Jack Vance's
Lyonesse trilogy is something that's been in my to-read pile for a long time and I regret that I'm only now paying it attention. I've just finished the first book,
Suldrun's Garden, and I've been absolutely smitten with it. It seems to me to be a masterwork of fantasy and reminds me of why I'm interested in the genre in the first place. I've avoided it until now because it's always described as "Arthurian Fantasy" and I envisioned a lot of pageantry and tedious lineage. It has some of that because it is in conversation with those stories, but it's only a piece of the whole. The book has as much King's Quest as it does King Arthur. I've also seen it described as "Better Game of Thrones," but again that only captures of part it. These analogies miss the book's breadth and richness, the way it lightly touches upon a variety of fantasy modes, its humor, charm, grotesqueness, and constant strange invention.
Reading it, it almost felt like a really excellent Dragon Quest. Think of the ones with really good stories like III, V, or 11, and the way they build an poignant overarching narrative through a long string of small fantasy stories, but here done to high artistic effect. Yes, what I'm saying is that Vance wrote a supremely good JRPG.
I could go on and on about the construction of its plot, the way it plays with conventions of the genre, the way its positioned as real world history, and on and on, but the thing that most astonished me was its use of language. Vance is a master of knowing what to state and what to leave implied. The specificity of his prose, and the way it lets him gesture to things unstated, is a marvel and makes for consistently delightful reading.
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I feel really lucky this book was just the first of a series and I have two more long volumes waiting for me. I can't wait to jump back in.