The Dying Earth

[sawyl]

Following Alison Flood's enthusiastic piece on the Guardian books site last year, I've finally got around to reading the first couple of parts of Jack Vance's collection The Dying Earth. Although I liked the first few stories, I felt that the whole thing really hit its stride with the wonderfully comic Cugel the Clever stories that combine brilliant writing with mordant humour.

Contrary to his moniker Cugel is only ever occasionally wily, constantly getting himself in hopeless scrapes. He gets sent halfway round the world to recover a contact lens after being caught burgling Iucounu the Laughing Magician. He gets tricked into volunteering for a job as watchman that requires him to live at the top of a 500 foot high tower. He behaves appallingly towards his fellow travellers. He casually barters away his travelling companion — a woman who found herself expelled from her home city on account of his actions — in exchange for some completely unnecessary travel advice. He gets a corrupt priest to fake a miracle to persuade a group of 50 pilgrims to cross a hostile desert, something that results in all their deaths, just because he is in a hurry to get home.

In short, Cugel is not much of a hero. But thanks to Vance's deadpan delivery and stylish prose, and Cugel's own unswerving belief in his own cleverness, the whole saga is incredibly funny. Here, for example, is a characteristic Cugel moment: hungry after failing to scam lunch out of local wizard, he encounters a unknown creature:

A new thought occurred to Cugel. The creature displayed qualities reminiscent of both coelenterate and echinoderm. A terrene nudibranch? A mollusc deprived of its shell? More importantly, was the creature edible?

Shortly after eating it, he discovers that the creature was actually the totality of the universe, something the wizard has been trying to attract for the last 500 years, and finds himself sent a million years into the past to try to track it down again.

Delightful.