One of The Great Bull Loons

Every book I read is about breakups. Or maybe that’s just life.

I finished Years of Rice and Salt sometime in January, on the first week of Suzie’s current visit. It does drag down the further along it goes, a relentless march of set-pieces and lectures and characters bubbling up through each other’s lives on their myriard reincarnations. The final movement is awash in lectures and echoes, including even an alternate-reality version of the book itself, written by “old red ink” from Samarkand, rather than Kim Stanley Robinson (there must be a pun there, but it eludes me). But it caught me, with its intense reflection on the life of a revolutionary-turned-history teacher that had time to see all his life’s achievements – politics, family, personal goals – grow hollow and without efect. And suddenly, reading of him and thinking of me, I felt myself being washed away into oblivion in the torrent of history, but yet somehow embedded in it. Life is meaningless only if you’re the one living it.

This Saturday I finished E.R. Eddison The Worm Ouroboros (apparently you can read the whole thing online at Sacred Texts, but I think it’s worth getting the book). This is one of those great antecedants of modern fantasy, a pre-Tolkien work by one of the writers Walter John Williams calls The Great Bull Loons, writers who were pursuing mad, beautiful ideas long before fantasy was anything you’d call a genre.
Eddison writes prose the likes of which has not been seen since the Seventeenth century (as the introduction puts it). I’d call his language “Shakespearean”, but actually it would be more correct to point to John Webster as his influence (according to this review at Wizards of the Coast, of all places, which does contain a big spoiler). I first read examples of his text in Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays The Language of the Night, in particular in a great essay where she talks about how “proper” high fantasy needs to use suitably high language; the Lords of Elfland do not speak like politicians in Washington DC, she says. Her examples of “how it’s done” were Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien, and Eddison is probably the least inimmitable of the three: his descriptions, dialogue, and written texts (complete with authentic-style irregular spelling!) don’t contain a single false note, and his gorgeous, tangled sentences just urge you to read on. Near the end, I was seized, as when I read Dunsany, with the desire to read this text aloud: this is prose that should be declaimed, not read in silence.
The actual story, once we dispense with an awkward framing device, is about the struggles and mighty deeds of the lords of two great kingdoms, Demonland and Witchland. While the lords of Demonland are clearly the heroes, they are too perfect to really be interesting. However, Eddison’s villains, the king of Witchland and his lords, are delightful, mixing nobility and venality, tragic heroism with basest treachery. The Demons, as they themselves realize, are only really interesting when fighting the Witches.
I found this a surprising and delightful book, despite some flaws (the plot seems to meander a bit, and Eddison loves his descriptions, of landscapes, weather and ornately decorated palaces, as well as long, long rosters of names, far more than any reader would).

And then I put down that book, and picked up Valis.
I’m still adjusting to the cluture shock.