With two princes down and dusted, Kirth Gersen looks to the next name on his Count-of-Monte-Cristo hit list—and perhaps the best named villain in the series, Viole Falushe. Where Kokor Hekkus' vices were rampant with unadulterated violence and madness, Falushe's evils are authoritarian. Maintaining a massive harem of unwilling women, he uses perfumes and poisons to rule a vast domain. That is, until Kirth Gersen steps into the picture to exact his revenge.
Having read all of Vance's ouevre, it's possible to say there are a few missed opportunities in The Palace of Love. The biggest is the palace itself and the planet it exists on. After Gersen arrives, Vance takes a leisurely, almost uninterested approach to the palace. A few details are provided to sketch things in the mind's eye, but a sketch is all it is. Looking at how Vance approached foreign places and cultures in Cugel or Araminta, a discrepancy appears; the palace and surrounding planet could have been richer, stronger elements of the book.
In the end, The Palace of Love possesses a unique premise that satisfies the book, but perhaps not the reader. The interstices of setting bare, Vance puts in place a sufficient revenge tale, but not a staggering one. Fans of the author will not look away, but they would likely look to others of his books as better representative of the style and swagger Vance was capable of. If wishes were fishes, I know, but I can at least imagine that had this book been written 20 years later, a great deal more would pop off the page, said palace a place of dreamy, pleasurable, aphrodisiac-infused evil.
Addictive reading, aren't they? I've just read these and some other Vance books for the third time in over a half-century, and I flew through them.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that really struck me on this reading -- and I think you overlook the writerly skill required -- is Vance's ability to make his ridiculously competent protagonists like Kirth Gersen or Adam Reith seem something close to feasibly real humans with inner lives and motivations sketched in with a few words, when on the face of it they should be, as you say, flat James Bondian supermen.
The description of Gersen's feelings and choices back in STAR KING during the fight scene where he slowly and deliberately cripples Tristano the Earthman, for instance, or his uncomfortable awareness that in many ways he's merely a blunt instrument -- arguably, the real killing machine' of that novel's title -- are hard tricks to pull off. Vance does them with sufficient economy and elegance he makes the trick invisible.