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rushthatspeaksI think reading Tanith Lee in a fever dream may be redundant.
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sovay recommended this one-- I'd read Saint Fire, which is in this continuity, and it annoyed me so much in so many various directions that I read nothing else in the series. (I can best describe Saint Fire as precisely the wrong way to retell Joan of Arc. For one thing, she does not work when set in Venice.) sovay reminded me that with Tanith Lee there is no relationship in quality between the books in a series,except that the later ones are marginally less likely to be interesting. And I wanted an antidote for Dragon Hoard, which was the sort of book that makes one doubt even the very long acquaintanceship one may have had with an author.
So this is one of the books set in Venus, which is Lee's alternate version of Venice, as her books of Paradys are set in Paris; and I think that Venice is really a very good use of Lee's talents. This is one of those books in which the atmosphere is slightly more than half the point. If you like books full of crumbling decadence and images through water and clever little classical allusions, which I do, this meets those desires, but unlike much of Lee it has a formal structure and her symbols are dealt out with some attention to overall resonance. I mean to say, this is a book in which she is in control of her material, of which I always approve.
There is a young man, who is rather more than ordinarily a Byronic protagonist, for reasons which are good and sufficient (and funny). There is a young woman, who suffers from the lifelong affliction of being made far too often into a symbol of something or other. There are various desperadoes and courtesans and gondoliers; there is a very good magpie. There is an alchemist of whom I can only think as Lee's attempt to put one in the eye at Shakespeare-- the entire plot has an awareness of The Merchant of Venice as something it is intentionally working against. There are evil masks, of course, because it is a Tanith Lee novel. I don't think I'd recommend it to outright Lee-haters, but it is definitely one of her stronger, and I am very glad not to have missed it.
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Anyway,
sovay recommended this one-- I'd read Saint Fire, which is in this continuity, and it annoyed me so much in so many various directions that I read nothing else in the series. (I can best describe Saint Fire as precisely the wrong way to retell Joan of Arc. For one thing, she does not work when set in Venice.) sovay reminded me that with Tanith Lee there is no relationship in quality between the books in a series,except that the later ones are marginally less likely to be interesting. And I wanted an antidote for Dragon Hoard, which was the sort of book that makes one doubt even the very long acquaintanceship one may have had with an author.So this is one of the books set in Venus, which is Lee's alternate version of Venice, as her books of Paradys are set in Paris; and I think that Venice is really a very good use of Lee's talents. This is one of those books in which the atmosphere is slightly more than half the point. If you like books full of crumbling decadence and images through water and clever little classical allusions, which I do, this meets those desires, but unlike much of Lee it has a formal structure and her symbols are dealt out with some attention to overall resonance. I mean to say, this is a book in which she is in control of her material, of which I always approve.
There is a young man, who is rather more than ordinarily a Byronic protagonist, for reasons which are good and sufficient (and funny). There is a young woman, who suffers from the lifelong affliction of being made far too often into a symbol of something or other. There are various desperadoes and courtesans and gondoliers; there is a very good magpie. There is an alchemist of whom I can only think as Lee's attempt to put one in the eye at Shakespeare-- the entire plot has an awareness of The Merchant of Venice as something it is intentionally working against. There are evil masks, of course, because it is a Tanith Lee novel. I don't think I'd recommend it to outright Lee-haters, but it is definitely one of her stronger, and I am very glad not to have missed it.
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