Review: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, was a pioneer in the fantasy genre. His stories of the fantastic, in the tradition of writers like George MacDonald and William Morris, set the stage for Tolkien & Lewis & Peake and the other writers that would follow.

Prolific as he was, Dunsany wrote few actual novels. He was a master of the short form and wrote a number of plays, as well as poetry, essays, a travelogue of Ireland, and several autobiographical collections. Dunsany remains most well-known for his short stories, many of which – thanks to Del Rey & Wildside Press & a plethora of anthologies – remain in print.

The King of Elfland’s Daughter is his best-known novel. It was reprinted in 1969 by Ballantine Books as part of their Ballantine Adult Fantasy series and again in the late 1990’s by Del Rey and Gollancz. I have the most recent Del Rey version, sporting a lovely Pre-Raphaelite cover depicting La Belle Dame Sans Merci and an introduction by Neil Gaiman.

“…trust the book,” Gaiman says. “Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly.”

Gaiman is right. Here be poetry and strangeness and magic. Dunsany’s language, so wonderfully poetic in his short stories, can quickly overwhelm the reader if it’s swallowed whole. Sentences can last a page. Paragraphs can last two. Drink slowly, indeed.

The lushness of the prose is an end unto itself. It distills the beauty and magic of Dunsany’s “Elfland” into human language without diluting its wonder with the dull light of the everyday.

And so it became a magical sword. And little magic there is in English woods, from the time of anemones to the falling of leaves, that was not in the sword. And little magic there is in southern downs, that only sheep roam over and quiet shepherds, that the sword had not too. And there was scent of thyme in it and sight of lilac, and a chorus of birds that sings before dawn in April, and the deep proud splendour of rhododendrons, and the litheness and laughter of streams, and miles and miles of may. (6-7)

That is just a small sample of it, like a tangle of rose bushes through which the reader must press forward, receiving a prick or two, snagging one's clothing. But smelling the flowers too. And feasting eyes on the blossoms.

The brief (and terribly simplified) overview is this: Alveric, the King’s son, travels beyond the twilight border of the mundane world into Elfland, bringing back the King of Elfland’s daughter as his bride. They have a child, Orion. Lirazel, his innocent bride, is ill-suited to her new role as mother and wife. She returns home. Alveric tries to follow her, but the way to Elfland is no longer open to him. “This is no country for old men,” as Dunsany’s friend W.B. Yeats would write two years later.

There are two distinct problems with the novel, and they are intertwined. Problem A is the plot. Or, I should say, the lack of one.

Problem B is the glacial pacing, which is partially due to Dunsany’s rich writing style (which I do not find fault with and thoroughly enjoyed), but mostly due to Problem A.

Let me clarify. I am not a reader that requires continual action, or a linear plot, or even complete resolution of a tale. Slow pacing in itself is not necessarily a problem, if a book has other redeeming qualities, as this one obviously does.

The problem is a lack of direction. Main characters – specifically Alveric – disappear for long portions of the narrative, wandering aimlessly in quest of faerie. There is one short chapter, “Lurulu Watches The Restlessness of Earth” where nothing happens. A character sits in the pigeon loft and watches things going about their course. For seven pages. We’re not even talking about a main character here.

What the novel felt like to me was a short story drawn out to novel length. Dunsany’s short stories are often dressed in finery and elegant language, but they are rarely lacking in substance. The King of Elfland’s Daughter seems to be exactly that. Mostly frosting, with only a little cake beneath.

This has often been my experience with pre-Tolkien fantasy novels. George MacDonald’s Phantastes, for example. Or E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. They lose themselves in a swamp of language and imagery that drowns the story.

Many post-Tolkien novels, on the other hand, exhibit an opposing problem, where subtlety and elegance and nuance are discarded at the expense of plot, often to the detriment of the story.

Despite its obvious flaws, The King of Elfland’s Daughter is well worth reading, especially for those interested in the roots of the fantasy genre, and those who enjoy prose edging toward poetry. Many authors have written of Elfland. Dunsany is one of the few to have obviously visited. His words on Elfland, and on magic, ring true.

I’ll leave you with a little sample cup of Dunsany’s “rich, red wine” (as Gaiman so aptly calls it). It has aged well. Whether or not to buy the bottle is up to you.

And as the hunt went on, the daylight faded away, till the sky was all prepared for the coming of stars. And one or two stars appeared, and a mist came up from streams and spread all white over fields, till they could not have seen the unicorn if he had been close before them. The very trees seemed sleeping. They passed by little houses, lonely, sheltered by elms; shut off by high hedges of yew from those that roamed the fields; houses that Orion had never seen or known till the chance course of this unicorn brought him suddenly past their doors. Dogs barked as they passed, and continued barking long, for that magical scent on the air and the rush and the voice of the pack told them something strange was afoot; and at first they barked because they would have shared in what was afoot, and afterward to warn their masters about the strangeness. They barked long through the evening. (127)

Review: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan

I find that few writers do slipstream well, especially at novel length. Murakami. John Crowley. Neil Gaiman. Stephen King. Jonathan Carroll. It’s a difficult, subtle tightline to walk, mixing the fantastic with the everyday, making the reader believe. More often than not, I find myself disappointed.

Add Caitlín R. Kiernan to the group listed above. The Drowning Girl is fantastic – a gorgeous, fractured tapestry of a novel.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

India Morgan Phelps – Imp to her friends – is schizophrenic. Her grandmother was schizophrenic. Her mother was schizophrenic. Both committed suicide.

If you think this sounds like a grim opening to a novel, it is, but much less so than you might think. Imp’s charisma, her sharply-drawn personality, shine through on nearly every page. Imp narrates her story through flashbacks, journal entries, analogies. These snarl into a tangle of contradictions, odd coincidences, and broken timelines that Imp can’t quite reconcile.

She knows, rationally, they can’t all be true. But she believes in them – in each of them – wholeheartedly. To quote the Radiohead song - "There There" - that Ms. Kiernan cites as an inspiration: Just cos you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

Imp has obsessions. Hauntings, she calls them.

One is a painting she sees at a local exhibit when she’s eleven. It’s called The Drowning Girl by Phillip George Saltonstall, and features a girl walking into a river or pool, and peering back over her shoulder at a dark, eerily dark, patch of wood. It isn’t just the painting, of course, that obsesses her. The reader comes to understand that Imp has a long-standing obsession with mermaids and fairy-tales, and that The Drowning Girl merely crystallizes that obsession, becomes a focal point.

The second is another painting, seen years later at another exhibition. It is called Fecunda ratis, and features a blurred Impressionistic rendering of a young girl in a red tunic, “surrounded by a circle of dark, hulking forms – the wolves – and the wolves, in turn, are sitting within an outer circle of standing stones, a looming megalithic ring.” This, of course, represents a form of “Little Red Riding Hood”, a fairy tale Imp calls her “least favorite”.

The two paintings, and the two fairy-tales, become the nexus around which the story revolves. Nightmare and dream. The two tales wrestle over Imp’s mind, ply each other for dominance. They become her stories.

A dark country road in Eastern Connecticut. Another dark road beside a river in Massachusetts. A woman who called herself Eva Canning, who might have been a ghost, or a wolf, or maybe a mermaid, or possibly, most likely, nothing that will ever have a name.

The narrative moves backwards and forwards in time as Imp tries to reconstruct her thoughts and find the truth of her story. She realizes that fact and truth are not synonymous. Imp says in the opening chapter that she will try to tell the story as she remembers it. “Which is not to say every word will be factual. Only that every word will be true. Or as true as I can manage.”

The story comes in broken chunks and flashbacks interspersed with her current life and in little pieces of fiction that she has written.

The story is strewn with references to everyone from Charles Perrault to Dante Alighieri. Kiernan peppers the story with odd facts (Imp collects odd facts like shells on the beach), and even fictional references like the painting of “The Drowning Girl” felt real enough that I needed to search to ensure it didn’t really exist. This gives the novel a feel of authenticity, a believability that never, even in its strangest moments, dissipates.

Capturing the skittering thoughts and images of Imp’s mind must have been a daunting task, but Kiernan’s style brings it off beautifully. It varies between extremely lucid and straightforward or surrealistic and dreamlike, dependent upon Imp’s state of mind. It is most powerful in its surrealistic state, especially Chapter 7, which centers around that number and reads like a strange opium dream.

This is my ghost story of the wolf who cried girl. The murdered wolf ghost who roamed centuries after a musket blast, without other wolves, except other wolf ghosts, for company. And somehow she forgot she ever was a wolf, deprived of others of her kind to provide perspective. She forgot.

The story doesn’t tie up neatly into a little bow. It remains fractured, just as its narrator remains fractured. Imp can control her illness through medication. But there’s no cure, just as you sense there’s no easy solution to her story. What happened, on a factual basis, is far less important that what is true. Imp realizes this central tenet to storytelling. It is why fiction is so much more important than non-fiction. There are truths contained therein that will never be found in a dry collection of facts.

I’m reminded of the lines from Yann Martel’s brilliant Life of Pi:

“Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?”.

The Drowning Girl is certainly a better story with the animals. And it’s one of the finer books I’ve read this year.

Review - The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

There are very few writers that leave me so eagerly anticipating their next novel that I will rearrange my schedule to read it. Years ago, I rushed to the bookstore to snatch up the latest Robert Jordan or Tad Williams installment the moment it hit the shelves. These days, with literally hundreds of patient, unread books on the shelves whispering “read me!”, and my tastes constantly evolving, very few authors receive immediate readings.

Hell, even A Dance With Dragons and The Wise Man’s Fear - and let’s admit it, ongoing series tend to receive some priority, since the story is incomplete – waited a few months from release before I cracked their spines. Anticipation, after all, whets the appetite.

But there are exceptions. When I learned some time in January that Margo Lanagan was releasing a new novel, I sat up very straight in my chair and began fishing around online for release dates. I devoured her first novel – World Fantasy Award Winner Tender Morsels - and found that her short story collections served to whet my appetite for the next novel quite enough, thank you. I didn’t intend to wait.

Then I discovered, to my chagrin, that the Australian & UK release dates were set for mid-February, while the US edition wouldn’t be released until September. September!

Waiting I would be, it seemed…because I have this phobia about paying for shipping. There are many, many things I don’t mind paying for, but shipping falls into the painful gray area of “utterly wasted money”, and international shipping…well, even the thought makes me shiver. There’s a great UK-based bookstore called The Book Depository that ships free worldwide, but it kept telling me the book was out of stock.

I’m nothing, however, if not persistent. I finally found a new copy on Abe Books – fulfilled through the Book Depository. Does this meandering backstory have a point? Not really, other than to tell any other anxious readers that you can find your own international copies in that way if you don’t want to wait until September.

And you shouldn't.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is a novel based on the author’s novella from 2010, “Sea Hearts”, which won the World Fantasy Award for that category and went on to appear in The Best Dark Fantasy and Horror of 2010 anthology. I hadn’t read the novella, mainly because it originally appeared in an Australian anthology that was difficult to come by in the US.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is an unfortunate title, and the UK edition that I purchased has underwhelming, stock-YA cover art. The Australian version of the novel kept the Sea Hearts title but the UK and US versions opted for Brides instead. Who knows why marketing departments make the decisions that they do? Sea Hearts is a far more fitting title, certainly. One that reflects the many nuances and conflicts that Lanagan portrays.

My disappointment in the presentation faded quickly once I began the opening chapter. I slipped into Lanagan’s fictional world like a selkie back into its skin.

The story is narrated by six different characters, though the bulk of the action revolves around only two, separated by a generation – Daniel Mallett, a young boy from the village; and Misskaella Prout, an outcast girl who becomes the means for drawing women from the seals. For a novel this short – it clocks in at just under 300 pages – you might think this method would hinder the ability to build character, but somehow the tale, and the characters themselves, emerge as distinct and greater than the sum of their parts.

The basic premise of the novel is this: On a lonely island, Misskaella is a witch with the ability to draw women – beautiful, enchanting women – from the seals that return to the island to breed and bask each spring. The men become so enchanted by the seal-women that they take them as wives – even those that already have wives and family – and drive all of the “human” women to the mainland.

That, of course, is only the bird’s-eye view. A cover blurb that doesn’t come close to capturing the novel’s heart. The novel has at its center a number of ideas – a contrast between real flesh-and-blood women and their idealized, submissive selkie counterparts; the effect of the absence of real female presence on the men and children of the island; an evocation of the tensions, jealousies, and bonds that form in an isolated community; but perhaps more than anything the underlying instinct – the drive – of both human & selkie alike to return home. The selkies rejoice to return to the sea; no less does Dominick Mallett rejoice on his return to Rollrock, after many years away. Nostalgia, in part. But also an old glove that fits the hand.

Lanagan’s prose is an absolute pleasure, utilitarian and poetic at the same time. It rarely bogs down or draws attention to itself, but builds on very specific details that reflect the setting and move the story forward without sacrificing style. Spare, where sparseness is required. Like Rollrock Island itself. Full of wonder at other times, teeming with the wild magic that lies beneath a bluff exterior.

When the wind was a particular strength of nor’-easter, Toddy and I would run up towards Windaway Peak. There was a blade of land there, up which funneled all the airs from Gambrel Wood to Oaten Share, and we stood on it with our toes curled over the rock like eagle-claws, and spread our arms and were held up by the wind. It would push and sluice around us, and overbalance us back down towards the path, or desert us so that we fell forward into a shallow little tumble-room on the south side, and make us laugh. (Lanagan, 273)

Lanagan’s novels and stories all seem to take place in a sort of timeless zone, an area just outside of the common world, and The Brides of Rollrock Island is no exception. There are nods toward a modern or semi-modern lifestyle, especially on the mainland – busses, motorboats, electricity – but Rollrock seems to exist outside of these things for the most part. There is no attempt to place the story in a definite time-frame, and I think it would be unproductive to do so. Like fairy tales, Lanagan’s writings take place just off the map somewhere, in that no-man’s land where fantasy and reality collide (Lanagan’s first novel, Tender Morsels, was very much about the collision of fantasy with reality).

And yet, despite the timeless feel of the island setting, we get a great sense of the “roll” of time and generations through the novel, seeing the changes through the eyes of several characters, often separated by twenty or thirty years of time.

If there was one problem I found with the novel, it was the general helplessness of the men against Misskaella and the sea-wives.

Only one male character in the novel manages to resist the lure of the selkies. His ability to withstand what all the others are utterly defenseless against is never explained, and its importance is downplayed. His resistance implies that the men’s choices are not all controlled by enchantment, but (at least in part) by free will. This casts the decisions of the rest of the male population in an unflattering light, to say the least.

I found the general weakness and simplicity of the male characters a bit off-putting. The men in this novel are not bad, heartless people, per se, but they are often crude, hormone-driven fools. There is some truth there, but it is far from a universal truth.

That qualm aside, this is a vibrant, beautifully-written novel, full of the magic of island and sea and of those things – human and otherwise – that pass between. Highly recommended.

A Year's Reading

Reviewing an entire year's worth of reading in retrospect is a daunting task. Looking back, we may misremember what we thought of a given book, or overlook the flaws that were so obvious on first reading. I'm left instead with impressions, random scenes, rather than the coherent whole. But what the hell, I'll give it a try anyway.

2011 was a year of mixed reading – a variety of genres, subjects, and styles. I followed through on my resolution to read (and re-read) more classics. I have a deep love and respect for nineteenth-century novels, but I find that all too often I pass them up because of their sheer size and the mental demands they require. Let’s face it, most modern genre novels require less of the reader than Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, or George Eliot.

Total Books Read in 2011: 49

That’s down several from the year before, but the difference is due more to the size of the books than anything else. I tackled some real doorstops last year. I’ve never had issues with long books, but I realized something about them last year.

Most are pointlessly bloated.

I don’t say all. In spite of its digressions, I wouldn’t shorten Anna Karenina by a word. Same goes for Middlemarch and The Adventures of Don Quixote.

In some cases, I may even encourage said author. George R.R. Martin – feel free to make the next book, and the one after that, just as long as you like. If some of the narrative is off-topic, so be it. When I open a new volume of A Song of Ice & Fire I’m perfectly happy to spend weeks, months, or years enveloped in the narrative. Though I’ve had quite enough of that Meereen plot-line. Bring everybody home to the Seven Kingdoms.

In the bloated department, there are varying levels of severity. Patrick Rothfuss, for example, keeps things interesting and fun in spite of an oversized and meandering narrative. I can enjoy The Wise Man’s Fear in spite of its heft because Rothfuss is a damned fine storyteller.

Another one? Connie Willis’s The Doomsday Book. I don’t go in for science fiction, generally, but this is Sci Fi lite. It's about people - about how different, and yet how similar, we are to those who came before. A thought-provoking book. Not a spaceship in sight, thank you. Oversized, and beautiful, and (I thought) somewhat anti-climactic.

Going several degrees worse – Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth. I’d heard good things about it, and I have a weakness for big historical novels. I found some of the story intriguing…but mostly I thought it was a big, ungainly, sprawling mess. Flat characters and a tiresomely redundant plot. I found myself, six-hundred pages in, thinking “haven’t I read this part already? Surely I did, back on page 324?”

One final mention of an over-large book? The Dragon Queen by Alice Borchardt. This was a selection for my book club. Weighing in at only 473 pages, it’s practically a novella compared to the others I’ve mentioned. And yet… And yet it seemed twice as long and painful as any of them. I will say no more on the matter. But be forewarned.

Some Highly Recommended Books of 2011:

Note: I’ll leave the classics off this list. Recommending a classic seems almost...well...redundant.

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay – I’ve already reviewed this one here, so I’ll be brief. The latest fantasy-historical by Kay. Asian setting. It matches up well with some of his best works like A Song for Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan.

Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin – Another book I’ve already reviewed here. It’s by Ursula LeGuin. What more needs to be said?

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – I loved this book. Absolutely loved it. Harsh, funny, touching. Whether you like westerns or not (and I’m generally lukewarm on them), read this one.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King – Native American magic-realism. Entwines Native American mythology with modern Native American culture. It’s essentially about stories – their significance, their relevance, and the effect they have on who we are and who we would like to be.

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin – At this point, giving Martin my recommendation is like spitting into the ocean. Pointless and redundant. But I’ll do it anyway. The man is sadistic. Downright evil. Oh, and genius.

Holiday by M. Rickert – One of my favorite fantasy short story writers, and criminally under-read. This collection came out around Christmas 2010 in a gorgeously illustrated hardcover edition. Weird fiction full of deep ideas, disturbing images, and sudden unexpected glimpses of the wondrous. If you like short fiction, try her. You won’t be disappointed.

A Few Disappointments:

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett – Mentioned above. Too long, too wooden.

Something Rich & Strange by Patricia McKillip – I’m a big fan of Patricia McKillip’s books and her lush, lyrical writing style. I purchased this one because it’s a bit of a rarity. The second book in a planned series illustrated by Brian & Wendy Froud that was cancelled after this book came out. This seemed forced and overdone to me. Her images were as lush as usual, but not as clear, and the modern environmental fable didn’t work as a plot device. Stick with McKillip’s other books.

The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers – This book seemed almost like a shoe-in on the “loved it” list. Shelley & Byron & Keats and succubae in early nineteenth century Europe. It had everything going for it except its execution. I was never drawn into the story, and I found it unfocused and often confusing. The main character was neither very likeable nor very coherent. I wanted to like it. I really did.

The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll - I really enjoyed Carroll's The Land of Laughs, so I had similar high expectations for The Marriage of Sticks. The book had its moments, but the ending seemed both preachy and highly contrived. I was not impressed. I have several more of Carroll's novels hanging around, so I hope this was just a blip on the radar.

What was your favorite book that you read in 2011?

Review - Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

I said in my “Upcoming Reviews” post that I would review Under Heaven and Across the Nightingale Floor together. I lied. I decided Under Heaven deserved its own review. But I’ll get around to Nightingale Floor soon enough.

I hope.

Prior to the last few months, I’ve read little Asian-inspired fantasy. I can’t say exactly why that is. My fascination has always been with European history, myth, and legend. Native American history and mythology has always had a pull on me as well.

But the Far East has primarily stayed off the radar. The history of the Silk Road countries – the Middle-East, China, India, etc… – is fascinating, and has an immense bearing on the European history that I confessed an interest in earlier. The Far East gave Europe spices, weapons, slaves, new modes of thought, Ghengis Khan, and the Black Death, amongst many, many other things. European history would be far different without them.

So what, exactly, does it take to draw me to an Asian fantasy novel? Guy Gavriel Kay, of course.

Kay is one of the most intelligent, thought-provoking, and moving fantasy novelists writing today. His historically-inspired fantasy novels – particularly Tigana, The Lions of Al-Rassan, & A Song For Arbonne – deserve to be mentioned among the very best fantasy novels ever, in my opinion.

So when I noticed the release of his newest book late last year, Under Heaven, I knew I had to have it, even if it’s subject was outside of my realm of knowledge. Especially since it was outside my realm of knowledge.

Under Heaven lives up to its promise in just about every way. Kay once again captures the essence of a time period, in this case Tang Dynasty China. It is full of snippets of song and poetry, lyrical fragments that echo the beauty of traditional Chinese verse and is full of recurring Far Eastern imagery:

Why sir, it is true: on the shores of Kuala Nor
White bones have lain for many years.
No one has gathered them. The new ghosts
Are bitter and angry, the old ghosts weep.
Under the rain and within the circle of mountains
The air is full of their cries.

The narrative follows the stories of two protagonists: Shen Tai, who has gone to the battleground of Kuala Nor in his grieving time after his father’s death to honor the dead; and his sister Li-Mei, who in Tai’s absence has been given as a bride to the leader of the barbarian Bogü people north of the wall.

For his work honoring and burying the battlefield dead, Tai is given a priceless gift that sets off a chain reaction of political intrigue, with Tai at the center, and he has to fight to merely stay alive. Meanwhile, north of the wall, Li-Mei finds herself in mysterious, unexpected company.

The characters are exactly what one expects out of a Kay novel – fully-rounded, interesting, thoughtful. Kay’s protagonists are a thoughtful bunch, and Shen Tai and Li-Mei are no exception.

And as usual, even the antagonists of the story are shown in their many shades of grey. Self-centered, stubborn, and power-hungry, certainly. But fully human in their desires and goals, as prone to mistakes and miscalculations as anyone else.

I have read elsewhere online that many were not happy with the ending. The novel does change pace during the final third of the novel, as if Kay had far too much story to wrap up within a single volume. The main narrative arc of the novel comes to rest directly before the primary action that the novel has been building toward, and I can see how some might find it anti-climactic.

I, however, struggle to find fault with it. Can you have a novel that takes place directly before the start of WWII? Does it then have to encompass WWII, or can it merely encapsulate its events and the parts the characters played in those events? That is the situation here – wherein the main novel essentially ends prior to a major event – and that event (and our characters’ roles in that event) are wrapped up epilogue-style, as if by a future historian looking back.

While I don’t find fault with the hurried dénouement of Under Heaven, I did find myself wishing to spend more time in Kay’s alternate China. I certainly wouldn’t have been opposed to two books to tell the entire tale.

By turns beautiful and heartbreaking, Under Heaven is not to be missed.

Into a Dark Wood - Reviewing Robert Holdstock

 I stumbled across a recent (and excellent) review / overview of Robert Holdstock’s “Mythago Wood” cycle over at The Green Man Review, and it got me to thinking about the books.

If you’ve never read them, these books are some of the most mind-blowing, original, puzzling, and under-appreciated novels in the fantasy genre. And they’re nearly impossible to explain. They’re “you had to be there” novels, because nothing I say can clearly capture, or even loosely capture, the essence of Holdstock’s novels.

Ryhope Wood is a small tract of forest in Herefordshire, England. It’s approximately three miles across. You could ride around it entirely in a few hours. But inside, once you breach its outer defenses, it is both timeless and nearly endless. You could travel for lifetimes without reaching the far side.

What Holdstock does in these novels is capture that most difficult thing in all of writing to capture. Magic. I mean real magic. Not fireballs and unicorns and all the other stuff genericized by the larger part of the fantasy genre as “magic”. I’m talking real bone and sinew magic. Echoes in the blood magic. That fleeting feeling that momentarily comes over you when you hear a snatch of music, or smell a campfire, or feel a sudden kinship – however briefly – with your older, deeper self. The self that still remembers cold nights huddled over smoldering fires in the primeval forest. The self that remembers the smell of animal-skin clothing and the taste of rare boar meat.

These books won’t appeal to everyone. They are difficult. Opaque. Unlike most fantasy novels, the reader never fully understands the rules of the wood. As soon as something starts to become clear, we realize we are walking on quicksand and must move aside and reconsider things. Quickly. If you think you are aware of where one of the novels is heading, there is a good chance that you are dead wrong.

The books venture into the labyrinth of the subconscious, the hidden parts of our mind that we can’t directly access but are there nonetheless, living fragments of our latent human instincts, remnants of our “survival of the fittest” past when each day was a struggle to survive. As such, the labyrinth is the recurring theme of the books. The mind and the forest are reflections of one another, labyrinths, and each character travels in toward the dark, unmapped center in search of the self.


Is there really a collective subconscious? I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. And I’m certain psychologists couldn’t agree on an answer either. But reading these novels, it certainly feels true. And for those with a background or an interest in mythology and mythological symbolism, these books are a treasure-trove.

These books aren’t without their faults. They are unevenly paced. Their strangeness is sometime off-putting, keeping the reader at arm’s length. Since they operate on a different set of rules, we don’t often clearly understand the characters’ motivations, and it causes us to mentally question the decisions they make.
These are quibbles, really, in the greater scope of things. Because these are great, great books. If you are a reader of fantasy literature and you haven’t read any of the Ryhope novels, you are missing out on one of the truly great series of this (or any other) genre. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

Oh, and start with Mythago Wood. It’s the right way to introduce yourself to Ryhope.

Review - Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis

Bitter Seeds is Ian Tregillis’ first novel, though a reader would never guess that. It is a dark, troubling, ambitious alternate history retelling of World War II. As alternate histories go, this era is perhaps more commonplace than any other. It is the fulcrum of modern history, and as such gets appropriate attention. And those greedy Germans make for perfect villains.

To his credit, Tregillis finds a way to stake an original claim on this period of history. His Germans a suitably villainous, though not the complete foil that so often appear. The English come off as at least as shifty and dislikable, since they are willing to do just about anything – pay any price – to avoid being taken by the Germans.

In this WWII, the Germans have scientifically-engineered a limited number of individuals with incredible talents – one individual is able to create (and clothe himself) in fire. A second can make himself essentially a ghost for limited periods of time with the ability to walk through walls and allow bullets to pass through him. The process by which this set of characters is created is left shadowy throughout, though we are led to know that the procedure is incredibly cruel.

By contrast, the English have discovered a way to fend off the almost-unstoppable German surge. Magic. A small subgroup of Englishmen has the ability to negotiate with a race of cosmic godlike creatures. This sounds strange, but it works within the construct of the story.

The story’s villain – one thinks, though we’re never entirely certain – is Gretel, one of the re-engineered Germans whose “gift” or superpower is an ability to see the future. She is an enigmatic character whose motives are always in doubt, and whose foreknowledge plays an intricate role in the unfolding of the plot. She is also an apparent sociopath with little or no concern for other lives, and often a blatant disregard for them.

The protagonists are two Brits; Raybould Marsh, a secret agent, and William Beauclerk, a friend of Marsh and a noble schooled in the secret arts of a warlock. When Marsh discovers the Germans’ secret weapons, he turns to his old friend as a way to counter the threat.

The British magic is, in its way, reminiscent of the magic in Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, though I don’t think it this novel ever achieves either the believability or potency of Clarke’s alternate England. Tregillis’ magic exacts a terrifying cost, though the ground rules for its use and the reasons for that cost are not well explained.

Marsh and Beauclerk, as protagonists, I found rather lacking. They certainly change throughout the novel – as anyone who endures their suffering would – but at no point do they truly strike me as human characters. Perhaps it is because the reader does so much skipping around through the various characters’ heads, but their transformation and decision-making rationale throughout the novel never seems fluid or well-defined.

Marsh, as the primary protagonist, should be understandable. Accessible to the reader. And somehow he never is. His grief, his regret, his pain. They are implied, but seldom felt. Beauclerk, at least, translates as a troubled and pain-ridden character, haunted by the things he’s done. Even by the novel’s end, Marsh is still an alien subject for me, and I’m left with only a vague distaste and repulsion.

That is the novel’s primary weakness.

For me, the most compelling of the novel’s characters was Klaus, one of the gifted superhuman Germans whose conscience and understanding slowly emerges throughout the course of the novel. He is the most realistically-drawn, the most relatable, of the novel’s characters. Gretel – the strange, sociopathic “precog” – is Klaus’s sister, and yet we realize that he understands her no better than we do. Perhaps less so.

Some aspects of the real WWII are notably missing, though whether this is through omission or Tregillis' alternative vision is unclear. Though we are constrained by viewpoints, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question – the pogroms and concentration camps and cattle-trains full of Jews – is scarcely mentioned. The Russian front – and how the Red Army succeeds against the invading Reich – is left hazy. Some answers are given, but they remain unsatisfactory. It remains to be seen why, if the war in the east was going so poorly, the Nazis did not employ their team of superhuman soldiers on that front. It seems likely that the Reich would use every weapon at its disposal to turn the tide of a war that had begun to go against them.

These are legitimate problems with the novel. Its strengths, however, are many. The prose is fluid and clear, at times excellent. The settings are vividly drawn and believable. Tregillis has done his research, and that gives this fantastic premise the ring of believability.

We are tragically drawn into the pain and loss of the war and the gut-wrenching decisions involved. Given a decision between two evils, what choice do you make? What price is too much? We are drawn back to Churchill’s dictum: Never, never, never, never give up. Sounds like great advice, in hindsight. What does that mean, when we examine it in more detail? When we put a human face, a human cost, on the balance?

This novel raises that question, but we are left to draw our own conclusions. As the first novel in a trio, perhaps the author’s stance will become clearer in later books. We are left instead with a pessimistic vacuum at the end of this novel, an unsettling ending that leaves an acrid flavor in the mouth, as the novel’s title suggests. There is very little human joy, little thought of redemption remaining. Only an echo of Babies. Monsters. caroming through my brain.

All the same, this is a novel worth reading. I’m afraid I haven’t done a suitable job of selling that conclusion, but it is the truth. I am interested in knowing where the next two novels are going, and I will be hitching along for the ride.

Review - The Innkeeper's Song by Peter S. Beagle

I finished this book a few weeks back but I’m just now getting around to the full review. I'll give the disclaimer that this was a re-read, not my first experience with the novel.

Peter Beagle’s The Innkeeper’s Song is not a new book. Far from it. It was initially published in 1993. I read it years ago and it has remained one of my favorite fantasy novels.

When my turn arrived to suggest a book for my fantasy reading group (a weighty responsibility) I considered and sorted through twenty-odd novels before settling, not without great trepidation, on The Innkeeper’s Song.

The problem with suggesting a favorite novel read in the past is that they often fail to measure up to your initial impression. Few novels that I read ten years ago or more retain the same charm they had upon their initial reading. We all grow more critical - more jaded in some ways - as we age.

Thankfully, this was not the issue with this novel. In fact, I found that it had grown upon me since my last reading. Beagle is a masterful stylist. I’d recently rediscovered much of Beagle’s short fiction due to an anthology titled Mirror Kingdoms released last year by Subterranean Press. So the high quality of the writing was no surprise to me. Full of wonderful, unexpected metaphors and a subtlety that relies upon the intelligent reader to make connections.

Lilies, corpses, ghosts – if these are white, then there must be another word for that woman’s skin. It seemed to me, gaping in the road, that her color was the color of something inside her, some bright, fierce life thumping and burning away with no thought at all for her body, no care or pity for it at all.

His narrative style jumps from character to character, allowing us to see each individual chapter from a different character's viewpoint – a style that George RR Martin adopts in his Song of Ice & Fire series of books. Some points-of-view work better than others. The Fox – a shapeshifter – is marvelous throughout, one of my favorite characters in all of fantasy literature.

Pigeons. Lift up my nose, no ceiling, no rafters between us. Close my eyes and see rumblysoft pigeon dark, juicy wing-beats filling the air with dust and grain, fluffy little under-feathers drift down. Much talking, much shifty-shuffly on their nests, restless with me. Close their pretty eyes like drops of blood, they see me, too.

The plot is not as strong as the prose itself. There is one long stretch of subplot involving two characters that is entirely unnecessary to the novel as a whole, other than to buy time and create some sort of quest adventure. It reminds me of a similar piece of unnecessary subplot in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind.

Some characters – most notably Tikat – come across a bit flat, or at least fail to entirely capture the reader’s imagination. Tikat is the first character we meet in the novel and it is assumed that he will be the primary protagonist. That is not the case. He is the least fleshed-out of the characters and the reader never really identifies with his motivation.

All that said, the novel overcomes its shortcomings so incredibly well because of Beagle’s skill with language. Chapters are given in first-person POV. Beagle flows effortlessly in and out of stream-of-consciousness. This gives the narrative a breathless, headlong speed – like a train rolling downhill – when it’s needed. In places, a fierce musicality. At other times the tone is slower, more reflective.

There were a number of instances I found myself - alone in my reading chair - whispering the words aloud to myself as if I were chanting a song. The song of the Fox, of the stable-boy Rosseth who is so charmingly and realistically drawn. The song of Lal-Alone, of Nyateneri and the Man Who Laughs. The innkeeper's song. My own.

I was asked several times during the course of the group discussion why I’d chosen that particular book. My answer was simple. Some books you love because they’re wonderful, magical, exciting, poetic, even all of the above. Some books you simply wish you’d written. This is one of those, for me.