Swords Against Wizardry by Fritz Leiber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "The time has come for sorcery and swords." Swords against Wizardry (1968) is the fourth book in Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery series about the rogue-adventurer duo Fafhrd (tall, fair-skinned northern barbarian) and the Gray Mouser (short, swart scion of southern civilization). It features four stories, each full of all the things that make the series so uniquely delectable: dry irony, witty banter, comical slapstick, graphic horror, kinky hints, suspenseful action, heroic anti-heroism, original imagination, and baroque style--including quaint archaisms, quirky vocabulary, Shakespearean syntax, rich alliteration, and vivid similes. Here follows an account of the four stories. I. "In the Witch's Tent" (1968) Favorite line: "It appears that someone doesn't like us." This short prologue-story is funny and entertaining in situation (visiting a drugged out hag for a prophecy), climax (using a tent as a weapon), description ("Its glow showed her face to be as dark, jagged-featured, and dirty as the new-dug root-clump of a black apple tree"), and banter ("You'd turn a wizard's workroom into a brothel"). However, it's really only a fix-up bridge between the last story of the third book ("Adept's Gambit") and the second story of this one. II. "Stardock" (1965) Favorite line: "I'm beginning to think . . . they aren't sportsman." In this novella Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have been challenged to climb Stardock, the tallest peak in the north, to win a pouch of stars and the right to father sons on the Snow King's daughters. The story is a funny and suspenseful mountaineering fantasy featuring an ice-cat, a flying-carpet manta, snow serpents, ice-gnomes, rival rogues, a race of invisible people, and a neat climax. Alternating between the comical (e.g., Fafhrd forgetting about the Mouser trapped in a chimney), the sublime (e.g. the vanishing of an entire snow ridge "as if some great God had reached down while the Mouser's back was turned and removed that block of reality"), the physical (e.g., eating powdered or raw meat while climbing), the story finally asks what drives men to climb mountains. III. "The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar" (1968) Favorite line: "Mouser? Your box is buzzing." This short story is a perfect length for its plot, freshly focuses on what comes after an adventure, and humorously humbles its heroes. Having spent too much time together before and after Stardock and quarreled over the best way to sell their invisible jewels, the friends part--until "Night was a-slink" and the "malfeasors" of Lankhmar are readying for business, and they run into each other by chance (?) outside the headquarters of their respective fences, Ogo the Blind and Nemia of the Dusk. When the Mouser proclaims that he and Fafhrd are the two best thieves in the city and Fafhrd crosses his fingers, one expects something to go amiss with their jewel selling. After all, adventuring is not conducive to thieving, and men are no match for women. IV. "The Lords of Quarmall" (1964) Favorite line 1: "He almost stuttered midway through the word 'slewerisophnak."' Favorite line 2: "But they assured me they were the very greatest sorcerers." This novella, the longest story in the book, is uneven, having been begun in 1936 by Leiber's friend Harry Otter Fischer and completed by Leiber decades later, but it is an entertainingly lurid romp that reads like a fusion of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Robert E. Howard's "Red Nails," and Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Unbeknownst to each other Fafhrd and the Mouser have hired themselves to the two feuding sons of the King of Quarmall. Quarmall is a "huge ramified castle kingdom," an unwholesome realm consisting of the King's above-ground castle, the older brother Hasjarl's subterranean Upper Levels, and the younger brother Gwaay's Lower Levels. Genetically modified pinheaded slaves with elephantine legs run treadmills to pump fresh air underground. Fafhrd's boss Hasjarl looks like a "kobold birthed in a hot-spring," pours invective from his sphincter-shaped mouth, tortures his slaves, and drives his bearded mages to bespell Gwaay with diseases. Gwaay, the Mouser's master, is "a pallid, handsome, soft-spoken youth" who goads Hasjarl while acting calm and keeping his depilated sorcerers blocking the disease spells. The hating brothers are fire and ice foils for each other and for their hired champions. As we read the story wondering what will happen when Fafhrd and the Mouser finally run into each other, we encounter many fine scenes: e.g., Gwaay playing a telekinetic strategy game; the King looking down from his tower at villagers walking like "ants struggling through some sticky trap"; Fafhrd reading the "dry and prosy" history of Quarmall inscribed by an eon-old cockroach called Scraa; Hasjarl having his eyelid grommets inserted; Hasjarl and Gwaay playing a game of chess; the Mouser finally getting to read a dread spell; the principles participating in a splendid climax; etc. As usual, Jonathan Davis gives a wonderful reading of the audiobook, doing an Aussie/Cockney Mouser and an American Fafhrd and relishing all of Leiber's outre events, characters, and style. I particularly enjoyed his High Eunuch, combustible Hasjarl, and Blind Ogo, his Eyes, and Nemia. Fans of sword and sorcery who want to see one of its decadent, imaginative, and witty fathers at the height of his powers should read this book. 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
April 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