LORD DARCY

TOO MANY MAGICIANS and MURDER AND MAGIC. Randall Garrett. Ace Books, 1966.

There are times when I just have to tell you about a book or two that you probably won’t be able to find. Perhaps you’ll stumble over a used copy, or maybe a groundswell of interest will bring the work back into print.

These books collect the bulk of Randall Garrett’s sixties-era Lord Darcy stories, works that represent a completely original niche that’s part fantasy, part science fiction, part detective tale. They are the fantasy mirror of Isaac Asimov's robot detective novels-- completely faithful to both detective fiction and the conventions of its genre.

Garrett presumes a world in which Richard the Lion-Hearted lives, conquers France, and encourages investigation and study of magic. Instead of an enlightenment era rebirth of sciences, this world has rational, codified magic in a somewhat medievalish social structure.

In this world we meet Lord Darcy, a detective who uses the classic principles of deduction and observation, plus the classic sidekick to whom he can explain it all. He just happens to do it all in a world where the rules are somewhat different from our own.

Garrett plays surprisingly fair; the rules of magic are consistent and logical and clear. Mysteries are not solved by any surprise bursts of legerdemain. His world allows for interesting twists on classic detective shtick such as a locked room murder, but displays all the logic and internal consistency of a science fiction work.

I can't give you a link, though I have seen used versions of a three-book-in-one that throws in Lord Darcy Investigates on top of these two.

The Many-Colored Land

This might be one of my favorite SF works of all time.

In the not-too-distant future, the earth is peaceful and society has assimilated all the problem elements. But for those who are not well-behaved or happy in this brave new world, there is an alternative. Technology has opened up a one-way time portal to the Pliocene Epoch, a time when Earth was forest and field, a natural wonderland without large or dangerous animals.

The novel follows eight characters—lovesick, sociopathic, grieving, adventurous—who choose to make that trip. But, surprise, the past is not empty—Earth is occupied by an alien race, refugees stranded on earth and locked in fierce struggle with each other.

For them, the humans are tools that they snap up and test for mental powers. Those without latent powers are made into slaves, while those with powers become valued servants. The eight travelers find themselves in a world of uneasy political alliances where some humans seek power, some seek freedom, and some seek a way to close the time portal.

All of this, mind you, is just the set up, the first 100 pages of the first of four novels. May creates a work with epic scope, joining myth and philosophy and religion with pure action and adventure with a large cast of characters that cover the full range of human heart and spirit. There are echoes of everything from fairy tales to Norse mythology here.

May beautifully balances the human scale drama of characters who must make choices of love, honor, and loyalty against grand battles for the fate of an entire civilization. May has a gift for creating a large cast of fully-realized, fleshed out, grown-up characters. It is the same sort of trick that Peter Jackson pulled off in his Lord of the Rings movies, only May’s work could never be squeezed onto the screen.

These are fully realized characters, free of clichés and hackneyed stereotypes. The plot is broad but exciting, with plenty of twists and turns and surprises. For fans of SF or adventure fantasy, this book is a must read. The series includes four books in all—two paired novels. The second pair incorporates characters from another May series, but readers need not be familiar with the Jack the Bodiless books (which May had not even published when her “sequel” to them appeared!)

Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

Susana Clarke's first novel was published wide and far; nowadays you can find it in many bargain bins, a monument to the publisher's over-estimation of how high other boats would float on the giant Harry Potter tide.

At nearly 800 pages, this novel is 200-300 pages too long. The bad news is that almost all of the extra pages are at the front of the book.

Clarke seems to be intent on creating a world that is strikingly ordinary. That's not necessarily a bad idea-- part of the charm of Harry Potter is a setting that is simply a British boarding school that just happens to teach magic rather than accounting. But Clarke takes ordinariness to a deadening extreme. The first section of the novel is no more charming nor interesting than a detailed account of a clerk going out for groceries, written in a style that deliberately avoids any intriguing turn of phrase or striking image. The setting is early 19th century, but that only matters in that Clarke inserts some Napoleonic warfare and Lord Byron, but neither they nor anything else are presented with enough specific vividness to make us think they could not easily have been replaced.

And in Mr. Norrell Clarke gives us a main character who is totally charm-free. I don't mean charmless in a charming way, like Gregory House or any number of Jack Nicholson characters. Mr. Norrell is a main character with nothing to recommend him, from his fussy self-importance to his clueless choice of sleazy associates.

Put all together, it adds up to one of the most tedious set-ups I can remember reading in a long time (and I will remind you that it has only been a few months since I read Moby Dick).

On the other hand, the book's eventual payoff is pretty good, and once things start to actually happen, Clarke delivers a fairly well-crafted tale. The closer to the end we get, the better the book becomes (which is not to say that, even with seven hundred pages to set up the finale, Clarke does not pull a pair of plot developments out of thin air).

It is possible that Clarke is Up To Something Bigger here; the novel pays a lot of attention to books and reading and it may be, as some have suggested, that Clarke is using "magic" as a stand in for letters and literature. I could believe that's the case, but that doesn't illuminate the novel in any particularly useful way and it's certainly not an interesting enough theory to make me want to try to unscramble the various individual parts of the allegory.

Mostly what we've got here is a work that would have been a very nice little fantasy adventure had some editor taken a chainsaw to it. As it is, we have a novel in which the rewards are great, but the patience required to reap them is considerable.