Swordspoint

Swordspoint: A Melodrama of Manners (1987) Ellen Kushner

I love this book.

As I’ve said before, this isn’t a fantasy in the usual sense of the genre. There are no magicians or mystical creatures.

There is no magic, except the magic found in the expert storytelling.

Here is our introduction to Richard St Vier:

The blood lies on the snow of a formal winter garden, now trampled and muddy. A man lies dead, the snow filling in the hollows of his eyes, while another man is twisted up, grunting, sweating frog-ponds on the frozen earth, waiting for someone to come and help him. The hero of this little tableau has just vaulted the garden wall and is running like mad into the darkness while the darkness lasts.

And here is the introduction to Lady Halliday, who is only a minor character in the story, yet fully developed.

Lady Halliday was a quiet, shy young woman with none of her friend’s fashionable talent for clever chatter. Her voice was generally low, her speech soft–just what men always claimed to want in a woman, but were never actually drawn to in the drawing room.

That single sentence tells us so much about Lady Halliday, and also about her husband, Lord Halliday.

But there is also so much commentary on the lives of the poor and of the rich made in passing so you almost miss the significance of it.

Look, get yourself some new socks; get yourself ten pairs, get them in silk. I’ve just been paid for the Lynch job. We’re going to be very comfortable as long as it lasts.

I told him it was the wrong time of the year, but he said he couldn’t change his birthday to suit the weather, and he has always been uncommonly fond of fireworks.

Of course, there are fabulous comments sprinkled through the story, such as Lord Christoper’s comment “(T)he truth cannot be considered an insult.” Or Richard’s comment, “Everyone can be bribed…(y)ou just have to know their price.”

“Just because he’s an idiot doesn’t mean his money’s no good.”

“You’d be surprised.”

But mostly there are the passage that I love, for no reason other than they strike something in me.

Richard enjoyed his description of love; it was the most accurate part of the play so far, with its images of hot and cold, pleasure and pain. But at the same tie, it made him uncomfortable to hear someone talking about it in front of a great crowd of strangers–even though it was only a play.

It was hard to tell what he meant when he talked like that, as though he were making fun of himself for speaking, and you for listening.

Of course, the later publication of the book has three short stories as well, “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death,” “Red Cloak,” and “The Death of the Duke.”

And of course there is the original cover, which is amazingly gorgeous and seems to fit the story to a tea–the perfect cover for the perfect book.

Published by Bantam Spectra

Rating: 10/10

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