Just a thought about A Wizard of Earthsea : I reread it a few years ago and was surprised by how dry I found it. The story-telling was cut to the bone, and the prose felt concise just to the edge of curt. There is no narrative fat, no stylistic curliques, only a story told in direct, but still evocative language.
I don't think this is just because it was a novel for young readers, I think it's because it was published early on in the Tolkein craze, before multi-decker fantasy novels became the norm. Most of the fat novels of the time were either literary works like Gravity's Rainbow or best-sellers like Allan Drury's political novels. Mid-list writers, and I think Le Guin would have been one of those at the time, though on the rise, had a word count cap. In most cases that was probably just fine, forcing economy of expression. If you look at her later work, I think you'll find she's only published a couple of novels that exceed 350 pages.
Away from Le Guin and veering toward topic, a couple of years ago I read Mischief by Douglas Clegg and was disappointed by it. I had the rare experience of thinking it undernourished, not long enough to do what it was attempting: Make a setting so ominous and threatening as to cause shivers just by mentioning its name, Harrow House. For me, Clegg tried gamely, but the novel fell apart by the end, and I wasn't sure I wanted to read any more of his work.
I'm glad I didn't stick to that decision. I just finished, and very much enjoyed, Clegg's Isis, a novella just reissued by Vanguard Press. Isis was originally published in a small, expensive edition by Cemetary Dance Publications a few years ago. Like the CD edition, the Vanguard edition has very nice illustrations by Glenn Chadbourne, evocative of the period in which the story is set, a kind of hazily evoked late 19th, early 20th century. And imagine my surprise to find out while poking around the Internet that this novella is connected to Clegg's continuing series of stories about Harrow House.
In spite of being a novella, the story unfolds in leisurely fashion, Clegg recreating the pace if not always the diction of the times -- and that's not necessarily bad -- through the first person narration by Iris Villiers, the youngest of four children and the only daughter. As the story unfolds, she and her brothers have been moved from their earliest home on Long Island to the family estate above the cliffs of Cornwall to look after their grandfather. Her father and oldest brother are strangers to her, the former always away to work, the latter off to school. Besides herself, her mother and her grandfather, an old man becoming senile, only a few servants and her twin brothers, Harvey and Spence inhabit the estate. Harvey and Iris are best friends.
Clegg neatly explains the title's allusion to Isis and Osiris, delineates the characters well enough, shows the pressures on Iris and the oddity of the household, and presents a believable brother and sister love without mawkishness. There are some minor flaws, mostly, I think, typos that got past the proofreaders, and one phrasing that struck me as not of the time: While a contemporary setting would allow "nude photographs of women" as acceptable if not proper sentence structure, I believe the more stringent grammar in effect at the time would have phrased it, "photographs of nude women," since no one expects their photos adorned in kimonos or mukluks. That said, the flaw, if it is one, didn't take me out of the story for as long as it took to explain my nit-pick.
Speaking of "nude photographs," don't let the illustrations fool you into thinking this is a children's story. While the mid-teens I know could handle it, I wouldn't recommend this for anyone younger; there are themes here that could be troubling for young or immature readers. For anyone else, if you like Gothic Victorian/Edwardian ghost/horror stories and have no constitutional objection to them being written well after the fact, I'd strongly recommend this book.
Randy M.
), even if the exact story wasn't followed.
