Monday 16 February 2004

Pic of the day: Random knight of the day is from the Dark Age of Camelot test server, since the covers of e-books are notoriously unimpressive (and copyprotected).

"The Knight" review

Just a quick impression of my favorite book the last few days, The Knight by Gene Wolfe.

I haven't read anything by Wolfe before, even though he seems to be a quite prolific fantasy writer. It was pretty much a coincidence (in as much as such a beast exists) that I found this book on Fictionwise.com at a nice rebate. (E-books really ought to be half price, given the nonexistent costs of printing, warehouse storage and distribution, and the fact that you cannot sell them as used books after a while. In practice, they are not that cheap, but if you keep visiting Fictionwise frequently, almost anything will be rebated at some point or another, in one way or another, sometimes in two ways at the same time. I rarely ever buy a book at full price from them, and they are probably my main provider of books these days.)

***

Anyway, The Knight. It reads a bit like "young adult" fiction, but I guess it is not really, not more than all magic fantasy is. I guess part of it is that the book is never explicit about the sex, although there is no doubt when it happens. Wolfe just doesn't make any attempt to describe it. Or his character doesn't. The novel is written as a book-length letter from the main character to his brother, so I guess that would explain his choices of what to describe or not ... This style works really well because the main character is not a very educated person, he is a teen boy who got lost in the woods and somehow ended up in a parallel world. Or rather a stack of parallel worlds.

Mythgarthr is the middle of seven worlds, one above the other. The sky of a lower world is the earth of the next up, and if you look just right you may see the people of that other world there in the sky. Each higher world moves faster, yet the people there are more advanced. The world above Mythgarthr is Skai, there lives Valfather and his people, the Overcyn. They are supposed to be kinda like gods, but you don't see them meddle much in the affairs of people. In marked contrast, the Aelf meddle like mad. They live on Aelfrice, the next world down, and know of hidden passages between the worlds. (Not to mention that they are shape-changers, so they can probably fly up there, much like eagles can reach Skai.) They cannot survive long in a higher world, though. There is also one character from Muspel (the world below Aelfrice) and a couple from Kleos, the world above Skai. They are all really weird, as can be expected, weirder the further you come from Mythgarthr. And we still have two worlds left ...

It is an Aelf queen who seduces the poor teenager and magically transforms him into a big, strong man, presumably for her own pleasure, although he stays that way when they part. He remains very much smitten with her and looks for her always, when not busy trying to be a knight, an idea he has latched on to after meeting one. One funny detail is how, when he tries to explain that he is really just a boy but this woman changed him into a man, people go like "me too". But he really means it, it really happened! "Yeah, me too!"

***

Weird adventures and weird companions just keep piling up as the chapters progress. There is hardly a dull moment. And Sir Able of the High Heart, as he is known in Mythgarthr, makes it even more interesting by hinting at things that he hasn't told yet, so that when they happen things make sense that didn't from the start. Both the storytelling and the world building are awesome. I could not have done it better myself!

In all fairness, I have a soft spot for layered worlds. I've used that in a few of my own unfinished stories, although these worlds were not so close you could see one from the other. They were more like the twin realms of Arcanus and Myrror in the game Master of Magic, which made such deep impression on me that I named my journal after one of its features. In addition, the Changewinds series by Jack Chalker featured stacked worlds as well, with the more chaotic ones further down. I was vaguely reminded of that here too, but of course Wolfe's worlds are heavily inspired by Norse mythology. Perhaps he and Chalker read the same books, or perhaps they share the notion of Hell being somewhere down below. (Muspel in The Knight is kinda hellish too, with lots of fires and populated by dragons.)

But even if parallel worlds are not your thing, there is a good chance you'll like this if you like magic fantasy with a mythological flavor and free from science fiction. Recommended.