Review: The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

The Big Book of Classic Fantasy by Ann VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Firstly, let's be clear: when the editors call this a big book, they're not kidding around. It's enormous.

"Classic" fantasy here extends from the late 18th to the mid-20th century, and the stories (and excerpts from novels) are arranged chronologically, so patterns emerge naturally as you read through. The early stories are not what we think of as short stories today; they're narrations of a series of events, and the characters are barely characters at all, just names with a couple of qualities attached. They tend not to drive the story particularly; they respond to events, but they aren't true protagonists.

By the mid-to-late 19th century, things have settled down, and writers have figured out plot and character pretty much as we know them today, though both continue to be enriched and refined over the following years. Until, that is, the early 20th century, when various experimental writers take things in new directions - directions that mostly proved unfruitful, I have to say. The modernist pieces are, to my ear, overwritten, repetitious, slow-moving and excessively descriptive at the expense of plot and character. We are back where we started in some ways: plots replaced by a series of events, characters replaced by names and vague qualities, effective protagonism largely absent.

Then comes the pulp era, and things pick up again (for my taste). The descriptions can still be a bit over-rich, but we have characters with goals driving plots to a satisfying conclusion. The characters can still be a bit thin, but they demonstrate their thoughts and feelings in action rather than reflection.

The collection ends with a Tolkien story, "Leaf by Niggle," which, like most of the better-known pieces, I'd read before, but which I very much enjoyed re-reading.

There's a mixture of very well-known classics, starting with Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," with more obscure pieces and authors, some of them originally written in other languages and here in English for, in many cases, the first time. As with other anthologies that attempt this kind of thing, I sometimes felt that the pieces had deserved their obscurity, though there were one or two gems. For example, before I'd even finished reading the excerpt from Living Alone, I went and downloaded the whole book from Project Gutenberg and read it before continuing with this book. The charming voice that had drawn me to it turned out to be its greatest, almost its only, strength, but I was glad to have discovered it.

I did skip a couple of stories in whole or in part. I'd read Kafka's Metamorphosis before, a long time ago, and had no particular desire to re-read it; and one of the stories became so tedious that I eventually skipped ahead to the next one. I considered doing this with several others, as well. Parts of the book I found a slog; see above about overwriting and deserved obscurity.

I suspect that this anthology is intended largely as a textbook, like the Norton anthologies that we had when I studied English at university. As a textbook, it provides a lot of fine material for analysis; it's deliberately wide-ranging, bringing in examples of many literary movements from multiple countries, while not neglecting the well-known English and American classics. As a straight read-through for entertainment, it's uneven, and sometimes, for my taste, not enjoyable at all. But it's certainly a monumental effort by the editors, and I commend their ambition, even if I didn't love every part of the result.

View all my reviews