I’m currently in the middle of reading all of the World Fantasy Award winners so I’ve read a lot of fantasy lately. I also have a very low tolerance for pseudo-medieval Tolkien rip-offs. Fortunately the juries of award generally select other things. I had been having a fairly good run of books until the most recent two I’ve read: Koko, which was by only the absolute broadest definition “fantasy” and to even say that it requires that you take narrative flourishes literally and Madouc which might as well have been titled Generic Fantasy Novel.
The novels preceding them that stand out were:
Replay was a very clever story of a man who keeps repeating his life from college to his death and what he does about it. The author, Ken Grimwood, plays with the scenario in about every way that you could and has a good grasp on the complexities of the situation.
Perfume - A very European novel about an amoral man who defines his world by scent seeks to perfect the art of perfume making. There’s a lot of odd allegorical digressions but painting a world of odors was very distinctive.
Song of Kali - Dan Simmons’s first novel and it captures Calcutta at the depths of self-consumer destructiveness. The fantasy elements are low key but the book does atmosphere and pacing very impressively. The story is about an author lured to Calcutta because a new manuscript has emerged from a poet who apparently a decade before. Once there he finds a cult of modern day Thuggees is mixed up in it but the reasons are not clear.
Mythago Wood is another allegorical novel, this one about the nature of myth. And unlike most books that explore that situation it quickly does away with familiar stories for a set of “precursors” that echo the themes in earlier and earlier forms. This is about a tiny forest in Britain which is tied to the human subconscious and the closer to the center of the wood you get the bigger it becomes. A family has members who become obsessed with penetrating the primal myth and become wrapped up in a myth of their own.
Here’s what I wrote about Bridge of Birds a few weeks ago:
It’s a great novel that you need to read.
Finally I have to mention Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. It’s a novel set at the turn of the nineteenth century about the reemergence of magic in Britain. It’s not a book for everyone and there is a simple test to know if it is for you: the book is written in the style of the period. If you said, “By Jove! That sounds like a delightful experience!” then this is the book for you. If, on the other hand, you said, “They had novels in nineteenth century Britain?” then you probably won’t enjoy it.