I've just finished rereading Hugh Cook's ten volume magnum opus 'Chronicles of an Age of Darkness', a fantasy series I first read as a teenager. Kind of Terry Pratchett but with less panto, and much, much more sex, violence, gore and wandering off on unnecessary narrative tangents.
After years of fruitless Googling, I've now discovered that Cook, who spent his formative years in New Zealand, now lives in Japan and has recently suffered from cancer. As is my wont, I sent him a fanmail, and he was cordial in his reply.
Were the Chronicles any good? To some degree they were just pulp fantasy, but in all the respects that matter to me, he blew everything else I read (David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Anne McCaffrey, Stephen Donaldson - though he could at least be credited with a brain, unlike the others) out of the water. The books weren't about heroes and villains, but about people struggling to get along in a world beset by ancient weapons, hellish creatures, lawyers and syphilis. These characters were people who had backstories and conflicting motivations, and weren't just "innocent farmboys" or "wicked tyrants", or, worst of all "the chosen one". (Indeed one of the books, about a man who believes he does have a destiny, is at pains to show that he does not.) A lot of the narrative has a mediaeval earthiness about it, a sort of novelisation of Pieter Brueghel the Elder's paintings.
The most important reason why I like the Chronicles is that Cook's sense of the absurd and occasional spasms of mania fit well with my own personality. Thus when, during a particularly exciting bit at the climax of his best novel, The Walrus and the Warwolf, he indulges in prose so purple it goes into the ultra violet:
"Meanwhile, the flames leaped through the still and sullen air, swift as a band of lunatic red-jacketed monkeys driven on by a throng of rabid slave-masters wielding razor-tipped whips by way of encouragement"
... I don't just think "That sounds like a fifth-former's attempt at overblown creative writing" (though it does); I also cry "Fuck yeah!"
To be fair, sometimes Cook's stylistic eccentricities sometimes went a little too far. But the backbone of his stories were sound enough.
Perhaps understandably for a series that was fiendishly complex and demanded work from the reader, the Chronicles didn't sell well. Meanwhile, they've made Eragon into a movie. Well, you have to laugh.
Posted by stuart at November 25, 2006 9:29 PM