The Complete Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, Madouc (Gollancz Black Books) [Hardcover]

The text: a tale of the lost continent or large island Lyonesse, West of France, South of Ireland. Mystery, strategy, war, romance, fairies and magic. How Princess Suldrun grew up and fell in love, while her father King Casmir tries to gain the ascendancy among the scattered kingdoms of Lyonesse; how Prince Aillas travelled the medieval lands of Lyonesse, encountering strange tribes and weird customs; and how Madouc, a faerie changeling, sets off on a quest not unrelated to the other stories. A rich multi-stranded epic of the Elder Isles.

The book: this hardback contains all three Lyonesse books in a single volume (and excellent Amazon price!)

My opinion of the text: it sounds like yet another fantasy/sword-and-sorcery tome, but Vance is such a good writer that he sweeps you (me) along and before you know it you are immersed, following all the various strands effortlessly. This is a classic of High Fantasy, with brilliant imagination, colour, wit, evocative names, lyrical as well as down-to-eart descriptions, strategy, magic, a range of personalities with foibles and traits... colour, food, drama, death... Vance's language is rich but very easy to read, he plays on your imagination, has a sardonic wit, is a story-teller par excellence, and leaves you with magnificent memories and dreams - and a wish for more, even after page 1024! I think this is among his best work, and it was written/recorded after he went blind. Homeric - plus wit!

My opinion of this hardback: first of all, my copy has a different cover - same colour scheme, but a nice goblet instead of this strange crown of the image above. Beautifully produced with nice text layout and font use; worthy of Vance, which is saying something! My only reservations are on the illustrations in the text: Vance does not need illustrating, his language calls up many images and visions already. Illustrations actually take some of the joy away, but most of them are pretty generic (even if slightly wrong, to my taste) and not very obtrusive. There is a very occasional larger plate of a scene or character, which is tedious for people who prefer their own imagination; but they are really very few, and I recommend this edition to all lovers of Vance. And if you don't know Vance, this would be a good place to start.

Oh, and the 'one line missing' from the first review? I think he/she means page 270, where one line is repeated a bit later - and the line that *should* be there, is missing.

When we started work on the Vance Integral Edition in 1999, only Vance's most recent works were in print. To find a copy of his acknowledged masterpieces--Lyonesse, Tschai (Planet of Adventure), Demon Princes, Emphyrio, the Dying Earth stories, Alastor, etc., etc.--you had to scour used bookstores and sites. Since the VIE was completed in 2006, most of these titles have now become available in mass-market editions, some of them based on our texts. In addition, limited editions of his lesser known works have been appearing, notably the mysteries, mostly from Subterranean Press. I have no doubt that the VIE, by making available fully-edited texts, is a major factor in publishers' taking this initiative.

This particular edition is especially close to my heart, as I was the primary textual integrity worker on the Lyonesse trilogy. I consider it Vance's masterpiece and the finest work of fantasy of the 20th Century, edging out Pullman's His Dark Materials by a narrow margin. Gollancz have given us the only mass-market Lyonesse that is faithful to Vance's creation (save only the Grafton Madouc in the UK, printed from the Underwood-Miller plates). While The Green Pearl was undamaged by editors, the first and third books were compromised. The Berkley editor of Suldrun's Garden felt it necessary to exchange Chapters 25 and 26, at the cost of some sweetly lyrical description, and the Ace editors attempted to fix some minor continuity problems in Madouc, and ended up making matters worse. (These are not the only continuity problems in the trilogy, none of which we felt compelled to correct; finding them is left as an exercise to the reader.)

The title page credits Adam Roberts as editor and author of an afterword. I suppose I can guess why Roberts felt it necessary to move the Preliminary and the Glossaries to the back of the book: suffice it to say I disagree with him. Perhaps if I had been given the title 'Editor' I might have felt impelled to elevate my judgment above the author's. If Roberts should read this, I would be grateful for a comment.

I did enjoy his Afterword, especially his emphasis on the role of children as major characters (also true of Pullman, and of lesser fantasists like Lewis and Tolkien--assuming Hobbits are children). The point was made previously by Paul Rhoads, the VIE Editor-in-Chief, in the project's newsletter, Cosmopolis, and deserves a wider audience.

Unfortunately the Afterword, like all the other material Gollancz did not acquire from the VIE, is littered with misspelled proper names. In addition there is an error of fact in the statement "Prince Dhrun's quest for the Ska woman he thinks he loves ends in disappointment." Roberts is arguing the childhood theme again here, specifically "the distance between adult and childish perceptions." Unfortunately he compromises both his argument and his credibility, as the questor is not Prince Dhrun but King Aillas, who was not a child when taken as a slave by the Ska. I would like to believe that this is an error in production, not in scholarship.

A couple of comments on previous reviews: like Henk Beentje's, my copy (purchased from amazon.de) has the Grail on the cover. The image shown here is on the back cover. Henk is also correct in identifying a missing line on Page 270 and Ant, in his comment, accurately supplies the proper reading.

In his comment on A Kid's Review, Ant speculates that an "unauthorized explicitly homosexual conversation" might be the missing material. Sorry, wrong. The relationship between Tamurello and Faude Carfilhiot *is* explicitly homosexual, as I can attest after examining three different manuscripts of Suldrun's Garden. (In passing, I observe that neither Tamurello nor Faude is 'simply' gay; rather they are omnisexual, like Kex in Strange People Queer Notions.)

A reviewer at the US site suspects that Gollancz has introduced British spellings. This is not the case, and I direct your attention again to Ant's comment, which cites a note from Vance to his editor at Tor on the matter of spelling and punctuation. Generally speaking, in his later works, Vance often employs British spelling--except when he doesn't.

However, Gollancz has introduced British quotation practice: single quotes for dialogue, double quotes for dialogue within dialogue. This is unfortunate, as Vance's practice is very much his own: double quotes for dialogue, single quotes for dialogue within dialogue and, significantly, single quotes for what we in the VIE came to call quotation for emphasis. This distinction is lost in this edition. It is not a large thing, but it is more than nothing.

Quibbles aside, I express warmest gratitude to Gollancz for this edition. Lyonesse deserves to be in print from now until the end of time. And I now possess a correct version that I can loan out without putting my Deluxe VIE at risk.

Incredibly imaginative, precise and elaborate prose, wonderful story ... face facts, it's hard to fault Jack Vance's Lyonesse. It simply is a beautiful piece of fiction written by a writer in total command of his craft, a writer who is both unique and brilliant.

If I were to pick faults, all I could say is that some people might find it difficult adapting to Jack's verbose dialogue. All of his character's talk the same way, with many words (most of them seldom found outside of the dictionary), much charisma and almost always the ability to defend their point of view with wit and intelligence. This isn't realistic, and neither is meant to be. What it is meant to be is entertaining. I've never enjoyed dialogue like I enjoy Jack Vance's. He can turn the simplest conversation into a battle of wits able to amuse the gods. Most of his conversations I re-read because I can't believe anything could be so good.

Anyway, I can't praise him enough. And if you haven't done so, after this book, try reading the Dying Earth books and the Demon Princes saga. They are equally as good.