Somnopolis

Thomas Pynchon’s latest comes quick on the heels of Against the Day and clocking in under five hundred pages is doubly surprising for this is an author who has vanished for years at a time, only for a large opus to suddenly appear every odd decade.  Like Salinger, or Terrence Malick he is seen as an eccentric recluse, whose output can divide readers between those who find him incomprehensible, or a revelation.

I confess I find his books to be a struggle sometimes. Characters and locations sidle up to the reader without warning, as Pynchon’s sentences are long flowing threads that need to be concentrated on. Nothing can be taken for granted as the goal is not so much ease of comprehension, but taking the literary form to strange new places.

So Gravity’s Rainbow ends in a Cabalist fugue, while Inherent Vice introduces us to the stoned thought patterns of Doc Sportello, whose every utterance is a minefield of question marks. Pynchon may give readers the impression of resorting to automatic writing on occasion, but there is a disciplined confusion of form and style here.

As I have said here before, this book reminds me of The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye. Both films took the model of a Raymond Chandler story and then aerated the claustrophobic noir form with the breezy indolence of post-loved up LA. Doc has a lot in common with the Dude, his stoned amicability allowing him to cruise into danger and blithely ignore the threats of powerful men. His way of life is a thorn in the side of ‘straight’ culture, as he appears to have found a neat middle-ground between the compromises of selling out and the naive hedonism of hippies.

While the Coens parodied Marlowe with the Dude, an unemployed bowler discussing the case of the Big Lebowski as if he has become convinced he is an actual PI – Doc Sportello has a detective’s licence and a reputation as a man who can be trusted to get the job done. Often pro bono. He even has a contact in the LAPD – Bigfoot Bjornsen – although the Swedish giant is just as likely to be Doc’s torturer as ally. The grudging respect between the two thankfully never devolves into the stereotypical ‘buddy up’, model of Hollywood. Doc is under no illusions. LA is haunted by the dual phantoms of the Watts riots and Charles Manson. He and his ‘kind’, are hated by the police and the feeling is more than mutual. Mention is made of the Mod Squad, the show that argued it was cool to be a narc. Doc is wise enough to bite the hand that feeds him.

The cover jacket blurb to Inherent Vice mentions that this is a departure for Pynchon, his own take on the detective novel. The plot does contain the usual tropes. Doc is hired to investigate two cases that are related. He finds himself caught in the middle of a massive conspiracy involving sex, drugs and real estate. Even the old standard of the femme fatale enters the proceedings, his ex Shasta who hires him to look into what soon becomes a missing person’s case.

In the end though I believe Inherent Vice fits neatly into the Pynchon canon. Like Against The Day, Vineland and Gravity’s Rainbow it is a story that revolves around the disillusionment with an era. The sixties are cosily remembered as a time of free love and the peace movement. Pynchon reminds us that Helter Skelter forever damned the hippies in the public eye as potential cults plotting murderous rampages and justified widespread police aggression. When so much politically was at stake, the idealism of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy’s Camelot enshrined by martyrdom, characters seem more interested in discussing episodes of Gilligan’s Island, The Mod Squad, or Dark Shadows. Sinking into nostalgia and witless trivia the sixties was transformed into a fiction of itself before it had ended. As Doc shambles from one adventure to another, he seems to represent a curious wisdom. Everyone is compromised, so why not trust the bad guys to do something right for a change?

“What, I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn’t give odds either way.”

Author Dan Roff and artist Chris Lane’s Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection had the misfortune of being published in 2009, some years after Max Brooks gave a one-two punch to the horror genre with the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. Both books had the clever conceit of being a collection of accounts of experiences  with the undead told by survivors, neatly doubling as short stories using zombies as a device in multiple locations and environments.

Roff and Lane rely on the old horror standard of the ‘found document’, in this case an illustrated diary. Dr Robert Twombly, a Seattle based haematologist, was working in a medical laboratory in the city during the initial outbreak. He resorts to describing the progress of the infection almost as a coping mechanism. Twombly has a habit of documenting migration patterns of birds as part of his study. The book begins with one such entry before the worldwide outbreak of the infection in January 2011. Throughout the entries that follow Roff and Lane refer to Twombly’s interest in animals frequently. He notes the behaviour of dogs around the undead and seems more at ease striking up relationships with them than other humans. He even wonders whether they can also be infected, which sets him off on a quest of sorts, travelling across the zombie infested wilderness to discover the cause of the outbreak.

Right there Roff has introduced some new elements into the zombie sub-genre. How such an epidemic might affect animals is not examined that often. One of the few examples I can think of is Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, where a pet dog was used to deliver supplies to a human trapped by marauding zombies. Secondly an actual cause is identified – and it’s a pharmaceutical one. George Romero took the decision never to reveal the reason why the dead started to return to life and devotees like Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg followed his lead in Shaun of the Dead, mocking films that do give a explanation.

 Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection becomes something of a warning then against the increasing separation of civilization from the natural world. One of the most entertaining sequences is Twombly’s encounter with a vegan rock band who are well used to travelling on the road in their van, quickly adapting to the outbreak. Lane’s image of a bass guitar being used to decapitate a zombie is a definite highlight.

However, while this is an interesting addition to the canon, the book is a quick read with nothing especially new on offer. Whereas Brooks broke the zombie tale out of its Romero-constraints (who is to say guns would work? Is fortifying a position really a sensible move against a foe that continually replenishes its numbers? What makes you think an island would be safe – zombies can’t drown!) Roff and Lane’s story is ultimately predictable. Twombly’s traumatised reaction is well realized – seeking to exorcise the horrors he has witnessed by capturing them in his diary illustrations, only to be plagued by nightmares regardless – however, the scenario is nihilistic in the most traditional sense. There is even a no nonsense Final Girl named Katherine who seems to stray into the book from her own story and then leave.

I worry that zombies, vampires and werewolves are saturating the market. Too often the stories repeat the standards of earlier entries, with each new book or film looking to be the definitive tale of the supernatural, only to retread the same steps with perhaps a glossier feel. Over the weekend I caught an episode of Supernatural which featured a nightmare vision of America overrun by the demonically possessed. The scariest moment in the whole gore-fest was a single phrase. “President Palin.”

Brrrr!

Immediately after finishing Jeff Noon’s Falling Out Of Cars, I started on this novel by the brothers Strugatsky. You may have heard their names mentioned in relation to Avatar lately, as some wags have suggested James Cameron ripped off a sequence of novels titled the Noon Universe by the two Soviet era sf authors.

Leaving aside the surname of the previous book’s other making for a neat piece of synchronicity with the Strugatsky’s work, I was also struck that both books are not so much post-apocalypse as much as transapocalyptic – the catastrophes at the centre of both novels are ongoing and humankind has adapted.

Roadside Picnic introduces us to a group of characters who live and work in the town of Harmont, the site of an inexplicable alien ‘Visitation’. The location itself is subject to many strange phenomena, including possible changes to the laws of physics, freak gravitational pressures and the rumoured existence of mutants. Called by locals and the professionals scientists alike The Zone, it is only one of several such places dotting the surface of the Earth. It is theorised that the various Zones resemble the scaring left by bullets striking the edge of a revolving globe.

‘Red’ Schuhart is a Stalker, an illegal smuggler of people and artifacts to and from the Zone. The novel drops in on him at various points of his life detailing his career as one of a dwindling number of old hands willing to risk their lives entering the strange site of the Visitation. Dogged by regrets as to the risks he has run, the danger he has placed clients who have entrusted their lives to him and the potential effects of exposure to any future offspring, Schuhart is a guilt-wracked figure. He is pushed onwards by the need to make a living from his work as a Stalker despite the risks, and also excited by his undeniable talent at surviving the excesses of the Zone.

A rival Stalker known as Buzzard (named for his habit of exiting the Zone alone, with his companions dead or lost) is rumoured to possess an alien artifact known as the Golden Sphere. This eventual McGuffin serves as the object that takes Schuhart on ‘one last job’, in the finest tradition of novels based around criminal activities. The sphere itself is rumoured to grant the wishes of whomever possesses it, which could easily have led to a cop-out ending (”I wish none of this ever happened…”), but thankfully does not. The Strugatskys are aware of the balance that needs to be maintained between the vagueness required for describing the unknowable (the Zone itself being mundane in appearance, but filled with hidden dangers) and an emotional connection to the lives of those affected by these events.

Falling Out Of Cars had its magick mirror and Roadside Picnic its alien artifact that grants wishes. Both serve to motivate the protagonists to keep moving, despite their world becoming too strange to comprehend.  The central mystery of the Visitation remains unclear to the very end, but the Strugatskys hint at a possible cause in the title of the story.

For, as one scientist at the Harmont Research Institute suggests, what if the Zone itself is meaningless? Not the site for an invasion of Earth, or even a staging area for negotiations with a benevolent race that seeks to make humans accustomed to their existence. What if the aliens were merely passing through, like a family on a daytrip on their way to the countryside, who stopped at the side of the road for a picnic and then left plastic wrappers, tin cans, oil leakage and gum in their wake to the confusion of the native animals that eventually came to investigate?

What if life itself is equally unknowable, without meaning or purpose and human civilization has no grand destiny awaiting in the stars, but instead needs to simply look after itself, raise families and strong communities that can withstand the quotidien tragedies and difficulties that make up living?

The Strugatskys’ novel was of course most famously adapted for the screen by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker, profoundly moving much like his other sf picture Solaris. Tarkovsky largely abandons the text of Roadside Picnic, focusing instead on the nature of the Zone and the relationship of the Stalker to it. He guides two men, each with a hidden agenda, to the heart of the Zone where there is said to be a room that can grant a man’s most deeply held wish. Stripping out most of the novel’s content allows Tarkovsky to concentrate on what he feels is most striking about the novel, using long, unbroken takes to suggest the strangeness of the landscape in the Zone. The three men are unnamed, the Stalker addressing them by their professional roles. They joke, confide and argue just to remind each other why they are risking their lives, or even to hide from what their life to date has amounted to. It’s a strangely beautiful and striking film, that teases with hints of the paranormal, achieving a sense of wonder in a slow, creeping shot of  a pool stagnant water.

No motion-captured, CGI blue people required.

“Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

It’s been some time since Jeff Noon first assaulted the 90’s with a debut that suggested an e’d up Philip K. Dick with a masters degree in English folklore. I haven’t read Vurt or Pollen in a good few years, but I remember the exciting feeling of having discovered something new, a fresh voice in British sf, that hinted at an all-too-soon future bacchanal bearing down on Manchester’s streets.

It’s been a while so since I last wrestled with Noon’s dreamlike prose, but over the weekend I gobbled down Falling Out Of Cars, which I had avoided when it was first published due to severe critical mauling. Now there are certain irritants present in the text. Britain has been afflicted by a horrific disease that causes people to go insane if they view their own reflections. Mirrors are avoided as a matter of course. Watches present a threat to sanity, as the ability to comprehend time has deserted the general populace. The only way to maintain some shreds of sanity is to take daily doses of the commercial drug Lucidity, or Lucys as they are called.

As the story is told from the point of view of someone infected by this disease, descriptions tend to veer off, sentences slow to a stop followed by an infuriating collection of periods and the dialogue reads like a drug-addled student who has just been awoken on the floor of a dance club the morning after the night before.

After a while though I grew to understand that Noon had set himself certain rules and these narrative quirks were symptoms of that discipline. Compare to Blindness by Jose Saramago, critically applauded despite the continuing anonymity of its characters, that facilitated a world drowned in shadow. Removing names allowed Saramago to provide further insight into how bewildering and strange it must be to become suddenly blind. By positing a world with ‘infected’, mirrors and strange spaces, Noon has robbed his characters of that essential building block of the individual’s psyche – Lacan’s mirror stage.

The French psychoanalyst posited the theory of the mirror stage to explain how an infant individuates itself, understanding that it is a seperate person. Under Noon, identity becomes fluid in a world where no one can see themselves. Most freeze in confusion, psychologically stalled. Others find new mantras or exercises to distract from the condition. Even the practice of taking Lucys, keeping sweet as the main protagonists term it, allows for a kind of structure and purpose.

Further direction, and the erstwhile plot of the novel, is provided by a quest to collect magical shards of a broken mirror, that each have some relevance to the overarching affliction suffered by the people in Britain. The shattering of the mirror is compared to the ur-myth of Narcissus drowning after falling in love with his reflection. Apparently the infected mirrors are somehow captured aspects of the natural world, the water that the tragic Greek stared into. This is all very poetic, but no actual reasons are provided and no solutions offered.

Noon has drawn inspiration from Lewis Carroll for his book Automated Alice (which I seem to recall was briefly mentioned in Bryan Talbot’s exhaustive Alice in Sunderland). I also see some hints of Carroll in Falling Out Of Cars though, with its systematic insanity resulting from a set of rules. The mathematic escalation of madness, the lunacy inspired by the number zero, it settles beneath the straining narrative like a horrible marsh, threatening to suck you down.

Cheerful fare so!

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Loving it so far, a strange noir-ish gumbo that takes in The Big Lebowski, The Long Goodbye and even Chinatown.

The jacket seems to almost self-consciously announce itself as a ‘novel’, an admission perhaps that Pynchon is wandering into what might be considered genre fiction. Still I feel Inherent Vice may even be related to Vineland, that other contemporary Pynchon novel with a befuddled hero caught up in the affairs of The Man.

Enjoying it very much so far.

The debut novel of Austin Grossman is a strange beast. It’s a novel that at its heart is a love letter to comic books, the bastard cousin of the more refined print-based artform, criticised in the past as a childish interest suitable only for illiterates. Grossman himself is feted as a newcomer to genre fiction, although a quick wiki reveals his father is a poet, his mother a novelist, his twin brother also a writer, his sister a scultor – and Grossman himself well-known in the computer game industry for his involvement in

• Ultima Underworld II
• System Shock
• Deus Ex
• Thief: Deadly Shadows
• Tomb Raider: Legend

Plot based Role-Playing Games for the most part, hardly the usual first-time author juvenalia. He’s even written for the New York Times! Then there’s the promotional artwork of Bryan Hitch that features in the book, the comic-book artist credited with inventing the ‘widescreen’, aesthetic that has allowed comics to further ape the visual excesses of big budget summer blockbuster movies. Not the typical amateur cover art then.

Thankfully Soon I Will Be Invincible carries the weight of expectation ably. Its knowing title is a clue to the awareness Grossman brings to the comic book tropes on show. The story focuses on two first-person narratives. Doctor Impossible, a twelve-time imprisoned supervillain who has a horrible habit of blurting his secret plans and blames his villainous behaviour on a personality disorder; and Fatale, a new superheroine plagued by self-doubt in the typical Modern Age fashion, whose tragic origin allows for that other great trope of contemporary comics, the fetishizing of the female body courtesy of her cybernetic implants. Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven-of-Nine meets Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias.

Doctor Impossible, the arch supervillain who just will not quit trying to take over the world, is the stronger character of the two. Given the title I suspect the original draft may have solely focused on his attempts to defeat the hero team The Champions. Perhaps Grossman felt this was too narrow. In any case courtesy of the two POV characters we follow the progression of the plot, with the heroes attempting to stop Doctor Impossible following his latest jailbreak and solve the mystery of their colleague CoreFire’s disappearance.

We are invited to sympathize with the villainous Doc, despite his continued efforts to takeover the world. Even he is unable to explain exactly why he acts as he does. He appears to be of the opinion that his vast intellect actually drives him to be evil, that to see the world as he does predestines supervillainy. In that he follows the Stan Lee tradition of villains who are at times misunderstood, occasionally even noble. Doctor Doom may be a totalitarian dictator whose hatred of Reed Richards is spurred on by vanity – but he also is a bereft son, whose study of the occult was undertaken to rescue his gypsy mother from demons. In Kevin Smith’s Mallrats Lee makes a cameo appearance and delivers dialogue he wrote for the Spider-Man villain the Vulture, which revealed a vulnerable side to the costumed criminal another writer may have ignored.

Grossman’s Doctor Impossible is also not a world away from Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible, or The Venture Brothers’  The Monarch – both ultimately delusional romantics who have been left disillusioned by the world. The heroes to them are merely the next stage in development of the schoolyard bullies they grew up with. CoreFire’s invulnerability lends him a smugness that’s similar to Whedon’s Captain Hammer: Everyone’s a hero in their own way / Everyone’s got villains they must face / They’re not as cool as mine / But folks you know it’s fine to know your place

The post-Marvel Age, post-Watchmen deconstruction trend allowed writers to re-examine superheroes with regard to their motivations and true intent. Batman became a psychopath, the X-Men child soldiers in a battle of ideologies, Superman a fascist boyscout and the Incredible Hulk a victim of abuse. Grossman plays with this exaggerated comic book ‘realism’, but undercuts it with genuine affection for supers.

At one point Fatale even wonders self-consciously if we have entered a ‘Rust Age’, in keeping with the classifying of different comic book periods as Golden Age, Silver Age etc. The general rule of thumb is that the earlier comic books represent a more hopeful era. Comic book historians have to turn a blind eye to the prevalent racism and misogyny to maintain such a claim, but it’s one that still holds some currency. Fatale herself, with her badgirl look and militarised powers is firmly in keeping with the modern era’s blending of sex and violence. Grossman has her repeatedly question her origins though, obscured by a convenient bout of amnesia and in that query the treatment of characters like Fatale, who are oftentimes designed to titillate rather than exist as independent female superheroes. That this all becomes a function of the plot itself displays just how much Grossman intended the book to be both a critique and a homage to the comics he loves.

Soon I Will Be Invincible I was gratified to discover is much more than a printed version of some gamer’s Champion’s campaign. It’s quite possibly the most entertaining book about comics since Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

This one will be brief, as I have learned to my cost that criticising Mr Hamilton, author of The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, online is tantamount to waving a red flag at a large bull. Whose hooves have been specially filed so it can type up its literary opinions.

Anyway, why do I hate Peter F. Hamilton’s patented brand of space opera?

Bionic genitals. It’s that simple. The Reality Dysfunction deserves to have won the Bad Sex Award retroactively every year since its publication in 1996. Of course, due to it being locked in the sf ghetto folk like Melvyn Bragg get the kudos, but seriously, judges of terrible literary sex, I implore you to consider the merits of Mr Hamilton.

Said enhanced genitals ensure that the adventures of our hero as he bedhops across the stars during a galactic crisis are long and unendurable. See that’s why I really hate them. It’s not prudery on my part. The conceit actually lengthens the tiresome description of the sex itself!

There’s also unpleasant scenes with possessed cadavers being transformed into rotting zombies sprouting spines; or a stage Irishman ressurected in the far future who is indistinguishable from the racist caricatures of 19c Punch magazine.

But that’s just a side-dish of awfulness. Bionic genitals people. Yuck.

One of my favourite films is the quirky Jump Tomorrow, a multi-lingual road trip across America. It features a scene with a Frenchman and an Englishman (Gosford Park’s James Whilby) arguing over the relevance of the French language. All the great Gallic thinkers and writers are dead, whereas English thrives thanks to the dominance of America.

You can see a similar smugness with regard to Russian culture. All those tolstoys and dostoyevskys had been buried by fukuyamism, relics of a dead culture, historical artifacts of the conflict between ‘freedom’ and despotism.

Except of course that’s nonsense. Russian letters are alive and well. In fact they are thriving on the fallout from the same conflict that buried the Soviet Empire. In Sergei Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch series the protagonist is caught in a century’s old conflict between the forces of good and evil – but takes the time to list the songs on his walkman as he wanders down a street. Lukyanenko’s novel was adapted into a film, which annihilated the Russian box office, inevitably drawing the attention of Hollywood. Some weighty handshakes later and the Night Watch books have been translated into English and a second sequel to the film set in America is due soon. Headcrusher by Alexander Garros and Aleksi Evdokimov reads like a post-Soviet Fight Club, as a highly educated young Latvian becomes increasingly disillusioned by the free market, realizing he is just another corporate drone. The cathartic diversions of Western culture, violent video games and movies, provide him with the inspiration to escape his fate, with bloody results.

I find it appropriate that the plot of Wanted, directed by Nightwatch’s Timur Bakmambetov, is very similar to Headcrusher. Stripped of the excesses of Mark Millar’s comic, it embraces the decadence of Western cinema violence, while also exploding a bomb beneath the drudgery of corporate neo-feudalism that its audience is subject to.

All of this is prelude to the clown prince Victor Pelevin. Like Slavoj Zizek, I am left unsure after each of his books just where the margin between parody and insight lies. Babylon focuses on the psychological conditioning of modern-day advertising by having its main character entire a state of drug-induced free-association, with commercial logos becoming transformed into ever-present Jungian archetypes. The Helmet of Horror appears to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, though it also appears to be a satire on philosophical wankery.

Just last week I finished The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, which cites its primary source as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The main character is a boyish prostitute, although Pelevin mines Eastern mythology by having her also be a shapeshifting fox named A Hu-Li. After a series of events almost lead to her exposure as an immortal shapeshifter, she encounters an intelligence officer who is also a were-creature named Alexander. The FSB officer is based on yet another literary character from the Russian canon and himself acknowledges this when A Hu-Li mentions Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog. The were-foxes it is revealed feed on human desire, whereas the were-wolves are in the service of the Russian government as oil-diviners.  The book is an attempt by A Hu-Li to describe her path to enlightenment, but as foxes are essentially imitative, she may only be imagining that she is experiencing such.

In the end the book is a satire on modern Russia and a pastiche of its literary and philosophical legacy. The fox A Hu-Li is tragic character frustrated that the long winter of the Cold War has not thawed enough, fondly reminiscing upon her former life in Asia. Alexander is plagued by loyalist fervour and machismo. He serves as Pelevin’s critique of Russian men and like the protagonist of Headcrusher finds himself out of place in a post-Communist world. The English translations of his books cannot come soon enough for me. I find it sad that the market sees fit to promote him as a ‘Russian Will Self’, whereas I find he shares little of the Englishman’s detached cynicism. He is to my mind a pop-literate tolstoyan, seeking the traces of the human condition among PSP games and blockbuster movies.

I’ve returned to Gene Wolfe, as I have been reminiscing about his The Book of the New Sun series lately. I enjoy his writing for being superbly literate and stylised, while at the same time unapologetically belonging to the fantasy genre. Fantasy, ghettoised as it is from the mainstream, is typified as a male, adolescent pursuit, which is why you will not find Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife stacked in the sf/fantasy section of your bookstore.

Wolfe confounds this prejudice by avoiding the adolescent cliches that reside in the ghetto, sketching intimate, yet bewildering stories of deceit and human frailty, with a fantastical central hook. The Fifth Head of Cerberus features a narrator who like Severian from The Book of the New Sun cycle, cannot be trusted. The twist in this story’s tale is not some sudden revelation, but an answer that resolves the peculiarities of the plot, only to prompt new questions.

Similar to the recent seminal picture Moon the story asks if a human could be conditioned to respond to the same series of stimuli, would they in themselves be a unique individual, or a ‘copy’. Parts Walt Whitman (“I am large, I contain multitudes”), parts Miss Havisham (”and with my teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and put ice in its place“) to my mind Wolfe has created a science fiction parable to rival these literary milestones.

My point is simple. There are no genres that should be defined in relation to some measure of quality so that one is better, or worse than another. Genre should only represent the nature of the content it describes.  There is only good writing and bad writing. And Gene Wolfe is a master.

I had a good feeling when I bought this book, much like I did with Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees. Partly because it also is published by Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks, which has done a wonderful job of republishing out-of-print fantasy books that deserve wider acclaim. It’s humbling to discover just how many writers have slipped beneath my radar.

Such as McKillip. Eld is written in a style similar to a classic fairytale. In fact it is hard to distinguish it from a tale by the Grimm brothers, so neatly observed is the use of conventions of the genre.

A young girl named Sybel, daughter of a powerful wizard, grows up after his death accompanied only by his menagerie of magical animals, hidden from the world in a mountain. She has learned from her father the ability to call any animal, or human and compel them to  do what she wishes. The opening with its description of how her father and his father before him lured young maidens to Eld to mate with was reminiscent of a Michael Moorcock book The Shores of Death that begins with an unfeeling father raising his daughter in a lone tower in the wilderness, or Jodorowsky’s Metabarons. It is clear that the birth of a daughter after three generations of male mages has broken the cycle and things are about to change. Sybel is an emancipated Rapunzel though, able to communicate her thoughts to her magical animals and sometimes travel across the land of Eldwold to steal tomes from rival wizards. Her greatest desire is to capture and tame the creature known as the Liralen, which has eluded her call since she first discovered it in one of those stolen books.

Then one day a man brings a child to the gates of Eld. The baby is the offspring of the king of Eldwold, whose wife has been having an affair with a rival prince. The man explains that he is the brother of that prince, who has been killed and that the kingdoms of Eldwold are at war. The king Drede is searching for the child, as he suspects it is illegitimate. The man begs Sybel to protect the baby and raise it in secret until the war is over and he has avenged the death of his brother.

Reluctantly Sybel accepts and the boy known as Tamlorn grows up in her household, reading the histories of the kingdom and playing with her animals. Then one day, after the boy has grown into a young man, the man named Coren returns to claim the king’s heir.

What follows is a plot filled with romance, intrigue and magic. McKillip has written a modern day fairytale that predates Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment by only two years, but deserves a chapter all to itself. It is a charming, wonderful book.