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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lush, brilliant, bewildering, stimulating., 10 July 2004
I think it's fair to say all Mary Gentle's books are extraordinary but this is the one I return to again and again. Richly colourful and written with her most lyrical prose, it glows with the sensuality of a Rennaissance painting and the mocking detail of a medieval woodcut. It's stuffed with marvellously quirky characters like Valentine, the White Crow, The Rat King(s) knotted together by their tails, Gods from some arcane alchemical calendar, the delightfully oversized Balthasar, Kat, a wickedly innocent lesbian rat and Messire Plessy, an elegant rat cleric. The book seethes with ideas and surprises and skims bewilderingly past multiple themes of politics, magic, sexuality, desire, youth, age, religeon. Everything really. There are many layered and interwoven plots and after several readings I still find new things to enjoy. Also still things I don't think I quite understand. I find myself reading mouthwatering descriptions and suddenly wondering,Hey, what happened there? You never know what's going to be round the corner of the next page! I love this book and recommend it unreservedly to anyone who loves word and stories and doesn't want everything handed to them on a plate.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An engrossing blend of medieval, mythical and modern imagery, 1 May 2002
By A Customer
Rats and Gargoyles is set in a world extrapolated from the middle ages, with some modern and invented ideas thrown in. In an immense city at the centre of the world, an aristocracy of man-sized rats govern a diverse mix of more human people, and all are under the incarnate eyes of a group of Gods living in a huge temple within the city. The storyline has several strands, involving a number of plots to overthrow the established order, and attempts by a sort of secret society to stop these activities from causing apocalypse. I first read this book years ago, when it was first published, then again a year or two ago. Both times I eagerly soaked up the ideas in the book - they were, and still are, unlike those in any other sci-fi story I've read; inventive, absorbing, and introduced gradually thoughout the book, keeping the story fresh right to the end. I found the storyline itself interesting, and the descriptive writing was also good (evoked plenty of images). One criticism, in parts the pacing was rather slow, I think this book could have been significantly better if it moved faster. But overall, a good read, and something you don't find every day.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best Fantasy Novel Ever?, 22 Oct 1998
By A Customer
I fell deeply in love with this book early in 1992. Tragically I lost my treasured hardback copy a short time later. This year I found a replacement and nearly cried! It is quite simply one of the most astonishingly well crafted novels of this or any other genre.
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by M. John Harrison
