Sometimes, with the number of books available, good or bad, it is impossible to simply pick one to read. Thus on my last trip to the book store I restricted myself to the new released and, almost blindly, selected the first book to offer any hope of well written prose and a compelling plot. Richard Matheson’s “Other Kingdoms” grabs the attention with an age-old curiosity – Faeries. With all the hubbub over vampires lately it is almost refreshing to see a fantasy novel of the old school. In a Tolkein-esque discovery of “Middle Kingdom” Matheson asks us to set aside our logic and reason for the sake of his story as Alex White escapes his restrictive home life and the violence of the war for the serenity and apparent peace of the English countryside. What he encounters in his escape, however, is nearly as bad as what he is running from with witches, fairies and his own conscious out to attack him.
The most unbelievable, or perhaps disappointing, feature of the story, and centrally the love story, was the fall-back onto a tropic female beauty of fragility, modesty, and golden hair over the aggressive, voluptuous sexuality of an adult woman. There is, in fact, a disturbing pedophilia in the main character’s desire for his true love “Ruthana” who first appears to him merely three feet high and quite like a child. Her naivety and total devotion to this, let’s admit it, unworthy hero smacks of some masculine desire for the subdued, devoted, uncontroversial woman who can care for him in sickness and defend him against unwanted hostility. If you were looking for a book of new-age romance and unexpected heroines you may prefer to look elsewhere.
Another shortcoming, which I did not find as troubling in the first part of the book, is the parentheticals. Typically, I imagine a parenthetical to be a character’s side note, almost an internal thought, often in the midst of dialogue. Matheson, however, uses his parenthetical like candy. They litter the pages from cover to cover with the narrator’s, an 82-year old version of the protagonist, comments on his own story and life. These are useful tools, at the beginning, to introduce us to this older version of Alex White (or Arthur Black, if you prefer). Ah, see, even I am doing it now, a diversion into the direct address of the audience. However, by the middle of the book to be interrupted in the story several, sometimes as many seven times a page, to be told, not for the first time, that the character is 18 or 19 at the time and that the narrator does not have a perfect memory and that his pseudonym Arthur Black was a gaudy writer, is simply the greatest annoyance of my read. Here is a perfect example: “(‘To too’ – Arthur Black would have shuddered at that ugly combination; but I was only eighteen, what did I know?).” If the audience is unaware by page 150 of the main character’s age and the circumstances of his narrator then perhaps it is a major shortcoming of the author and the audience should be spared the pain of beating a dead horse.
Aside from the parentheticals the story itself was a concise chronology of the events of an 18, going on 19, year-old boy escaping from the war. The descriptions are succinct but accurate and despite the, again, Tolkein-esque inability to stay focused all the time, the plot moves forward at a steady, pleasant pace.
