Текст книги "Abhorsen"

Автор книги: Garth Nix

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

Q is really quite a difficult letter to find an author for. I shall have to embark upon a Quest to find one that I actually read when I was younger.

R is for Arthur Ransome

Swallows and Amazons Forever! I think that Swallows and Amazons and its sequels can be classified almost as fantasy, in that they are children’s adventure stories that couldn’t happen now and probably couldn’t have happened even in the 1920s and 30s when they were written. But then again, they are completely believable and, as a child, I so wanted to be in one of them. Preferably as a Swallow, not an Amazon. My all-time favourite is Winter Holiday. If Lake Windermere (one of the real lakes in the North-West of England on which the books’ composite lake is based) ever freezes over again I shall be there.

S is for Rosemary Sutcliff

The Eagle of the Ninth introduced me to Roman history when I was nine or ten. It was a potent seed, growing into a still-spreading tree of many branches, because I’m still reading fiction and non-fiction about the Romans. The two sequels (though not direct ones), The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers, were great discoveries. I remember the excitement of finding out they existed and ordering them in to my local children’s library. I like many other Sutcliff historical novels, but my absolute favourite is not one of the Roman novels, but a medieval one. It is Knight’s Fee, the story of a Saxon dog-boy and his friendship with a young Norman destined to be a knight.

T is for J.R .R . Tolkien and James Thurber

I’m sure that everything that could be said about childhood infatuation with The Lord of The Rings has been said. It is enough for me to add that my mother was reading it when she was pregnant with me, dooming me to the life of a fantasy author. And to add that I love and respect Tolkien’s work so much that while I may try and imitate some of the epic feel and sweep of his work, I trust I will have the courage to never steal his elves, dwarves, dark overlords and other coin to debase for my own foul purposes.

James Thurber must be mentioned for The Thirteen Clocks. This is a deceptive book, for in addition to being hugely entertaining, it is written in kind of hybrid prose-verse style which I suspect many people may have attempted but been unable to bring off. The Golux and the Todal are tremendous inventions, but it is the language which I love most.

U is for . . . uh . . . Uther Pendragon, which allows me to mention T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, though I think the first part The Sword in The Stone is the best. Once again there are two versions, the stand-alone book is not the same as the text as included as part one of the entire sequence.

V is for Jack Vance

My father’s favourite science fiction and fantasy writer was naturally going to get a head start with me. Jack Vance’s prose style is instantly recogniseable, as is his baroque and lustrous imagination, always coupled with a sly sense of humour and great erudition. My favourites are the five Demon Princes books, which despite the series name are science fiction novels: the Demon Princes are criminals on an interstellar scale. I also return often to the Planet of Adventure series. Of his fantasies, the later Lyonesse series are a personal favourite, though I think only the first one was published while I was still in my teens. Almost anything and everything by Vance is worth reading.

W is for Victoria Walker

It’s also for P.G. Wodehouse (the Psmith and Uncle Fred novels are my favourites, not the Jeeves ones), and the historical fiction writer Ronald Welch, who would run second to Sutcliff as my childhood favourite in this genre. But space is of the essence, so I will mention The Winter of Enchantment by Victoria Walker. A charming forgotten fantasy from the late 1960s, the story of a young boy in the 19th century who must take on a great Enchanter to help a girl rescue herself from his clutches. Lots of people are interested in republishing this work, but the author has proved difficult to find, possibly by choice. It’s a pity, because the book should have another run out on the bookshop shelves.

X is for the reader participation segment of this article. If you can think of a writer whose surname starts with ‘X’ that I might have read in the years roughly between 1970 (when I was seven) and 1983 (when I turned twenty) let me know.

Y is for Jane Yolen, whose books I didn’t read when I was a child (because they weren’t yet written), but wish I had.

Z is for Roger Zelazny

Not just because his name starts with ‘Z’. The first Amber series, beginning with Nine Princes in Amber were important reading for me as a teenager. I really, really liked the idea of a central world that cast shadows of itself, our Earth being but one of those shadows. I also liked that Zelazny didn’t explain stuff. There was a lot of action and the story kept moving and you had to keep up, only after reading and re-reading the whole series did I begin to understand what it was all about. The story was everything and it was all there, only you might not get it the first time through.

Now you know my ABC of books remembered. Or at least one version of it, for there are many authors left out, and many more books that I could have remembered, should have remembered, would have remembered . . .

Garth Nix