Revisiting Xanth.
Mar. 13th, 2007 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenLast night, instead of reading a chapter or two before bed, I ended up finishing the second half of A Spell for Chameleon, the first book of Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It's good to be revisiting Xanth, and I'm hoping to get through it in chronological order this time, so that things make more sense.
Warning: spoilers for A Spell for Chameleon and vague references to stuff in later books.
Reading A Spell for Chameleon reminded me, full force, how I'm a total sucker for Piers Anthony's Evil-with-a-capital-E-but-not-really-evil antagonists. I'm talking about Evil Magician Trent, of course, and also the Incarnation of Evil Parry -- and I guess I must have been preoccupied with Evil Magician Murphy at some point, considering I wrote a "study" of him and Trent for Writers' Workshop in eighth grade. >_>;;
It's been a while for all of them, so I really had forgotten. I mean, I knew I liked Trent, but I didn't think he ranked up there with Silk and George Cooper as one of my all-time literary crushes. I guess after Xanth I should start rereading Incarnations of Immortality so I can remember how much I like Parry, too.
It kind of boggles my mind how Trent can be so damn perfect. I don't even have a detailed enough conception of perfection to be able to so infuse a character with it. [I guess I kind of try, with Andrew Sorenson, but he's barely a major character, probably because I just don't know how to write him.] There are so many scenes that make me want to drown in Trent's character -- when Bink realizes how completely outmatched he is at their first meeting, when he transforms the lovebug back into a sea serpent, his matter-of-fact preparation to transform anyone who recognizes him, Herman's coup de grâce. I really love the glimpses of Trent through Bink's ideology as someone who absolutely wants to protect Xanth and has grown up hearing of Trent's horrible legacy. My favorite scene is probably right after the lovebug transformation, when Bink tells Fanchon he needs sleep because he can't tell evil from good anymore. And maybe it helps to imagine Trent walking naked across the beach while the sun hits his hair. ._. Not that Piers Anthony gets more graphic than that when describing men. The adjectives Trent gets are pretty ordinary -- "handsome", "strong", "courageous", "heroic" -- but there's always one at the end that carries something more subtle -- "urbane", "erudite". They're words with a different flavor.
By pure coincidence, the first Xanth book I ever read was Harpy Thyme, in which Trent is youthened and goes with Gloha on her adventures. I'm sure I developed a crush on him then, but I find his character in A Spell for Chameleon much more interesting. In between those two books, I basically lose interest. Take out the "Evil", and make him a boring, legitimate politician, and it's just not the same, apparently. He doesn't get that much attention anyway, as far as I can remember. So there's really only this one book for me to savor. When he's on the cusp of being good, but is still driven by calculating ambition.
Trent aside, the early Xanth books have always been my favorites. There's more simplicity to them, perhaps. They have all the flavor of Xanth, but come before the series collapsed under the weight of its massive cast, and wandered into more bizarre and implausible things that I'll never fully comprehend -- the world inside the hypnogourd, the Brain Coral's pool, ComPewter, the asteroid that circles Ida's head. [I'm hoping that reading things in chronological order might help me make some sense of the three-plus generations of insanity, but it's a faint hope.] Especially in A Spell for Chameleon, there's a sense of newness to the world, a probing of the way things work that almost flirts with the fourth wall, but which eases one into Xanth quite nicely. All of the history is established -- now that I think about it, it comes in rather artificial chunks like Cherie's lecture and Trent's theory of interbreeding, but it doesn't feel so contrived when you read it. And, I didn't notice until I finished, but it wasn't really punny, and that didn't particularly make it any less Xanth-y, so maybe I was wrong about how essential puns are to Xanth and to my liking it.
I think the minimal cast really helped. I don't even necessarily like all of them (except Trent *ahem*), but I liked getting to know them. Fanchon is interesting, and I always wish she'd made it back before the book ended -- Trent's coronation must have been really quick. Bink is kind of a non-entity. I like his intellectual musings -- he's probably a lot like Ish in Earth Abides, one of the literary characters with whom I most identify -- but it just doesn't work as well in a setting like Xanth, and he ends up being little more than a foil for Trent. I really like Iris when she's plotting and manipulating, but then she shows her petty and short-tempered side -- and it was scary how spineless she was at the end. I kind of feel like her whole character is the most disgustingly sexist thing I've ever read. In fact, all of the female characters are pretty stereotypical in their own way but that's how it goes, maybe. Then there's Magician Humfrey, another of my favorite characters. He's just . . . great. I can't describe it. "Crusty" might be a good word, and definitely "insightful", but that doesn't help much. It's just so much fun to see him discomfited. I remember liking the second book, The Source of Magic, because he features so prominently, instead of just being around for a few chapters while someone gets his Answer.
As I said, the expanding cast of Xanth gets pretty overwhelming as the books continue. It's not so much that everyone starts jostling around for the spotlight, but there are more and more cameos, and people have similar names, and I can never remember who's in whose generation. Not that I didn't miss some people that weren't in A Spell for Chameleon -- in particular, I was always fond of Demoness Mentia and her linguistic troubles. The main problem is that old characters don't go away. That's always been the most implausible thing to me -- it's tied in with the Brain Coral somehow -- but I can't fight it because I would be really, really sad if they did go away. But I still have to wonder why in the world Trent is still around in book seventeen, when the current rulers are his great-grandkids or something. Only a series as shallow as Xanth, that I read for giggles and warm fuzzies, could get away with something like that.
But hey, that's why I love it.
ETA: So I was poking around on Facebook, and apparently they're making a movie out of A Spell for Chameleon! This is either very awesome, or is going to ruin my image of the book forever. Considering what Peter Jackson did to Faramir, I am not counting that much on the former. But, the Facebook group was talking about their dream cast, and apparently everyone decided that Cary Elwes (Princess Bride) should be Trent. So at least until the movie actually comes out, it has achieved some good, because it planted that thought in my head. <3
Warning: spoilers for A Spell for Chameleon and vague references to stuff in later books.
Reading A Spell for Chameleon reminded me, full force, how I'm a total sucker for Piers Anthony's Evil-with-a-capital-E-but-not-really-evil antagonists. I'm talking about Evil Magician Trent, of course, and also the Incarnation of Evil Parry -- and I guess I must have been preoccupied with Evil Magician Murphy at some point, considering I wrote a "study" of him and Trent for Writers' Workshop in eighth grade. >_>;;
It's been a while for all of them, so I really had forgotten. I mean, I knew I liked Trent, but I didn't think he ranked up there with Silk and George Cooper as one of my all-time literary crushes. I guess after Xanth I should start rereading Incarnations of Immortality so I can remember how much I like Parry, too.
It kind of boggles my mind how Trent can be so damn perfect. I don't even have a detailed enough conception of perfection to be able to so infuse a character with it. [I guess I kind of try, with Andrew Sorenson, but he's barely a major character, probably because I just don't know how to write him.] There are so many scenes that make me want to drown in Trent's character -- when Bink realizes how completely outmatched he is at their first meeting, when he transforms the lovebug back into a sea serpent, his matter-of-fact preparation to transform anyone who recognizes him, Herman's coup de grâce. I really love the glimpses of Trent through Bink's ideology as someone who absolutely wants to protect Xanth and has grown up hearing of Trent's horrible legacy. My favorite scene is probably right after the lovebug transformation, when Bink tells Fanchon he needs sleep because he can't tell evil from good anymore. And maybe it helps to imagine Trent walking naked across the beach while the sun hits his hair. ._. Not that Piers Anthony gets more graphic than that when describing men. The adjectives Trent gets are pretty ordinary -- "handsome", "strong", "courageous", "heroic" -- but there's always one at the end that carries something more subtle -- "urbane", "erudite". They're words with a different flavor.
By pure coincidence, the first Xanth book I ever read was Harpy Thyme, in which Trent is youthened and goes with Gloha on her adventures. I'm sure I developed a crush on him then, but I find his character in A Spell for Chameleon much more interesting. In between those two books, I basically lose interest. Take out the "Evil", and make him a boring, legitimate politician, and it's just not the same, apparently. He doesn't get that much attention anyway, as far as I can remember. So there's really only this one book for me to savor. When he's on the cusp of being good, but is still driven by calculating ambition.
Trent aside, the early Xanth books have always been my favorites. There's more simplicity to them, perhaps. They have all the flavor of Xanth, but come before the series collapsed under the weight of its massive cast, and wandered into more bizarre and implausible things that I'll never fully comprehend -- the world inside the hypnogourd, the Brain Coral's pool, ComPewter, the asteroid that circles Ida's head. [I'm hoping that reading things in chronological order might help me make some sense of the three-plus generations of insanity, but it's a faint hope.] Especially in A Spell for Chameleon, there's a sense of newness to the world, a probing of the way things work that almost flirts with the fourth wall, but which eases one into Xanth quite nicely. All of the history is established -- now that I think about it, it comes in rather artificial chunks like Cherie's lecture and Trent's theory of interbreeding, but it doesn't feel so contrived when you read it. And, I didn't notice until I finished, but it wasn't really punny, and that didn't particularly make it any less Xanth-y, so maybe I was wrong about how essential puns are to Xanth and to my liking it.
I think the minimal cast really helped. I don't even necessarily like all of them (except Trent *ahem*), but I liked getting to know them. Fanchon is interesting, and I always wish she'd made it back before the book ended -- Trent's coronation must have been really quick. Bink is kind of a non-entity. I like his intellectual musings -- he's probably a lot like Ish in Earth Abides, one of the literary characters with whom I most identify -- but it just doesn't work as well in a setting like Xanth, and he ends up being little more than a foil for Trent. I really like Iris when she's plotting and manipulating, but then she shows her petty and short-tempered side -- and it was scary how spineless she was at the end. I kind of feel like her whole character is the most disgustingly sexist thing I've ever read. In fact, all of the female characters are pretty stereotypical in their own way but that's how it goes, maybe. Then there's Magician Humfrey, another of my favorite characters. He's just . . . great. I can't describe it. "Crusty" might be a good word, and definitely "insightful", but that doesn't help much. It's just so much fun to see him discomfited. I remember liking the second book, The Source of Magic, because he features so prominently, instead of just being around for a few chapters while someone gets his Answer.
As I said, the expanding cast of Xanth gets pretty overwhelming as the books continue. It's not so much that everyone starts jostling around for the spotlight, but there are more and more cameos, and people have similar names, and I can never remember who's in whose generation. Not that I didn't miss some people that weren't in A Spell for Chameleon -- in particular, I was always fond of Demoness Mentia and her linguistic troubles. The main problem is that old characters don't go away. That's always been the most implausible thing to me -- it's tied in with the Brain Coral somehow -- but I can't fight it because I would be really, really sad if they did go away. But I still have to wonder why in the world Trent is still around in book seventeen, when the current rulers are his great-grandkids or something. Only a series as shallow as Xanth, that I read for giggles and warm fuzzies, could get away with something like that.
But hey, that's why I love it.
ETA: So I was poking around on Facebook, and apparently they're making a movie out of A Spell for Chameleon! This is either very awesome, or is going to ruin my image of the book forever. Considering what Peter Jackson did to Faramir, I am not counting that much on the former. But, the Facebook group was talking about their dream cast, and apparently everyone decided that Cary Elwes (Princess Bride) should be Trent. So at least until the movie actually comes out, it has achieved some good, because it planted that thought in my head. <3
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Date: 2007-03-14 04:06 am (UTC)