Tales of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Things of Value Thrown out of a Burning House “And at last, when melancholy brought only regret and the uselessness of his work gained round him with age, he decided to consult a magician.” Most of Lord Dunsany’s nineteen Tales of Wonder (1916) depict such yearning to escape the everyday real world of London, work, business, steel, gas, etc. for the magical, beautiful, and exciting world of fantasy. Drugs (e.g., hashish or “bash”) or alcohol (e.g., rum or “Gorgondy”) may ease the passage or open the vision to “the Edge of the World,” the liminal site of wondrous adventures or sights (milk, “a cursed beverage,” won’t work). Even in stories where the real world is not transcended, it is transformed (as with the Bureau d'Exchange de Maux), or larger than life protagonists (like Shard, Captain of Pirates) attempt amazing feats in it. Dunsany’s imagination is fertile and original, his writing style rich and elegant, and his tone playful with wistful, ironic, and ominous undertones. The following passage embodies the pleasures of Dunsany's fantasy: “And so with painful steps (for the shores of the world are covered with huge crystals) he came to the risky seas of Shiroora Shan and saw them pounding to gravel the wreckage of fallen stars, saw them and heard their roar, those shipless seas that between earth and the fairies' homes heave beneath some huge wind that is none of our four. And there in the darkness on the grizzly coast, for darkness was swooping slantwise down the sky as though with some evil purpose, there stood that lonely, gnarled and deciduous tree. It was a bad place to be found in after dark, and night descended with multitudes of stars, beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered [See any dictionary, but in vain.] at Neepy Thang.” And here is an annotated list of the stories: In “A Tale of London,” a Baghdad “hasheesh eater” dreams of the wonders of “the desiderate” city of London, transforming it into an exotic Arabian Nights-like place. “Thirteen at Table” depicts the unintentional exorcism of a haunted manor house via an offensive joke. In “The City on Mallington Moor” an alcoholic shepherd helps the narrator access a fabulous city of white marble and gold minarets in the British moors via a strange rum-like beverage. “Why the Milkman Shudders when he Perceives the Dawn” is a teaser story with a great hook-question that’s never answered, because we’re not of the company of milkmen. “The Bad Old Woman in Black” is another teaser story in which said woman is rumored to have run down the ox-butchers’ street, leaving unanswered questions in her wake, like “What future evil did this portend?” In “The Bird of the Difficult Eye,” if the renowned jewel thief Neepy Thang can steal the eggs of a mythical bird before they can hatch, they’ll turn into extraordinary emeralds; otherwise, it will be “a bad business indeed.” *Here’s Sidney Sime's exquisite illustration of the Bird:* The narrator of “The Long Porter's Tale” hears a story about a quest for an old woman’s song leading to a wondrous city at the edge of the world. “The Loot of Loma” is a Native American pastiche, with warriors who raid Loma stealing four of its idols and, unwittingly, a secret curse. “The Secret of the Sea” reveals that when an entire ship’s crew falls down drunk, their ship goes its own secret way to the Temple in the Sea to meet other similarly free ships, but we cannot know “what lyrical or blasphemous thing their figureheads prayed by moonlight at midnight in the sea.” In “How Ali Came to the Black Country,” a man with the seal of King Solomon comes from Persia (on foot) to save England from the devil Steam, but when asked to save it from the devil Petrol, he says, "And shall a man go twice to the help of a dog?" The fine concept of “The Bureau d'Exchange de Maux”—a bureau d’exchange where the “goods” exchanged are evils, the narrator trading his sea-sickness for another man’s fear of lifts—is marred by antisemitism. To evade the pursuit of five navies in “A Story of Land and Sea,” the pirate captain Shard unprecedentedly sails his “merry” but “volatile” men on his “rakish craft the Desperate Lark” through the Sahara, only to run afoul of some stubborn Arabs. In “A Tale of the Equator” a poet so vividly tells of a wondrous land lying south of the world and the fabulous palace his Sultan will have built there that the Sultan says, "It will be unnecessary for my builders to build this palace, Erlathdronion, Earth's Wonder, for in hearing thee we have drunk already its pleasures." “A Narrow Escape” features a jaded magician who decides to wreck London, requiring for the purpose the heart of a particular toad. In “The Watch-Tower,” an old man claiming to be the spirit of an old Provencal tower tells the narrator to beware of the Saracens, who’ve been gone for 400 years. In “How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire” a single combat between a giant and an ugly dwarf ends unexpectedly. “The Three Sailors' Gambit” is about a team of three sailors who seem ignorant of chess but beat a legendary master in two straight games, thanks to the devil, a crystal, and a soul. After riffing on forgotten gods, the narrator of “The Exiles’ Club” is invited by an exiled king to a dinner attended by other exiled monarchs, whereat a faux pas reveals that the ex-kings are but the waiters for the real members of the club, who are "upstairs" and prone to flinging lightning bolts at curs. In “The Three Infernal Jokes,” the narrator meets a tout who regrets having received three killing jokes as part of a fateful bargain. Although the best stories here are good, I found this collection less wonderful than the earlier Book of Wonder (1912), and I had trouble remembering the stories enough to write about them. Partly that’s due to the readers of the LibriVox version I listened to being less than stellar (though Sandra reads her stories fine), but it's also due to some of the stories being short, teaser-ish, or insubstantial. One of the best lines in the collection comes at the end of Dunsany’s Preface, written in 1916 while he was recovering from a wound: “And now I will write nothing further about our war, but offer you these books of dreams from Europe as one throws things of value, if only to oneself, at the last moment out of a burning house.” View all my reviews
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