The Book of Wonder by Lord Dunsany
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Wonder, Irony, Horror, Poetry, and Fantasy “Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.” That's the preface of Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder (1912). The fourteen short stories following his invitation are full of fanciful wonder, whimsical irony, sly horror, rich imagination, and poetic style. They explore and transcend the boundaries between the “real” world of London and careers and business etc. and the “imaginary” world of Faerie and gods and monsters etc., usually depicting protagonists who undertake some impossible feat of “Romance.” There is a centaur, a pirate, a troubadour, an idolator, an idol, a young man from Sussex, a straight-laced young lady of London, two bored businessmen of London, and several thieves. Sometimes the heroes and anti-heroes fail in their essays, but even or especially then their attempts are sublime. Here is an annotated list of the stories. In “The Bride of the Man-Horse,” a lusty young centaur takes up the legendary war-horn of his people and sets off across “the mundane plane” and past numerous cities on a quest to win Sombelene, the mortal daughter of a half-centaur, half-god father and a half-sphinx, half-lioness mother. After opening with an ominous cough, “The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler, and of the Doom that Befell Him” recounts how Thangobrind took up his sword Mouse and tried to steal the Dead Man’s Diamond (reputed to always find its way back home) from its spider idol maker. In “The House of the Sphinx” the narrator escapes a malevolent forest by seeking refuge in the House of the Sphinx, whose paramour is Time and children gods, only to find that the flimsy door of the House can’t protect the resigned Sphinx from an imperious and ghastly doom. “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men” features three thieves sent by their nomadic poem-less tribe to steal a gold box full of choice poems. When pursued by a giant implacable guardian, is it better to flee, hide, or jump over the edge of the world? After offending the etiquette of the gods in "The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolator," Pombo turns iconoclast till an arch idolater tells him about a Little Disreputable God residing at the edge of the world. “The Loot of Bombasharna” features pirate captain Shard, his ship the Desperate Lark, the beautiful city Bombasharna (looking “far off like a pearl, shimmering still in its haliotis shell, still wet from the sea”), the Queen of the South, and a floating island. In “Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance” a staid young upper-class London lady is ravished away by a gold dragon out of the prime of romance, and, forgetting advertisements for pills and political cant, defeats time with her kidnapper. Because the icy beautiful queen (like “a sun-stricken mountain uplifted alone”) in “The Quest of the Queen’s Tears” will only marry the man who can make her cry, the troubadour-king Ackronnion embarks on a quest to collect the tears of the Gladsome Beast. In “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” Alderic, famed Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault and hereditary Guardian of the King’s Peace of Mind, decides to rob the absurdly rich Gibbelins, who “eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” In “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles” a “likely lad” is taken by his master thief teacher into Faerie to rob the dread gnoles, ignoring ominous portents like “the skeleton of some early Georgian [fairy] poacher nailed to the door in an oak tree.” "How One Came, as Was Foretold, to the City of Never" recounts how a lad from Surrey flies off on a hippogriff in search of the City of Never in wonder’s native haunt, twilight. But isn’t there a fairer city and “a deed unaccomplished”? In “The Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap” a “plausible” man of business escapes the beastliness of his London life by building a beautiful fantasy city, and then, “unwisely insatiate,” annexes all lands of wonder. "Chu-Bu and Sheemish" depicts the rivalry between the established idol Chu-Bu and the upstart idol Sheemish, whom the priests one day start worshiping. “The situation called for immediate miracles,” like an earthquake. One day in “The Wonderful Window” a young man of business, who’s liable to gaze into the distance as if “the walls of the emporium were of gossamer and London itself a myth,” buys a window from a mysterious man (who bought it in Baghdad and installs it in the young man’s flat) and starts looking through the window at a golden city full of dragons dancing on flags. Dunsany could write-- --pure ecstasy: “For joy he was as a song.” --cool poetry: “The wind blew bleak from the stars.” --dry humor: “There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably fed.” --creepy horror: “The moment that Tonker touched the withered boards, the silence that, though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul.” --cosmic horror: “falling from us still through the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.” --philosophical questioning: “For who knows of madness whether it is divine or whether it be of the pit?” --and beautiful fantasy: “Built of a stone unknown in the world we tread were its bastions, quarried we know not where, but called by the gnomes abyx, it so flashed back to the twilight its glories, colour for colour, that none can say of them where their boundary is, and which the eternal twilight, and which the City of Never; they are the twin-born children, the fairest daughters of Wonder.” I listened to two LibriVox audiobook readings of Dunsany’s book, and much preferred the reading of Sandra Cullum, who has a clear and appealing manner and British accent. Her reading surprised me with the pleasure (to the point of grinning) of Dunsany’s prose. I also found online and was mesmerized by Sydney Sime’s detailed, decadent, and beautiful drawings that apparently inspired Dunsany’s stories. Fans of imaginative fantasy and rich style should find Dunsany’s writing wonderful, as Tolkien and Lovecraft did. View all my reviews
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