"Gaskell, Jane - Atlan Saga (Cija) 05 - Some Summer Lands UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gaskell Jane)

all time. Though more was about to happen, had to happen,
what more could Cija offer from her multitudinous cupboard
of responses? It was not that her possibility had been ex-
hausted, but that the character herself was tired out. You
could feel it. She was real enough to be on the verge of total
collapse. And now 1 have a strange matter to relate, believe
or disbelieve as you will.

I have never met Jane Gaskell, and knew nothing of her
work habits or program. But 1 distinctly recollect that I
thought to myself a year or so after the third (fourth now)
Allan book, that it seemed to me the way to go on with those
tumbling lands and lives was to write the next book in the
person of Cija's daughter.

*Since The Serpent is now published in two volumes. The City has
become, of course, ^fourth novel.

INTRODUCTION xl

Imagine my astonishment when, around ten years after
Atlan, Some Summer Lands appeared, a history told now not
by Cija, but by Seka, her second-bom. Jane Gaskell, how-
ever, uses a device 1 would have missed, would never have
thought of. perhaps wouldn't have dared to try. It was sound
precedents (with Charles Dickens, for example). Seka con-
structs her book from the vantage of adulthood, yet she tells it
unvarnished as she saw it when a child.

It is a frank and occasionally shocking series of revelations
that follow. Any kid gloves employed in the past works have
been sloughed- Children are normally savages, and the sexual
and social savagery which Seka exhibits, coupled to the
profoundly adult observations to which so many intelligent
small children are prone, startle, jolt, amuse, disturb the
reader, and may sometimes even throw one sprawling.

Some Summer Lands is a very different book altogether.
And yet utterly connected to the forerunners. It contains their
spirit of primal thingsЧand I don't merely mean in the terms
of era or landscape. The novel is an adventure both in the
sense of plot and in the manner of the telling. Ultimately,
too, it is a metaphysical book. A set of metaphysics so lightly
and readably presented that there is no reason on earth not to
forget 1 just said that. These pages can be absorbed as a
fantasy novel without a sideways glance. Although a novel is
very certainty what it is. Apart from anything else, one now
has the lemon-Juice joy of seeing all the charactersЧmost of
all, Cija herselfЧthose creatures one has only been able to
look at with a single perspectiveЧsuddenly advanced through