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OtherRealms Issue 21 Part 04
Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 4
Scattered Gold
Charles de Lint
Copyright 1988 by Charles de Lint
Installment #4:
In which we discover that
the aliens are already among us
The Sadness of Witches
Janice Elliott
[****]
Hodder & Stoughton, 1987; 192pp; Cdn$25.95; 0-340-41657-2
Communion: A True Story
Whitley Streiber
[**+]
Avon, February 1988; 306pp; $4.95;
0-380-700388-2
Unassigned Territory
Kem Nunn
[****]
Delacorte Press, 1987; 305pp; 0-385-29536-7
Second Sight
Mary Tannen
[*****]
Knopf, 1987; 259pp; $16.95; 0-394-56204-6
Red Prophet
Orson Scott Card
[****+]
TOR, February, 1988; $17.95; 0-312-93043-7
Barking Dogs
Terence M. Green
[***+]
St. Martin's, 1988; 214pp; $15.95;
0-312-01424-4
A Fall of Princes
Judith Tarr
[***+]
TOR, April, 1988; 448pp; $18.95; 0-312-93063-1
Waiting for the Galactic Bus
Parke Godwin
[****]
Foundation, May, 1988; 229pp; $17.95; 0-385-24635-8
The Silver Glove
Suzy McKee Charnas
[***]
Bantam, March 1988; 162pp; $13.95
0-553-05470-8
Crazy Time
Kate Wilhelm
[***+]
St. Martin's Press, March 1988; 248pp; $16.95; 0-312-01411-2
Velocities Boxed Set
edited by Andrew Joron
[****]
Ocean View Books, 1988; 290pp; $12.95
Set of five booklets/boxed; 0-938075-03-9
The Silicon Mage
Barbara Hambly
[***]
Del Rey, April 1988; 338pp; $3.95; 0-345-33763-8
The Nightingale
Kara Dalkey
[*****]
Ace, May 1988; 221pp; $16.95; 0-441-57973-6
Or maybe not. It all depends on whether or not you take Whitley
Streiber's latest book as fiction or fact, but that's something you'll
have to decide for yourselves.
In the meantime, there's lots to look at this time around, so without a
lengthy preamble, let's get straight to the books.
The Sadness of Witches
For the reader unafraid of occasionally wandering afield from our
venerable genre, who considers story, style and strength of
characterization above genre labels, who is willing to follow Mystery
in his or her fantasy reading rather than the simple retelling of yet
one more magical quest of epic and heroic proportions, I offer the
following slim volume: Janice Elliott's The Sadness of Witches.
I know little of the author beyond what the dustwrapper has to offer.
What made me pick up the book from the mass of thrillers and the like
with which it was surrounded on the bookstore's new releases shelf was
it's intriguing title and the reproduction of William Blake's "Hecate"
on the front cover. And though I judged a book by the cover, in this
instance, I wasn't for a moment disappointed.
The plot is simply put. To quote the dustwrapper, Walter Waterman gives
up his efforts to save the earth and settles with his wife Molly in a
coast guard cottage on a Cornish cliff, high above the steep dark
village of Poltreth.
Across the harbour a witch watches.
The story goes on to relate Walter's involvement with the witch,
introducing other odd residents of the village and the Waterman family,
and generally meanders about in a most engaging style that combines a
sense of whimsical description with mysterious goings on. The
interrelationship between the characters is, as it is in real life,
both befogging and illuminating, the former because all people are a
mixture of good and bad impulses and sometimes it's difficult to judge
a person because we often don't know which impulse is in ascendance can
vary, and the latter because Elliott has a true gift for getting right
to the heart of her characters and revealing them to us in a few quick
strokes. The brooding Cornish coast becomes a character in its own
right and Elliott's handling of her fantasy element is so
matter-of-fact that many readers would be hard put to realize they're
reading a fantasy novel in the first place....
Ah, but that's the kick, isn't it? In our field, we say fantasy novel
and it immediately conjures up Tolkienesque imagery, or Conan clones,
or...but you get the idea. It makes for easier marketing and it helps
the reader to know exactly what kind of a book they're getting. Oh,
certainly books slip by -- as Ace did with Jonathan Carroll's Land of
Laughs, say, or Doubleday with Evelyn E. Smith's The Copy Shop -- but
mostly we know what we're getting and prefer it that way. I can be as
guilty of that as the next person.
But sometimes...sometimes we miss out on wonders. Because we're looking
for another one just like the last one we enjoyed and don't want to try
something different. Because that wonder is published outside the genre
and we're busily wearing our blinkers and can't see it for looking.
Elliott's novel has everything a good book should have -- engaging
characters, deft style and a plot that matters (not because there are
worlds to be saved or dragons to be slain, but because we care about
the characters, so we care what happens to them). It's also a damn fine
fantasy and I hope a few genre readers out there will give it a try.
Communion
When this book first appeared in hardcover from Macmillan last year, I
wrote a brief review of it for my local newspaper that ran:
"Communion is an account of the author's own possible experiences with
mysterious 'visitors' -- possibly extraterrestrials, possibly from an
alternate reality. Although intriguing, and certainly related with a
sense of initial skepticism upon the author's part, the exhaustive
seeking after proof becomes quickly boring and the premise a bit too
much to swallow.
"At the hardcover price, interested readers are better off waiting for
the paperback, or following similar, if not quite so competently told,
stories in the supermarket tabloids."
Well, it's now out in paperback -- arriving in my post box along with a
thick sheaf of press clippings, glossy flyers and a button with a
picture of the "alien" from the cover and the words "WE ARE HERE"
emblazoned above its head -- and I wonder....
No. I don't believe Whitley Streiber was actually taken away by little
people to some spaceship or hidden laboratory. But ever since I read
the book last year, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I
keep finding myself wondering: Well, what if it did happen? What if he
is telling the truth?
Preposterous, yes. But that "what if" is a part of the whole
speculative process that has us writing and reading
sf/fantasy/horror...all those fictions that take a step beyond the here
and now to explore...what if.
I've long admired Streiber's work. The Wolfen and The Hunger were
easily two of the most original horror novels to come along in years --
each of them reworking tired old themes in such a way that they
acquired whole new freshness. His The Night Church was a
disappointment, but he more than made up for it with his subsequent
books like War Day and Nature's End, realistic speculations on the
aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange and the dissolution of the
environment, respectively.
But the Streiber of late has been giving us ever stranger material. His
novelette "Pain" in Cutting Edge (Doubleday, 1986) speaks of
enlightenment through torment. Catmagic, a contemporary fantasy
utilizing pagan beliefs as its magical base, was written with
collaborator Jonathon Barry, "a practicing witch" who turned out to be
a pseudonym of Streiber's. And now Communion -- a "true story" in which
Streiber expounds on how ETs or elves are messing up his life.
What are we to make of it all?
On the one hand, it's extremely easy to laugh off -- and write the kind
of review I initially did for the hardcover edition. On the other
hand...what if all of this really did happen to Streiber -- just as
he's described it in Communion? Mightn't that explain the recent
strange turns that his fiction has taken?
Not that I believe it for a moment.
But what if...?
Unassigned Territory
Like Nunn's first novel, Tapping the Source (Delacorte, 1984),
Unassigned Territory has its roots in the desert. Obadiah Wheeler, a
member of a fundamentalist faith the Friends, is sent into Nye County,
Nevada, where there are hardly enough people, little say Friends, to
form a congregation. The purpose of the trip is to bring an "assigned
territory" -- an area not belonging to a particular congregation of
Friends -- into the folds of the faith.
But for Wheeler the trip is more like a Biblical forty days and forty
nights in the wilderness -- a test of his faith which he loses on his
first day out when he meets Delandra Hummer, becomes her lover, helps
her steal an artifact known as the Mystery of the Mojave from her
brother's museum, and flees with her into the desert.
What follows is a novel that never clearly sits in any particular
genre. There are moments of fantasy -- never quite overt, but present
all the same; side trips detailing UFOlogy, H.P. Lovecraft's
influences, and other strange mock-sciences and oddities; a sense of a
coming of age, as well as mid-life crises; hardboiled aspects....
Pulling it all together is Nunn's prose -- by turns tough and lean, and
again lyric and mysterious. His characters are fully realized from the
moment they hit the page, whether it's Wheeler and Delandra, or the
church elder Harlan Low who is pursuing Wheeler, Delandra's brother Rex
pursuing the stolen Mystery and the rest of the cast of quirky, almost
caricatured desert dwellers and sleazy cultists.
But while the novel straddles genres, the clarity of its purpose is in
no way dimmed: We learn, as much as can be learned from the written
page, of the Mojave desert, its mysteries and foibles, its
foolishnesses and wisdoms -- all as they are embodied in that bleak
landscape, yes, but more as they are reflected in the people who have
chosen to live in, or pass through, the desert's boundaries.
In that sense, the title "unassigned territory" takes on more than the
simple meaning it has in the Friends' fundamentalist faith, referring
as well to some mysterious proving ground that lies outside the regular
confines of space and time. A place that can only be entered by those
willing to risk all.
In other words, Kem Nunn's second novel is well worth the time spent
traveling its pages.
Second Sight
Although it's billed as her first novel, Second Sight is actually Mary
Tannen's fourth book. The other three were for children and therefore,
considering the short shrift that YA books usually receive, aren't to
be thought of as "real" books, one can only assume. But we're not here
to talk about the inequalities of literary perception, but rather to
discuss Tannen's new novel.
And what a book it is.
Set in a barrio in the worn-out mill town of Wallingford, New Jersey
(just twenty minutes from New York City) it follows the descendants of
two families who were once the town's most important movers and
shakers: the Appleyards and the Birds.
The Appleyards are represented by the last of the line, Will, who
arrives ostensibly to write a history of the town for his dissertation.
It's not long before he realizes that his true reason for coming is to
learn the truth behind the Appleyard curse -- the men of his family are
doomed to have accidents while riding horses. The curse originated in
Wallingford. Will is a simple soul, an Everyman, but he's also a
catalyst for much that happens in Wallingford after his arrival.
The Birds, on the other hand, are represented by any number of wonderfully
quirky characters. There's Delia who tells fortunes under the name of
Destiny Ortega; her son Lazaro, a tough street kid; her mother Lavinia,
who lives alone in a castle-like house, tending orchids and waiting for
her husband to come home after a fifteen year absence; the husband,
Delia's father Nestor, a successful business who's suddenly in
financial trouble; the sister Cass, who lives in California, but makes
periodic visits back home, criticizing everything and everyone.
The other characters are all gems as well, particularly a film director
who thinks in terms of film as he lives his life and the mysterious
Senora, a kind of voodoo priestess who has magical plans for her
grandson Lazaro -- yes, she's related to the Birds as well, because her
son married Delia. Tannen has a gift for bringing her people to life,
in quick easy strokes. And while their initial appearances might leave
the reader puzzled as to their presence in the novel, by the time we
get to the end of our journey, it all makes a certain sense -- not
necessarily a tidy one, but sense all the same.
Tannen's prose is at once lyric and streetwise. She writes in the
present tense, but rather than it being a literary affectation, it
results in a completely natural sound. Her plotting grows out of the
characters, rather than the straightforward unfolding of events one
comes to expect in a novel, fantasy or otherwise.
As for the fantasy element, the "magic", as it were, Second Sight is
one of those books in which the presence of the fantastic isn't so much
on stage, as waiting in the wings, on the edges of our perception. It's
not surrealism, because, in the end, it all does makes sense, but nor
is it merely high fantasy transposed to a contemporary setting, antique
costumes and baggage exchanged for modern gear.
Like the plot, like every part of the book, the magic is tied up in the
characters. The entire novel rests on their shoulders and in doing so,
Tannen has made a wise choice, for she illuminates both human and
non-magical truths with her characters that ring with authenticity and
enchantment.
While it's a difficult book to explain -- rather like dissecting your
pet dog to find out what it is about him that you like -- Second Sight
is a very easy book to recommend.
Seventh Son
Seventh Son, the first of the projected six volume "Tales of Alvin
Maker" series, introduced us to the 1800's of an alternate America
where magic works, mostly through the various "knacks" that people have --
second sight, dowsing, charms and hexes, etc. It used the Matter of
America -- Native beliefs, folklore and magic, the Ohio frontier -- in
a proper fashion, something that, at least this reader, has long been
waiting for someone to do.
In Red Prophet, Alvin is now ten-years-old and leaving his home in the
company of his brother Measure to become an apprentice to a blacksmith.
They're captured by Indians and it looks like it's certain death for
the pair of them -- but wait a minute. That part of the story doesn't
start up until 120 pages into the book.
Before that we're introduced to a whole new set of characters, the most
important being two Indians -- Tenskwa-Tawa, who comes to be known as
the Prophet, and his brother Ta- Kumsaw. The Prophet sees the
possibility of a peaceful settling of the growing unrest between whites
and Native People, but Ta-Kumsaw means to unite the various Indian
tribes and drive the white man from their land.
So when Alvin and his brother are captured, it's into this conflict
that they become pivotal players. The plot grows more complex with the
new characters: whites willing to kill their own children -- making it
seem as though they were slain by Indians to escalate the coming war;
north in Canada, a French commander plotting against his king; a
mysterious weaver of fates, hidden in a secret valley....
What Card has done is create a fascinating alternative to what we know
of America's history, peopling it with believable characters, and
threading the whole together with a riveting plot. It's interesting
that, again, many of the antagonists are not so much evil, as simply
well-intentioned, but misguided. Like any of the conflicts in the real
world -- Northern Ireland, the Middle East. etc. -- there are no easy
answers. Not any more. Once, long ago, if things had been done
differently, we could have avoided the present situations. But that
opportunity's lost and what must be dealt with is what's at hand. Not
might have beens.
The fantastical element of Red Prophet is important to the book and
ably handled, but I found the characters -- their choices, mistakes,
sacrifices and glories -- far more intriguing. Put the two together,
and we're left with a fine second installment to this ongoing series.
Barking Dogs
Mitch Helwig is a Toronto cop in the year 1999 and he's just recently
lost his partner. There are no clues as to who killed him -- it was
just a matter of his being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- but
Helwig refuses to let it rest at that. He embarks on a personal crusade
against crime in his off-hours, no longer arresting criminals, but
executing them on the spot.
Put like that, Toronto author Terence M. Green's first novel Barking
Dogs sounds like any of a dozen film and book clones along the lines of
Brian Garfield's Death Wish or the "Dirty Harry" movies. And perhaps
that's why the artist or art director decided to model the cover
character after Clint Eastwood. But there's more going on here than
vigilante fantasies.
Barking Dogs is also a science fiction novel. There's not a whole lot
of exotic gadgetry in the first half or so of the book, but there is
the one implement that lies at the heart of it all: a Barking Dog. It's
a device that allows its bearer to tell if someone's telling the truth
or not -- an absolutely infallible lie detector that can be secreted on
one's person without anyone being aware of its presence.
There is also some interesting characterization explored along the way:
Helwig himself; his police chief who's on the verge of retirement and
just wants to do something meaningful before he goes; his wife who's
starting to look beyond their marriage for fulfillment. These are all
handled sensitively and with great care.
Where the book falters is in its antagonists and the flashback sequences
between Helwig and his partner. The Archangel, a crime lord, is simply
too one-dimensional, even given the number of pages in which we see
things from his viewpoint. He could have been far more intriguing,
especially given the raw material with which Green is working. As for
those flashback sequences, while they do show the closeness of Helwig's
relationship with his partner, the bantering and bonhomie between the
two goes on for far too long. It reads like padding.
Yet the book is still well worth reading. There are surprises in the
plot, the prose is clean, and the other characterization -- especially
that of Helwig himself, is superb.
A Fall of Princes
The fact that ninety percent of the high fantasy coming out today is of
a similar tiresome sameness is so true that just talking about it makes
me feel bored. Happily, there's still that ten percent of the Good
Stuff to look for and, of that ten percent, a new book by Judith Tarr
is something I always look forward to reading.
A Fall of Princes concludes her three-volume Avaryan Rising sequence
set in the kingdoms of northern Han-Ianon and southern Han-Gilen. In
The Hall of the Mountain King we were introduced to the rival princes
of Han-Ianon: Moranden, who has given his allegiance to the Moon; and
Mirain, raised in Han-Gilen and the son of the Son, born of an
immaculate conception. The story was told from the viewpoint of
Mirain's reluctant squire, Vadin, and ended with Mirain defeating
Moranden and taking the throne.
But the Moon's influence is not so easily combated. In The Lady of
Han-Gilen we learned that She was making a new threat against Mirain,
appearing in the form of his old enemy, a Moon priestess known as the
Exile. The viewpoint character in this second book was Eilian, a
princess of Han-Gilen, who had promised herself to Mirain and proved to
be another reluctant participant in the new struggle.
The third and concluding volume again deals with two princes: Sarevan,
the son of Mirain and Eilian; and Hirel, son of the Southern Emperor
with whom Sarevan's father has been at war for as long as he has held
his throne, although at the time of the book's opening a ceasefire of
sorts has been in effect for a number of years. The princes make
fascinating foils for each other, almost like personifications of the
left brain/right brain theory as they interact.
Like the first two books, the third volume can stand on its own, though
naturally, when they're put together, they tell one longer story. It's
a traditional high fantasy as well, with the right amounts of magic and
intrigue, journeying about and wonders, told in a comfortable style
that Tarr makes her own, even if her plots don't stretch too far from
the genre's perimeters. Except....
Well, I don't want to give anything away, but in the midst of the war
between the two empires, amongst the quests and gradual unfolding philosophy
that Dark and Light need each other to survive, Tarr manages to pull
off such a surprise that it sets the entire book on its ear. Wonderfully so.
And no, I'm not going to tell you what it is. Go read the book.
I doubt you'll be disappointed. The clarity of Tarr's prose and the
warmth with which she regards her characters -- a warmth that's easily
conveyed to the reader -- makes her writing a delight to read. And
while I've said it before, it bears repeating: there are few who do
this kind of book better than Judith Tarr.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus
I love an author who isn't afraid to take chances, who doesn't allow
him or herself to be bound to either one genre or previous successes,
but rather is willing to grow with each subsequent book, to constantly
explore new ground.
Parke Godwin's a good example of this kind of an author.
Right, I can hear some of you say. Wasn't he responsible for yet
another Arthurian trilogy? Well, yes. But even there he took chances.
Arthur as the viewpoint character. What happened to Guenevere after
Arthur's death. An exploration of religion through the eyes of a saint
and a lost race of people that legend names faerie.
He did all that. And then he moved on again. To the glorious success
(at least in literary terms) of A Truce With Time which was as far from
his previous work in terms of subject matter as Robert E. Howard was
from Tolstoy. And now this.
Waiting for the Galactic Bus, simply put, is a black comedy.
Five million years ago, two aliens, stranded on our world, create the
human race. Eventually, as the twentieth century draws to a close and
they see yet another negative catalyst (a la Hitler, etc.) about to
rise and plunge the world into a new age of darkness, they decide to do
something about it. They take the parents-to-be of this anti-avatar --
one Roy Stride, a racist and fascist, and one Charity Stovall, who has
a great deal of potential, only no chance to use it -- and run them
through a gauntlet that would have done James Branch Cabell proud.
The simple lesson at the heart of this book is that you shouldn't yearn
too strongly for something, because you just might get it and discover
that it's not at all what you wanted. Each of these two major
characters confronts just that situation -- in a place that bears no
resemblance to Heaven or Hell, but is considered to be one or the other
by many, depending on their viewpoint. What happens after that? Read
the book.
Let me just say that Godwin's never been in finer form. His dialogue
crackles; his humor isn't the slapstick from TV sitcoms, but a true
humor based in part upon the human condition (listen if we can't laugh
at ourselves....) and all the stronger, and yes, more poignant, for
that; and most importantly he doesn't take any easy ways out. The
outcome of the book is based upon the characters and the characters
remain true to themselves throughout.
I said earlier that this book would have made Cabell proud, and I mean
that, in only the best sense. Godwin remains his own writer, but he's
the first to come so close to something like Cabell's Jurgen -- a
writer I would have love to still be alive today and writing about
contemporary situations -- yet still retain both a modern sensibility
and his own voice. For that he deserves a hearty bravo.
The Silver Glove
Fourteen-year-old Valentine Marsh is back in Suzy McKee Charnas' new
novel, The Silver Glove, and once again she's caught up in the
mysterious magic otherworld that runs side by side with that of the
more mundane New York City in which she lives.
This time an evil sorcerer is after her grandmother. He's also
collecting the souls of street people with which he's going to
resurrect dead warriors in a battle on a far-off world. He's even got
Val's mother under his sway and all that stands against him is Val, who
knows next to nothing about magic, except that it's real and it can
hurt you, and her grandmother who might be suffering from Alzheimer's.
I liked the first book in this series, The Bronze King (Houghton
Mifflin, 1985), and I like this one as well. Charnas' young heroine has
a likable voice in her first person narrative and there are wonderful
touches throughout as magic wrecks mayhem using everyday items as both
talismans (the silver glove of the title) and dangers (stalking
bicycles, killer kites).
It's a quick read, but a most entertaining one.
Crazy Time
When, in the opening pages of Kate Wilhelm's Crazy Time, a computer
hacker playing a war game with a government computer accidentally
triggers a test laser, "Corky" Corcoran is literally blown to pieces.
Or rather, his physical and mental being are broken down into their
smallest components and spread across the universe.
With an effort, Corky can temporarily bring himself back together again --
usually by focusing on psychologist Lauren Steele who was the last
person he saw before the accident. Unfortunately his ethereal presence
makes Lauren think she's losing her mind. And it makes a leftover
paranoid General from the Cold War, one "Trigger Happy" Musselman,
believe that the pair are actually "commies" trying to subvert
America's greatness with some dirty plot that he basically makes up as
he goes along. (Although, I should add, that Musselman believes in it
all wholeheartedly.)
How this all works out makes for one of Kate Wilhelm's most
entertaining books to date. It has the feel of Thorne Smith to it, not
to mention Gary Grant comedies like Bringing up Baby, but retains a
contemporary feel for all it's old-fashioned sense of fun. The point
of view tends to shift around a lot -- often within a scene, which can
be irritating -- but that's a small carp when one takes the whole
lighthearted romp into account.
Go out and have some fun with this one.
Velocities
I met you long ago, but you wouldn't have known, for you
weren't there. Only your ghost.
The ghost that slid out of one of your books and met me in a
train station long abandoned....
As the above quote that leads into Jack Dann's "Night Meetings" can
attest, speculative poetry is still alive and well -- at least it is in
the pages of the occasional poetry journal, Velocities.
The magazine has had a run of only five issues -- from 1982 when the
first issue appeared, to the most recent issue out this year -- but
each issue has had enough good material in it to make it required
reading for sf readers who want a fully-rounded view of the genre.
Naturally the older issues are out of print, but Ocean View Books has
now collected them together in an attractive package (that admittedly
gets more professional in appearance with each subsequent issue).
What do you get? What's going on here?
Some of the names will be familiar -- Robert Frazier, Joe Haldeman, Kim
Stanley Robinson, Steve Resnic Tem, Suzette Haden Elgin -- others not,
but there's something happening in these pages, something thought-provoking,
at times irritating, at times lyrical, always fascinating -- whether
it's the subtly of Dann's ghost stepping from the pages of a book, the
hard science voice that can be found in Bruce Boston's "A Feast for the
Vanquished" ("Warring buggers all/in the war-gone streets,/the night
condenses/on their sticky gear....") or the juxtapositioning of sheer
lyricism with cold facts in Gene Van Troyer's "The Whole Message"
(compare lines like "the way she looked at things;/these particles of
her life/are strewn/like winter stars/across the walls...." with
"Holograms are in every way/like the objects they represent....").
You won't like everything you find collected in this boxed collection
of Velocities , but I'd be very surprised if you didn't find enough to
make you feel the money you paid for them was well-spent. If your local
store doesn't carry the boxed set, write to: Ocean View Books, Box
4148, Mountain View, CA 94040 and tell them OtherRealms sent you.
The Silicon Mage
Barbara Hambly's The Silicon Mage brings back computer programmer
Joanna Sheraton from the first book of the duology, The Silent Tower.
This time Joanna must rescue the mage Antryg Windrose from the Silent
Tower -- an impossible task -- and then with Windrose's help, try to
defeat the Dark Mage Surakin who has combined his world's magic with
computer technology from our world to create a computer that will feed
on the life force of both worlds.
What's that? Did I hear someone say that that's pretty well the plot of
the first book as well?
I'm afraid that's right. Certainly the incidents are different, but the
basic thrust of the storyline, the sections with Joanna, Antryg and the
warrior Caris crossing the otherworldly landscape on their impossible
quest.... It's hard to deny the sameness in both volumes that's
especially noticeable in the first hundred pages or so of book two.
But -- you knew there'd be a but, didn't you? -- Hambly does remain a
very entertaining writer and while I wouldn't recommend you read the
two books of this duology too closely together, they're still quite
enjoyable. Hambly has a real gift for characterization -- especially
bringing stereotypical high fantasy archetypes such as her mage Antryg
vividly to quirky life -- so much so that her characters are always a
treat, and her prose carries the story along in the best page-turning
"what happens next" fashion.
I had fun with this, and I don't doubt you will too, but I do wish the
plot had not seemed so familiar.
The Nightingale
The third book in the Ace Fairy Tales series -- an ongoing series of
fantasy novels retelling classic tales that's been edited by Terri
Windling -- sports a gorgeous cover by series-designer, Tom Canty. But
good as that cover is, it doesn't hold a candle to what's inside the book.
I might as well admit it straight away: I'm going to be blathering about
this one, just trying to find the words to describe how much I enjoyed it.
Kara Dalkey's contribution to the series is Uguisu: The Nightingale.
She's taken the classic Hans Christian Anderson story and recast it so
that it's set in Japan now, rather than China, and the nightingale is a
young woman named Uguisu who plays the flute. But recast though the
elements that make up the story have been, Dalkey hasn't changed the
heart of the story, nor in fact the events or the order in which they
take place. They simply have new faces to show us.
But what faces they are. Through prose that is lyric with a sense of
old Japan, yet thoroughly approachable to a modern viewpoint, Dalkey
has brought the courtly world of Japan's Heian period vividly to life.
The intrigues are there, the courtly exchanges of poetry, the gods and
goddesses. Her characters are both fairy tale archetypes and living,
breathing people. And through it all, underpinning every part of the
storyline at the same time as it rises effortlessly above to point the
way the words must go, is that old classic fairy tale; happily
unchanged, yet thoroughly transposed.
"The Nightingale" was always one of my favorite fairy tales when I was
a child -- right up there with "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", "The Seven
Swans" and the "Jack" tales -- and I'll admit to having been nervous at
how a retelling of it would turn out. I shouldn't have been. With the
grace and clarity of a haiku, Dalkey spins the words out from her mind
to book page to our minds in a manner that comes very close to matching
the impact of the original story upon which her novel's based. And if
you love that original story as much, you'll know that's high praise indeed.
Look, I said I was going to blather. Fair warning and all that. But I was
utterly charmed by this tale and its telling, and I think you will be too.
We're out of room again. Next time we'll look at David J. Skal's
Antibodies, some of John Shirley's recent work, a new novel by Eric Van
Lustbader and...but, no. Let's leave a few surprises.
OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Copyright 1988
by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
One time rights have been acquired from the contributors. All rights
are hereby assigned to the contributors.
OtherRealms may not be reproduced in any form without written
permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be
distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights,
author and publication information remain intact.
No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way
without the express permission of the author.
