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The Zimiamvian Trilogy #3
The Mezentian Gate
Mezentian Gate, The by Eddison, E.R.. 4 1/4 x 7. 2d ptg.
275 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
About the author
E.R. Eddison
21 books165 followersEric Rücker Eddison was an English civil servant and author, writing under the name "E.R. Eddison."
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 12, 2022
OK, this one is also complicated ... Not so much the broad strokes of the story, this time, though; rather, it's the structure of the book. Unfortunately, Eddison died before completing it; fortunately, he did leave enough notes to allow the book to be understandable even in partial form. Apparently, he wasn't one of those authors who starts at the beginning and keeps going until they get to the end; he was one who creates the framework of the story, and then goes in and starts expanding & detailing the interesting bits until everything is finished. So in the book there are a number of chapters of varying stages of completeness -- he had at least drafted out the first part of the book, and the last part, and a couple of key bits in the middle.
For the chapters that were not completed, we're for the most part presented with "Arguments" -- a couple hundred words describing the main events of the chapter, and some of their implications.
There are also at least a couple of chapters that weren't fully drafted, but for which various notes & fragments exist and are presented.
In the end we have maybe a quarter to a third of the completed book? plus the assorted arguments and drafts and notes filling in the gaps. And on the one hand, it's a damned shame we didn't get the full book -- had it been completed (and, of course, had its potential been realized in its creation) I think it would have been a masterpiece of the first water; on the other hand, I'm at least happy that we got such of it as we did.
The narrative is much more straightforward than A Fish Dinner in Memison. There's a brief introduction -- excuse me, Praeludium -- with the Lessingham of our world, but then the scene shifts to, and remains in, Zimiamvia.
If you recall, in the first book of the trilogy, Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia, the Triple Kingdom was wracked by civil war after the death of King Mezentius and, shortly after, his son King Styllis. A Fish Dinner in Memison showed some of the events immediately preceding Mezentius' death, up to and including the eponymous fish dinner. The Mezentian Gate shows the history of the Triple Kingdoms, as embodied in the family of the Parrys and the family of the royal house of Fingiswold, on an epic scale, beginning generations prior to the events of Mistress of Mistresses and ending just prior to that book, and introducing pretty much all of the major players and moving them into their opening positions. Additionally there are plenty of deep philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and of Love (yes, always with a capital L), and intimations that some characters may be, or at least represent, Gods in their mortal shell, all told in Eddison's inimitable prose. Plus the mysterious Doctor Vandermast and the oh-so-charming (and dangerous) ladies Campaspe, Anthea and Zenianthe, none of whom is entirely as she first appears to be.
Those Parrys really are bad eggs, btw.
Even in its incomplete state, it's a remarkably assured and ambitious book.
For the chapters that were not completed, we're for the most part presented with "Arguments" -- a couple hundred words describing the main events of the chapter, and some of their implications.
There are also at least a couple of chapters that weren't fully drafted, but for which various notes & fragments exist and are presented.
In the end we have maybe a quarter to a third of the completed book? plus the assorted arguments and drafts and notes filling in the gaps. And on the one hand, it's a damned shame we didn't get the full book -- had it been completed (and, of course, had its potential been realized in its creation) I think it would have been a masterpiece of the first water; on the other hand, I'm at least happy that we got such of it as we did.
The narrative is much more straightforward than A Fish Dinner in Memison. There's a brief introduction -- excuse me, Praeludium -- with the Lessingham of our world, but then the scene shifts to, and remains in, Zimiamvia.
If you recall, in the first book of the trilogy, Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia, the Triple Kingdom was wracked by civil war after the death of King Mezentius and, shortly after, his son King Styllis. A Fish Dinner in Memison showed some of the events immediately preceding Mezentius' death, up to and including the eponymous fish dinner. The Mezentian Gate shows the history of the Triple Kingdoms, as embodied in the family of the Parrys and the family of the royal house of Fingiswold, on an epic scale, beginning generations prior to the events of Mistress of Mistresses and ending just prior to that book, and introducing pretty much all of the major players and moving them into their opening positions. Additionally there are plenty of deep philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and of Love (yes, always with a capital L), and intimations that some characters may be, or at least represent, Gods in their mortal shell, all told in Eddison's inimitable prose. Plus the mysterious Doctor Vandermast and the oh-so-charming (and dangerous) ladies Campaspe, Anthea and Zenianthe, none of whom is entirely as she first appears to be.
Those Parrys really are bad eggs, btw.
Even in its incomplete state, it's a remarkably assured and ambitious book.
Read
August 6, 2020You: Boy, I sure hope George RR Martin doesn't die before finishing his epic fantasy series!
ER Eddison, an intellectual: [Publishes his epic fantasy series in reverse order, so that at his death it's the middle of the first book which is left incomplete]
I've only previously read what passes for his hit, The Worm Ouroboros, an epic fantasy written by a man who'd lived through the First World War, which nevertheless ends with the heroes wishing to go through all their battles again. This is off to no better a political start, opening in distinctly Ayn Rand mode, with the assembled, petty forces of, you know, humanity, about to bring down a majestic figure with whom the narrative is unashamedly in love: "There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other." Still, even if one doesn't entirely buy the implications of this, particularly in 2020 I couldn't help but have some sympathy with the lament for "the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness". And this is where we understand why an epic fantasy has opened on this contemporary scene, as that imposing figure says to his enigmatic lover "If this is, as I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your handiwork...I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one. The best I can suppose is that it may be some good as training-ground for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one." Well, I definitely know that feeling. And from there the narrative is transfigured into a grand fantasy world so overwritten and draped in fustian as to make Tolkien look like Joe Abercrombie, Dunsany seem positively scurrilous. More traditional, too, in many ways; after all, even Tolkien, at least in his most famous work, foregrounded the little and unexpected heroes, not the archetypal great men. None of that for Eddison. His world more real than Earth opens on Pertiscus Parry, his brothers Mynius and Sidonius, a set of names even She Who Shall No Longer Be Named would have rejected as a bit much, and there's worse to come: in particular, Barganax and the Duke of Bork sound like they've escaped from a Ryan Browne pisstake.
These are not the only wonkinesses of tone. Eddison has a taste for antonyms which sound archaic but, which if not neologisms, I've certainly never encountered in old texts myself - things like 'downcome' and 'illfare', which sometimes teeter on the edge of bathos. Despite much of it reading as the very highest of high fantasy, sometimes odd moments will intrude which would never have flown in Middle-Earth – scenes of sapphism, for instance, or even something as mundane as using the word 'vomit'. Part of it, of course, is that nowadays, even if reacting against Tolkien, we can't help but think of fantasy partly in terms of parameters he established, by which standards the worldbuilding is distinctly iffy - made-up lands where they speak English and worship Greek gods. But of course, Tolkien's world was meant to be our misremembered past, and his heirs generally work in worlds either wholly separate from ours, or somehow parallel. Here, as in Cabell's Jurgen, our world is instead a little bubble within the story's more real reality. Indeed, when you consider that it was created after dinner by people who'd been drinking, it should hardly come as a surprise how we turned out: "crooked", "spoilt"; "our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its nightmarish unreality and transience, unfortunate episode in the real life of the Gods". In some ways this reminded me of Grant Morrison's crippled infant universe of Qwewq, a tiny, benighted world where the superheroes exist only as fictions, but with the difference that Superman et al feel a terrible compassion for Qwewq, a responsibility to help it grow up, whereas Eddison's characters consider our world more a case of 'I think we'd all had a few, let us never speak of this again'.
That whole theme, though, is treated more fully in the series' next/previous volume, A Fish Dinner In Memison. Here it's more an interlude in a saga which feels at once like a sort of mediaeval history plus, and wholly unimportant. There's some dynastic stuff and various territories and betrayals and I can't for the life of me remember who was doing what to whom, or why. The whole thing is magnificent yet somehow sedate, like the sort of mediaeval art its cover emulates; similarly, the details are as impossible for me to commit to memory as the wars between the later Carolingians, or the city-states of Italy. Once we get to the sections Eddison never completed, the action picks up markedly; a rare case of a writer who needed to tell, not show. When he wasn't trying so hard, Eddison could come up with memorable stuff like "He discloses himself to the Queen and makes fierce love to her. Rosma, who is now forty-one and in a perilous state of boredom, is at first infuriated but at last, saying she will ne'er consent, consents." The rest of the time, the soothing archaicism make it best suited as bedtime reading, which has been doing wonders for my slumber but further doomed any comprehension of the plot. Still, it does have its gorgeous moments - not whole scenes, even, so much as jewelled images, tapestries in prose. Inventive methods of assassination, such as getting someone drunk and putting them to bed with a bear, or playing a game of chess with certain pieces poisoned. There's a fabulously heady hymn to light and flowers, alas too long to quote in full; or, briefer, "He sat there like a man altogether given over to the influences of the time and the place, fondling the lynx beneath the chin and sipping hippocras from a goblet of silver." And it all ends with an allegorical resolution which seems almost intended as the basis for a new religion. Well, whatever the many, many other criticisms one might make of Eddison, nobody could claim he lacked ambition.
ER Eddison, an intellectual: [Publishes his epic fantasy series in reverse order, so that at his death it's the middle of the first book which is left incomplete]
I've only previously read what passes for his hit, The Worm Ouroboros, an epic fantasy written by a man who'd lived through the First World War, which nevertheless ends with the heroes wishing to go through all their battles again. This is off to no better a political start, opening in distinctly Ayn Rand mode, with the assembled, petty forces of, you know, humanity, about to bring down a majestic figure with whom the narrative is unashamedly in love: "There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other." Still, even if one doesn't entirely buy the implications of this, particularly in 2020 I couldn't help but have some sympathy with the lament for "the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness". And this is where we understand why an epic fantasy has opened on this contemporary scene, as that imposing figure says to his enigmatic lover "If this is, as I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your handiwork...I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one. The best I can suppose is that it may be some good as training-ground for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one." Well, I definitely know that feeling. And from there the narrative is transfigured into a grand fantasy world so overwritten and draped in fustian as to make Tolkien look like Joe Abercrombie, Dunsany seem positively scurrilous. More traditional, too, in many ways; after all, even Tolkien, at least in his most famous work, foregrounded the little and unexpected heroes, not the archetypal great men. None of that for Eddison. His world more real than Earth opens on Pertiscus Parry, his brothers Mynius and Sidonius, a set of names even She Who Shall No Longer Be Named would have rejected as a bit much, and there's worse to come: in particular, Barganax and the Duke of Bork sound like they've escaped from a Ryan Browne pisstake.
These are not the only wonkinesses of tone. Eddison has a taste for antonyms which sound archaic but, which if not neologisms, I've certainly never encountered in old texts myself - things like 'downcome' and 'illfare', which sometimes teeter on the edge of bathos. Despite much of it reading as the very highest of high fantasy, sometimes odd moments will intrude which would never have flown in Middle-Earth – scenes of sapphism, for instance, or even something as mundane as using the word 'vomit'. Part of it, of course, is that nowadays, even if reacting against Tolkien, we can't help but think of fantasy partly in terms of parameters he established, by which standards the worldbuilding is distinctly iffy - made-up lands where they speak English and worship Greek gods. But of course, Tolkien's world was meant to be our misremembered past, and his heirs generally work in worlds either wholly separate from ours, or somehow parallel. Here, as in Cabell's Jurgen, our world is instead a little bubble within the story's more real reality. Indeed, when you consider that it was created after dinner by people who'd been drinking, it should hardly come as a surprise how we turned out: "crooked", "spoilt"; "our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its nightmarish unreality and transience, unfortunate episode in the real life of the Gods". In some ways this reminded me of Grant Morrison's crippled infant universe of Qwewq, a tiny, benighted world where the superheroes exist only as fictions, but with the difference that Superman et al feel a terrible compassion for Qwewq, a responsibility to help it grow up, whereas Eddison's characters consider our world more a case of 'I think we'd all had a few, let us never speak of this again'.
That whole theme, though, is treated more fully in the series' next/previous volume, A Fish Dinner In Memison. Here it's more an interlude in a saga which feels at once like a sort of mediaeval history plus, and wholly unimportant. There's some dynastic stuff and various territories and betrayals and I can't for the life of me remember who was doing what to whom, or why. The whole thing is magnificent yet somehow sedate, like the sort of mediaeval art its cover emulates; similarly, the details are as impossible for me to commit to memory as the wars between the later Carolingians, or the city-states of Italy. Once we get to the sections Eddison never completed, the action picks up markedly; a rare case of a writer who needed to tell, not show. When he wasn't trying so hard, Eddison could come up with memorable stuff like "He discloses himself to the Queen and makes fierce love to her. Rosma, who is now forty-one and in a perilous state of boredom, is at first infuriated but at last, saying she will ne'er consent, consents." The rest of the time, the soothing archaicism make it best suited as bedtime reading, which has been doing wonders for my slumber but further doomed any comprehension of the plot. Still, it does have its gorgeous moments - not whole scenes, even, so much as jewelled images, tapestries in prose. Inventive methods of assassination, such as getting someone drunk and putting them to bed with a bear, or playing a game of chess with certain pieces poisoned. There's a fabulously heady hymn to light and flowers, alas too long to quote in full; or, briefer, "He sat there like a man altogether given over to the influences of the time and the place, fondling the lynx beneath the chin and sipping hippocras from a goblet of silver." And it all ends with an allegorical resolution which seems almost intended as the basis for a new religion. Well, whatever the many, many other criticisms one might make of Eddison, nobody could claim he lacked ambition.
October 24, 2016
One of Neil Gaiman's better ideas was Morpheus's library of unwritten books in The Sandman. Every book that anyone has ever thought about writing, but never actually got around to, is in there and, naturally ninety nine. nine percent of them have titles like 'The Best-Selling Spy Novel that I think about on the Bus that will sell a million copies and mean I'll never have to work again.' I don't remember what happens to books that people go on to write, but presumably they're removed from the shelves and respectfully pulped. Well either way, it's nice to think that somewhere in the library of unwritten books there's the missing three quarters of 'The Mezentian Gate,' and probably the other ∞-odd books Eddison planned to write about Zimmavia and it's inhabitants before he unexpectedly brought the big one. As it is I think we got the best stuff.
True, it would have been nice to read a fully worked through version of this mad arsed section:
but Eddisson seems to have been most engaged with articulating his unique philosophy, and detailing the baroque romances of his 'Olympian' characters, and made it his priority to get the parts of the novel that touched on those down on paper. As such the bits we get seem to be the bits he seemed to have enjoyed writing the most. This means a lot more passages dedicated to Eddison's (frankly bizarre) thoughts about the 'divine feminine,' as the lady Fiorinda admires herself naked in the mirror*, than any boring, blokey stuff about wars or succession**. It's fairly easy to mock, I don't suppose that even in his most whisky-soaked Tolkien ever gave much thought as to the colour of Eowyn or Galadriel's pubic hair, but I'd honestly feel a little small for doing so. This isn't tacky fantasy, with added cod philosophy and gratuitous t&a, it's a colossally eccentric and totally unique work, written in gorgeous and ornate pseudo-Elizabethan prose.
It's too incomplete and sketchy for a full 5/5, and a book which dedicates half a page to describing the fabrics that surround the heroine's four-poster bed is obviously not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think the world is a little bit richer for what we do have. My suggestion for getting a feel for the novel would be to have a listen to this whilst contemplating a few Pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful ladies in a suitably respectful way:
image:
______________________
*Fair to say Eddison *really* loved the ladies, several bits of this - particularly the bits with 'that oread lady, Anthea and sylph-like Camapaspe' must have sent the pulses racing when the proofs landed in the 1940s publishing houses.
**The downside to this is that Eddison's greatest character - the 'blood-soak'd vicar of Rerek, that foxy and wolfish butcher Horius Parry' never actually appears outside the 'argument with dates' summary sections. Ah well, he had plenty to do in Mistress of Mistresses, and should I ever be called upon to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons I fully intend to model my approach to life in fantasy-land after his own. How can you not love a man whose response to being caught in the act of conspiring against his King is pretend to have uncovered this nest of vipers, and have been so overcome with rage he promptly killed the lot of them before they could say a word? That's the right idea about life.
True, it would have been nice to read a fully worked through version of this mad arsed section:
but Eddisson seems to have been most engaged with articulating his unique philosophy, and detailing the baroque romances of his 'Olympian' characters, and made it his priority to get the parts of the novel that touched on those down on paper. As such the bits we get seem to be the bits he seemed to have enjoyed writing the most. This means a lot more passages dedicated to Eddison's (frankly bizarre) thoughts about the 'divine feminine,' as the lady Fiorinda admires herself naked in the mirror*, than any boring, blokey stuff about wars or succession**. It's fairly easy to mock, I don't suppose that even in his most whisky-soaked Tolkien ever gave much thought as to the colour of Eowyn or Galadriel's pubic hair, but I'd honestly feel a little small for doing so. This isn't tacky fantasy, with added cod philosophy and gratuitous t&a, it's a colossally eccentric and totally unique work, written in gorgeous and ornate pseudo-Elizabethan prose.
It's too incomplete and sketchy for a full 5/5, and a book which dedicates half a page to describing the fabrics that surround the heroine's four-poster bed is obviously not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think the world is a little bit richer for what we do have. My suggestion for getting a feel for the novel would be to have a listen to this whilst contemplating a few Pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful ladies in a suitably respectful way:
image:
______________________
*Fair to say Eddison *really* loved the ladies, several bits of this - particularly the bits with 'that oread lady, Anthea and sylph-like Camapaspe' must have sent the pulses racing when the proofs landed in the 1940s publishing houses.
**The downside to this is that Eddison's greatest character - the 'blood-soak'd vicar of Rerek, that foxy and wolfish butcher Horius Parry' never actually appears outside the 'argument with dates' summary sections. Ah well, he had plenty to do in Mistress of Mistresses, and should I ever be called upon to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons I fully intend to model my approach to life in fantasy-land after his own. How can you not love a man whose response to being caught in the act of conspiring against his King is pretend to have uncovered this nest of vipers, and have been so overcome with rage he promptly killed the lot of them before they could say a word? That's the right idea about life.
June 30, 2023
A little perfunctory research will tell you that this, the last-published volume of the Zimiamvia series, is unfinished. It consists of fairly detailed chapter summaries, things that look like chapter summaries but aren’t (I don’t care how ruthless Rosma Parry is, she’s not going to dispose of two husbands and a brace of lovers in a one chapter), finished but unpolished chapters, and some fully-completed material. It is, to steal Eddison’s metaphor, a portrait with some areas roughed in in charcoal and others nearing completion. It’s probably the most ambitious of his books.
A little elementary mathematics will suggest that, had Eddison been granted a few extra years of life, The Mezentian Gate would likely have been at the upper end of five-hundred-odd pages long; as it currently stands it’s a comparatively slender 270. Of course that’s juggling with average chapter lengths in a rather stupid fashion and assuming Eddison wouldn’t have dropped material, shunted stuff off to a fourth volume, left some of the notes as backstory, fleshed out “finished” bits, and generally buggered about with the thing. Do you think that likely? I don’t. Chances are that, in an alternate universe where Tolkien was run over by a bus in 1943, Eddison lived to a ripe old age, Peake managed to complete his Gormenghast series (because there must be balance, children, there must be balance even in fantasy), and I’m sat here speculating inaccurately on what The Lord of the Rings might have looked like had the situation been reversed, The Mezentian Gate would have felt very different. Eddison’s style is, like Peake’s, all about polish.
Which takes us where?
Which takes us to the book we actually have, rather than the one in the labyrinthine depths of L-Space, on the shelves of John Charteris’s study, or, I suppose, probably, somewhere out there in the Land of If. The book we have is worth reading, but it’s probably only worth reading if you have first swallowed Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. It might be a little too rough about the edges otherwise, besides which if you couldn’t stomach the two finished books why on Earth would you bother with the unfinished one?
The book we have covers, childhood to death, the life of King Mezentius of Fingiswold and peripheral events relevant thereunto… That’s misleading. It’s better to say that it covers events across the Three Kingdoms and Akkama, largely during the reign of King Mezentius including his minority. It encompasses, therefore, the events of A Fish Dinner in Memison (almost entirely without the “Earth” sections), and serves as the back-story (in Zimiamvian time, at least) to Mistress of Mistresses. This is not as complicated as I’ve made it sound. There’s the usual combination of richly-finished (where completed) description, highly-mannered archaism of speech, Machiavellian scheming and betrayal, glorious drama, and heavy-philosophical juggling of avatars, but it isn’t as self-indulgent as the preceding volume. Which is not to say that A Fish Dinner isn’t still quite brilliant, or that self-indulgence is always a bad thing in an author. Self-indulgent is much better than boring.
Very roughly, we have the more-or-less finished start of the book (which is, mostly, very good, though I feel might have received a bit more surface gloss in places), the more-or-less finished end of the book (which is glorious), a couple of rogue chapters dealing with Fiorinda (which are also superb), and a great bulk of “arguments with dates” in the middle that serve as highly-compressed chapter summaries and so forth, and that, throwing back of an envelope estimates into the fireplace, would surely unpack into something gigantic. Part Greek tragedy, part blood-drenched soap-opera, part idiosyncratic religio-philosophy, part watching pretty girls in the sunshine, I’m not sure, really, that Eddison, who was not exactly the quickest of writers, would have had time to finish it even if he’d lived to a hundred. I’d have loved to watch him try, though.
Since it is unfinished there’s a lot less in the way of interior decoration, nature-writing, top-heavy metaphors and inserted poetry than I’ve come to expect from Eddison. His characters are still in character – Eddison is Euripedes to Tolkien’s Aeschylus, and his characters, though extreme, are truly alive. The completed sections are lush and rich and highly individual in a way that, if you love Eddison, you will love, and if you don’t… If you don’t then why are you reading this? The “arguments with dates” are a lot more skeletal, but do at least give some indication of where he thought he was going and how the writing process worked for him. It’s a much more interesting way of finding that out than ploughing through letters and diaries and whatnot, though there are people who like that kind of thing and who am I to judge?
The major problem with it, I suppose, is that there’s a lot of material that in a finished book would doubtless have been fully integrated, but that doesn’t quite fit together as things stand. What I’m choosing to regard as The Very Bloody History of Queen Rosma, for example, is presented entirely within the arguments, with the woman herself popping up only in the last couple of chapters. That means a key player in the highly dramatic scenes at the end of the book, a woman whose psychology is crucial to the way things play out, feels a little like she’s dropped in out of nowhere. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it is there.
Five-star writing, therefore, where complete, but not enough of it for five stars overall.
Done.
A little elementary mathematics will suggest that, had Eddison been granted a few extra years of life, The Mezentian Gate would likely have been at the upper end of five-hundred-odd pages long; as it currently stands it’s a comparatively slender 270. Of course that’s juggling with average chapter lengths in a rather stupid fashion and assuming Eddison wouldn’t have dropped material, shunted stuff off to a fourth volume, left some of the notes as backstory, fleshed out “finished” bits, and generally buggered about with the thing. Do you think that likely? I don’t. Chances are that, in an alternate universe where Tolkien was run over by a bus in 1943, Eddison lived to a ripe old age, Peake managed to complete his Gormenghast series (because there must be balance, children, there must be balance even in fantasy), and I’m sat here speculating inaccurately on what The Lord of the Rings might have looked like had the situation been reversed, The Mezentian Gate would have felt very different. Eddison’s style is, like Peake’s, all about polish.
Which takes us where?
Which takes us to the book we actually have, rather than the one in the labyrinthine depths of L-Space, on the shelves of John Charteris’s study, or, I suppose, probably, somewhere out there in the Land of If. The book we have is worth reading, but it’s probably only worth reading if you have first swallowed Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. It might be a little too rough about the edges otherwise, besides which if you couldn’t stomach the two finished books why on Earth would you bother with the unfinished one?
The book we have covers, childhood to death, the life of King Mezentius of Fingiswold and peripheral events relevant thereunto… That’s misleading. It’s better to say that it covers events across the Three Kingdoms and Akkama, largely during the reign of King Mezentius including his minority. It encompasses, therefore, the events of A Fish Dinner in Memison (almost entirely without the “Earth” sections), and serves as the back-story (in Zimiamvian time, at least) to Mistress of Mistresses. This is not as complicated as I’ve made it sound. There’s the usual combination of richly-finished (where completed) description, highly-mannered archaism of speech, Machiavellian scheming and betrayal, glorious drama, and heavy-philosophical juggling of avatars, but it isn’t as self-indulgent as the preceding volume. Which is not to say that A Fish Dinner isn’t still quite brilliant, or that self-indulgence is always a bad thing in an author. Self-indulgent is much better than boring.
Very roughly, we have the more-or-less finished start of the book (which is, mostly, very good, though I feel might have received a bit more surface gloss in places), the more-or-less finished end of the book (which is glorious), a couple of rogue chapters dealing with Fiorinda (which are also superb), and a great bulk of “arguments with dates” in the middle that serve as highly-compressed chapter summaries and so forth, and that, throwing back of an envelope estimates into the fireplace, would surely unpack into something gigantic. Part Greek tragedy, part blood-drenched soap-opera, part idiosyncratic religio-philosophy, part watching pretty girls in the sunshine, I’m not sure, really, that Eddison, who was not exactly the quickest of writers, would have had time to finish it even if he’d lived to a hundred. I’d have loved to watch him try, though.
Since it is unfinished there’s a lot less in the way of interior decoration, nature-writing, top-heavy metaphors and inserted poetry than I’ve come to expect from Eddison. His characters are still in character – Eddison is Euripedes to Tolkien’s Aeschylus, and his characters, though extreme, are truly alive. The completed sections are lush and rich and highly individual in a way that, if you love Eddison, you will love, and if you don’t… If you don’t then why are you reading this? The “arguments with dates” are a lot more skeletal, but do at least give some indication of where he thought he was going and how the writing process worked for him. It’s a much more interesting way of finding that out than ploughing through letters and diaries and whatnot, though there are people who like that kind of thing and who am I to judge?
The major problem with it, I suppose, is that there’s a lot of material that in a finished book would doubtless have been fully integrated, but that doesn’t quite fit together as things stand. What I’m choosing to regard as The Very Bloody History of Queen Rosma, for example, is presented entirely within the arguments, with the woman herself popping up only in the last couple of chapters. That means a key player in the highly dramatic scenes at the end of the book, a woman whose psychology is crucial to the way things play out, feels a little like she’s dropped in out of nowhere. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it is there.
Five-star writing, therefore, where complete, but not enough of it for five stars overall.
Done.
August 3, 2018
This is one of the books comprising Eddison's Zimiamvian Trilogy.
It is the last in order of date of publication, and his last work, but is the first in order of the Trilogy's chronology.
For those interested in pre-Tolkien fantasy novels, I would recommend first reading Eddison's separate work, "The Worm Ouroboros", then starting the Trilogy by picking up first this book, then on to "A Fish Dinner in Memison", and concluding with "Mistress of Mistresses".
These novels are distinguished by the Elizabethan/Shakespearean language used throughout - the dialog, descriptive passages, the action, are all conveyed in this old English form. Eddison wrote in a poetic style, and it bears careful reading to both appreciate both the fineness and beauty of his expression, as well as his plain meaning.
It is the last in order of date of publication, and his last work, but is the first in order of the Trilogy's chronology.
For those interested in pre-Tolkien fantasy novels, I would recommend first reading Eddison's separate work, "The Worm Ouroboros", then starting the Trilogy by picking up first this book, then on to "A Fish Dinner in Memison", and concluding with "Mistress of Mistresses".
These novels are distinguished by the Elizabethan/Shakespearean language used throughout - the dialog, descriptive passages, the action, are all conveyed in this old English form. Eddison wrote in a poetic style, and it bears careful reading to both appreciate both the fineness and beauty of his expression, as well as his plain meaning.
April 22, 2020
This is an unfinished work by the author, yet is more comprehensible than the other two in the triology. This tells us something about this author.
I read Eddison because CS Lewis liked him and I love Lewis. I can also see to a small degree why Lewis loved his work.
I read Eddison because CS Lewis liked him and I love Lewis. I can also see to a small degree why Lewis loved his work.
January 23, 2020
thrilling! its partial state reveals a lot about eddison's greatness, two main points:
1. the overarching plot of the zimiamvia books is often lost in the moment to moment pleasures of eddison's prose, but the detail of the argument with dates proves just how completely he thought through the political history of his world
2. the fact that the part he made sure he finished first, and saw as the grand finale, is a long series of discussions of leadership and love and metaphysics reveals the true seriousness of his artistic and philosophical intent. all the battles are confined to summaries of what he would have written if he hadnt died
1. the overarching plot of the zimiamvia books is often lost in the moment to moment pleasures of eddison's prose, but the detail of the argument with dates proves just how completely he thought through the political history of his world
2. the fact that the part he made sure he finished first, and saw as the grand finale, is a long series of discussions of leadership and love and metaphysics reveals the true seriousness of his artistic and philosophical intent. all the battles are confined to summaries of what he would have written if he hadnt died
September 29, 2007
(review of the full series in Zimiamvia: A Trilogy)
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