David
Lindsay’s 1920 Voyage to Arcturus is
a quiet classic of fantasy. The story of
a man who is transported to the eponymous planet, he finds himself walking a
kaleidoscope land where the sky can be purple, mountains rise and fall like the
wind, and the people he meets have such esoteric thoughts he can only take
stabs in reply as to their ultimate coherency.
Saving his best for last, the concluding volume of Jeffrey Ford’s
Well-Built City trilogy, The Beyond
(2001), spins Lindsay’s story darker and weirder, tying itself back into the
main ideas of the preceding two volumes, The Physiognomist and Memoranda, to
create a strange, kaleidoscope voyage of its own. The
Beyond as imaginative and conceptually deep as contemporary fantasy series
gets these days, it confirming the trilogy’s status as among the contemporary
best.
Memoranda a ninety-degree
turn from The Physiognomist, looking
ahead to The Beyond the reader has no
hope of guessing what comes next—despite the lead-on in the final paragraphs of
Memoranda. Abandoning the second dimension for the
third, Cley and Misrix’s adventures in the wilds beyond the Well-Built city are
mythic in mode but 100% Weird in style.
With the trusty hound Wood by his side, Cley carries on his hunt for
Arla, the woman fixed in his mind, while Misrix, gleaning through the rubble of
the Well-Built City, attempts to reconcile the demon and human inside himself
and civilization.
The Physiognomist and Memoranda are wholly engaging for the
color of imagination, clarity of style, and perpetual awareness the narrative
is operating along more than one degree of meaning. The
Beyond may be moreso. Like Lindsay’s
protagonist, Cley continually finds himself in places and situations abstract
from his conception of reality but perseveres nonetheless, sticking to his
goals as elusive as they become and discovering a land wholly new to his conception
of possibility in the process.
The Beyond a story of
finding redemption, like a Gene Wolfe novel it requires close reading and
connecting the figurative dots to understand what precisely the context for the
redemption is. From the tattooed tribe
which never speaks to the knife-wielding wraiths, the magical seed to the fight
with the ‘serpent,’ Cley’s journey is a flight through the imagination as much
as it is the wilds of the Beyond. Every
bit as imaginative as the preceding two volumes, if not more, the pace remains
brisk and colorful, letting disappointing none of the promise of the preceding
two volumes.
For
readers seeking some resolution to the series as a whole, Ford delivers—with a
caveat: it may require re-reading the whole trilogy. Cley’s journey certainly transformative, from
what, into what, for what, and the representation of it all are dependent on
the larger context. Heavily allegorical,
separating what is story from what is symbol, then piecing it together into a
holistic statement is to be the reader’s mode.
In
the end, The Beyond is a great finish
to one of fantasy’s more literary trilogies.
Utilizing the power of dark, colorful imaginings to tell a story
relating one man’s quest through life, the murky undertones of the series to
date exude themselves in ever more shadowy form, but come to a moment of finite
closure that recurses through the trilogy as a whole. Highly recommended.
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