work for “Brief Lives”.
The Thing About Stories
Anyway, after that much needed love declaration: “The Parliament of Rooks” is about stories, but it’s not one-dimensional: It’s about why we tell them (to preserve mysteries, to explain ourselves, to cope), how we tell them (authoritatively, tentatively, personally), what they can make us (rigid, vulnerable, repetitive), and who gets to hear/read/judge them (other storytellers, external audiences, ourselves).
And I’d say that the issue’s central point does come from Cain: The mystery is far more interesting than the explanation (she says while she writes meta-analysis 🤦🏻♀️🤣). Buuuuut it also immediately gets turned on its head by having Abel explain the mystery, and having the audience somewhat appreciate it, and having Cain kill Abel for it. All three things are true.
So maybe it’s rather that some people need the mystery and some people need the explanation. Stories contain multitudes, and truth in stories is relational.
The issue’s final image is Lyta finding a single raven feather with Daniel. And of course in the context of The Sandman, that’s proof that the boundary between dreams and waking, stories and reality, is permeable (and Daniel can cross it).
Stories leave a mark. They always do…
