The Collected
Jorkens, Volume I, by Lord Dunsany, edited by S. T. Joshi, Night Shade
Books, Portland, OR, 2004, US$35, ISBN: 1-892389-56-8
A review by Rich Horton
I wrote this review for Locus back in 2004, and on this the 140th anniversary of Edward James Moreton Drax Plunkett's birth, it seems appropriate to repost it here.
Lord Dunsany's reputation is founded on his highly
atmospheric, often ironic, often Romantic, fantasies: several collections of
short stories from the first two decades of the past century, and novels such
as The King of Elfland's Daughter.
These are remarkable works, and extraordinarily influential – I would call him
the second most influential fantasist of the 20th Century. But he wrote little
in that vein after 1924. What was he writing later in his career? Partly, an
enormous wad of tales told in a club, by an aging raconteur named Joseph
Jorkens, a man who seemed to have traveled everywhere. These stories are the
admitted model for Arthur C. Clarke's Tales
from the White Hart; and presumably at least an indirect model for many
further bar tales. (Though one should not forget P. G. Wodehouse's Mr.
Mulliner.)
These stories are full of ironic humor, much coming from
Jorkens' insistence that, at the very least, none of his tales can be proven
false. He is quite sensitive about this, and those few club members who doubt
him often get a subtle comeuppance. Fortunately, the frame narrator (ostensibly
Dunsany himself) is always ready with a whiskey and a prompt to urge another
story from Jorkens. Dunsany's control of both his narrative voice and of
Jorkens' voice is a continuing pleasure.
The humorous aspect of the Jorkens tales seems at the
forefront of their reputation, but in fact many or most of the stories have
rather a different flavor taken separately from their frame. To be sure, some
are downright funny – I delighted at the perfectly prepared punchline to
"A Drink at a Running Stream", in which the notorious whiskey drinker
one-ups the rest of the club in describing the best drink he ever had. But more
often the stories have a tinge of horror, as with the stalking trees in "A
Walk to Lingham"; or Jorkens' terrifying climb in "The Golden
Gods". There is also often a very characteristic Dunsanian melancholy, as
in "The Witch of the Willows", wherein Jorkens is offered the love of
a beautiful witch but rejects her for the ordinary England of the 20th Century
– and regrets his choice forever. Surely a metaphor for the loss of the
unspoiled countryside in exchange for mod cons. Other tales are mainly tall
tales, amusing in their exaggeration but not laugh out loud funny, as in
"The Escape from the Valley", in which Jorkens carefully calculates how
many ducks are required to lift him into the air.
Dunsany is naturally best known as a fantasist, and most of
these stories are either fantasies or somewhat implausible adventure tales. But
he does venture into Science Fiction once or twice, in particular with two
tales of journeys to Mars. These are "Our Distant Cousins" and
"The Slugly Beast", in which a friend of Jorkens travels to Mars by
aeroplane. These are not terribly hard SF, to be sure, but they do offer the
real SF frisson, and the real Jorkens
snap as well.
I was thoroughly enchanted by this collection – a marriage
of elegant and balanced prose, wry and ironic humor, and an always fertile
imagination. Very highly recommended.
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