‘… Is The Name Of My New Band’

 

Click to embiggen. Thanks to my friend Francis Spufford, who has mocked-up this poster in honour of my favourite, and let us be honest over-used, joke.

Nikolai Tolstoy, ‘The Coming of the King: The First Book of Merlin’ (1988)

 

Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Coming of the King (1988) is the first volume in a projected but uncompleted trilogy, a quasi-Arthurian fantasy, larding densely and sometimes estranging Norse and Celtic elements into a peripatetic, rather unstructured whole. Tolstoy's is an unfamiliar version of the traditional story. In this telling Merlin postdates Arthur, and the king whose coming is adverted in the book’s title is his descendent Maelgun. Much of the book concerns hallucinatory spirit-journeys Merlin, more shaman than wizard, undertakes into the otherworld.

There’s a lot of unleavened research into Celtic and Norse mythology and culture dumped into this novel: untranslated names and concepts, archaic flourishes of prose. Merlin is trained by the Salmon of Lyn Liw. The story stops to retell various famous stories. For instance, Beowulf gets rewritten in toto, reworked into prose: ‘dread mother in her underwater lair, stabbing her with a wondrous sword he found hanging upon its stony wall, and hacking off her head which he bore by the hair all bloody back to Hrothgar’s hall at Heorot’ [580] and the like.

There’s also a lot of Bad Sex Award style writing: ‘then is every thought bent towards bed and boudoir … to our snug trysting place’. I hadn't thought of boudoir as a particularly Anglo-Saxon piece of terminology, but I could be wrong. Perhaps it's what Boudicca was named after. Here’s Merlin excitedly boinking Gwenddydd: ‘I draw you to me even by utterance of your name: Gwenddydd, Gwenddydd!’ Not quite as euphonious a name as Nabokov's Lo-li-ta, but you go with what you got, I suppose. And what is it that ‘quickens the blood within my veins and the seed within my loins?’ It is ‘the beam that shone upon me from the scented warmth of your white breasts.’ [410] Luminous breasts. Neat. And here's Merlin boinking Angharat:

Then does my trouserful of wantonness make play with his eager jerking: a long night’s roaming across smooth soft plains, twin rounded hills, white slopes for wandering; and at last the choice warm, wet cavern whose ferny entrance awaits the stiff ram-headed serpent’s gentle entrance. Do you recall what followed, my Angharat of the golden hair, that evening when our fingers met by chance about the goblet’s stem at king Rhydderch’s feasting? Long ages of the earth have passed between us since the night that followed, but it is not I who can forget each move and moan and murmur of our brief meeting. [394]

In other news, ‘Trouserful of Wantonness’ is the name of my new band.

Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts, ‘Daughter of the Empire’ (1987)

 

In my recent blog on Feist’s Magician (1982) I wondered if I should reread the trilogy he wrote with Janny Wurts:

There are, as I said, thirty-or-more Riftwar novels. I have not read all of them. Those unread titles might be Tolstoy for all I know. Back in the 1990s I did read the ‘Empire Trilogy’, set in Kelewan/Fantasy-Japan: Daughter of the Empire (1987), Servant of the Empire (1990), Mistress of the Empire (1992). All three books were co-written with Janny Wurts, and my memory is that they were less male-centric and better written than Magician (Wurts is no Nabokov, but she is a more skilled writer than Feist, I’d say, so this perhaps won’t surprise us). Though, again, my memory for all three books is hazy. Maybe I should revisit them.

After I posted that blog, I decided I would revisit them. Perhaps they are better. And, having looked again at Daughter of the Empire (1987), so it proves.

The underlying story of Daughter (that is, the fabula, not the sjuzhet) is similar to Magician: a kid—Pug, in Magician, the 17-year-old Mara in this novel—overcomes adversity, passes through various adventures and eventually achieves power and prominence. The key difference is not just that Pug exists in a fictionalised medieval Europe and Mara in a fictionalised medieval Japan, although that is a difference. It’s that Pug’s ‘power’ is the arbitrary exteriorised folderol of ‘magic’, a  manifestation of the jejune belief that power means the ability to manipulate externalities at a distance, by waving one’s hands or a wand or whatnot. Mara’s ‘power’ is power as it actually manifests, in the world: control over interpersonal dynamics, attracting or compelling obedience from other human beings, being able to get them to do what you want them to, or to support you doing what you want. Power is a politics, not a sparks-and-levitation conjuring trick. Power is an index of human intersubjectivity. And that’s what Mara works towards and finally achieves in this novel, using the structures of belief of her society and her own resourcefulness and determination to bend people, and eventually the whole of her society, to her will.

This is a good story, a better one than in Magician. It’s decently written too—workmanlike and sometimes a little bland, but the prose here gets both story and backstory across and doesn’t litter its paragraphs with solecisms and idiocies. And there’s an attractive cleverness in the way Mara uses her disadvantages—her youth, her vulnerability, her femaleness in a highly structured patriarchal society—as weapons against her combatants, turning the honour-code hierarchies and warrior-logic of her world against her adversaries. There’s nothing so sophisticated as this in Magician. And, setting questions of cultural appropriation aside, it’s refreshing to turn from a Yet-Another-Medieval-Europe Fantasy world to one based on an Eastern society and culture.

Not that it’s a flawless novel. The pace sometimes slows and stagnates. The prose is sometimes awkward and tangled. The inclusion of the interspace rifts, and the presence of Midkemia on the far side of them, mandated by the fact that this is a ‘Riftworld’ novel, is a little clumsily, distractingly done (my memory, though I haven’t reread them yet, is that the next two novels in this trilogy integrate this aspect better).

I have no idea how Feist and Wurts (and might I add how delicious I find Bavaria’s traditional feistenwurst sausages ...) [clears throat] ... I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel. I have written 25 novels, and I work alone. The closest I have come to collaboration is a series of four novels I’m doing with Dave Hutchinson, and there Dave wrote vol 1, I wrote vol 2, he has written vol 3 and I’m now working on vol 4. But I know other writers don’t lurk Oscar-the-Grouch-like in their dustbin, as I prefer to do. Friendship between writers is common, and so is professional collaboration.

When writers collaborate they do so in a number of ways. They might divide up the writing that needs to be done chapter by chapter, or section by section; one might write a section, pass it to the other to rework and continue, they passing it back when they are finished and so on. The two writers might sit side-by-side and wrangle each emerging sentence between them for all I know; though this would, I think, be a laborious way of proceeding. More usually, Writer A will produce a chunk of writing, Writer B a succeeding chunk, Writer A the next bit and so on. So it’s possible that a 600-page novel might be produced by one writer writing the first 250 pages, a second writer adding a couple hundred more, and then the first writer finishing everything off. I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel.

Accordingly I offer the following observation without prejudice or implication. In the first 250-or-so pages of this novel, Mara is described in terms of her resourcefulness and determination. Where her physicality is described the novel mostly stresses her smaller size, her poise, her control (after an opening section in which she is grieving the death of her family, and is more extravert in her bereavement) the beauty and impassivity of her face. Then, for a couple of hundred pages, the tenor of description shifts. Mara is suddenly described almost exclusively in terms of her mammary glands.

Buntokapi watched the rise and fall of Mara’s breasts beneath the flimsy fabric of her day robe … by the time the wine was finished and his goblet thrown aside, he closed his sweaty hands upon that maddening obstruction of silk. [Feist and Wurts, Daughter of Empire, 227]

A toss of her head dislodged a river of loosened hair and the light shone warm on her breasts. Buntokapi licked his lips [289]

The tips of her breasts pressed clearly through the scarlet cloth, and her hair tumbled sensuously over a shoulder artfully left bare. [292]

All Chipaka could remember was she had large breasts … Lord Chipaka might perhaps have thought Mara’s breasts large, since his nose had hovered within inches of her chest as he spoke to her. [304]

A ripe, soft figure with breasts that were high and well-formed despite being large, a small waist and flaring hips. [346]

Mara emerged from behind the screen, swathed in soft towels. The old woman waved the servants aside and dabbed an exotic essence upon the girl’s shoulders and wrists, and between her breasts. Then she lifted the towels aside; regarding the nude form of her mistress, she resisted an impulse to cackle. ‘You’ve a fine, healthy body on you, Mara-anni.’ [380]

Mara turned towards the reflecting glass … Her breasts were slightly larger than before, but her stomach was as flat as ever. [393]

Mara fanned herself, then pulled her bodice open and exposed most of her breasts to Bruli’s view. The effect was immediate. [401]

Her robe gaped further, and Bruli caught a teasing glimpse of [Mara’s] nicely formed breasts and the hint of a taut stomach. Mara smiled as she noted the focus of his attention. With slow, provocative movements, she rebound her sash. [448]

She slipped her robe from her shoulders and bared her lovely breasts. [449]

The curve of her breasts beneath her thin robe [489]

And then, around the 500-page mark, the breasts … stop. Stop, that is, in terms of being a feature of how Mari is described in the novel. Instead the focus shifts back to her resourcefulness, her petite-ness and poise, the way others underestimate her, as she works towards her final triumph.

I have no idea how Feist and Wurts divided up the practicalities of co-writing this novel.

Raymond E. Feist, ‘Magician’ (1982)

 

Raymond Feist’s Magician (1982) was the first title in what has become the ‘Riftwar’ series: presently some thirty novels, with, presumably, more to come. This is another one of those late-century Fantasy novels that began life as Dungeons-and-Dragons-style gameplay. The major premise of this series is that two worlds, a D&D-like medieval European-y realm called ‘Midkemia’, and a quasi-oriental world called ‘Kelewan’ (influenced by M. A. R. Barker's role-playing game Empire of the Petal Throne 1975) collide with one another. While studying at the University of California San Diego, Feist and his friends would play their own D&D-style game set in Midkemia. In the years after his graduation Feist wrote-up the lengthy—800+ page—Magician, set in this place. Its success led to everything else.

We start with a conventional Fantasy storyline: a boy from a humble background (one ‘Pug’) goes on a series of adventures as he grows in importance, eventually achieving eminence: in this case, as the titular magician. We might call this a Bildungsroman, except Bildungsroman traces the evolution of character, and it would overdignify Pug to describe him as a study in character. He’s a type, as all Feist’s figures are, and subject neither to growth nor psychological depth.

Midkemia is Tolkienia by another name, and indeed is Tolkienissima: a medievalised land of kings and wizards, of trolls and dragons, elves and dwarfs. Feist transfers across JRRT’s worldbuilding and character types (who is this elf-friend and haunter of the wilderness? ‘Large-shouldered, tall, and solidly built. He had dark hair and beard and the raw, weather-beaten appearance of one who spends most of his time outdoors’ [7] … Strider? Is that you?) also, unfortunately, passing across some racialised stereotyping, as with this Jew, sorry, dwarf: ‘a short figure, no more than five feet tall … heavy brows of brown-red hair came together at a point above a large hooked nose’ [151]. Such alterations as Feist makes to his source material have the flubby energy of a poker-player’s tell: not giant spiders, but giant ants; not Gondor but ‘Krondor’, not Thorin dwarf-lord but ‘Tholin’. And so on.

No sooner has Pug’s story gotten underway than strange warriors wash up on the shore, first a mystery to be investigated, then a series of battles to be fought, and ultimately a world-wide war. It transpires that a portal, the series-titular ‘rift’, has been opened between medieval Europe and medieval Japan—that is, between Midkemia and Kelewan—such that warriors from the latter place have invaded the former. The rest of the novel, and indeed the series, details the development of this war and its eventual resolution. To his credit, this set-up mostly avoids the flattening moral binarism of classic Fantasy’s ‘good versus evil’. Kelewan—a realm without horses or advanced metallurgy, a strongly hierarchical, warrior culture where twenty gods are worshipped—is not ‘evil’, any more than Midkemia is ‘good’. This is a novel ‘about’ culture clash, about east meeting west; and it is worth nothing that with Feist (born in the 1940s) we are only a generation away from American writers penning hysterically racist fantasias about the ‘yellow peril’ in which the Far East is a bestialised and demonic threat to all that is good and decent. Magician is, happily, nothing like this. Then again, later novels in the Riftwar sequence revert to the familiar moral bivalve, with our heroes battling various ‘evil’ forces, including a near-immortal wizard called Macros the Black, a Genghis-Khan-esque mass-murdering warlord called Murmandamus and a gigantic magic power known as ‘The Enemy’. But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

On the plus side: Magician’s story, as narrative, in terms of things happening, and small things building to bigger things, is well-paced and readable. On the negative side the whole is cripplingly derivative, imaginatively limited, thinly characterised and poorly written. To say so is not to deny the very great commercial success the book enjoyed in the 1980s, though it is, perhaps, to perpend the relative paucity of post-Tolkien material then being offered for sale.

Stylistically Feist is not skilled. Insofar as he has ambitions beyond the writing of merely utility prose, he lacks the powers euphony or vividness. The first description of Pug, in Magician, absolutely drowns in sibilance: ‘the sun sent sparkles through the sea spray swirling around him [and] his sun-streaked brown hair … Pug set his sack down, making sure it was securely tied, then squatted on the sand’ [Magician, 3]. How could a writer write such a sentence and not tone it down, even a little, in revision? Kick a few of those geese out of the boat?

Feist begins every chapter with a short (usually three- or four-word) sentence, set portentously apart as a paragraph on its own: subject + verb + object, sometimes just subject + verb,: ‘the ship sailed into the harbour’: ‘The storm had broken’; ‘The breeze was cool’; ‘Pug was restless’; ‘The Inn was crowded’; ‘The troops stood silently’, ‘The priest struck the gong’ and so on. It’s a gimmick, and, over-prolonged, it starts to seem like a nervous tic. He thinks the way to introduce a character is to describe a handful of physical features, much as a dungeon master might thumbnail Mr or Mrs Cardboard-Invented, to enable players to visualise them in the simplest terms whilst the gameplay, the really important part, proceeds. Here’s a blacksmith: ‘the stocky figure of Gardell the smith, a barrel-chested man, with little hair and a thick black beard. His arms were grimy with smoke’ [103]. Here is a wizard: ‘with high forehead and deep-set black eyes. His beard was black as night. He wore a brown robe of simple material. In his left hand he held a sturdy oak staff.’

“Are you a magician?”
The traveler stroked his long black beard. “Some have thought me one.” [198]

Here’s the Elf Queen: ‘beautiful … her eyes were large and a pale blue; her face was finely chiseled, with high cheekbones and a strong but not masculine jaw’ [89]. Without that qualifier—but not masculine! heaven forfend you think there was anything masculine here! —this is commonplace stuff; its addition betrays a depressingly hidebound imagination.

‘With his light brown hair and blue eyes, Roland stood tall for his age’ [25]

And without his hair and eyes he was, what? A midget?

A shout of incredible joy went up. [617]

What is it about this joy that provoked incredulity? Who doesn’t believe the joy—the shouters? The author? But it’s his story!

A fondness for archaisms, gestures towards the medieval-ness of Midkema, spreads stiffness and gawkiness through the prose: people are ‘garbed’ rather than dressed (‘a man garbed in brown leather’) and ‘don’ clothing rather than wear it. One magician describes another as ‘a most puissant artificer of magic’ [10], which may or may not be a typo for pissant. There’s a quantity of thee-ing and thou-ing (‘“Thou mayest take whatever else here pleaseth thee, … Take whatever else pleaseth thee, also, for thy heart is good.”’ [179]) and, however much the reader might wish they wouldn’t, characters insist on saying ‘hearken to me!’ and ‘ease your doubts!’ and ‘let us cast off and go a-roving!’

At the same time, Feist’s ‘medieval’ world is supplied with a wealth of anachronistic, or cod-anachronistic, details: there’s much silk and many potatoes (‘Pug’s plate … was fully laden with hot lamb, greens, and potatoes’ [43] ‘[his] tunic was a bright yellow affair of the costliest silk, and the hose were a soft pastel blue’ [58]—though pastel is an art medium that didn't come to actual Europe until the 18th century). Chocolate and coffee are not words Chaucer would have recognised (‘his skin was dark like unclouded choca or coffee’ [507]) any more than he would have understood ‘orange’ (‘his black-and-orange-striped armor sparkled as he dismounted from his dragon’ [388]), a colour the medieval English called ‘saffron’, and which doesn’t properly enter the vocabulary until the 17th-century. Ships’ decks have metal rails, people eat puff-pastry, folk play not medieval village-to-village football but an 1880s English FA-rules version (though with open barrels for goals rather than nets). Every window has glass in it and halls are adorned with gigantic chandeliers. ‘Arutha crossed over to large glass doors and peered through them. “I can see Father and the King sitting on the royal balcony”’ [224]. Sliding glass doors, we assume, double-glazed? Feist has said in interview: ‘I don't write fantasy; I write historical novels about an imaginary place.’ In that case, maybe work a little harder to get the ‘history’ closer to an approximation of right?

You might object that this is so much pedantry on my part. I might concede the point. But I might also suggest that it bespeaks a novel uninterested in the medieval life it purports to address. It’s all set-dressing and cosplay, framing an otherwise modern world: a place of guilt rather than shame, of individuality rather than community, bourgeois values rather than feudal ones. Characters say ‘it is considered axiomatic’ [82] and ‘right you are!’ [86]. Magic is used to achieve effects for which we nowadays rely on Persil:

Blood splattered the white tabard, then flowed off, leaving it spotless. [538]

There are sentences here that seem to have dropped out of a Guy Ritchie screenplay:

Trevor Hull looked to Jimmy the Hand, who answered with a grin. [487]

Is there a more 1950s name than Trevor? In fact, Jimmy the Hand is a main character. Indeed, later in the series he gets a whole novel devoted to his loveable roguery: a book that fills-in his backstory (story-wise it fits, we are told, between the sequel to Magician, Silverthorn [1985] and the third-book published A Darkness at Sethanon [1986]). Just as Jimmy steals various items in the city of Krondor, before his larger destiny as part of the ‘Riftwar’ takes over (he ends up a Duke) so Feist takes not only details from Leiber’s Lankhmar and Tolkien’s legendarium, but whole phrases from other sources: ‘crazy like a fox, Jimmy thought, motionless, as implications ran through his mind. Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan’ [Jimmy the Hand (2003), 39]—John F Kennedy’s words, lifted from his famous 1961 speech, the serial numbers filed off and sold-on to the readers of this book.

The magicians in this world are all male. Indeed, in a later book characters travel back in time through the multiverse to the Big Bang itself, and on every imaginable world magicians are male. The same can be said for almost all figures in authority in both Midkemia and Kelewan. A patriarchal social and sexual logic generally obtains. Here, a character called Keili, renamed ‘Talon’ for reasons to do with a magic prophesy, is distressed that the beautiful Lela is ready to have sex with him but not to marry him.

Talon looked as if his world was falling in on him. “Is she … what is that word?” “What word?” “A woman who lies with men for money.” “A whore,” supplied Caleb. “No, my young friend, she is not. … she’s from a land where people don’t think twice about lying with one another for amusement.” Talon felt an empty pit form in his stomach. “It’s not right,” he muttered. [Talon of the Silver Hawk (2002), 85-86].

M.N.H. Claessens has crunched the numbers on the balance of male and female characters in eight novels across the first 25 years of The Riftwar Cycle, noting that male characters outnumber female five-to-one: ‘at best, female characters form 30% of the cast, with equivalent dialogue. Furthermore, female characters are often marginalised, put in traditional roles or are victims of sexism’ [Claessens, ‘The Presence and Role of Female Characters in Raymond E. Feist’s The Riftwar Cycle’ (University of Utrecht, 2018), 2]. Claessens also quotes Feist’s offhand response, in 2000, to criticism of the lack of female magicians in his Fantasyworld: ‘it's a male domination thing, certainly. We never explored the historical reasons behind it, just set it in place as a social norm.’ Rarely has the embedded nature of structural sexism been so laconically expressed.

But the greatest weakness in Feist’s writing is how pinched is its moral imagination. At the heart of his dramatic vision there is nothing but insipidity and platitude. ‘Magnus fell silent for a moment, then he said: “the ways of the heart are complex.” He looked out at the ocean again. “The waves churn and break upon the rocks, Talon. So do human feelings”’ [Feist, Talon of the Silver Hawk, 152]; “Life has shown me all too often it’s a fragile gift. Remember, no one gets out of life alive” [Feist, Rage of a Demon King (1997), 131]. “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” “You buy cheap you buy twice.” “The open hand has the strongest grip.” “Never parachute into an area you’ve just bombed.” And in fact, adverting, as of course I am here doing, to (one of my single favourite scenes in all TV, this) the moment when Rev met Aslan-in-a-tracksuit, reminds me of another lack in these novels: their po-faced lack of any sense of humour, the absence therein of irony and therefore of eloquence in his vision of how the world goes.

There are, as I said, thirty-or-more Riftwar novels. I have not read all of them. Those unread titles might be Tolstoy for all I know. Back in the 1990s I did read the ‘Empire Trilogy’, set in Kelewan/Fantasy-Japan: Daughter of the Empire (1987), Servant of the Empire (1990), Mistress of the Empire (1992). All three books were co-written with Janny Wurts, and my memory is that they were less male-centric and better written (Wurts is no Nabokov, but she is a more skilled writer than Feist, I’d say, so this perhaps won’t surprise us). Though, again, my memory for all three books is hazy. Maybe I should revisit them.

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.

C J Cherryh, ‘Gate of Ivrel’ (1976)

This is Cherryh’s first published novel. In a later interview she said that, having been writing since her teens, this ‘was the first time a book really found an ending and really worked, because I had made contact with Don Wollheim at DAW, found him interested, and was able to write for a specific editor whose body of work and type of story I knew.’ The reference to an ending is a little odd, since this book, on its own, doesn’t really end—indeed two sequels followed in short-ish order, carrying on the narrative [Well of Shiuan in 1978 and Fires of Azeroth in 1979; the three books were collected as The Chronicles of Morgaine (1985)] with another installment a decade later [Exile's Gate (1988)]. Still: this is a good novel. Stark, absorbing, a fantasyland quest with real friction through a believable, immersive world, and a fascinating main character. Wollheim got Andre Norton to write a preface to the volume: ‘I do not know the author,’ said Norton, ‘but her talent is one I must envy’, adding: ‘never since reading The Lord of the Rings have I been caught up in any tale as I have been in Gate of Ivrel.’

The story is set on a planet called Andur-Kursh, a pre-medieval world of clans, warriors, horses, honour, life a hardscrabble existence in a chill, Nordic landscape of mountains and plains. Humans share the world with regular animals and also certain kinds of monster, haunting the wilderness; there is a caste of folk with supernatural powers, witches and wizards called here qujalin. There are remote places, with strange structures erected upon them, which are considered cursed.

We start with handsome young Vanye, the illegitimate son of a Nhi lord called Rijan (his mother was a bondswoman from a rival clan, the Cha). After a lifetime of bullying by Rijan’s legitimate sons, Kandrys and Erij, Vanye ends up killing the former defending himself in a fight and is banished.

So: the landscape of this planet is dotted with certain ‘gates’ and we learn right at the beginning—in a long prelude, rather infodumpishly disposed—that these are sciencefictional devices, spacetime gateways constructed by a now-vanished alien civilisation. It was through these gates that humans first came to this world, although their use is now entirely forgotten by the locals and they are all now deactivated, or at least are in what we might call sleep-mode. What the qujalin have access to is not magic but advanced technology, and the monsters that haunt the forests are actually alien lifeforms shipped-in from other planets.

Vanye, fleeing his home, the castle of Ra-Morij—so many ‘j’s and ‘q’s in this made-up language! think of the Scrabble possibilities!—passes-by one of these gates just as it activates. Out rides Morgaine: the beautiful qujalin warrior-witch-queen. She’s not any of these things, actually: she’s just a regular woman (she’s not even qujalin, in the sense that this word strictly refers to the blood of the ancient, extinct qhal who made the gates; although she has various items of Clarkean sufficiently-advanced-tech indistinguishability, like a phaser and a sophisticated medical pack and a ‘sword’ that is actually an atom-bomb, or something equivalent). It turns out—we learn this betwixt and between the ongoing story—Morgaine is the last survivor of a team sent long ago to destroy the gates, since they are dangerous and could be world-ending. The problem is they also enable unscrupulous people to extend their lives, even to achieve immortality, by using them to swap their souls (I think: it wasn’t entirely clear) into healthy young bodies. One such is Thiye of Hjemur, one of the original team who has gone rogue and now rules as a wicked king in the far north.

A hundred years before the story began, Morgaine raised an army of a thousand warriors from the land of Koris and rode north to stop Thiye, but the latter used magic to ‘raise a mighty wind’ that slew every last one of these soldiers—actually what he did, I think I’m right in saying, is open a gate onto interstellar vacuum, sucking a chunk of the atmosphere of the world out into space and dragging the army with it, which is a pretty improbable manoeuvre, I'd say. But there you go. Anyway so far as the inhabitants of Koris are concerned, Thiye is a mighty wizard who destroyed the army with magic, and Morgaine is to blame for leading them into such a doomed endeavour. Persecuted, Morgaine flees on horseback and, to escape capture, rides into a gate in the far south. No time passes for her, though a century rolls-by in Andur-Kursh. Now she rides out again, meets Vanye and puts him under an oath to serve her for a year and a day as her ilin. There are complicated honour-bound reasons why Vanye must agree to this, though he doesn't want to, for he is thereafter in effect her slave. He wants to ride south to more temperate lands, but Morgaine is determined to travel to the far north and finish what she started with Thiye.

Cherryh’s novel is under 200-pages long but feels longer, in part because of her spare, often stark style: the details of life on this gruelling world are well chosen—struggling on horseback over snow-blocked mountain passes, building fires in woodland to keep oneself warm and alive, but not too large a fire (you don't want to attract the attention of the monsters who live there). Cherryh renders landscape with brisk but vivid descriptive writing, and there’s a lot of interpersonal jockeying for duty-defined or honourbound positioning (attacked on their journey, Vanye recognisers their assailants and calls out: ‘hai, Chya! Chya! Will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins … I am Nhi Vanye i Chya ilin to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya’). The blend of this highly structured formality and the often brutal, to-the-death intermissions of hard fighting, savagery, makes for a distinctive, effective vibe.

The two travel to a homestead ruled by a mad lord, then further north to Koris, where Morgaine is a fell legend and then they go still further north. Then, in the last fifty pages or so, the plotting abruptly picks up speed, loads happens in a rather blizzardy way, and the book ends. This structural ineptness is a shame: the wintry slow-build of the first two thirds gets scattered. But then again, there are the sequels, to pick-it up again.

Fundamentally this novel is what my friend Justina Robson calls ‘fit-bloke Fantasy’. An older woman (in this case literally a hundred years older, though she is still beautiful and alluring) acquires for herself a buff, handsome young feller. In the first place he agrees to serve her unwillingly, but as they adventure together he falls under her spell. She tantalises him, he adores her. All good. And I liked the twist the novel offres on what I’d identify as one of the main structural functions of Fantasy—the Walter Scott dynamic, or Lukácsian dialectic, in which romantic older worlds (feudal, heroic, shame-culture, honour, status cultures) clash with inevitable modernity (bourgeois, respectable, Whiggish guilt-culture, contract-rather-than-status worlds), the interaction dramatized by a ‘waverley’ figure who wavers between the two worlds, though he (usually a he) really belongs in the latter. In Gate of Ivrel Morgaine is literally from the former—she’s been gone a hundred years, and speaks an English full of ostentatious archaicisms—and Vanye is the ‘modern’; but actually Morgaine is the future, the coming of modernity as such, and Vanye a relict of an outmoded feudal honour-status-romantic past.

That said, though the novel starts with Vanye it seems to lose interest in him as things go along. Halfway through we discover that, despite his martial prowess and warrior-loyality and general buffness and hotness, he’s actually a coward inside (‘he was not brave. He had long ago discovered in himself that he had no courage … he feared a great many things: he feared death, he feared Morgaine …’ [87])—this seems, as the kids say, a weird flex for the character. But perhaps not: what Cherryh really loves here is Morgaine herself. And Morgaine is a fascinating, compelling piece of characterisation.

One irritant, especially given Cherryh’s reputation (quoth Wikipedia: ‘Cherryh's works depict fictional worlds with great realism supported by her strong background in languages, history, archaeology, and psychology’) are the various sunspots and errors. Horses clop along despite the fact that they’re unshod and travelling over wilderness, not metalled road. Morgaine’s archaisms, designed to show us that she’s out-of-time, are bungled: ‘thee has a place,’ Morgain tells Vanye, ‘go to it’ [95]; and later: ‘thee is an idiot’ [99]— that these should be ‘thou hast’ and ‘thou art’ respectively would not take any very strong background in languages to realise. It’s as if the mere fact of an archaic form is enough for Cherryh's purposes. In Return of the Jedi there's a scene where Darth Vader approaches the Emperor with ‘what is thy bidding, my master?’—George Lucas (who wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Kasdan) means to suggest that there’s something old-world, something formal and ‘historical’ about the two men’s relationship. But it’s bonkers to suggest that Vader would, as the French say, tutoie Palpatine! They’re simply not that matey! Ah well.

Also, the first-edition cover (up top) is egregiously bad: at no point does Morgaine swan around this chilly winter-world in a bikini top and loincloth. She'd catch her death.

Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, ‘Dragonlance Chronicles’ (1984-85)

 Three key D&D weapons: Bow, Boobs and Blade

Not having been a player of D&D in the 1970/80s (I played a fair bit of Star Fleet Battles back in the early 1980s, but not the other), nor a reader of D&D tie-in novelisations, I approach the phenomenon of Dragonlance novels with dismay. Dismay because the series really is extraordinarily popular—since 1984 some 190 titles have been published, with global sales in excess of 22 million copies, which makes it a major event in the tradition of Fantasy writing. It's clearly a phenomenon which, writing a ‘History of Fantasy’ as I am, I cannot ignore. Then again, the prospect of reading two hundred bloody novels, extruded out of the Tactical Studies Rules, Incorporated (TSR Inc) megacorps machine, fills me with a sensation approaching the heebying geebies.

Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn describe Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, and by extension the many other D&D and Dragonlance ‘official’ authors of tie-material, as ‘hacks’, pointing to the tired shuffling and reshuffling of overfamiliar generic counters and tropes in which these many, many novels indulge, their exhaustion-by-repetition of the ‘quest narrative’ format across so very many titles. [Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (London: Middlesex University Press, 2009), 123-4]. Hack is perhaps harsh, although the novelisations, in lacking the element of individual engagement, reaction and in-story feedback of actual gameplay, are bound to be a more procrustean and limited matter. Of the first Dragonlance book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984) David Langford said it was ‘inspired by an AD&D campaign full of chunks ripped bleeding from Tolkien’, and he lamented the ‘deadly predictable questing, with stock D&D characters in familiar encounters’ [‘I couldn't finish this one’ he confessed; Langford, ‘Critical Mass’, White Dwarf (Games Workshop, May 1985), 10].

Sword & Sorcery is by its nature a more playful, ludic mode than the more formal Heroic Fantasy. In the case of the game Dungeons and Dragons—developed in its first iteration by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and published in 1974 by ‘TSR Inc’—play is actualised in the social iteration of the sword-and-sorcery text. Players adopt characters, and embark upon adventures that may involve a board, pieces, dice and other gameplay paraphernalia, or may simply happen in the players' imagination. There is also a quasi-author, a ‘dungeon master’, who coordinates and narrates the adventure. Adventures can happen anywhere within a capacious and expansive imaginative realm, and players can encounter any manner of monsters, wizards, fantasy creatures, magical weapons and artefacts, but often D&D ‘campaigns’ will focus on the titular dungeons, explored at length and mapped-out in great subterranean detail. The game quickly became immensely, and globally, popular, hugely influential both on later tabletop games and, in time, video games.

D&D's success fed the format back into literature. The first tie-in novelisation was Andre Norton’s Quag Keep (1978), a book in which a group of D&D players find themselves projected into an ‘actual’ fantasy realm. Since the early 1980s TSR(Inc) and their successor corporation Wizards of the Coast have published or licensed many hundreds of D&D novelisations. In the early 1980s two D&D-licensed authors, Laura and Tracy Hickman, developed an adjunct game called ‘Dragonlance’. Reportedly the TSR(Inc) marketing department believed (in Hickman’s words) ‘that the company should do more with dragons. We had plenty of dungeons, they said, but very few dragons’. [Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Realm of Dragons: The Worlds of Weis and Hickman (New York HarperPrism 1999), 46]. As for the main inspiration for the game and then for the novels, Hickman is upfront: ‘I remembered McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern. There it was. I wanted to create a world where fighters on dragonback fought other fighters on dragonback’. The Hickmans helped developed the game, and, as with ‘original’ D&D, its popularity swiftly led to tie-in novelisations, many of them written by Tracey Hickman and his longterm collaborator Margaret Weis.

Jared Shurin, who put his teenage years to better use than I did by reading many Dragonlance books, acknowledges the limitations of the series (derivative conceits, clunking prose) but praises them for what they innovated: viz., an ensemble cast of characters, some of whom die—the death of the virtuous and noble knight Sturm Brightblade, in volume two of the original series, caused consternation and shock amongst the books' fans—war and politics represented as, sometimes unchivalric and cruel In The War of the Lance, Shurin says, ‘the book's central conflict, touches every corner of the continent. Civilian populations are uprooted, cities are occupied and destroyed, refugees are chased from one hostile land to another, innocent people are enslaved, assaulted, the whole horrible nine yards … [a] quaint pastoral forest home is levelled by dragonfire. The noble elves are evicted by the high fantasy equivalent of nerve gas. People—innocents—are maimed, tortured, raped and killed, all because of some mysterious greater conflict, about which they know virtually nothing’, although by the same token ‘big epic battles’ are ‘never shown’). There are ‘flawed’ Elves (‘out of touch, jingoistic and arrogant; reactionary, isolationist and overtly racist’) and morally-ambiguous protagonists.

Some of this is perhaps less original than Shurin suggests. Much of this is already there is Leiber and Moorcock. Multiple ‘point-of-view’ characters, or a gang who get together and have adventures, are also in Lord of the Rings, The Worm Ouroboros, Conan and others. The spin with Dragonlance is the extra-textual premise: playing D&D is having fun with your friends: hanging out and enjoying yourselves together. The novelisations replicate that in fictional form. As for the rest, whilst they are features of the Fantasy writing here, isolating them perhaps puts too great an emphasis on just how artificial and trope-y the books are: how, as Mendlesohn and James say, they flog the ‘quest’ format to death.

The first trilogy of novels—Dragons of Autumn Twilight (1984), Dragons of Winter Night (1985) and Dragons of Spring Dawning (1985), collected in one vol in 1988—opens with a group of friends: Tanis Half-Elven, Goldmoon, Sturm Brightblade, Caramon, Raistlin, Flint, Tasslehoff Burrfoot (a hobbit in all but copyrighted name: in the story his ‘race’ is called the kender) and the beautiful Kitiara Uth Matar meeting in an inn. The group is reuniting, as they had promised they would, after all had gone off on various individual quests. Soon enough they are tangling with a puritanical religious cult called ‘The Seekers’ who, in league with the Dragon Highlords, are themselves questing for the magic Blue Crystal Staff with which they can rule the world. The friends battle lizardmen (the ‘draconians’), befriend centaurs, fight off undead zombies, fly on the back of Pegasus-y flying horses, locate the magical ‘Disks of Mishakal’, are sold into slavery, are freed by elves (the beautiful elven princess, Laurana Kanan is in love with Tanis and wants to marry him, although it turns out Tanis is in love with Kitiara). They fight dragons, ally themselves with dwarfs, encounter a mysterious figure called ‘the Everman’ who flees almost as soon as spotted, they travel to the port-city of Tarsis, watch as a dragon army entirely destroys Tarsis (Weis and Hickman claim they based this scene on documentary footage of the Luftwaffe bombing London during the Blitz), split up, come back together, encounter certain magical orbs, artifacts capable of controlling dragons, and afterwards break these, fight in a dream dimension (in which they have visions of their own deaths), get involved in an elf civil war, and take possession of some newly forged ‘dragonlances’ with which the dragonic armies can be fought and afterwards do ... well, nothing very much with them. The group goes by sea, visits an underwater city inhabited by sea elves, meets mages, encounters a rare group of ‘good’ dragons, and end-up fighting over the magical ‘crown of power’ in the ancient city of Neraka.

The books aren’t quite as hectic or pinball-jerky as this summary perhaps suggests, but it’s not far off. Insofar as the readers invest-in and identify the characters, in the intragroup interactions, the soap-y on-off love affairs, in their plans and hopes and fears, then the peripatetic to-ing and fro-ing will hold their attention. But the events are repetitive-with-minor-variations, characterisation is rudimentary and the writing bad. Writerly tics are abundant. Take Caramon, twin-brother of the wizard Raistlin, a beefy warrior. The writers, looking to characterise him, lay their collective finger upon the word clanking. His armour and weapons, and by extension his personality, all clank.

‘Trying to be silent in spite of his clanking armor, he soon stood by a slender ladder that ran up to an iron grating’ [197]; ‘But Caramon was already shoving past him eagerly, his sword clanking against his thigh’ [199]; ‘Caramon who was having trouble squeezing his body and his clanking arsenal through the shaft.’ [199]; ‘Caramon trudged through the snow, his arsenal of weapons clanking around him,’ [393]; ‘Caramon nodded reluctantly, then he walked ponderously up the stairs, his weapons clanking around him’ [405]; ‘He heard a clanking sound. Caramon was getting up’ [432]; ‘The big man ran into the room, his sword clanking at his thigh’ [476]; ‘Caramon followed clumsily, his sword and armor clanking’ [656]; ‘Now Caramon ran through the darkness, his armor clanking.’ [895]; ‘Raistlin heard Caramon clanking down the corridor’ [1007]

Clanky clanking. Clank clank clank. Caramon is occasionally capable of greater daintiness:

Sitting down at the small drop-leaf table Caramon had constructed for him, Raistlin carefully withdrew from the very innermost pocket of his robes an ordinary-looking sack, the sack that contained the dragon orb. [605]

That eminently medieval-era piece of furniture, the drop-leaf table! Excellent. 

Raistlin, the mage, undergoes a strange transformation: ‘the flesh had melted from the face, leaving the cheekbones outlined in dreadful shadows … the eyes were no longer the eyes of any living human Tanis had ever seen. The black pupils were now the shape of hourglasses!’ [21]. These physiologically improbable eyes, combined with his newly engoldified skin, mark him out:

“When I awoke,” the mage said, “my skin had turned this color—a mark of my suffering. My body and my health are irretrievably shattered. And my eyes! I see through hourglass pupils and therefore I see time. Even as I look at you now, Tanis,” the mage whispered, “‘I see you dying, slowly, by inches.”

I see the same thing every morning, when I look in the bathroom mirror. Then there’s Sturm Brightblade, the series’ archetypal noble paladin. As a name ‘Sturm’ is Germanic enough, and the reader, or at least this reader, might be struck by the fact that the bright ‘blade’ of the stormtrooper was a key Nazi symbol. The ‘Olbrecht’ sword (that is, ‘all-bright’ blade) was a piece of SS ceremonial gear, and Hitler’s paramilitary ‘Sturmabteilung’ (‘storm-division’) takes its name both from Sturm and that which a blade does (teilt, cuts, divides, hence: division). Then again: a medievalised Fantasy kingdom rigidly divided between good and evil, in which fair-skinned warriors battle monstrous evil? We could hardly call such a conception Nazi! No Nazi would be called Sturm Olbrecht. Nobody who speaks German could be an evil man. Etc.

The captain turned immediately, whipping his spyglass out of the pocket of his fur parka and placing it to his eye. [500]

Parka, first attested in English in 1924, is actually from the Tundra Nenets парка, via Russian па́рка and so, despite the word’s Quadrophenia associations, isn’t impossible in a Fantasy setting. It's not as if Weis and Hickman have their captain mount a moped and zoom away.

The wind of momentous events was starting to swirl into a huge vortex. [950]

That's the thing about history. It's basically meteorological. To quote Thucydides: “the wind of the war's momentousness was now huge-vortex-whirling.”

What remained of Riverwind no longer resembled anything human. The man’s flesh had been seared from his body. The white of bone was clearly visible where skin and muscle had melted from his arms. His eyes ran like jelly down the fleshless, cadaverous cheeks. [143]

Ugh!

Without a word, without even pausing in his stride, Lord Ariakas swung his gloved hand. The blow caught Garibanus in the ribcage. There was a whooshing sound, like a bellows deflating. [829]

Oof!

He saw the blue [dragon] open his hideous fanged mouth. Tas ducked behind the shield… grabbed hold of the dwarf’s beard and yanked his head downward, behind the shield. [810]

Nothing like a bit of climactic beard-grabbing to add to the dramatic tension.

Laurana raised her hands and her eyes to heaven. [707]

Her hands are ... holding her eyes? Eww. And whilst we're on the subject of eyes:

Raistlin nodded and melted back into the shadows. His eyes were abstracted.

Abstracted [adj] Separated or disconnected; withdrawn; removed; apart. Separated from matter, not concrete. OK then!

The elves parted, and out of their midst came an elfmaiden who walked forward to stand beside the Speaker. Her hair was honey pouring from a pitcher; it spilled over her arms and down her back, past her waist, touching her wrists as she stood with her arms at her sides. [266]

Ah, gloopy hair! Is there anything sexier? Gloopy-sticky. Clang! Clang!