Jack Vance

I've started in rereading Vance's Lyonesse trilogy. Now, I have to admit that I haven't read all that much of Vance's work. Let's see: I've read Lyonesse, The Gray Prince, The Languages of Pao, Space Opera, Ports of Call, some of the "Dying Earth" stories, and "The Moon Moth", and I think that's about it. So, I'm going to make some generalizations about Vance, but they're based on very incomplete data.

I've never been able to pin down what it is that makes Vance's prose so distinctive, but it's always struck me as unmistakable. It bears some resemblance to Dunsany's, but Dunsany was florid where Vance tends to be brittle. His characters are, most often, grotesques, and I rarely find myself sympathizing with them; it's more a matter of marvelling at their peculiar behavior than anything else. It's tempting to compare them to the characters in the Gormenghast trilogy, but some, at least, of those characters were sympathetic - Keda, Flay, and Fuschia in particular. In addition, Gormenghast is dark and claustrophobic, two words that could never be applied to Vance's work. Not that Vance is never serious; The Gray Prince, in particular, includes some biting commentary on contemporary (mid-1970s, I think) politics.

At any rate, I find that I can only take Vance at long intervals. It takes a definite effort of will to read through something as long as the Lyonesse trilogy. It's worth the effort; the Ska are quite memorable, and Vance's version of Faerie is rather good, for instance. But, in general, I find a little Vance goes a long way.

"The Ornament of the World"

It's nasty and wet tonight. There've been intermittent thunderstorms, bad enough to disrupt the satellite dish. Fortunately, there's nothing I normally watch on Thursdays, though I may take a look at the Frasier finale. It's been quite a few years since I watched it, but what the heck - if the weather permits, it might be worth it.

Anyway. I finished reading The Ornament of the World, by Maria Menocal, yesterday. I found it quite interesting. It's not a history per se; Menocal instead gives brief vignettes, focusing on specific people and events over a period of some seven centuries. We see warriors and statesmen, philosophers and theologians, poets and mystics: `Abd ar-Rahman I, Samuel the Nagid, El Cid, Peter the Venerable, Pedro the Cruel, Maimonides, Moses of Leon, ibn Khaldun, and Cervantes (in a wistful and thought-provoking coda) cross the stage, along with many others. Enough detail is given for a picture of the broad sweep of the history of Muslim Spain: the unification of the peninsula by `Abd ar-Rahman I, the declaration of the caliphate by `Abd ar-Rahman III, the collapse of the caliphate into the taifa city-states, their destruction under pressure from the Christian kingdoms of the North and the Almoravid and Almohad fundamentalists invading from across the straits, and the final surrender of Boabdil to Ferdinand and Isabella. It's a sad story overall; the culture of tolerance shared by the taifas and the contemporary Christian states was probably doomed from the outset, but it shone so brightly for a few centuries...

An interesting what-if occurs to me. In the 11th century, Alfonso VI was on his way towards unifying Spain under Christian rule when the Almoravids invaded and drove him back. They saved the Muslim states from being overrun, but in their zeal crushed the mixed culture that had arisen in the taifas. When Spain was finally united, four centuries later, it was the intolerant Ferdinand and Isabella who did so, rather than the more moderate Alfonso. What impact might it have had on Western (and Muslim!) civilization had Alfonso succeeded?