One for the Morning Glory

One For the Morning Glory by John Barnes. Another day, another re-read. I'm halfway through two new books, but some recent conversation or another reminded me of this book, and I picked it up a few days ago when I needed something light to read.

It's a short book, an easy read, and delightfully odd:

After that long moment of gazing at each other, the Prince laughed and began a merry song, an old ballad of how a gallant woodman crossing a bridge in the fog had lost his way, thought he faced a great giant, boldly drawn his trebleclef, and fought with the terrible being on the narrow bridge, only to discover that the bridge was the highway, the giant a windmill, and he himself only the dream of a butterfly who had been unable to imagine a Chinese philosopher.

The tune was jolly, so Wassant joined in after a moment, and then all the men took it up, singing in a rough four-part harmony that was traditional among entourages of fighting men in the Kingdom, who needed only a dashing officer singing lead as an excuse to burst into song.

It's a weird and wonderful little book, telling the story of Prince Amatus, who at the age of two drinks the Wine of the Gods, and loses his left side (it's totally absent, not just invisible, though, oddly, this doesn't prevent him from getting into all manner of adventures. Clearly, a Story is afoot, and what's more, all the characters know it, and carry out their fairy-tale roles with great aplomb.

The book is full of delightful little touches: from the marvelous names (a minor character named Pell Grant, the stalwart Sir John Slitgizzard, Deacon Dick Thunder and his well-organized band of robbers-- married robbers, mind you) to little background details like the weighty tomes Highly Unpleasant Things it is Sometimes Necessary to Know and Things That Are Not Good to Know at All. Common words (see "trebleclef" above), and others not so common, are redefined for no clear reason-- people fight with trebleclefs, pongees, pismires, and escrees, and dine on haunches of roast gazebo-- but that only adds to the fun, as when the Prince and his companions meet at the Sign of the Rambunctious Gazebo...

The most surprising thing about this book, though, is its source. John Barnes is best known for writing some deeply unpleasant science fiction-- the cover proudly proclaims this to be a book "From the author of Mother of Storms, a disaster novel that it gritty in the same sense that staring into a sandblaster is "gritty." This is an author whose works prompted someone on rec.arts.sf.written to devise the rule that "John Barnes books containing forcible sodomy are bad, while books not containing forcible sodomy are ok."

And yet, he wrote this delightful little fantasy romp. I can't think of two more wildly different books by a single author than the unremittingly ugly Mother of Storms and this (I haven't read Kaleidoscope Century, though, which I'm told is even worse...). I can't imagine what somebody who really liked Mother of Storms would've thought on reading this, though I would guess that some expletives probably had to be deleted.

It's a mystery to me. A deeper mystery, and one that I'd badly like to see solved, is "how can we get John Barnes to write more books like this one?" I'm not wild about his other books, but this is really good stuff.

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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