Second Breakfast

Conversation this morning:

A: (Looking at yesterday’s mail) Well, I’m glad we got our Christmas cards done well before Christmas this year. Now everyone is sending us one since they got ours.

B: I hope all of our friends think “That Brian and Alan, they’re so organized. I wish we could be more like them. (In voice of fictitious straight neighbor or friend) Honey, we should be more like Alan and Brian.”

A: Well, they’re gay.

B: Well, indeed.

A: Anyways, that’s what I like about Christmas. Its the shaming and jealousy.

B: Indeed.

“Madouc” is the third and final installment in Vance’s “Lyonesse” trilogy, and serves as a fine conclusion to an impressive and quite enjoyable series.

The third book focuses on the eponymous title character, daughter of Casmir, king of Lyonesse, whose unrelenting and ruthless political aims drive much of the action in the story. It turns out that Madouc, who resembles Casmir’s first daughter Suldrun in temperment and defiance of Casmir’s desire to control everyone around him, was in fact switched at birth with Suldrun’s real child, and is rather the offspring of a fairy and an unknown human. Madouc passionately desires to find out her true parentage (her “pedigree” as she styles it), and eventually sets off to find out. The secret of the identify of Suldrun’s real child is of vital importance, due to a prophecy that Suldrun’s child will sit on the throne of a united Elder Isles, a position that Casmir has been scheming to obtain since his ascendancy. The doings of wizards, and the eventual fate of the Isles themselves are also at play in a complex chess game that eventually comes to a fairly satisfying close.

Again the typical tropes of fairy tale fiction are here: fairy princesses, kings and queens, quests, witches and wizards, monsters, and the like. But what is striking is how, through nuance, humor, and imagination Vance takes these cliché devices and turns them into a sophisticated and compelling narrative that is nicely-sustained through the entire three books (which really can be read as a single, if long-ish, story). Vance’s fairies, for example, are indeed silly and mischievous, but also terribly puissant, arbitrary, and perceptive, and feel as much like an alien force as something to be found in a pleasant bedtime story.

Vance employs a writing style that can confound rapid readers like myself at times — it is easy to miss the action embedded in his sometimes epic descriptions, and I found myself re-reading sections that I had skimmed to figure out that some important event had occurred literally under my nose.

Vance also doesn’t tie up all of his loose ends in neat packages. For example, why we know what endangers the Elder Isles, they are saved from imminent destruction in the course of the third book, and we do not know what ultimately happened to cause their demise (at least I can’t find them on any map of Western Europe that I have access to).

Vance is the author of a large body of fantastic fiction. I’m curious to see what some of his other work is like.

Yes I am a geek. For the uninitiated, these posters are a reference to some of the places and events key to Joss Whedon’s sadly-canceled Firefly series, and the Serenity movie that followed.

As my husband points out, one would have to be a college student to hang these without a bit of shame (the BSG ones are really cool as well), but I think they’d work in a TV/media room.

We do have a pair of the really cool prints from Bidlack’s “Old Ann Arbor” series in the back entryway to our house. I want the Monorail one for my birthday (Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!), and the airship one is quite nice as well (neither of which are shown on the site).

This is the second of Vance’s three-book Lyonesee series, which while published as three separate books, so far feels like a single novel telling a large tale through a number of smaller stories.

The structure, style, and tone of The Green Pearl are essentially identical to the previous book, and contain the same satisfying mix of ironic narration, fairy-tale like tone, and rather adult characters and themes.  Vance is, as my friend at Dawn Treader Books remarked, a master prose stylist, and I’d agree that the overall style of the book is what is so compelling — its mixture of language, tone, and place are unique and work quite well.

The focus here is mostly on Aillas, now king of Troicinet and an increasingly larger portion of the Elder Isles.  Aillas is almost the archetype of a just ruler, and his actions throw him into stark contrast with Casmir, his rival and father of Suldrun, with whom he fathered a child and later killed herself.  Aillas is increasing his power, and despite the theoretical truce agreed to by Casmir, it is clear that a major conflict is inevitable.  Meanwhile, Aillas plans are threatened by the Ska (Vance’s fictional ancestors to the Vikings), who have invaded the westernmost kingdoms of the Isles), and those he loves by Casmir’s machinations.

I find it tedious to summarize complex fictional plots so I won’t do so here.  But Green Pearl is as satisfying and pleasurable as Suldrun’s Garden, and I’m eager now to move on to Madouc.