Characters tend to represent stages in that growth, or at least are taken as such by Shandon. It’s in three parts, like The Divine Comedy, and it’s about a soul’s growth in spiritual understanding. To reach it, he has to make a voyage through the underworld, which turns out to be a moralising and somewhat didactic passage.įrom the outline, you can tell that the story owes something to Dante. That turns into a strange picaresque adventure by the end, Shandon’s been charged by an oracle to go to a spring called Hippocrene, the source of poetic inspiration. The second follows Shandon and Golias as they try to help a friend of Golias’, Lucias Gil Jones (a mixture of Lucian, writer of The Golden Ass, with Gil Blas and Fielding’s Tom Jones).
VARNOCK SILVERLOCK SERIES
Shandon finds his way, through a series of misadventures, back to Golias, who is waiting at the hall called Heorot. Together, the two men are washed up on an island, then make their way to the mainland, where they’re separated. Bobbing about in the waves, he meets a man named Golias - named many other things as well Golias is a kind of universal bard, named for great singers from across a range of cultures. It begins with Shandon shipwrecked in strange waters. Still, the book did seem to me to be worth writing about, because whether or not it’s wholly successful in itself, it raises a host of interesting questions about the nature of fictional characters, and how they work, and how we read them, and how these things may change in time.Ī few more words about the book before going on. It’s a fun book, but I couldn’t help but feel that Myers bit off more than he could chew - or, perhaps, that the idea was setting up greater expectations (as it were) than he or anybody could fulfill. For myself, I enjoyed it, with reservations.
My copy has essays by Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle praising it to the skies.
The book follows Shandon through the Commonwealth, as he is forced to learn and grow in the course of a three-part journey. Clarence Shandon, gifted with a white streak in his hair from which he’s nicknamed ‘Silverlock.’ A former business student, Shandon’s completely ignorant of books and literature, so does not fully realise into what sort of land he has fallen: a land where every character, every name, comes from fiction or mythology. Silverlock imagines a Commonwealth of Letters inhabited by the world’s great fictional characters. And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mash-ups have precedents as well I have not read Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books, nor have I read John Kendrick Bangs’ Associated Shades novels, which date back to the 1890s, but I have read John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, and came away from it with a few thoughts. Crossovers, it has been said, date back to Homer writing of heroes coming together to fight the Trojan War. In fact, though, this is really nothing new. At an extreme, a work like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen imagines a world where every character derives from some other source, comes from some other story imagines a world where all stories overlap and so make a strange collective setting. Fan-fiction interrogates texts we thought we knew, crossing characters from one tale over into another. A film like The Avengers blends together characters from five other movies. It’s been said that this is the age of the mash-up: of art formed from the fusion of other works of art.
0 kommentar(er)
