Ursus of Ultima Thule

There are some writers who perfectly marry the style of the their story to its content.  And some who just have a sort of neutral style that goes with whatever story they happen to write.  But I've never come across a novel style and substance seem to be so much at odds with each other as Avram Davidson's Ursus of Ultima Thule.

I always think of Avram Davidson's narrator as slightly fussy erudite professor.  He knows a lot of obscure information, and he backtracks in his narration to fill in those details every so often.  (This is clearly a deliberate authorial persona; I don't claim that Davidson himself talked like that, of course).  This is a device that works really well for his "Vergil" stories, for example, with its intellectual protagonist.

But in Ursus, Davidson seems to be channeling Robert E. Howard, writing a story about a barbarian warrior in a mythical land in the frozen north.  Davidson's ornate style, with its repetitions, back-trackings, break-outs into metered verse, and so on, seems oddly fitted to this type of story at first glance.  And at second glance.  Overall, though, I'd say Ursus has some real high points, where Davidson's overlays lend a feeling of strangeness to this story of what should be, after all, a very strange land to us.  On the other hand, there are climactic moments when one can feel the force of the story moving forward, but Davidson slows down, not so much to build tension as to add another arch comment or something.

In the end, I enjoyed it and I'm glad I read it, but I would certainly not recommend it as a first taste of Davidson to anybody -- the Vergil stories are Dr. Esterhazy stories are much more successful.