Dunsany: Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of the Shadow Valley

Inspired by Nosferatu, a member of the Vault of Evil, whose unstinting gratitude offered free books to the read-hungry here’s a review of an author I much admired as a young man.

David A Riley has remarked somewhere that he doesn’t read much fantasy nowadays and I’m the same. Having considered this I wondered whether a certain bleak cynicism creeps up in the middle years – fantasy becomes whimsical, less supported by any true conviction that there are better things beyond us, perhaps it becomes a childish throwback. Who knows?

Dunsany’s, Don Rodriguez:, was published in 1922. It was his first novel and is set in a Romantic Spain that never decorated a history book because it never existed. The device of Spain seems to be a means of creating a parallel mystical world but Dunsany in this first book seemed also unwilling to risk an uncompromising fantasy world without something tangible for his readership to cling on to – hence Spain. Sufficiently far off to be romantic, sufficiently near to be comprehensible.

Chronicles of Shadow Valley is basically flawed. The modern humour is fine if you like modern humour. At times the prose rambles. It’s somewhat episodic. It’s simply not as good as later novels. But it still shines well above most modern fantasy authors on a number of levels. The most paramount being perhaps the beautiful use of language,

‘he dreamed he walked at night down a street of castles strangely colossal in an awful starlight, with doors too vast for human need, whose battlements were far in the heights of night…’

followed maybe by an ability to create a sense of whimsical longing for other realms which would bear later fruit in more mature works; to lesser degrees its use of symbolism, its understanding of humanity and its characterization.

Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ was inspired in part by Dunsany but if you are a horror afficionado I wouldn’t take Rodriguez as your first door into Dunsany’s world  unless it is to have a brief look at the chapter on the Professor of Saragossa which is a brilliant description of a magician and his powers. The Professor takes the hero on a journey through space to witness marvels beyond comprehension. Wish I could have gone too.

Inspired by Nosferatu, a member of the Vault of Evil, whose unstinting gratitude offered free books to the read-hungry here’s a review of an author I much admired as a young man.

David A Riley has remarked somewhere that he doesn’t read much fantasy nowadays and I’m the same. Having considered this I wondered whether a certain bleak cynicism creeps up in the middle years – fantasy becomes whimsical, less supported by any true conviction that there are better things beyond us, perhaps it becomes a childish throwback. Who knows?

Dunsany’s, Don Rodriguez:, was published in 1922. It was his first novel and is set in a Romantic Spain that never decorated a history book because it never existed. The device of Spain seems to be a means of creating a parallel mystical world but Dunsany in this first book seemed also unwilling to risk an uncompromising fantasy world without something tangible for his readership to cling on to – hence Spain. Sufficiently far off to be romantic, sufficiently near to be comprehensible.

Chronicles of Shadow Valley is basically flawed. The modern humour is fine if you like modern humour. At times he prose rambles. It’s somewhat episodic. It’s simply not as good as later novels. But it still shines well above most modern fantasy authors on a number of levels. The most paramount being perhaps the beautiful use of language,

‘he dreamed he walked at night down a street of castles strangely colossal in an awful starlight, with doors too vast for human need, whose battlements were far in the heights of night…’

followed maybe by an ability to create a sense of whimsical longing for other realms which would bear later fruit in more mature works; to lesser degrees its use of symbolism, its understanding of humanity and its characterization.

Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ was inspired in part by Dunsany but if you are a horror afficionado I wouldn’t take Rodriguez as your first door into Dunsany’s world  unless it is to have a brief look at the chapter on the Professor of Saragossa which is a brilliant description of a magician and his powers. The Professor takes the hero on a journey through space to witness marvels beyond comprehension. Wish I could have gone too.