Members of the list will no doubt be please to hear that our long-time listmaster, one Zurcher by name, has had a fantasy novel, Twelve Nights, published by Penguin.

It isn't out yet in the States, but you can order a copy from Amazon UK. I did. It arrived last week and I read it nonstop over the weekend. Here is my one-paragraph review:

On pages 286-7 of Twelve Nights, Andrew Zurcher’s aesthetico-metaphysical didactic postmodern fantasy novel for children, an almost unthinkably powerful adult male character says to the progatonist, nine-year-old Katharine Worth-More:

“Plotters work with boards, Kay.… The boards are of a certain size. We move the stones around the boards, watching the patterns. Our hands think through the narratives of things as they guide and are guided by the stones. But always the stones stay on the board and the narratives are, as we say, conserved. If stones could fall off the board or come on to the board from nowhere, the plotting could not function. For that reason, there is nothing a plotter fears more than the edge of the board; nothing a plotter guards more carefully than the security of the stones. Causes must generate effects, and effects derive from causes; a cause without an effect or an effect without a cause would break the principle of conservation, and would undermine the plot.

“The greatest stories flirt with the edge, and become great exactly because of this flirtation. They skirt it, needle it, always toying with the loss of a cause or with the spontaneous effect; but the art of the greatest storytellers lies in the surprise of conservation, in the delight of an expectation dashed, only to be fulfilled. It may be a simple rule, but it is a rule.”

Not many nine-year olds will be able to follow this kind of metafictional labyrinth, but those who do will burn through the book like a lit fuse, for all the long discursive and descriptive passages that ease the pace. So will a great many high school and college students, not to mention their teachers. As a literary event, Italo Calvino meets Spenser meets Plato meets Aristotle, C.S. Lewis, and narrative theory is too cool to miss. It is an adventure story suspended for 436 beautifully written pages on the edge of the board.

David Lee Miller
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
(803) 777-4256
FAX 777-9064
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