I totally couldn’t get into the Charles Williams book that I was reading, and it was a lovely Friday evening two weeks ago so I wandered over to Afterwords books, which is a remainder book shop just across the street from where we usually hang out at Cafe Felix. They usually have some interesting things among the pickings on their sci-fi and fantasy shelf.

I saw this book and was intrigued. I had never heard of Fletcher Pratt (the famed author of such books as “What Every Citizen Should Know about Modern War”, “Invaders From Rigel”, and “Rockets, Jets, Guided Missiles, and Space Ships”), but the publisher was Gollancz, who had also republished John Crowley’s “Little, Big”, so I thought this might be interesting. It is, but it is a difficult read.

This book was published in 1948, six years before Tolkien published Lord of the Rings, so it predates by a few years the real establishment of the modern heroic fantasy genre. But we have many of the same elements: a world entire, complete with history, a map, peoples, and places with some linguistic root to their name and arrangement; magic with its attendant consequences; politics and power struggles; and a hero who undergoes a great personal transformation as he is drawn into a world of struggles much larger than himself.

One thing that is difficult about the book is the language — Pratt makes heavy use of dialect and idiom, which makes conversations and the action difficult to follow. Pratt is also not overly-fond of exposition, so the reader is pretty much thrown in the middle of a history and conflict without a lot of orientation. What I found most infuriating is the heavy use of place-names that don’t exist on the map, but figure heavily in the action. I kept flipping back to the front of the book to figure out where the heck people were talking about.

That said, this is an interesting book, and if you’re an attentive reader there is much here that is rewarding. The book is stylistically very effective, and I found myself enjoying the read even though I didn’t always follow exactly what was happening or why. But I have a short attention span, even for someone who reads so many books.