Nef, and the
Every Day Fairy Tale
A review of The Scrolls of
Nef, by Gary Glickman, Hand to Hand Publishing
(509 words)
Seekers
of genre Fantasy rabbit-holes will be surprised, perhaps, as the readers of
excellent fantasy are, by the strong resemblance of people in Nef and
surrounding kingdoms to people in our own ordinary lives. And seekers after the
kind of precise reflection that realist-literature promises will be surprised,
perhaps, that "real life" can so often resonate with the sound and
shape of epic and fairy tale; we are all part of a larger story, after all,
full of the drama of the age, if only we can raise the camera-angle
sufficiently.
And
that seems to be one of the energetic impulses of this novel of both epic sweep
and intimate sensibility—to weave together the simultaneous realities of
heroic and humble, archetypal and personal. The story-book reality of
once-upon-a-time is filled with unglamourous,
imperfect human relations; even the most sordid or humble moment is part of a
powerful story, if only we can learn to recognize it.
Interestingly,
The Scrolls of
Nef can be read either as a
fantasy or as a very realist memoir written by a king who by novel's end has
reached a very old age, and narrates to his great-nephew. The eventual King-narrator,
Orland, is a young man during most of the story, exiled by a fundamentalist
empire from his childhood castle,
and waiting out the war on the southern island of Nef, where his mother had
once herself been the child of a king. Orland's older brother Talland is exiled
in the northern mountains of their home country, healing from battle wounds in
a secret mountain-top abbey run by half-crazed healer women. Orland escapes
from Nef entrusted with the great treasures of his uncle's translated scrolls,
and voyages through a vast archipelago hoping to bring them to safety.
Meanwhile Talland learns heroism and selflessness just in time to save the
women who saved him, and thereby tipping the balance of rebellion toward hope.
Eventually, the two brothers come together to save the day, each with his own
very different gifts.
A
plot summary, of course, can only show the outline of a map, whereas the
pleasure of the journey itself is in the music of the prose, the
transformations of the characters, the exciting pacing of dangers risked and
revelations attained, whether cheerful or heavy. As teenagers both princes are
narrow and arrogant in opposite ways, and one of the great pleasures of this
novel is watching the naivetŽ of youth successfully transcend its typical
limitations and connect the characters with their innate heroic potentials. In
that sense the brothers are
Everymen, even though princes.
It
remains to be seen if the portrait of an intolerant religious fundamentalist
empire attempting to swallow tolerant Gaia-honoring cultures will offend
real-life monotheist fundies— conversions by
the sword and by burnings at the stake, that sort of thing—or if this very heart-centered fairy tale
will be embraced as the treatise on love that it also is.