One of the inconveniences of being middle-aged is the difficulty in finding a good triple-decker fantasy novel to revisit the comfort they gave when I was fourteen. I suppose it's like petrochemicals: it didn't occur to me in my youth that I was mining decades of writing, E. R. Eddison and Mervyn Peake through Ursula Le Guin and all, the best of threescore years and ten. Between their natural rarity and my now-non-fourteen-year-old tastes (Anne McCaffrey used to make me happy) I don't even finish most first volumes any more.
I can't think of an analogy to energy dependence and smog and global warming. Perhaps without the soft path of fantasy I'd have only read pastorals, in the original Latin.
I wanted to know how this story turned out, although in hindsight it isn't as coherent even as it seemed at the time. The oddest disjunction is that the plot is gory and awful, but the author and most of the characters are bouncy and good-natured. In the course of events, these opposites combine by having almost all the deaths rather quick; people die by beheading, or having their spines severed, or by sorcerous flash-combustion. They don't die of gut wounds or infections or third-degree burns or anything smelly. This seems like a healthy absentmindedness on the part of the author, if not outright intentional.
There is a second volume, but this one ends pretty well as a finished book. The ends aren't tied up but they're no looser than they were at the in medias res start of the picaresque.
ISBN: 0312877404
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