The Sword of Welleran, Waiting for the End of the World

Dunsany was one of the creators of modern fantasy, and The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories benefits and suffers in about equal measure from his being among the first. One of his great strengths is that he moves around effortlessly within subgenres -- any given story might be a sword-and-sorcery tale, an allegory, a fairy tale, or what have you. He also has an ear for how his sentences sound -- his sentences are resonant without the ornateness of, say, E. R. Eddison.

At the same time, some of his pet tricks have become cliche by now, and grate after a while. For example, the way in which inverts he his sentences can frustrating be after a while. In addition, he has some clumsy contrivances which fantasy has largely grown out of, like the way he specifies that he (the narrator) saw this story in a dream, or was watching for a hidden place, or something like that. Even his own later fiction like The King of Elfland's Daughter doesn't have this problem, and I can imagine it was something that he came to realize was unnecessary.

The stories themselves are a mixed bag, not just in genre terms as I mentioned above, but in quality as well. The title story hits a great emotional high point as the citizens of the city, inspired by the ghosts of heroes past, take up arms against the barbarians and repel them, only to fall into deep mourning that so many good people have died, and to reject the values of their erstwhile heroes. Other stories really drag -- Dunsany seems to have a deep streak of pastoralism (as Tolkien does later), and the meditations on the virtues of the countryside vis-a-vis the city get old very quickly, even if they're disguised as stories. Ultimately, it's fun to go back and read the "classics", especially when they're as short as this one -- the whole book is maybe 50 pages (hard to tell page counts on the kindle).

One of Andrew Taylor's psychological novels caught my eye in the bookstore, but it was the middle of a trilogy, so I decided to look for the first book at the library. They didn't have it, but they did have one of his first books, Waiting for the End of the World. I took it out, not knowing quite what to expect and ended up having a blast with it. The story concerns Dougal, who seems to have gotten sucked in to the unsavory circle of a certain Hanbury (this all happened in Taylor's first book, Caroline Minuscule, which the library unfortunately didn't have, so I'm guessing a bit), and gets suckered into doing some spy work for Hanbury. Hanbury is trying to infiltrate an arms-smuggling ring for his own nefarious purposes, and the hapless Dougal ends up trying to infiltrate a castle in secret, working for the FBI and CIA, and so on, while trying to hang on to his moral center. All in good fun, and, even if the psychological novels aren't as good, I think I'll try to at least scoop up the rest of his thrillers.