Ramon reaches the magician's hidden lair and, thanks to the memory of his grandfather, is not repulsed; but still there is a fee--Ramon must surrender his shadow. The magician's ancient charwoman implores Ramon to refuse. Long ago she lost her beautiful, dancing shadow to the Master, and she has mourned it ever since.
Not understanding, and urgently charged by his father to send gold, Ramon agrees. In compensation, the sorcerer provides a false shadow. Ramon is satisfied--until he visits a nearby town at evening and all see that his unnatural shadow does not grow. Dejected and forsaken, Ramon vows at least to retrieve the charwoman's shadow, allowing her to escape the magician's clutches at last. But the good Father Joseph warns him that he himself is in mortal peril: It is our shadows that guide us to salvation in the hereafter.
Meanwhile, Mirandola has sent to him for a love potion in place of the dowry gold. Ramon dutifully learns this art and sends the potion, but it makes Mirandola's noble target deathly ill. All the Tower trembles, waiting for the illness to pass.
Ramon works feverishly on the secret of opening the box that holds the shadows prisoner, terrified of discovery by the powerful magician. Even as he loses hope of fulfilling his knightly vow, the heavy steps of the sorcerer sound in the passageway.
Charming and lyrical
Not many books have jacket blurbs from William Butler Yeats; that this book does--alongside quotes from a dozen other luminaries--is a tribute to Lord Dunsany's love for language and the respect in which he is held. Dunsany's every sentence reflects a belief in storytelling as a craft as well as an art. Phrases ebb and flow, dialogue sparkles, names of people and places convey more than the sum of their syllables; in short, each word tells.
The Charwoman's Shadow is not an epic or complex tale. Its compass is small and its elements are simple: A gnarled hag with a lifelong sorrow, a young knight in over his head, a beleaguered lord and a grasping neighbor. It is a fireside tale, well and carefully told.
The characters, for all their simplicity, are fascinating. Ramon Alonzo is young enough to learn his lessons the hard way, but his innocence helps him survive. His slow understanding of the old crone's plight is itself as much a rite of passage as his confrontation with the nefarious magician; these are two sides of the crisis of identity facing a young prince. The story is set in a starlit mirror of medieval Spain, a counterpart to the England in which Merlin lived alongside mortal Arthur--and like that England, Dunsany's mythic Spain is similarly doomed to lose its primeval magic.
This is fantasy refracted into its purest form, the light of faeries captured in a crystal phial. No 21st-century cynicism can survive a saunter through these woods or a draft from these wells. Like a sojourn into C.S. Lewis's wardrobe, it may not last, or change the harsh realities of our own world, but those who emerge on the other side are children again, if only for a while.
In an alternate universe, fantasy author Peter S. Beagle may become best known not for his own books--which include such classics as The Last Unicorn--but for his ringing introductions of other works. I was amused to see his introduction here, since I first encountered his name as the author of the preface to The Lord of the Rings. -- Mark
