Janny Wurts, ‘The Curse of the Mistwraith’ (1993)

 So, lately I’ve been catching-up on some big-hitting Fantasy that I didn’t get around to reading (or only dipped into) when it first came out, 1970s-1990s. I’m doing so because I’m writing a Short History of Fantasy and though I’m pretty well-read when it comes to 19th- and earlier 20th-century Fantasy, I'm less familiar with the last decades of the century, a period which saw a huge boom in commercial fantasy, a great flood of often very lengthy novels, many of them units in extended series. A few of these I read at the time, many I did not. But I can hardly cover this period without at least some sense of these titles. So, in I dive. I am in-diving. Splash!

And here's Janny Wurts. Back when they came out I read—though I’ll be honest, my memory is pretty patchy—a trilogy she co-authored with Raymond Feist, one part of their (lengthy!) Midkemia sequence. I didn’t get around to reading any of her Wars of Light and Shadow novels (1993-ongoing), although I was aware of them. They were, and so far as I can see continue to be, hugely popular. The first book in the series Curse of the Mistwraith has four thousand reviews on Goodreads, heavily skewed towards 5-star assessments: an impressive number for a book published fifteen years before Goodreads was even created. None of my books have had a fraction of a fraction of that kind of response. There's clearly something here.

So I read it, and: it’s fine. Pretty good. It starts briskly, slows down for multiple hundreds of pages, and then picks up again for a big, climactic battle. We’re in a familiar-enough Fantasyland territory, a combination of Manichean and Nominalist logics. By the former I mean that, as per the overarching series name, this is a world in which ‘light’ and ‘shadow’, good and evil, compete, on the material but also the magical plane. The ‘moral’ of the stories is that these things must be in balance. They're not, for this novel, or there would be no novel, so OK. 

There are two brothers (or half-brothers) who embody these two modes and around whom the story is constructed: Arithon s'Ffalenn (possessor of elemental shadow magic, able to generate darkness, conjure cold, summon eidolons and illusion &c) and Lysaer s'Ilessid (all sunshine and smiles, dedicated to justice, possessed of elemental light magic: so, able to create brightness, heat &c &c). Both lads are more than five-hundred-years old, having drunk from a magical fountain that grants five hundred years of extra life to imbibers, and which is, by a notable does-what-it-says-on-the-tin logic, called ‘the Five Centuries Fountain’. Fons quingentorum, no less. [sings: ‘—and AYY will live five hundred years/and AYYYY will live five hundred more—’] 

This novel concerns the titular ‘Mistwraith’, which evil, magical entity has swaddled the land in fog and blotted out the sun. Lysaer and Arithon, together with seven celebrated, summoning-spell-speaking sorcerers, known as the ‘Sellowship...’ that is, ‘Fellowship of Seven’, must combat this evil. Doing so takes simply ages. This is a 700-page novel and for most of those pages little happens. People trek about the world—(there’s a map printed at the front, but it seems to have been shrunken down from poster- to postage-stamp-size, and I literally couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Couldn't make headland nor vale of it)—they talk amongst themselves, fill-in the worldbuilding and magical system for the benefit of the reader, wander some more. By Nominalist I mean that, as in Le Guin’s Earthsea, magic here is primarily a matter of naming, and knowing true-names: ‘since the effectiveness of any arcane defense stemmed from Name, no spell could perfectly thwart what lay outside of the grasp of true seeing; to balk an essence wrought of mist and multifaceted sentience posed a nearly impossible task, like trying to fence darkness with sticks’ [355]. As this quotation suggests, nominalism entails a kind of essentialism, just as the ‘good versus evil’ moral superstructure entails a reductive binarism.

Wurts has acknowledged the influence of C J Cherryh’s Morgaine books on her own writing, and that’s evident in this novel, not least in the prominence of rounded, interesting female characters. But in one respect Wurts is very different kind of writer to Cherryh, whose spare, pared-down, sometimes telegraphic style achieves effects of Hemingwayesque vividness and directness (although, to be fair, sometimes it gets subordinated to over-busy plotting and narrative complication). Wurts’s prose is not like this. Hers is an expansive, centripetal, rich, sometimes pudding-y and overwrought style, plumped with description and evocation, lingering for multiple sentences on details and atmosphere and this and that. Especially that.

This is fine, insofar as it avoids blandness and avoids slipping into stylistic cliché. But it has its own problems. Sometimes Curse of the Mistwraith is overwritten and gooey, and occasionally it teeters into outright daftness. The writing can be merely pretentious—(‘the guardsmens' blows tumbled his unresisting flesh over and over before the dais, raising a counter-strophe of protest from the chain’ [47])—in a way that detracts from the immersiveness of the telling. Often, though, it is simply and umembarrassedly de trop, part of a tradition of over-writing that is, we can be honest, a glorious element of the heritage of genre. Poe’s stories are over-written in this heightened, gothic-y, melodramatic, strive-for-intensity manner. So are Marie Corelli’s novels, or, in a slightly different way, Lovercraft’s tales. It is, we might say, Bulwer-Lyttonesque:—by which I mean a sentence such as ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ can be both a bit ridiculous, and actually quite effective and atmospheric. Here, for instance, Wurts’s characters approach a particular location on the impossible-to-decipher map:

Looming in eerie outline through the mantling mist rose Ithamon, city of legend …Amid that graveyard of ravaged splendor, of artistry spoiled by war into a cataclysmic expression of hatred, arose four single towers, each as different from the other as sculpture by separate masters. They speared upward through the mist, tall, straight, perfect; their existence held wonder that made sunlight seem murky, and beauty, a blindness to be endured. Somewhere between silence and sight, they exemplified the antithesis of cruelty. The very incongruity of their wholeness against the surrounding wreckage shaped a dichotomy fit to maim the soul. [298-99]

Soul-maiming dichotomy! That's my least-favourite variety of commercially-available dichotomy!

So, yes: the style is often gnashing, overblown, but it is also often, as here, atmospheric and evocative in a garish kind of way. I mean, it’s a style that grows wearisome if overextended, and this novel is, as I say, seven hundred full pages long. Wurts is certainly capable of vivid and even poetic writing, but she also overuses adjectives and adverbs (‘Arithon looked whitely strained’ [86]; ‘his eyes showed him vistas of blank darkness.’ [32]—as opposed to what other kind of darkness, exactly?) and the writing is often over-fruity.

Wired wrists screeched across sail hanks as he toppled and crashed. [24]

Sometimes it goes further, and slips into active ridiculousness:

Brown eyes slid craftily to the Shadow Master. [184]

Could Asandir close his ears, he would have. [286]

The city apothecaries fattened their purses on profits wrung from unguents. [382]

By amazing coincidence, ‘Wrung From Unguents’ is the name of my new band. There’s a dangerous fondness for bizarre similes:

Dakar slapped the reins, swaddled like a vegetable in wet cloaks. [295]

He looked out of place as a botched carving amid violet and gold tassels and amber cushions. [471]

It’s a balance, this kind of writing. One the one hand, it’s commendable that Wurts resists mere stock-phrases and cliché, and works to make her prose more originally expressive. On the other, these things can be taken too far. One specific example: eyes. Loads of descriptions of eyes in this novel. Eyes are semi-precious and precious jewels, sometimes the sorts you’d expect (‘Lysaer raised eyes gone hard as the cut sapphires at his collar’ [26]; ‘eyes like shadowed emerald’ [486]; ‘Asandir regarded the prince with eyes like unmarked slate.’ [214]), sometimes of a more rummaging through the mineralogical textbook stylee: ‘his eyes opened, dark and hard as tourmaline.’ [77]; ‘Eyes like aventurine’ [288].

Tourmaline and Aventurine. Well I'm straight-off, noneedtogoogle familiar with both of those. Yes indeed.

That a novelist might sometimes rein it in—perhaps refer to eyes just as ‘eyes’, bare of qualifier, or indeed even not mention a character’s eyes at all—is beyond the competence of this text. Rather we get: ‘eyes the color of new spring grass’ [11]; ‘Dakar rolled sour, cinnamon eyes toward the Sorcerer’ [54]; ‘eyes light as mirror glass’ [101]; ‘Asandir's eyes hardened like cut glass’ [105]; ‘eyes of soft, unfocused turquoise’ [110]; ‘steel gray eyes’ [120]; ‘silver, imperious eyes’ [220]; ‘eyes bright and ruthless as sword steel’ [283]; ‘his eyes mild as pond water’ [380]; ‘peat-bog eyes’ [471]; ‘ tea-colored eyes’ [485]; ‘eyes, black as rivets’ [576]; ‘his black eyes inimical as shield studs’ [658] and so on.

To repeat myself, it’s to her credit that Wurz doesn’t simply repeat (as many writers of Fantasy do) eyes of cornflower blue, emerald green eyes and the like. But I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the phrase less is more? It means, in a nutshell, to boil it down, that less is sometimes more. So, yeah. That.