When Tom Holt
uses his K. J. Parker heteronym, at his best, is a very good genre writer:
which is not to say that genre writers can't be as good as (if not better than)
their literary counterparts - but they have not been taken as seriously, which
is true even now. I must admit I found Gene Wolfe's work to be good too, rather
than something to be proselytised for, or raved about. Moorcock's essay
"Epic Pooh" is a good analysis in some respects (though perhaps
influenced by Terry Eagleton et al, and Marxist Lit-Crit in general) and admits
the fact the LOTR writing is at least accomplished. Of Moorcock's work
"The Dancers at the End of Time" series is both funny and readable
and "The Condition of Muzak" to me seems still his best. Folk finding
Peake to be overwritten just proves what sort of literary world we now inhabit:
Orwell's plain English has come back to bite us on our collective arse, and we
can no longer cope with sentences with sub clauses, or paragraphs full of
metaphor via elision. Oh, well. It's just that when folk write stuff like
"The Book of the New Sun" is the best fantasy ever written, I must
assume that they haven't read much to compare it to, genre fantasy or
otherwise. No doubt all shall be well in
the ground of our beseeching, if that's the phrase I'm stretching for.
Much
modern fantasy suffers from a need to be perceived as dark, and combined with a
desire to out-epic the competition it's led to something of a sameness in the
huge-number-of-mutilated-dead count, tougher-than-the-last-tough-guy
hyperinflation, and characters flawed by their amorality or brutality (Staveley comes to mind). Parker maintains a personal scale, even though
world-changing events (though his worlds always have a sparseness to them -
rarely any heaving multitudes), and his characters are flawed by their
vulnerabilities. There's darkness aplenty - I find more horror in his themes of
erasure or corruption of identity than in how many hundreds of thousands of
anonymous bodies line roads to cities (Baker, Staveley, Ryan, Cameron, etc.).
This approach pays dividends in his mastery of character development. His books
follow anything but an expected path - unexpected events shape characters in
entirely unforeseen ways, and while that can lead to great emotional investment
on the part of the reader, Parker can be bruisingly unsentimental. That’s why I
say fantasy is the progressive rock of literature. It has its ardent fans who
champion its cause in the face of utter derision from critics. It has its fair
share of pretentious tosh but there are nuggets of excellence to be found if
you look hard enough with an open enough mind, a bit like its sister, science
fiction. Another factor in fantasy's 'rehabilitation' that might be worth
exploring is the prevalence of fantasy in computer and video games. Why does
that work so much better than, say political fiction? Anyway, from someone who
has read SF (science Fiction and Fantasy) for over 30 years, I’m still
surprised we can still find writers writing non-magic fantasy. I like prog rock
too, naturally, but that's another story... Parker is a peerless creator of
genuinely unearthly mindscapes.
The other great
thing about K. J. Parker is that even with his fantasy potboilers he still
entertains me with his florid use of language, the weird and wonderful names,
and the little details he drops into his stories, products of his wild
imagination that elevate even the most mundane tales.
SF = Speculative
Fiction.
