The Newsletter of
The Council for the Literature of the Fantastic
Volume 1, Number 4 (1997)
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LORIEN LOST by Michael King

ISBN 0-312-14349-4 $22.00
A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press

Review by Jeff VanderMeer
Copyright © 1997, by Jeff VanderMeer

Lorien Lost, despite being the kind of Victorian romp I usually enjoy, is very much a lost tale--full of lost dramatic possibility, lost focus, lost verbiage. A certain talent for detail and one interesting situation save this first novel by Michael King from oblivion, but only just.

The plot sounds better on the front cover flap than on the page, where the disjointed structure leaves it without form: In 1870s London timid Milton Radcliffe visits the lovely Lorien in the fantastical Larking Land by entering the paintings of Lorien's artist husband, Jonathan Larking. When a fire destroys Radcliffe's only Larking painting, he must discover the whereabouts of a life-size statue of Lorien. Radcliffe embarks on an expedition to find the statue and is helped on his quest by an opera singer named Heather who knew Larking. To this story, King has tied three or four subplots and a number of fantastical occurrences.

However, any attempt at complexity is doomed by King's reliance on Radcliffe as his main character. Radcliffe--passive, lacking a past and a future--is the single most uninteresting character I have ever had the misfortune to encounter in a book. Although Radcliffe inhabits most of the scenes, he might as well be absent from many of them since his tongue is silent and his thoughts unexpressed for whole pages while others prance and prattle on like paper dolls.

Radcliffe's ability to mimic a black hole, a nothing, the center of a donut, forces the minor characters to carry equal narrative weight and thus Lorien Lost collapses, too short to absorb so many different voices without fragmenting into a series of choppy scenes which exist for their own sake rather than at the service of the novel's unity. This search for unity need not mean sacrificing subplots or the unique voices of individual characters--Charles Finney's The Circus of Doctor Lao, with its many set pieces revolving around the circus, provides ample proof of that. Here, disaster: the fantasy has no internal logic (we are asked to believe in Larking Land and then in phantasmagoria which do not seem to occupy the same universe) and the supporting cast has as much integrity as Colonel Mustard and Professor Plum in the board game Clue.

What should provide form and structure for Lorien Lost--Radcliffe's quest for the statue--is substantially diluted by numerous false starts to that quest, Radcliffe's thoroughly revolting passivity throughout, and structural defects in the novel. Worse, whether as a function of the novel's weak characters or of King's fickle flitting from character to character, Lorien Lost is all surface--a shallow pond rather than a deep lake. A stone thrown into that pond would not skip, but simply slide. At times I felt I was reading a children's story, the text is so devoid of sensuality, physicality, and any other normal human muss and fuss. (And also devoid of substitute pleasures--the pleasures of Borges' metafictions, the pleasures of Eco's vast puzzles.) I couldn't help but wonder as I read along what exactly Radcliffe would do when he found Lorien. Would he take her in his arms and profess his love? Would he hug her and tell her how much he missed his best friend? Would he gaze upon her in wonder, overcome by his emotions? Would he--could he?--do anything recognizable as human?

King's inability to imagine the sensual world is linked to a surface infatuation with detail about objects rather than people, with the idea of emotions rather than emotions themselves. I cannot help but be reminded by contrast of Brook Stevens' The Circus of the Earth and the Air, in which the quest for the beloved managed to retain a dark fairytale tone without sacrificing its immediacy and intensity.

And yet, King's sense of detail, even applied to objects, saves Lorien Lost from simple mediocrity. Although King clearly has only a hazy conception of England, and a crippling, cliched vision of the 1870s--the Dover clip art scattered throughout the book is there, I suppose, so that hopefully we will overlook King's dazzlingly arrogantvagueness about the time period--he obviously loves to write, and if he often sheds images like heat lightning and veers off track to deliver some interesting but irrelevant description, then at least he cares enough to give us such detail.

Another redeeming quality concerns the tale of Mr. Hartshorne and his elaborate indoor wooden forest, which he must chop up one cold winter (here described by Heather):

"Have you ever felt a room to be as big as the whole world? Well, that was the effect of Hartshorne's Enchanted Forest. The walls seemed to dissolve away, and soon the woodland was everywhere, and you could smell the decayed leaves beneath your feet and hear the cool murmur of a brook somewhere, and the scamper of squirrels above you in the boughs...Sometimes I would catch [Hartshorne]: in the midst of company, he appeared to slip away for a moment into his own personal forest, until the distant voice of a guest would call him back."

I rarely chide an author for the book s/he didn't write, and yet I must say here that King should have jettisoned all the rest of the novel's sound and fury--even the cutsey trappings of Larking Land itself--for love of this single moment of truth: the mystery inherent in Hartshorne and "his own personal forest." Unfortunately, King traps Hartshorne within the hollow, empty, airless center of Radcliffe's quest.

Fantasy cannot exist on images of its own beauty. Fantasy cannot exist without its own illogical logic. Fantasy cannot exist without its whimsy firmly anchored to something, whether it be a compelling character or a mythic resonance. Once Michael King learns the difference between what stories need to be told and what stories should never reach the page--and once he puts his often marvelous gift for detail to the service of people and emotion--he will be a valuable addition to the fantasy field. For now, he suggests untapped talent, even possible brilliance, but not its fulfillment.