The Sarban Omnibus: "Ringstones", "The Sound of His Horn", "The Doll Maker" [Paperback]

Up until 2008 here were your options. Option 1: Track down one of the tattered Ballantine copies of Sarban's three core works (Ringstones, The Sound of His Horn, and The Doll Maker) at prices that are usually reserved for regular hardback novels (about an average of thirty bucks) and sometimes up to three times that amount. Option 2: Track down one of Tartarus presses absurdly difficult to find and absolutely beautiful hardback editions. Option two is the way to go, but became more difficult almost as soon as the books were released (especially for the edition with "The Sound of His Horn"). So for quite a while one of the 20th century's greatest fantasy writers has been, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible.

Sarban (nom de plume of John William Wall) is a writer that deserves to never be out of print. Thank you Blackmask for ensuring this. What you get here is a sturdy, reliable, TEXTUALLY ACCURATE reproduction of Ballantine's three Sarban paperbacks. I don't know about you, but I'm the kind of reader who likes to engage my books. I write notes on the margin as they come to mind; I underline passages; I dog-ear the corners of particularly memorable pages. I cannot do this with my Tartarus copies (for the love of God, it would be like underlining a passage in a 1st edition Whitman) and my Ballantine copies are too brittle to withstand such treatment. I CAN do this, if I so choose, with the Blackmask edition. I can also leave it untouched and have a copy that will allow me access to great fantasy lit, knowing I will not have to worry about having to cover it in cellophane to make sure it doesn't crumble to dust. This is a GREAT reproduction of three great works of fantasy literature. My hope is that it reaches a new generation of fantasy fiction enthusiasts and allows them see the truly avant-garde writing of one of this genre's most underrated writers.

The first tale, "Ringstones," involves Daphne Hazel and her encounters with ancient British relics and lore. Though this is Sarban's first published tale, it has echoes of cosmicism in it that resembles Machen. Yet, the sinister and terrifying elements that made Machen's work like "The Great God Pan," and "The White People" classics are, to be honest, not so much absent in "Ringstones" as muted. One gets a sense that the volume is turned down at points in the story where it could have been raised. Having said this, however, I still believe it is a tale worth reading as it does have some truly memorable passages.

The second tale, "The Sound of His Horn," is the one Sarban is perhaps best known for. I appreciate how Blackmask kept the Kingsley Amis introduction to the story that Ballantine originally had. I believe it fits very well with this work and I don't know if I would say that the story could be the same without it. It is the story of Alan Querdilion, a WWII veteran who tells a story to his friend in a drawing room one night, a story of how he found himself in an alternate future where the Nazi's had won WWII. Most people have categorized this tale as a science fiction story. I guess it fits given the alternate future component, but you could also categorize Jorge Luis Borges' "Ficciones" as sci-fi. This categorization, however, loses so much. It misses the fact that this is an achingly beautiful tale of love. At least this is one way to read it. It has one of the most beautiful lines of any Sarban (or any fantasy writer) tale when it states that Querdilion "learned for the first time how such a loss uproots all other agonies from the soul and makes of the heart a desert where fear and pain can never grow again."

The final tale is "The Doll Maker." I think this is, perhaps, the best point to address a criticism often leveled at Sarban, that of weak (and almost caricaturized) female characters. I will admit that Clare Lydgate is not the most well-developed character in all of fantasy fiction (and one could say the same more strongly of Daphne Hazel). Yet, Sarban never errs on the level of Jane Austen, giving us a female lead whose biggest problem is which gentleman she will fall in love with. (Pace Austen fans) There is depth to Clare and to her encounters with the eponymous Doll Maker, Niall Sterne. Without such depth, the story would be empty and the character would be more like a marionette (like in a Jane Austen novel) than a flesh and blood person, making the story about nothing. Clare is as integral to the stories success as is the Doll Maker. The interplay between the two is brilliant as Sarban unfolds each narrative element to the reader. I bring this point up here (and not when speaking of "Ringstones") because I actually can see merit in the criticisms when reading "Ringstones," but can see absolutely no merit in the criticisms when reading "The Doll Maker." Clare is a beautifully real character and, to me, shows a positive growth in Sarban's ability to create convincing characters (which may have been the lacking ingredient in "Ringstones.").

I would recommend this book highly and envy the reader new to Sarban's fiction. Be aware though that Sarban is an acquired taste. Blackmask ordered the stories by date of publication, but that is not how I would read them. Read "The Sound of His Horn" first. If you find nothing in there redeeming whatsoever, then Sarban is not an author for you. Not every author is for every reader. (I still cannot see what H. R. Wakefield did that M. R. James didn't do first . . . and better; and I obviously cannot see any merit to Jane Austen's work, though I have friends whom I consider highly intelligent who love Austen.) But. If you find something in "The Sound of His Horn," you will almost be guaranteed to find something in the other two.

Sarban was a very distinctive and fascinating writer and I was initially pleased to see that these three novels were back in print. However, this new edition from Black Mask is a disaster. The impression it gives is very amateurish. It is riddled with typographical errors to such an extent that it is occasionally difficult to be sure what the author intended. Not only are there a great number of these errors, but some of them are so blindingly obvious that it is clear that nobody proofread the text before it was sent to the printers. For example, the symbol for the British pound [£] is more than once replaced with an ampersand [&] followed by the word "pound;" -- kind of hard to miss, assuming you actually do any proofreading. In addition to this, the typographic design is quite careless. The margins are too small (the page numbers nearly touch the bottom edge of the paper) and the inner margin seems to be no larger than the outer margin; the text disappears into the binding if you do not hold the book spread wide open. I find it hard to believe that anyone with any experience in professional publishing or book design was involved with this shoddy edition. It seems more like the sort of thing you expect when buying some would-be writer's self-published book from iUniverse.

I decided to take a chance on this book based on the previous reviews, and I'm glad that I did. The closest comparison I can make is to the style and concerns of Arthur Machen, where pagan survivals imply glimpses into other aspects of reality of which we are normally unaware. Ringstones builds up a lovely evocation of such a pagan survival, paradoxically embodied by the children of a country family, only to undermine that reality at the end in what at first seems a disappointing way. On further consideration, however, the twist actually makes the story more interesting. In The Sound of His Horn, a certain psychological pattern that was implicit in Ringstones becomes much more explicit: an interest in relationships that involve absolute domination, whether of an underclass by an overclass, or more especially of women who are subjugated by men. The use of hypothetical future Nazis allows Sarban to pursue this theme in a blatantly fetishistic way that was probably a little shocking when these books first appeared (and actually is unsettling even now). Whether Sarban found such relationships to be titillating or appalling is an interesting question; both at once, would be my guess. The theme reaches a sort of apex in The Doll Maker, which explores the protagonist's perverse thrill at being absolutely controlled by a masterful man. But the story also addresses issues of the ethics and goals of art, and of the cost of not accepting our own mortality.

It's only fair to acknowledge, as a previous reviewer pointed out, that this edition is poorly edited and contains scattered typographical errors. On balance, however, I think Black Mask should be congratulated for making an inexpensive and clearly printed reprint of these works that are otherwise difficult to obtain. (Next time, it would be better still if they would hire a proof-reader!)