Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Now tell me about civilization and your part in it." Swords and Deviltry (1970) is the first book in Fritz Leiber's original, ironic, funny, and richly styled sword and sorcery series about the relationship between and the adventures of the antiheroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. This collection of three novellas depicts the origins of the complementary duo (giant-sized, red-haired, fair-skinned northern barbarian Fafhrd and child-sized, black-haired, swart-complexioned southern slum-boy Mouser), how they came of age, found their first loves, and became friends. The first story, "The Snow Women" (1970), depicts naïve and secretive 18-year-old Fafhrd's erotic infatuation with civilization, embodied by the "culture dancer" mime-actress-thief Vlana, who has traveled with an exotic theatrical troupe to Fafhrd's home in the Cold Wastes of the far north, where a literal cold war is being waged by the women on the men over the decadent southern entertainment. The story ends with a tour-de-force climax in which Fafhrd must choose between civilization and the south and Vlana or barbarism and the north and his controlling girlfriend Mara (who says she's pregnant with his son) and his dominating mother Mor (who'd like to keep him in her ice magic womb) in a sequence fraught with danger, female magic, fireworks, a ski jump, an ambush, and a dagger. If "The Snow Women" is Fafhrd’s coming of age origin story, "The Unholy Grail" (1962) is the Gray Mouser's, revealing how he came by his name and affinity for dark arts. Returning from a quest that is to complete his apprenticeship under the gentle white magic hedge-wizard Glavas Rho, the Mouser (still called Mouse) finds his master murdered and his cottage burnt. Detecting the agency of the magic-hating Duke Janarrl, the Mouser employs black magic against him, despite having been warned that its use strains and stains the soul. His revenge is complicated by the Duke's daughter, the “perpetually frightened yet sweet” Ivrian. The novella is unpleasant and lacks the series' usual humor, though it features a fine climax involving a torture chamber, a rack, an ant, an audience, and the "hitherto hidden . . . whole black universe." The third story, "Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970), is the strongest and strangest in the book, a classic. It recounts the fateful meeting of the two young men and their lovers in Lankhmar, City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes (and hence City of the Black Toga) when Fafhrd and the Mouser separately decide to mug two men belonging to the powerful (and misogynistic) Thieves’ Guild and become instant friends. There are great comedic scenes, like the Gray Mouser inviting Fafhrd and Vlana into the "throne room in a slum" that he's set up for Ivrian with his loot, Ivrian getting drunk and acting like a Tennessee Williams’ aristocrat and calling Fafhrd and the Mouser “poltroons,” and the new friends touring Thieves' House in beggar guise, "fired--and--fuddled by fortified wine." And then suddenly--"a universe upturned." In the three stories Leiber introduces his fantasy world Nehwon (= Nowhen), its terrains, cities, cultures, magic, swordplay, and banter with which he developed the sword and sorcery genre. He complexly portrays Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, as well as Vlana and Ivrian. He explores themes on civilization and barbarism (both are indicted, but for different reasons) men and women (both are "quite horrible," but in different ways), and relationships between parents and children (Ivrian’s parents make Fafhrd’s look like June and Ward Cleaver) and between lovers (the power dynamics between the two sets of lovers are shifty). And he does lots of his fine fun writing, featuring wit (e.g., "he was about as harrowed as virgin prairie"), ambiguity (e.g., "He wondered why, although his imagination was roaringly aflame like the canyon behind him, his heart was still so cold"), alliteration (e.g., "a very faint foam of fear"), and varied and vivid imagination and style, ranging from the comic to the horrible and from the colloquial to the Shakespearean (e.g., “Fafhrd won and with great satisfaction clinked out his silver smerduks on the stained and dinted [tavern] counter also marked with an infinity of mug circles, as if it had once been the desk of a mad geometer”). Leiber has been criticized for male chauvinism, and if it bothers you to call teenage boys men and mature women girls, you may wince at some things in his stories. Indeed, the scariest, weakest, or most abused people in this book tend to be women. But keep in mind that Leiber is a mid-20th century writer, that he can sympathize with the female point of view, that he writes plenty of unsavory male characters and institutions, and that his "heroes" are rogues. Jonathan Davis reads the audiobook with panache and pleasure. He gives the Gray Mouser a cocky cockney-Aussie (?) accent to make him sound more civilized than his very American Fafhrd. He does a fine East European Grandmaster thief and a creepy squeaky wizard's familiar. Readers who like elegant, bawdy, unpredictable, usually funny, and psychologically complex (if not twisted) sword and sorcery should like this book and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. View all my reviews
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