a702228348a00b9496363110_aa240_l.jpg“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.