Fairy Tale - Stephen King

I was pleased as always to come across a new Stephen King novel last month. It’s comforting to know that he’s out there, and I’ll have something enjoyable form him to read every year or so. It’ll be a sad day when he’s gone.

Fairy Tale treads a similar path in broad strokes to another of his more recent works, 11/22/63. In both books, a young narrator befriends an old recluse and through their friendship discovers a portal to another world. Except in 11/22/63, it’s a question of when, and in Fairy Tale it’s a question of where. In this case, the world of Empis, a kingdom once majestic but defiled by a usurping king. Drawn to the world by the promise of a cure for his ailing dog, Charlie Reade finds himself slowly transformed into a storybook prince, albeit one with a dark side, and becomes embroiled in the struggle to right past wrongs and restore balance to the kingdom. The book follows and plays with fairy tale convention, demonstrating the allusive richness that King has become known for, especially in his later years.

The writing is pure King, effortlessly readable, with rich turns of phrase now again dropped in without tarnishing the sense of genuine dialogue needed in a first person account. As always, King’s characters are his strongest point, and the long set up as Charlie meets and befriends the cantankerous old Mr. Bowditch, scenes that would be mere water treading for a lesser author, are in some ways the best parts of the book.

Shardik - Richard Adams

A copy of Shardik has sat on my bookshelf for over fifteen years. I bought it as a teenager, fresh off the heels of reading the incomparable Watership Down and further intrigued by the character’s name check in the third Dar Tower book, The Waste Lands. I know I started it shortly after I bought it, but for whatever reason I put it down after fifty r so pages and didn’t pick it up again until a few weeks ago. I can understand why, as it is a long book written in a rich, almost antiquated style, and the plot simmers for quite awhile before flaming up into action. I’d read more challenging books by then, though, so perhaps it caught me when I was craving a breezier read. In any case, it sat unread on my shelf all this time, following me between houses and cities, always earning a place among my other books.

But now I’ve read it, and I can safely say I was missing out. Shardik is a fantastic book, densely woven with complex characters and a world envisioned in such detail that it almost seems real. it is the worldbuilding that aligns it with Watership Down, that and the fundamental optimism of its author, which survives the horrors enacted in both books only to emerge unscathed at the end of each. Otherwise, they are very different novels—so much so that I can’t help but admire the bravery (or thickheadedness) of Adams following up a highly successful children’s book about rabbits with a dense religious parable about the evils of slavery and the unfathomable nature of the divine.

The hero, a simple hunter named Kelderek, is greyer than his leporine counterparts in Watership. He starts out with a simple nobility that reminds me of Fiver, but Adams allows for his corruption when given the sacred role of envoy to Shardik, the bear god long worshipped on his home island of Ortelga but unseen for generations, until the chance arrival of an enormous bear driven ashore by a forest fire. Shardik has a rich cast, but Kelderek is its core, and Adams makes the bold choice of making him compromised by his decisions, breaking him down in the third act in a saintly scouring that allows him to reemerge, literally and figuratively cleansed.

Adams’ writing remains superb, deftly outlining the geography, history, and politics of the Bekla and the surrounding regions. His prose is strong, though in this book he has a tendency to use extended similes, in which a scenario is depicted in great detail—sometimes for whole paragraphs—then compared to the current action. As a device, it harkens back to classical texts, and gives the writing an air of antiquity, but there are periods where it feels somewhat repetitive, being employed over and over again in quick succession.

This is a small matter, though, and doesn’t detract form the book’s overall power. It deserves to be ranked among the great 20th century novels.

The Collected Fantasies Vol 1: The End of the Story - Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith is not a name I’d come across until recently. Though he is widely regarded as one of the three biggest voices to emerge from the Weird Fiction world of 1930s pulps, alongside Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, I would argue he has become the most obscure of the three. None of his works have received the major motion picture treatment, nor do any of his characters or stories have the universal name recognition of a Conan or a Cthulhu.

The reason for this may be that, unlike Lovecraft and Howard, who focussed the bulk of their talents and energy on short fiction, Smith was a poet above all, and seemed to consider prose writing as a side project of sorts, somethign to help pay the bills. It was, however, a very fruitful side project, since he wrote and published well over a hundred short stories in his lifetime, with 53 of them published in the seminal journal Weird Tales alone. (By comparison, Lovecraft, widely seen as the author of a sizable canon, wrote only 65 stories total).

Comparisons with Lovecraft are inevitable, and would not have been ill-received by the author—the two were friends and mutual admirers—but it is a gross oversimplication to call Smith’s work Lovecraftian. For one thing, he covered a much wider range of genres than Lovecraft, who dabbled in satire and fantasy on a couple of occasions, but for most of his literary career remained firmly fixed in the horror camp, veering only between cosmic and terrestrial strains.

Smith, on the other hand, wrote stories of high fantasy that hewed closer to Fritz Leiber or Robert E Howard, as well as sci-fi of a Bradburian or Vancian bent. Whiel certainly he favored plot over characters, as did Lovecraft, Smith’s creations are more full-blooded, bespeaking a greater comfort and familiarity with humanity than the perennial misfit Lovecraft ever managed (though Smith’s dialogue could be as stilted as Lovecraft’s at times, a fact that is so ubiquitous among pulps it seems more like a stylistic choice than a defect). Romance also gets more mileage in Smith’s writing, with characters professing love for one another and engaging in canoodling that, while hardly enough to go toe-to-toe with Tropic of Cancer, goes far beyond anything I remember from Lovecraft.

Smith is most regarded now for his prose style, rather than his stories, and it does bear a pleasing grandiloquence, though I think Lovecraft gets short shrift in this regard, since he too could cobble together gravity-defying towers of archaism-stuffed csubclauses that imporbably remained aloft. I enjoyed Smith’s writing now, but I would have absolutely loved it at 20, when my passion for earnest if strained metaphor had reached full flower (probably better I didn’t find it until late,r though; it would only have spurred on my worst impulses)

All told, Smith’s stories were a good find, and I intend to track down the second volume soon, Eventually, i suspect I’ll get all of them.

The Cloven Viscount - Italo Calvino

The Cloven Viscount is the first book in a trilogy called Our Ancestors. I read the second book, The Baron in the Trees, already, but the sequence of books doesn't seem especially important, as there is no connection between them in terms of plot or characters. Instead, the link between them is thematic, as each is set in a period of Italy's past and uses fantasy to explore the society found in that time.

In the Cloven Viscount, the eponymous nobleman Medardo of Terralba is cut in half by a cannonball. His two sides both live, with his right side encompassing all of the Viscount's evil, and the left side all of his good. Medardo's nephew narrates the story, but he remains so firmly in the background that you often forget he is a character.

The story reads as a parable, eschewing realism in favor of archetypes. The characters aren't psychologically complex, but the structure of the story is such that this feels like a deliberate choice and not a weakness. It reads a little like a fairy tale, in that the characters aren't meant to be seen as actual people, but rather as instruments to get at some deeper truth embedded in the story itself. The writing likewise reflects this approach, it simple eloquence belying its poetic richness and depth.

I adored The Baron in the Trees, and though Viscount didn't grip me with quite the same intensity, it was still excellent and encourages me to read the final book in the trilogy.

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

My god, I wish I came across this book when I was 13. I loved it at 33, and don't doubt I'll love it just as much when I eventually reread it (which I'm sure I will), but I think I would have loved it even more then. And not simply for its content—though as an avid tree-climber it would doubtless have gripped me--but for its melancholic whimsy. It reminds me in tone of Winnie the Pooh and, in a sense harder to define, of Louis Sachar’s Wayside books. Stories that seemed so fully realised that as a child I fell into them, walked about their pages for a while, and emerged at the final chapter ever so slightly changed.

The main character is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, who at the age of 12 has a fight with his father over dinner that leads him to climb into the trees and never come down. The story is narrated by his younger brother, who often relies on secondhand information and freely admits that certain passages are supposition on his part--a device that lends both uncertainty and verisimilitude to the story. The rest of the book is an episodic chronicling of Cosimo's life in the trees, with passages both prosaic (his inventive solutions for toiletry, sleep, and commerce) and heroic (battles with pirates and treacherous Jesuits). I loved the former as much as the latter, and the whole story flows effortless as a long campfire fable.

The prose is translated from the Italian, but retains a bit of Mediterranean flavour, evocative but not florid. It avoids the common pitfall of first person narratives where the narrator takes on the cadence of capital N Narration, losing the voice of the person who is supposedly telling the story. I never doubted the voice used here.

Italo Calvino is a name I'd heard for some time but never pursued, knowing nothing about him apart from that he was an author. I found The Baron in the Trees as a fluke, as it was mentioned in the comments of a Guardian article about a man who spent 2 years in a tree. Such happy accidents reinforce the value of always keeping an ear out for new titles. Sometimes the best stories come to you from unexpected places.