Subject: Review: "The Lure of the Basilisk" by Lawrence Watt-Evans

From: "Stevens R. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 21:30:46 GMT

"The Lure of the Basilisk"
	by Lawrence Watt-Evans
	Review by Stevens R. Miller

This review is in the public domain.

Books take their readers to other times, other places.  None do that so well
as fantasy novels.  The fantasy author has the power of a god and can use it
to build worlds that neither do, nor ever really could, exist.  That's an
awesome task by itself, yet the fantasy author, having built a world, must
go on to the more mundane task of telling a story there.  And, mundane as it
may be -- by comparison to having scratch-built a universe -- it can be
rather more difficult than most other fictive drama.  This is because,
lacking anything familiar, the fantasy world may not easily generate events
about which a reader will care.

The great names of the genre have most often met this challenge by
implicating tremendous issues that generate a sympathetic concern.  Tolkien,
the archetype, put the whole of Middle Earth into jeopardy and equated
Frodo's struggle against Sauron with the transcendent battle of all good
against all evil.  If the reader doesn't care about that, what else is
there?

To make the story accessible, Tolkien made Frodo as simple and ordinary a
character as he could.  The reader may not be a hobbit, but he can identify
with being a small player in the great game of life.  The interplay of vast,
forbidding forces and Frodo's gentle honesty made perfect use of an
impossible time and place to tell a gripping story.

In "The Lure of the Basilisk," Lawrence Watt-Evans chose to do it a harder
way.  Nothing so grand as good-versus-evil is implicated as the protagonist,
Garth, pursues his self-appointed quest for eternal fame.  Instead, putting
his faith in a local oracle, Garth (a big, strong, slightly dumb humanoid
non-human known as an "overman") accepts the assignment of the Forgotten
King to capture and bring back the first living thing he finds in the crypts
of the city of Mormoreth.

That's a pretty big order, as it turns out, but it's not the start of a big
story.  That is, while one might develop a vicarious sense of purpose while
reading about the penetration of Mordor, who would care about Garth's ego?
Well... I would.  Or, to be more accurate, I came to care about the
adventure his ego forced upon him.  While I didn't particularly give a damn
about his reasons, I was able continuously to identify with Garth's approach
to his mission.

Watt-Evans has told this story in meticulous detail, never wavering from
Garth's third-person limited point of view.  As a result, the reader sees
what Garth sees, knows what Garth knows, and has the chance to noodle out
the solutions to the myriad problems that Garth must solve.  It's almost
like (to overuse a phrase) being there.

For example, Garth acquires a jewel that can render him invisible.  Upon his
first use, he discovers that this has a few downsides.  To begin, he can't
see his own body or possessions (and burns his fingers as a result).  Next,
he can't move anything that he can see.  Then, he drops his sword and can't
find it.  Say, what if he drops the jewel?  Uh oh...

Though Garth isn't human, he's nothing so special that the reader feels
intimidated.  Instead of being a character for the reader to watch, Garth is
a vehicle for the reader to ride.  You don't follow him, so much as let him
carry you along.  As his quest proceeds, the reader can't help but want
Garth to succeed, because -- as with Frodo -- a sympathetic bond develops.
It takes a few pages for this to happen, but it grows stronger as Garth's
progress improves.

Garth himself is a refreshingly direct, honest fellow.  He has no love for
violence or death and will not cause more trouble than he can justify.  He's
a dreadful liar with the result that his straightforward dialogs are more
disarming to his adversaries than any Baileyesque cross-examination.  And,
though he isn't human, he has no remarkable special abilities that appear
when nothing else will solve the dilemma of the moment.

Now, in case it isn't clear, I liked this book.  But, one might ask, why
choose something from 1980 (and probably out of print, as far as I know) to
review?  As with the problem of fantasy itself, what could possibly make
anyone care about "Lure" when Watt-Evans is publishing new stuff today?

The answer is in the amplified power of this particular book to do what
other books can only do in a limited way: take you to another time.  In this
case, the time is the moment when a new writer's career was launched.  In an
engaging and self-effacing essay (available among his Web pages), Watt-Evans
has explained the birth of this novel as the almost-didn't-make-it
springboard to the twenty-something novels and over 100 short stories that
have followed it.  (Let's not be ambiguous: "Lure" has three sequels; the
other stuff is just the rest of the author's oeuvre.)

In an autobiographical sketch that parents everywhere should keep from their
children (for fear they will all follow his example), Watt-Evans does as
much as anyone can to reinforce the notion that a relentless, chuck-it-all
devotion to writing will get one published.  He flunked out of Princeton
(Princeton!) and was told to wait a year before reapplying.  He collected
over 70 rejection slips (submitted with that reapplication as evidence of
his seriousness) while waiting for his first sale.  "Lure," which had begun
as a novelette (novella? I can never remember the difference), was one of
those.  Years later, rid of Princeton for a second time, Watt-Evans was at
the eve of abandoning writing altogether when Del Rey told him they would
buy the novel version of the story.

To read it is, therefore, to see the author in another time and place.
Apparently steeped in the modality of late '70s fantasy, the young
(twenty-five or so) writer spoke in a voice of those times.  For example,
Garth's field of vision is his "gaze."  A dining room is a "chamber."
Townsfolk say "methinks."  It gets a bit grandiloquent at times, but that's
the way fantasy was, in the late '70s.

In the same vein, fantasy of that era often seemed a bit embarrassed about
itself.  As a result, one often found hints that the world being rendered
was either a precursor (Tolkien himself gave in to this one) or follower of
our own.  Watt-Evans hints that Garth lives in a land descended of the one
we live in.  It neither helps nor hinders the story; I suspect it is merely
an artifact of the times in which the author found himself.

In delightful contrast to these features -- which are a minor aspect of the
book as a whole -- are the passages where the author's individual voice is
clear.  For example, when Garth is confronted in a show-down by the wizard
Shang, he is told, "You will recall that I told you I would kill you if you
captured the basilisk."  He answers, "We all make foolish remarks on
occasion."  A purely derivative author, slaving himself to Howard or
Lovecraft, wouldn't have had the confidence for dialog so droll.

Lawrence Watt-Evans is, by anyone's standard, an established professional
writer.  "The Lure of the Basilisk," his first book, does more than take you
to its fantasy world.  It will take you to the moment when a coming
professional writer didn't yet know he would ever be established, when a
Ring of Power set the standard he would have to meet, and when a Princeton
degree meant no more to him than being a teller of stories.

3 stars out of 4.

%A	Watt-Evans, Lawrence
%D	March 1980
%G	0-345-28624-3
%I	Ballantine Books
%T	Lure of the Basilisk, The
--
Stevens R. Miller              http://www.interport.net/~lex/