This distinctive alternate world makes Romanticism Great again.
When I chanced on the paperback of THE STRANGERS WOES (BOOK TWO OF THE LABYRINTHS OF ECHO) I knew that this was something which I had to devote some column inches to. Even so my pulse was not quickened: this brand of unadulterated fantasy involving magicians and their spells ranks alongside War and Historical Romance as amongst my least liked genre.
Eye opener.
Cracking it open on the metro home, I experienced moutning surprise. Here was a novel altogether different from the Lukyanenko’s Nightwatch tribute that I had been expecting. In fact, it is even poles apart from the hard-boiled nature of much Russian popular fiction.
A winner.
A multi-million seller in Russian speaking countries, the Max Frie series comprises some twenty-four books now, with but four of them out in English courtesy of the London based publishers Gollancz.
Critics tend to pigeonhole the series as being Urban fantasy but I find this label a tad misleading. For me they belong to the Magical Land subgenre, albeit laced with the detective genre and with a lot of humour poured into the mix.
Max Frei is both the protagonist of the stories and the author of them. It is the pen name of Svetlana Martynchuk, a 54 year old Odessa born Ukranian who has spent some time in Moscow and has since settled in Villinus.Her artist partner Igor Steopin developed the premise of the series and has collaborated with her on some of the writing.
The Labyrinths of Echo cycle came into being in 1996, lasting until 2003. Then Martynchuk breathed new life into the much loved franchise in 2014 with an update on it known as Dreams of Echo.
English speeaking monolinguals, though, have only been able to buy these books for the last eleven years. The translators, from an American agency called Gannon & Moore, have also rendered the rather more weighty works of Ludmilla Ulitskaya into English. Polly Gannon boasts a doctorate in Russian literature from Cornell University and Ast. A. Moore, the assistant editor, comes from a more technical background.
What makes this series worth looking at, even if you are no devotee of Fantasy, is how it shows what kind of appetite exists among the Russsian book reading public.
Loser redeemed.
Frei, an Everyman Hero if ever there was one, begins as a twenty-something nobody who likes food, drink and the odd cigarette – in our world, that is. However, when he dreams his way into the alternate world of the City of Echo he becomes both respected and feared as a part of the elite Secret Investigative Force. (As exposition is kept to the minimum, I recommend that you start this series from Book One. I have had to piece together backstory as I was going along).
You see…a long tiime ago there had been a cataclysmic conflict between waring magic orders. This had depleted the very World’s Heart and had almost lead to the destruction of the world itself. So now the use of magic has been forbidden. The City of Echo resides at the world’s Heart and here a Secret Police force is at work to ensure there is no recurrence of the dark days of the past….
The long-lived inhabitants of the low-tech world use luminous mushrooms as indoor lighting, have giant domestic cats, use several baths as a part of their morning routine, frequent numerous taverns and can contact each other via Silent Speech, a type of telepathy.
Max Frei, under the tutelage of the avuncular Sir Juffin Hully, the director of the Secret Police and alonsgside such colleagues as Lonli-Loki and the glamorous Lady Melamori, learns about his own latent magical abilities. These he is able to use in the just fight against those using magic for the wrong villainous reasons. He becomes Sir Max.
Within the pages of Book Two Sir Max will hunt down a criminal returned from the dead in the outlands of the city, become an ambassador to a distant tribe of desert people, and deal with an apparent zombie attack .
Dialogue heavy.
It is its style and not the not-so-original plot which makes this book so noteworthy though. Book Two contains three big chapters which are divided into sections and is 412 pages in length. Much of what transpires is dialogue in the form of merry banter between colleagues. The most elementary rule of commercial fiction – to boil everything down and keep the pace going – is broken. Here is a more or less random quotation:
Max, the lives of all the policemen of Echo are in your hands.
Smiling Melifaro made himself comfortable atop my desk, knocking the self-scribing tablets on the floor and an empty cup in my lap. Melifaro didn’t even blink. Instead, he hung over me, wringing his hands theatrically and demanding attention.
Ever since Boboota ran out of those funny smelling sticks you gave him, his temper is even worse than it used to be.
Impossible, I said in a calm voice. It can;t get any worse than it was. Nature's resources are not limitless. The boys simply forgot what their boss used to be like before he stuffed himself on King Banjee. Now he's completely recovered, that's all.
So you don't hae any more of those smoking sticks? said Melifaro. Poor Apurra.
No I don't have any at the moment, but I can fetch some more. No problem. Who's Apurra?
Right, you haven't met him yet. Lieutenant Apurra Blookey. He's been with the police since Shixola died. As smart as the late Shixola, and almost as nice. You'll like him. Oh, and there's a new dame in the city police, Lady Kekk Tuotli....
(From page 137)
It feels spirited and affectionate with an exuberance that becomes infectious even as you flag a bit with ploughing through pages and pages of this stuff. You can appreciate the humorous tone even if it does not leave you teary eyed with laughter.
Some have made comparisons with Harry Potter insofar as this seems like a classic wish fulfilment saga, others with the more sophisticated Jasper Fforde and other critics even with Oscar Wilde. For myself I was reminded a bit of some of J. P Donleavy at times. None of these capture the uniqueness of Martynchuk’s writing though.
Grumble sheet.
Online commentators have carped at the quality of the translation. I am in no position to comment much on this but I did notice some lame Americanisms.
We meet the phrase Stop making fun of me a few times. A more real-world approximation of this would be Gimme a break will ya or, if you want to be more British Stop taking the piss. Likewise the exclamation gosh is uttered in many situations – sometimes in extremis !
Just as common is the complaint that the Max Frei protagonist is nothing but a Mary (or Marty) Sue type of character. That is to say he functions as a flawless over-idealised projection of the authors. Whilst this may be so, Sir Max gets portrayed as a man full of gratitude for the wonderful world he resides in and this fact makes him forgiving and unassuming. Such a hero is difficult to dislike, even if he is a phoney.
Modern romance.
This is 100 carat escapist pulp fiction which can appeal to both adults and teenagers alike. The charm of it is the unfashionable romanticism at work behind it all. Is there a message in it too though?
It is difficult to ignore the trademark of the series – which is its eat-drink-and-be-merry hedonistic ethos. Right now this feels like a cheeky slap in the face to the lights-out-by-ten shibboleth which is all around us.
Frei, Max THE STRANGER’S WOES: THE LABYRINTHS OF ECHO:BOOK TWO (London:Gollancz, 2011) Translated by Polly Gannon and Ast. A. Moore.
(All quotations are from this text.)
Main image: tr.pinterst.com