Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia by E.R. Eddison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars ‘When I kiss you, it is as if a lioness sucked my tongue’ OR A Renaissance Game of Thrones Featuring Four Eternal Lovers and a Bestial Machiavel After an odd “Overture” in which the narrator attends the funeral in our world of his great friend Lessingham, E. R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses (1935) shifts to the Renaissance fantasy world Zimiamvia, where Lessingham is alive and twenty-five and the cousin/troubleshooter of Horius Parry, the Vicar. The Vicar is a noble but brutish Machiavel who wants to rule the land as Regent for the new eighteen-year-old Queen Antiope, the King her brother having recently been assassinated (the hand behind the poisoning rumored to have been the Vicar’s). Because the dead king’s bastard half-brother Duke Barganax (whose hobby is painting his gorgeous goddess of a lover Fiorinda and then destroying his paintings for failing to capture her essence) and his allies chafe at being ruled by the duplicitous Vicar, war breaks out, both sides claiming to support the Queen. Against the odds, Lessingham wins a big battle and then attempts to force a peace on the stubborn Duke and the enraged Vicar, after which he heads north to the court of the young Queen in Rialmar to shore up her defenses against the perennial enemy of the realm Akkama, ruled by the loathsome King Derxis. Will the Vicar accept the peace? If he starts scheming again, what will the Duke and Lessingham do? And what will happen when the consummate courtier and captain Lessingham meets the beautiful and clever Queen Antiope? And won’t Derxis, who’s been egregiously wooing Antiope, do something dastardly? And why does the old “logical doctor” Vandermast, a philosophical wizard, tell Lessingham he’ll be dead within a year or two? “What is fame to the deaf dust that shall then be your delicate ear, my lord?” The basic plot is like a compact Game of Thrones with far fewer players, far more metaphysics and romance, and no dragons or undead. But the plot is not where lie this novel’s charms and fascinations! These largely derive from Eddison’s splendid and ornate style, painterly descriptions, epic similes, dry humor, and pleasure in nature, architecture, music, poetry, beauty, love, etc. Characters occasionally lace their speech with Greek or Latin quotations—which fortunately they often translate. (How Sappho and Shakespeare made it into Zimiamvia, I don’t know…) Eddison’s “Elizabethan” prose is savory, e.g., “The horror and ugsomeness of death is worse than death itself,” and-- ‘Philosophic disputations,’ said Fiorinda, ‘do still use to awake strange longings in me.’ ‘Longings?’ said the Duke. ‘You are mistress of our revels tonight. Breathe but the whisper of a half-shapen wish; lightning shall be slow to our suddenness to perform it.’ ‘For the present need,’ said that lady, ‘a little fruit would serve.’ ‘Framboises?’ said the Duke, offering them in a golden dish. ‘No,’ she said, looking upon them daintily: ‘they have too many twiddles in them: like my Lord Lessingham’s distich.’ He writes great similes, like “Only there sat in his eyes a private sunbeamed look, as if he smiled in himself to see, like a sculptor, the thing shape itself as he had meant and imagined,” and-- “Again her eyes crossed with Lessingham’s: a look sudden and gone like a kingfisher’s flight between gliding water and overshadowing trees.” And evocative descriptions, like “The falcon was perched still on the crag, alone and unmerry,” and-- “So they had passage over those waters that were full of drowned stars and secret unsounded deeps of darkness.” The battles and duels here have neither magic nor the supernatural but are man against man with armor, weapons, numbers, and tactics. The novel does introduce, however, fantastic things: immortal shape-changing Hamadryads, a time-free garden and cottage, a leaf to open any locked door, and most provocatively the two pairs of lovers, sensual Barganax-Fiorinda and spiritual Lessingham-Antiope, vibrant, distinct individuals who at times merge into each other. Lessingham and Barganax gaze into different mirrors and see each other’s reflections, Lessingham’s voice and manner recall Fiorinda’s, and Lessingham looks at Barganax and sees Antiope. As the Duke muses to his lover in a letter, “My thoughts growe busy that some way there bee IV of us but some way II only.” All of this suggests interesting things about gender and love and identity. Although the real-politic world of intrigue, assassination, and war drives the plot, Eddison often seems more interested in the two-couple romance he’s writing. The main characters are larger than life—archetypes—Eternal Lovers prefiguring Michael Moorcock’s later Eternal Champion. Lessingham dies in our world and yet vibrantly lives in Zimiamvia; he says to Antiope, "I love you … beyond time and circumstance" and calls her “Mary,” the name of his wife in our world; and the novel closes with Fiorinda, Mistress of Mistresses, looking at her nude reflection in a mirror and musing on all her female identities, from Aphrodite to Zenobia. All that said, Eddison isn’t only writing metaphysical romance. The novel features heroic violent action: a few battles, a bath time brawl between the Vicar and his dogs, Lessingham’s horse ride down a two-thousand foot cliff, and so on. And it features plenty of life wisdom like, “There was often more good matter in one grain of folly than in a peck of wisdom,” and “That which can be done, ’twas never worth the doing. Attempt is all.” Just keep in mind that it's not The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Eddison’s more famous epic fantasy, which has much more action and much less romance. Mistress of Mistresses has a lot of conversation and description, and the ending feels rushed and incomplete, but I relished reading it for moments like this: “As a man awakening would turn back into his dream, yet with that very striving awakes; or as eyes search for a star, picked up out but now, but vanished again in the suffusing of the sky with light of approaching day; so Lessingham seized at, yet in the twinkling lost, the occasion of those lines, the thin seeming memory blown with them as if from some former forgotten life.” And this: “And now his bee-winged kiss, hovering below her ear, under the earring’s smouldering of garnet, passed thence to where neck and shoulder join, and so to the warm throat, and so by the chin to that mocking spirit’s place of slumber and provocation; until, like the bee into the honeyed oblivion of some deep flower incarnadine, it was entertained at last into the consuming heaven of that lady’s lips.” Eddison was an English civil servant?! View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University