Williams is, to this day, best known for his Tolkienesque trilogy Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, comprising The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Stone of Farewell (1990) and To Green Angel Tower (1993). These very lengthy novels—the third one so ample its half-million words had to be split between two separate, blocky volumes upon paperback publication—detail the rise of a lad called Simon Mooncalf, from his lowly status as a kitchen boy in the castle of dying King Prester John, to saviour of the realm. Williams calls his Middle Earth ‘Osten Ard’, his elves ‘Sithi’, his wizards ‘mages’ and his Old Forest ‘Aldheorte forest’, folding into his story magic swords of power, enigmatic prophesy, wicked sorcerers, quests, enchanted scrolls, intelligent wolves, trolls, and all the paraphernalia of an enchanted pseudo-medieval Europe. What makes his trilogy different to the, by the late 1980s, excessively over-familiar fare of post-Tolkien heroic fantasy is the detail: the novels give us great shovelfuls of specific detail, a textual strategy Tolstoyan in ambition if not in execution. It means that the series is slow to start, the curtain rising on several hundred pages of scene-setting and authorial throat-clearing that a reader may find immersive, or else frustrating-offputting, depending. Eventually a larger story emerges from the welter of detail: Ineluki the Storm King, undead ruler of the Sithi, blights the land with the power of his dark wrath, forcing the scattered remnants of humanity to rally at the ‘Stone of Farewell’. Simon, rising from servitude and adolescence into an important adult role in the ‘League of the Scroll’, is caught up in the final battle of good against evil.
Williams’ prose is prolix but inexact. Of Ineluki, we are told: ‘he has become a smoldering ember of despair and hatred … he exists to see the present state of the world obliterated and its injustices made right, but his only window is anger’ [Stone of Farewell, 123]—writing that, in a general sense, communicates its meaning, even if it leaves us pondering how a smouldering ember can have a window and how such fenestration can be constructed out of so unsolid a material as anger. Late in the trilogy, Simon thinks back on all he has been through.
These old stories are like blood. They run through people, even when they don’t know it or think about it. He considered this idea for a moment. But even if you don’t think about them, when the bad times come, the old stories come out on every side. [To Green Angel Tower, 190]Important, I feel, to keep your mind focussed at all times on the fact that blood is circulating around your body in a network of veins and arteries. Stop thinking about it, even for a moment, and it’ll start oozing out from every pore. Memory, Sorrow and Looooooong.
Yes, that makes sense. Sloppy reading on my part. I'll delete that section of the post.
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