Charles de Lint, The Very Best of Charles de Lint (Tachyon Publications, 2010)
In his introduction, Charles de Lint informs us that he approached this project with some trepidation. And with a publisher dead-set on a title like The Very Best of Charles de Lint, it's not hard to see that any author might have been nervous at the prospect. But de Lint is (among other things) a clever man, and he made a very clever choice on this one. ". . .I realized," he tells us ". . .I should ask the people who really know. . . In other words, my readers. So I went to a few of the social networking sites and asked my readers to name their favourite stories. They responded enthusiastically and what we have collected here are the stories that got the most votes." And he adds, with characteristic honesty, "Mostly."
Rarely has the democratic process been applied so successfully to the field of art. Because that vote harvested a crop of winners.
And I use the term "crop" advisedly. There's something deliberately organic in the de Lint mythos: not only a cast of characters with a mythic air about them, but characters who are at least half-conscious of their placement on the misty borderline of myth, art and reality. That consciousness, in turn, seems to blur the line between page and reality from time to time, so that after reading several of his Newford tales, you can spend a few days halfway expecting to run into Jilly Coppercorn on the street.
Let me make an observation here, because it's going to colour the rest of this review: I didn't always like de Lint's writing much. I've followed his career off and on since his first publication, and in the early novels, I was not hugely impressed. Mystical conflicts tended to be resolved in terms of physical battle, and I felt let down. He'd start by taking us into Charles Williams territory, and conclude with a gun-fight. There were a lot of things I liked about him, things that kept me coming back --- references that showed we shared a love for Sandy Denny, Robin Williamson and Lord Dunsany, to begin with -- but I came away with the feeling I'd like him a great deal better in person than I did as a writer. In the mid-'80s, I stopped reading him altogether, save when his tales happened to come up in Bordertown anthologies.
So some ten years later, when I was almost forcibly introduced to the Newford stories -- by an old friend who really ought to be living in Newford herself -- I was very pleasantly surprised indeed. Memory & Dream was a far cry from the style and structure I remembered. Since then I have come to suspect that de Lint's muse actually resides someplace in Newford; and I am definitely of the opinion that the author's best stories take place in and around (and sometimes under) that city. In Newford de Lint has sown a field of modern myths, borrowing from the past whatever roots he needs to make his magic fresher and more immediate than anything in his earlier work. What begins in myth now buds and flowers in kind, new leaves on an old tree. It comes as no surprise that the majority of the tales in this volume take place in Newford.
De Lint's work has always carried a fairly strong flavour of political correctness, but where in his earlier work this generally came across as fairly heavy-handed, with characters that sometimes behaved and spoke more like symbols than living people, the past few decades have honed his artistry to the point that most of the characters in this collection now feel real in their own right. And as such, the tragedies and triumphs of their lives become at once more personal . . . and more effective as messages. Even in the places where the stories are not at their strongest, his characters have become people we'd like to know, people we can believe in.
And his messages hit home with personal force. "Coyote Dreams" uses the intertwined imagery of Amerindian myth and cultural assimilation to speak of a kind of mythic alienation not limited to any one people or nation. It can lift you up and it can leave you in tears; it had both effects on me.
It's usually pretty easy to tell what de Lint wants to get across in a given story -- the moral point, or the question of personal growth he wants to address. At one time, that tended to lose me, but his touch has become far more subtle over the years. "In the House of My Enemy" is a spectacular example of this: juxtaposing catalogue entries from an art exhibition with personal stories of abuse survivors, the story barely manages not to preach, and yet that narrow margin of success is gloriously sufficient to make the tale very powerful indeed. One of the uncommon successes of this story lies in the visual art he describes to such good effect. Frank Zappa once observed that "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture," and in general, verbal descriptions of paintings are subject to the same criticism. But in this tale de Lint succeeds in writing about pictures in a themed exhibition in such a way that we are left to draw our own conclusions, very much the way we would do on viewing the pieces ourselves.
And in the process, he highlights another piece of his progress. De Lint has always tended to describe the physical world in great detail. In what I've come to regard as his mature work, he has achieved a fine artistic sense of what to leave out, like a musician who no longer needs to fill the space of every beat with a note. Where there are weak spots in this collection -- and there are some -- they occur almost exclusively in his earlier pieces, and consist of places where he tells too much. Places where he describes the contents of a room to the point that my eye wanders from the page . . . even though those rooms of his, as I could tell in the early novels, are points of characterisation in and of themselves. Places where we're informed in no uncertain terms that a certain magic has occurred, rather than being allowed to understand that for ourselves. There are a few times, as at the ending of "Merlin Dreams In the Mondream Wood," when I'd prefer to have had my intelligence and insight trusted by the artist who'd evoked them so well through the preceding pages. One penultimate paragraph explicates all the ambiguity in a piece of lovely half-spoken subtlety, and in so doing, weakens it.
But there are a number of stories here -- quite an impressive number of them -- that are simply perfect. By that, I mean that they hit the mark they've aimed at. (And de Lint never aims low.) They've achieved the intended effect. An artistic balance has been achieved between lyricism and clarity of language, consistent and well-developed characterisation that propel the plot at a good pace, and the elements of myth dosed out carefully enough that they retain the elements of mystery. And it's easy to miss that exquisite feat of craft in sheer enjoyment of the story, and the set of feelings the author has evoked.
And that, my friends, is storytelling at its best.
De Lint's facility with dialogue has developed quite remarkably: in particular, I find he handles women's conversation with an uncommon knack -- I won't call it a gift, because he's worked for it. There aren't a great many male authors in any genre who can write women as honestly and accurately as de Lint does. He didn't always have this knack, and that's worthy of note because it shows he's done something we would all like all artists to do: he's kept working at it until he got it right. He has not rested on his laurels. He's grown. One thing I note in these tales, looking over the copyright dates, is a consistent progress, an ongoing refinement of artistry over the years.
A theme he never ceases to explore is love that doesn't develop in the stereotyped pattern of formula romance. Whether a tale ends in painful mystery, as in "Timeskip" (a story that even now evokes for me the room and the rainy day where first I read it, overlooking the waves on the rocky Oregon coast), or on a note of cautious optimism, as in "Old Man Crow," these feel like people you know. They're trying to sort through fears, old injuries, and attractions to find their ways to some place their hearts can call home. There's no Hollywood, no Harlequin, here. There may be happiness at the end, but there's no happy ending -- and no guarantee of one.
He also works well in the voice of youth. Told in parallel first person, "Sisters" offers us a dual rarity: a convincing pair of teen girls, and a good modern vampire story. (Let's face it, good ones are rare as hen's fangs.) To say much more about this piece would be to spoil its effect, but it lives up to its title, and it's fresh.
The Very Best of Charles de Lint begins with a Charles Vess cover that can keep you looking at the details for quite some time, and concludes with a tale that I suspect has a strong thread of autobiographical incident for de Lint. Personal and low-key, "The Fields Beyond The Fields" is not the strongest piece in this collection, but it is one of the most honest, heartfelt discussions of the writer's craft and the writer's essential dilemma that I have ever read.
No author would have cause to be ashamed if this collection were his best. But based on all I see here, I think -- and I hope -- the title is a trifle misleading. The very best of Charles de Lint, in my opinion . . . is yet to come.
I'm looking forward to it.
But if you haven't been introduced to his unique magic, or if you haven't read his work in a while; or if you'd like to see the progress of a fine, honest storyteller whose work always reaches for the highest star he can set his eyes on . . . then buy this book. Welcome to Newford. You won't want to leave.
