Recollections of Oscar Wilde, by Charles Ricketts

Charles Ricketts was a painter, illustrator and book designer who was a friend of Oscar Wilde from about 1889 until Wilde's death in 1900. Their friendship was much closer before Wilde's trial and imprisonment, though they corresponded until shortly before Wilde's death. These recollections were written thirty years later, and one year before Rickett's own passing, and they were published in an elegant limited edition by Nonesuch Press the year after Rickett's death. (The version I read was a slim paperback published in 2011 by Pallas Athene as a "close copy" of the rare original 1932 edition.) While these memories have a great deal of interest based on acute observation, they seem at times a bit inhibited and occasionally stiffly written. It's clear that it took Ricketts's a long time to feel able to write about his dead friend, but there remained a lot that he must have felt he couldn't write about at all. Yet here are some nice observations by someone who knew Wilde well before he became the famous playwright, and before the tragic downfall and exile. Ricketts found Wilde to be a man who embodied kindliness and who engaged in scintillating conversation:  "there were two personalities in him: the exhibitor of well-rehearsed impromptus, of which he had a stock, and the spontaneous and witty critic of Life. In the cadenced phrases of his prose, in the elaborate retorts of his actors, we miss the flash and glitter of his speech. Then, many of mechanical epigram, or inversion of some common saying, would be told with humour and conscious exaggeration, a smile, a wave of the hand, gave it its proper significance, the quality of his laughter preceding it (for he often laughed before speaking) gave the key to the temper in which an epigram should be understood." These recollections entice the reader; yet one wishes for more than these guarded observations that Ricketts eventually decided to share with posterity. .

Blue Lily, Lily Blue, by Maggie Stiefvater

The third book of the four volume Raven Cycle accelerates the downhill trend begun in the second. While the first book was tightly constructed, the third is sprawling  and unfocussed.  Again, the characters seem to act solely to move the plot in whatever direction the author wants it to move, rather than with any interior logic to their natures and development. And the "bad" characters are not only caricatures, but actually silly. Yet there are still a few interesting aspects to the story (though less here even than in book 2), and if there were more than a single final book remaining to read I'd probably give up now and cut my losses. We'll see if it's worth it.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Okay, The Dream Thieves is the second book of the four volume Raven Cycle, of which the first, was The Raven Boys. The second continues on with the main story-line, expanding and making it all more complex. The first volume was more taut, conceptually, and the second more sprawling, and in some central ways disappointing. That is, some of the characters appear to be motivated entirely by the author's needs for the plot, and that is a failing, especially when it pulls you out of the story as a reader and makes you think what-the-fuck. Overall I still enjoyed the book, primarily because as a fantasy novel it is unusual in what it attempts to do. So I found aspects of it surprising and intriguing. But I'm beginning to think it would make a better tv series than it does as books. I'll see what happens with volume 3. 

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

This YA book is an odd volume. Slow to find its groove, and set-up from the beginning with some strange plot strictures, it nevertheless comes into its own in the second half of the book. It's set in Virginia, where a young girl (from a family of psychics), with four boys from a privileged prep school, continue an improbable quest for the burial of Welsh historical figure Owen Glendower along ley lines in America. This is the first book of a four-book cycle, and it just ends without much plot resolution. But I am interested enough to check out the next volume.

Cartes de Visite by Mark Valentine

Sad to say, but this small book of prose poems, Cartes de Visite (2019) by Mark Valentine, was a real disappointment, primarily because there is so little content spread out over many pages (including facing page translations into Portuguese, plus lots of white space). Really, there is less than seven pages of text to read in booklet of sixty-some pages.  The best writing is in the final item, titled "Clues":

Be attentive to the hints that hide behind the facade, sift and consider the glimmerings. Never to be daunted when the day is dull and the walls are silent. Knowing that another day, or dusk, or evening, will bring again clues. And perhaps in old bookshops find chance volumes long forgotten where one single phrase has been waiting to be rediscovered, a phrase whose meaning was hidden even to the one who wrote it.

The Pale Illuminations

Robert Morgan was the uncredited editor of three anthologies reviewed here previously, all of which I greatly enjoyed, so it's nice to see him take credit for them all on this new volume, The Pale Illuminations, which takes its title from a quote from a Charles Williams novel All Hallow's Eve (1945): "She was free from the pale illumination of the dead." Sadly, this collection seems to be the lesser of the four, though it's not a bad compilation at all. All four stories seemed to me a bit off structurally, or a bit too unfocused. The Peter Bell tale drags on for too long, while the Reggie Oliver story felt too short.  Mark Valentine's tale, after an uncharacteristically slow start, comes to life too late, and the ending almost but not quite makes the whole work.  The Derek John story has some interesting sections, but doesn't hang together in toto.  Still a decent anthology, but not quite up to the higher levels of the other three.

The Ogre's Wife

The Ogre's Wife: Fairy Tales for Grownups (2002), by Richard Parks, is a collection of fifteen stories collected from magazines and books published in the seven years prior to its compilation. Five come from Realms of Fantasy. Others come from Asimov's, Black Gate, SF Age, and Weird Tales. There is a laudatory introduction by Parke Godwin which rightly notes the eclectic nature of the tales and claims it is "one of the best  SF/fantasy collections I've read in years." Sadly, this is typical overpraise. While the stories are competent and sometimes intriguing, they mostly feel like writings exercises from workshops rather than inspired stories in their own right. And the prose is workmanlike, never exhibiting any special traits or reaching for more than bemused irony.  A decent collection, still, but it didn't make me want to seek out more by this author.