Thoughts on Lyonesse

I've recently finished reading Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy. It was something of a Herculean task for me; I started reading it at least six months ago, probably longer. My experience with the books became an epic saga akin to that contained in the series itself, with ups and downs, twists and turns, and sudden surprises. There were big gaps here and there where I didn't read any of it for weeks at a time. At other times I would devour a hundred pages in a day or two. Gradually I forced myself to the finish.

It's safe to say I liked it. Not as much as the Cugel books, which are Vance's most extraordinary masterpiece and I think probably the best written fantasy work in the canon (if you don't include anything by Gene Wolfe, to whom no comparison is really fair). But still, it is a stunning achievement, which Vance, as always, makes look incredibly easy: above everything else, it is just incredibly entertaining in the truest sense of the word. As well as making it look easy, Vance gives every impression he was having a whale of a time writing it, which almost certainly wasn't true - it must have taken far too much energy and craftsmanship - but the sense of fun that pervades the books is indisputable. It also has more emotional depth than the Dying Earth works; while Vance's voice is as objective and detached as ever, affection for the characters and concern for their fate seeps through.

There are flaws, of course. Aillas is a bit of a Mary Sue who you never feel is likely to fail at any stage in his adventures. The sub-plot (or overarching plot, depending on your view) of the struggle between the mages Tamurello and Murgen and the fate of Melancthe is consistently less interesting than the other goings-on. It doesn't particularly matter, because the charm of the characters, the gloriously understated narrative, the joy of the exclamation mark-riddled Vancian dialogue sweeps you along.

For somebody who isn't particularly renowned for his progressive sexual politics, Vance also manages to pull off, in Madouc and Suldrun, what almost no modern fantasist has ever done: written convincing, strong female leads - main characters who drive the plot, have great lines, and don't need men - without ever once falling prey to the idiotic notion so prevalent in fantasy fiction that in order to make women characters interesting you have to make them ass-kicking badasses.

As a D&D fan, what I took most from Lyonesse, though, was that it feels far more like D&D even than Vance's earlier work. If Lyonesse hadn't been written in the 80s, you'd swear it was more of an influence on Gygax and Arneson than the Dying Earth books. It has everything - the early, low level picaresque, the mid-game of establishing a career, the kingdom-building end-game. At times it has the random feel of a hex crawl; the sense that at any moment Vance will roll the random encounter dice and come up with a new event or encounter to change, willy-nilly, the course of the plot. And it has the fluctuating and sometimes startling changes in tone that are present in every game session: on one page the feel will be that of a light hearted fairy tale; on the next a brutal torture scene will be narrated with Vance's customary detachment; on the next characters will be engaging in the pulpiest of pulp fantasy adventure. Those tonal shifts are never jarring because Vance handles them so well, just as they are never jarring in a game session because it's just the way things are.

Give it a try if you can find it. I picked up a single-volume anthology on Kindle, and it provided me with a heck of a lot of reading. It's certainly better than 99% of the fantasy books I could have been reading for the first half of this year.

You Stupid Bookers

The 2010 Man Booker Prize winner was announced recently; it ended up being Harold Jacobson's The Finkler Question, which I'm willing to bet was probably an entertaining read - something that is quite unusual in Booker winners - as I've read some of Jacobson's stuff before and always liked it. (I doubt any American readers have heard of him; he's sort of like the British Jewish equivalent of Tom Robbins without so much of the fourth-wall-breaking.)

But it comes just as I'm re-reading Vance's Dying Earth stories, and the confluence of the two events really does hit home precisely how stupid and blinkered supposedly intellectual people can be. We fantasy fans are worldly enough by now to know that the literati loathe the genre, and fantasy authors will never get recognition even when they deserve it - that's par for the course; indeed it's a truism. But every so often a moment like this comes along and really hammers home the point: a man who could write something so absolutely perfect in every way as the Cugel stories had more creative power in his little finger than every Man Booker prize winner since the competition began, and yet his career gets almost no mention in any sort of discourse on modern literature - indeed I would be surprised to learn any literary establishment figures in the UK had even heard of him (I can't speak for the US.)

There are moments reading Vance where he is simply so brilliant, so much of a virtuoso, that you can hardly stand it. My particular favourite episode in all of the work of his that I've read is the chapter called (I think; I don't have the book in front of me) "At the Inn of the Blue Lamps", which comes near the start of Cugel's Saga. The depiction of gradual descent into drunkenness of the characters involved, the understated humour, the slightly sardonic detached tone in which it is written, and the joyous unfurling of the tightly-wrought and carefully constructed plot (the creation of which you haven't even noticed because it has been done with such aplomb) - it's enough to make you remember all over again just why literature is enjoyable and important. And yet, because it doesn't pretend to say anything about the human condition, or contemporary geopolitics, or gender, or multiculturalism, or [insert liberal bete noire of the week here], it apparently isn't worthy of the attention of anybody with a brain. What a strange and mysterious world we live in.