Customer Reviews

A Dreamer's Tales

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Wildside Press does much good by resurrecting rare old books, but this edition of Dunsany's classic has some of the worst typos I have ever seen. For example:

Page 34: Instead of "Never since then have I seen my city alive," Wildside has: "Now since then have I seen my city alive," disastrously reversing the meaning of the sentence, at the very climax of "The Madness of Andelsprutz".

Page 111: Instead of "But the folk of the Weald arose and went back well-fed to their byres," Wildside has: "But the talk of the Weald arose and went back well-fed to byres" (two errors in one line!).

Page 113: A line has dropped out! Instead of ". . . and beat the roses against cottagers' panes, and whispered news of the befriending night," Wildside has: ". . . and beat the roses of the befriending night"--ruining one of Dunsany's more evocative passages.

And most ridiculous of all, at the climax of "Blagdaross", instead of "Saladin is in this desert with all his paynims", we get "Saladin is in this desert with all his pyjamas"!

And so on. These errors might be a minor annoyance encountered in, say, "War and Peace", but Dunsany's tales are very short, very carefully crafted, every word selected with care and precision. They are more nearly poetry than prose. Errors of this kind GLARE at the reader.

Wildside boasts that this edition is "authorized" by the Dunsany estate, but Dunsany would have been infuriated by it. Wildside needs to issue a corrected version, and maybe an apology.

"These are the Inner Lands..." Technically that describes the fictional cities in the first story of "A Dreamer's Tales," but it could easily have described Lord Dunsany's fantastical mind. Full of invented legends and exotic characters, Dunsany's short stories are a wonderful early fantasy read.

He writes about desert cities, where the sea is only a legend; of a rocking horse that revels in a little boy's fantasies; of cities that are "quite dead; of dreams and redemption, long-dead cities that were supposedly going to last forever, prophets and swords, desert curses and terrible, beautiful gods.

There are boats on the banks of the Yann river, the "everlasting" city of Zaccarath, a stone age tale of religion and sacrifice, and the hashish man. Most striking is "The Field," in which Dunsany experiences strange feelings while sitting in a field of flowers -- a field with a terrible secret.

Dunsany had a masterful flair for exotic-edged fantasy. Before anyone had ever heard of J.R.R. Tolkien or "The Hobbit," Dunsany was spinning his stories. And while Tolkien has been the most powerful influence on modern fantasy, Dunsany did his share too -- he can be seen in descriptions of beautiful temples and desert cities.

His writing style is typical of the late 19th/early 20th century, rather formal and ornate. But the imagination of the stories frees them up. "I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could there be any hell for me," Dunsany says ominously at the start of one story. And half the horror of that is wondering what the horrible thing is.

Dunsany is shown in his glory in "The Dreamer's Tales," a rich collection of beautiful fantasy stories. Funny, poignant, majestic, this is a keeper.

How neat to be able to easily purchase this great book. Dunsany skillfully weaves his tales so the reader is brought into his world of imagination. His was a unique vision. Each tale still speaks to our world today a message of morality. His worlds are very real.

I'll first quote from Ursula K. Leguin's website:

--------
When people ask me about "a book that changed my life," one of the several hundred honest answers I can give them is A Dreamer's Tales. (Then they look blank, which is too bad.) I was about twelve when I picked it up, one of those nice little leather-bound books the Modern Library used to do, and from the first sentence I was a goner.
. . .

I described this moment also in the first essay in my first book of essays, The Language of the Night, how I stood with the book in my hands there in the living room, silent upon a peak in Darien.
-------

Dunsany was the progenitor of modern fantasy -- before Tolkien, before Lewis, before Howard and before Lovecraft. This may be his best book that's available in the public domain; one story in particular, "Idle Days on the Yann," may be the best short story he wrote, period. Reading this, his influence on every major fantasy author from Lovecraft through to Zelazny is made clear, as is Dunsany's complete uniqueness as a writer.

I won't try to sum up the plots of these stories in a paragraph because these aren't really stories that hinge on plots, or heroes, or quests, or morals, or any of the other common modern fantasy models: though all those figure from time to time, they don't take center stage. Mostly, these stories are carried along by Dunsany's masterful writing style, and to read them is to watch Dunsany show you a series of intricate visions, visions beautiful, pathetic, sublime, and horrible by turn. Nobody else has ever really replicated his voice (the closest I can think of, oddly, is Kahlil Gibran, though Gaiman managed a hint of it in _Stardust_), and Dunsany is able to hook the reader hard just with prose style and clarity of detail. Perhaps the most amazing thing about these stories is how unique and memorable they remain, even after a hundred-odd years' worth of his influence.

Anyway, don't take my word for it; this book's free. Grab this thing and read "Idle Days on the Yann," if nothing else. There's no excuse not to. If you don't like it, thbffff to you.



The stories it contains are:

Preface"
"Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean"
"Bladgaross"
"The Madness of Andelsprutz"
"Where the Tides Ebb and Flow"
"Bethmoora"
"Idle Days on the Yann"
"The Sword and the Idol"
"The Idle City"
"The Hashish Man"
"Poor Old Bill"
"The Beggars"
"Carcassonne"
"In Zaccarath"
"The Field"
"The Day of the Poll"
"The Unhappy Body"

This book, which contains 16 magical tales, is just great. I read it twice from cover to cover and loved every sentence in it. Dunsany has a very particular style, making it easy to envision the story and experiencing it as if it were really happening.

Before there was Tolkein, there were William Morris, E.R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany. Dunsany's richly poetic style is delicious but a bit like a box of chocolates--best savored in small doses; too much and you might get a tummy ache. These are not so much tales as fragments, dreams, wisps of imaginings. Plot takes a backseat; these pieces read more like prose-poems, and are all about setting and language. They work well together since most are about dead or forgotten (imagined) cities or lands. An air of sadness wafts off the pages. Recommended for those who wish to voyage to exotic kingdoms that don't exist and those who enjoy reading ornate, beautiful prose evocative of Swinburne and Tennyson.

Lord Dunsany has a rare imagination and unqiue gift for writing. If you enjoy imaginative and visionary tales or if you are a fan of fictional mythologies, you will like Dunsany. While the stories are often compact, the vision is almost always expansive. He adopts language and prose approrpriate to his subject matter; often dreamy and languid it is a step away from the norm. Dunsany's tales dwell in places seldom visited by modern authors. Highly recommended.

_A Dreamer's Tales_ consists of 16 short stories (I've sorted them by title rather than order of appearance); it's in print as I write this, as part of the Fantasy Masterworks edition of _Time and the Gods_.

"The Beggars" - The cloaked strangers, begging gracefully, as gods beg for souls, had a gift for seeing past the dreary surface of life in the city.

"Bethmoora" - a story of the desolation of Bethmoora, a city at the desert's edge.

"Blagdaross" - As twilight falls upon a rubbish heap, all the castoff things therein find voices to remember where they have been. Among them is the rocking-horse Blagdaross.

"Carcassonne" - It was prophesied to Camorak at Arn that he should never come to Carcassonne, but he decided to defy Fate.

"The Day of the Poll" - Since everyone in the town had gone raving mad on election day, the lonely poet set out to trap and save an intelligence for company.

"The Field" - Why is it the field of king-cups, and not the hideous ugliness of the town, that is covered with an ominous feeling of foreboding?

"The Hashish Man" - Another visitor to Bethmoora picks up the tale.

"The Idle City" - The city's custom was that anyone who wished to enter must pay a toll of one story at the gate.

"Idle Days on the Yann" - the story of a journey on the ship _Bird of the River_ down the Yann, and of the cities along the Yann.

"The Madness of Andelsprutz" - The city of Andelsprutz had been conquered, and stolen from the land of Akla. What happens to the souls of conquered cities?

"Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean" - The Inner Lands are those three kingdoms which have no view of the sea, being bounded on the west by the mountain Poltarnees. But none who had ever climbed Poltarnees from the very earliest times had ever come back again...

"Poor Old Bill" - the Captain never talked to the ship's crew, except sometimes in the evening he would talk a bit to the me!n he had hanged at the yard-arm. But just when the crew thought life couldn't get any worse, the Captain learned how to use curses.

"The Sword and the Idol" - Which would have more weight - the family of the man who made the first iron sword, or of he who made the first idol?

"The Unhappy Body" - The body, afflicted with a poet's soul that would not let it rest, was advised to drink and smoke more, so that the soul would cease to trouble it.

"Where the Tides Ebb and Flow" - What happens to the souls of those who are cursed so that they cannot rest on either the earth or the ocean?

"In Zaccarath" - The prophets and singers have spoken of the iniquity of the King, and the onrush of the Zeedians, but the King and his queens and warriors are paying heed only to their feasting and celebration, or so it would seem...

this is a work of art. incredibly imaginative, it speaks directly from the subconscious mind. it is not only art but also an excercise in psychoanalysis. key words are: gods in poppy fields in the twilight. prohpets beheaded and sent on a journey into the outer stars.if you like gods beating up on little people, you will love this guy