Review: Silverlock

Silverlock by John Myers Myers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A difficult book to rate and review, because of its mixture of strengths and weaknesses and also its mixture of tones.

Both a strength and a weakness is that the author has a rich background in classical fantastic and adventurous fiction (from the Epic of Gilgamesh on forward), and references it continually. The first-person narrator does not have this background, and never seems to figure out that he is wandering around a literary landscape; his university degree is in business management. I have some background, but not nearly as much as the author, and while the book works without knowing who all of the minor characters are exactly, sometimes (especially near the end), when the namedrops are coming thick and fast, I did feel at sea, and also as if I was in the presence of a show-off who was setting out to make me feel ignorant. Some of the characters are combinations of several legends in one person, which makes it even more confusing (and difficult to look them up on Wikipedia).

The story does not follow a conventional plot. (I think I detected signs of the Hero's Journey, which I am not a fan of, but it wasn't too obtrusive.) It's a picaresque, "the episodic adventures of a rogue," and involves the viewpoint character facing various adventures, in the course of which he kills several people (in self-defence, but sometimes if he'd been smarter he wouldn't have been in the situation where he needed to), steals a few things (out of desperation, but the same if-he'd-been-smarter caveat sometimes applies), and commits adultery (this was just a straight-up choice on his part and gets no defence from me). He has an old-fashioned outlook on violence and women, not a million miles from, say, Ernest Hemingway, which won't go over particularly well to most present-day audiences.

The events of the story are not just wandering from scene to scene, though, at least not all the way through. He does have goals at various points. The first is to reconnect with his companion, who is every famous bard ever in a single character. Once that's achieved, they set out to help their friend Lucius Jones win his love. This character seems to be a blend of Lucius from the Golden Ass (since he's turned into a donkey at one point, and has to eat roses to change back to human) and possibly Tom Jones, since, while longing after his beloved, he has no hesitation in sleeping with other women if the opportunity presents itself.

The quests escalate as the book goes on, and the third one is to reach the Hippocrene Spring, which makes people into poets when they drink from it. This one is given by an oracle, and involves a descent into the underworld, modelled on Dante's Inferno but guided by "Faustopheles," seemingly a combination of Faust and Mephistopheles. This is where the tone takes a very dark turn, as Faustopheles preaches nihilism and hopelessness, illustrating his points with the characters they encounter. It was a lot more philosophical than the earlier parts of the book, and I felt it didn't fit well; the author, perhaps, was putting down on paper his own darkest thoughts in an attempt to exorcise them.

The character of Silverlock is not a philosopher, and starts the book alienated and uncaring about others, but he picks up some ideals of behaviour from a few encounters along the way (notably including Sir Gawain). While he is never a highly admirable character to me, he does improve, albeit from a very unpromising starting point. He's capable of being fair-minded, a faithful friend, brave, and a protector of the innocent.

The setting never gets much of an explanation, and is a strange mishmash of the whole of literature up to the 19th century (there may have been some early-20th-century material that I missed). Different regions are from wildly different historical periods, and people wander between them, but there doesn't seem to be, say, trade in weaponry, for example. It's meant to make symbolic sense rather than literal sense. Also, the characters that Silverlock encounters always seem to be partway through their stories - the key moments of the stories are happening just as he arrives - which again follows story logic rather than any other kind of logic.

The edition I read has numerous typos (see my notes), including a good many missing quotation marks, and some consistent errors. For example, the author uses a comma after "of course" when it's not required, and doesn't use a comma after "Why" as an exclamation beginning a sentence. I didn't notice any vocabulary errors, though, and the interpolated poems are well executed, in contrast to so much fantasy poetry. Apparently this book is a favourite with filkers (people who perform fandom-based songs), and I can see why.

Overall, it's an odd book, and I can see why some people love it and others hate it. I neither loved nor hated it; for me, the best parts made it good enough to make it to my Best of the Year, but in the lowest tier because of its patchy nature. It did make me consider reading (or re-reading) some of the source material, though.

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