Lord Dunsany disappoints me

I first read Lord Dunsany’s Two Jars of Relish back when I was in high school. I think I hunted it down because Isaac Asimov (or Harlan Ellison?) wrote that it was a mystery story critics couldn’t ignore, even if they wanted to.

And I have to give it this, the story has stuck with me.

I am not going to spoil the story but I will say that the actual solution to the mystery is not remotely surprising. The strength of the story is the solution isn’t spelled out. It’s implied and the reader has to put the pieces together themselves.

Honestly, the last line, which is referenced every single time I read anything about the story, is the entire selling point of Two Jars of Relish.

Many years after I read the story, I found out that it was the first in a series of mystery stories. The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories contains nine Smethers stories (Smethers is the Relish narrator) and seventeen other mystery/crime stories.

And Two Jars of Relish is easily the best story in the book.

Lord Dunsany can be an incredible writer. His fantasy works didn’t just help create the fantasy genre. They also hold up and are some good reading. His later Jorkens stories are also jolly good fun.

So when I say this was the weakest Lord Dunsany book I’ve read, there’s still room for greatness. But no, the Little Tales of Smethers is mediocre.

They read like they were written in a world where Trent’s Last Case was never written, let alone the whole hard boiled revolution. Which still leaves room for great stuff but that isn’t there. The puzzles and solutions aren’t good and I didn’t find the characters interesting.

A number of the stories felt like someone was trying to imitate G. K. Chesterton but without the charm or whimsy. When you consider the number of people who have tried to write like Lord Dunsany, reading him seem to trying to write like someone else is weird.

And, from what I can gather, he was writing the Jorkens stories around the same time. So I am not going to accept that ‘Oh, his later stuff wasn’t as good as his older writings’ I have read that Dunsany only wrote a first draft and never revised and this collection shows that doesn’t always work.

There is so much profoundly good stuff to read by Lord Dunsany. The Little Tales of Smethers just isn’t one of them.

Even middling Lord Dunsany is good

I was surprised to realize, when I started reading it, that I hadn’t read Tales of Three Hemispheres before. While there are vast  sections of Lord Dunsany’s writings I haven’t read, I’ve still read a lot of his early short stories. 

There was a period about ten years ago when I was reading collection after collection on Project Gutenberg and I assumed I had read Three Hemispheres then. I’m glad that I didn’t. While it isn’t the best Dunsany wrote, if I had read it amidst a flood of other Dunsany, I’d have missed what nifty elements it does have.

The book actually breaks down into two distinctive parts. Some unrelated stories and three interconnected stories, including the previously published Idle Days on the Yann.

I enjoyed the first part. The stories might not have been extraordinary but even middle of the road Dunsany is good reading. I particularly liked the Old Brown Coat, which would have been at home as a Jorkens story.

But the last three stories, collectively known as Beyond the Fields We Know (a phrase that since been pounded into the ground until it has reached the Earth’s core), that’s the best part of the collection. Although the best story being a reprint from an earlier collection doesn’t Tales of Three Hemispheres any favors as a stand-alone book.

I’m not exaggerating that each of these stores is Lord Dunsany going to the land of dreams… and being a tourist. In particular, Idle Days on the Yann is a flat-out travelogue. It isn’t a narrative. It’s world building. And in Lord Dunsany’s hands, world building is magical.

Between The Gods of Pegana abs Beyond the Fields We Know, Lord Dunsany basically created solar books.

Tales of Three Hemispheres is not one of Lord Dunsany’s greatest hits. However, it isn’t just for the completists either. 

Dunsany’s Jorkens throws me off my game

 For years, I’d read about the Jorkens stories of Lord Dunsany. I’d read a couple of the stories in anthologies but the actual collections themselves seemed to always be out of print. So when I finally saw a e-version of the first collection, the Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, I snatched it up. (Clearly, not literally)

Short version: it wasn’t what I expected.

I had read that the Jorkens stories had created the Pub Story genre. Which clearly wasn’t the case since it has earlier roots with authors such as Chaucer and Raspe and Wodehouse. Given the fantastic elements in some of those works, I don’t even think that you can claim that Dunsany introduced the idea of fantastic elements to the genre.

However, I had read that Dunsany codified the genre and influenced later authors like Arthur C.

Clarke, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Larry Niven and Spider Robinson. So I had a pretty good idea what I was in for. I expected the dreamy writing of his early works and the tropes I’d seen used in so many later works.

The Jorkens stories (at least the early ones) are  grounded in the contemporary world, which has the effect of making them feel more dated than just about everything else I’d read by Dunsany. Not every story takes place in the Billiards Club. And Jorkens, as opposed to merely being a vehicle to tell stories, is much more fleshed out as a character than many pub narrators. In fact, the last two stories form a character arc for him.

Full confession: I struggled to get through the book. Not because it was badly written or because it was complicated. No, just because it was not what I expected. I feel like I honestly can’t assess or judge the book. At some point, I will need to reread it for what it is, not for what it isn’t. And Dunsany kept writing Jorkens stories for decades. I hope to see how they developed.

And, as I ponder it, I realize that plenty of other authors broke the ‘rules’ of pub stories and I had no problem about. I’m pretty sure Spider Robinson broke ALL of them :D What threw me off my stride was that Jorkens is not like the Gods of Pagona or The Book of Wonder or others.  And that’s not fair to the collection or Lord Dunsany.

At the end of day, I want to read more Jorkens stories and reread the ones I’ve read. Lord Dunsany never fails to intrigue and fascinate.

Lord Dunsany’s voyage to Mars

 I have been slowly reading The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens by Lord Dunsany, the first of his Jorkens collections. It took me years to find a copy so I am savoring the book. I mean to write about the whole experience when I am done but one story really struck me.

While most of the stories I’ve read so far with Jorkens are slightly grounded travel stories, Our Distant Cousins veers into serious science fiction. Which also actually makes it feel the most dated.

Spoilers 

Spoilers 

Spoilers 

For a story that was first published in a magazine pretty close to a hundred years ago 

It has been said that the Jorkens stories helped codify the pub story (even though example go way back) but this one breaks a lot of the conventions. Eh, it’s Dunsany. He seems to have only followed his own rules.

Our Distant Cousins isn’t actually told by Jorkens but by an associate of his who allegedly made the first voyage to Mars but lost all the proof that he had by the time he made it back to Earth.

The actual plot is honestly an abridged version of the Time Machine by H. G. Wells only with space travel instead of time travel. However, it’s the details that really struck me and stuck with me.

The traveler gets to Mars via a conventional airplane, albeit one with a rocket attached. Honestly, I’m not sure that I’ve ever actually seen that idea used literally. 

However, he doesn’t fly through ether or does there turn out to be a breathable atmosphere in space. He actually turns off the engine and uses the momentum of the Earth to to power his trip to Mars. More than that, it takes him thirty days to reach Mars and he describes the silence and boredom of the experience. His head is stuck in a special but faulty oxygen helmet and his body is wrapped in special bandages to deal with no atmospheric pressure.

It’s the last bit that just really stayed with me. Bandages as a space suit. Dunsany actually considered the issues with flying a plan into space. No, they wouldn’t work but they make sense. That part of the story is actually remarkably hard science fiction.

Yeah, landing on a pastoral Mars where grotesque monsters keep humans as livestock sends us straight into fantasy, possible allegorical fantasy. But the space flight part is just neat.

I found out that Dunsany wrote a sequel, the Slugly Beast, where the traveler is lured back to Mars by threatening radio messages. It’s entirely from the viewpoint of Jorkens and the narrator. I think it’s a better, more atmospheric story but it doesn’t have the same science fiction bite.

The Gods of Pegana broke rules that didn’t exist

 I’ve been rereading Lord Dinsany’s The Gods of Pegana regularly enough over the years that I’m not sure how often I’ve read it. I didn’t even mean to read it this time. I just found out that The Travel Tales of Mr Jorkens was available as an ebook. That made me look at other works of Lord Dunsany and I found myself reading The Gods of Pegana.

Lord Dunsany and The Gods of Pegana are both ridiculously influential.  Fantasy as a genre would be completely different if it wasn’t for Lord Dunsany and The Gods of Pegana is a big part of it. 

Authors who have listed Dunsany as a major influence include Lovecraft, Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Ashton Smith, LeGuin, Neil Gaiman, and... look, the list just goes on. It’s hard to believe one guy did so much to jumpstart fantasy as we know it.

And he seems so overlooked by modern audiences if not modern authors. It does seem hard to find his non-copywrit works which also makes me wonder if his estate is sitting on his later work.

The Gods of Pegana was his first book and it’s a tiny little thing. A novella at best or a bunch of linked vignettes. And there almost isn’t any plot to speak of. It’s a description of a fantasy pantheon of Gods and their prophets. It really reads like a holy text  for a religion that doesn’t exist in a world that doesn’t exist. 

But here’s the thing. This is one of the earliest examples of a book that is just about creating a setting and a cosmology. I have read that it was the very first (I’m not convinced of that fact but it does sound good) More than that, it was written in the context of the world, not from the viewpoint of an outsider.

World building is one of the corner stones of speculative fiction. The Gods of Pegana is a template for world building, an ur-example. I know fantasy worlds existed before it but I don’t know if anyone created whole pantheons out of cloth before. It was a game changer but the game didn’t even exist when it was written.

Did Lord Dunsany create a lot of ideas or tools that later creators would use or would someone else have come up with these tropes and concepts?

Dunsany Dreams 1

The Voice of the Mountain

As I walked in the wilderness,  I heard a voice. It was the voice of the wilderness.

‘I am mountain. I am the giant of the world. I stand above all things. Even the clouds are below me. My strength is never-ending. I will outlast all things, that even eternity. I am mountain.’

All this I heard from the desert sand.

Lord Dunsany gets in your brain

At least once a year, I find myself reading the early works of Lord Dunsany. (Because those are the ones that are public domain and I can’t seem to find any version of his later stuff online or even affordably in print. Seriously, who is sitting on the rights to the Jorkens stories!?)

One of the side effects of reading early Dunsany is the urge to write like he did. Ursula K. Le Guin even referred him as “the First Terrible Fate That Befalleth Unwary Beginners in Fantasy" and boy was she right. It even happened to Tolkien and Lovecraft. Neil Gaiman may have never recovered :D

(Just joking, Mr Gaiman, sir. You mastered Lord Dunsany’s tropes to tell your own stories)

And it happens to me every time.

‘In the black halls of the Fortress Inconsolable walks the almost forgotten god T’rtl Wx. All know that he is truly a god but none can recall him what nature of godhood was given to him. Even in the moldering library of Bubblbth, which lies on the far end of the catacombs of the decadent city of Rhode Hows, the oldest and most faded of scrolls mention his name but not his nature.

‘Of all the wizened sages and plucky nimble-fingers who dare to enter  the Fortress Inconsolable to seek out T’rtl Wx and discover the truth of his nature, none have yet to return. For the dark halls were built without a floor plan and every bathroom is undiscoverable.

‘And eternally does T’rtl Wx walks, forever waiting for an honestly good cup of tea for Oolong will never suffice for him.’

Seriously, Dunsany rewires your brain.

 https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Edward_John_Moreton_Drax_Plunkett