The Wizard Knight
I've just finished reading The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe. What a truly extraordinary book. It's a proper, deeply old-school high fantasy. It has knights with pennants on their lances when they joust and giants and dragons and magic swords and castles. It takes cues from the high arthurian stories and from norse mythology and all the roots of most standard fantasy fiction and yet somehow through sheer deftness and storytelling it somehow sneaks between the predictable events and avoids the cliches even as it uses them.
It is rooted in the same legends that Tolkien was inspired by, but the story itself is of a different kind, revolving more around the notions of knightly conduct and how people can relate to each other, maybe closer to a medieval romance in that respect, tapestried and bright with the glare of sunshine on burnished armour. However it is not caught in that time, the storytelling is modern, but modern without ever drawing too far from the setting or being distracting to the reader. The development of the central character changes as he grows through his adventures and their writing does too.
I mostly bought it because I know Neil Gaiman is a big fan of his work and I can really see why. This is a grand story of honour, glory and adventure. It doesn't read like it's trying to be anything that it's not- you could write a book of this kind and people would read it and think "this is trying to be T.H.White" or Tolkien or whoever else - this book reads like it is it's own thing and it is clearly a classic, from start to finish. It belongs to a canon broader and more illustrious than the fantasy genre, alongside Mallory and Grimm as much as Martin and Le Guin and I recommend it strongly. Reaching the last pages made me sad because I didn't want it to end.
Also it really freaked me out by starting with the line "Ben, look at this first."
It is rooted in the same legends that Tolkien was inspired by, but the story itself is of a different kind, revolving more around the notions of knightly conduct and how people can relate to each other, maybe closer to a medieval romance in that respect, tapestried and bright with the glare of sunshine on burnished armour. However it is not caught in that time, the storytelling is modern, but modern without ever drawing too far from the setting or being distracting to the reader. The development of the central character changes as he grows through his adventures and their writing does too.
I mostly bought it because I know Neil Gaiman is a big fan of his work and I can really see why. This is a grand story of honour, glory and adventure. It doesn't read like it's trying to be anything that it's not- you could write a book of this kind and people would read it and think "this is trying to be T.H.White" or Tolkien or whoever else - this book reads like it is it's own thing and it is clearly a classic, from start to finish. It belongs to a canon broader and more illustrious than the fantasy genre, alongside Mallory and Grimm as much as Martin and Le Guin and I recommend it strongly. Reaching the last pages made me sad because I didn't want it to end.
Also it really freaked me out by starting with the line "Ben, look at this first."