he Lord of the Tower and Rocky Forest needs gold. His daughter, Mirandola,
must marry well, but the dowry casket is empty. He sees only one solution:
His son, Ramon Alonzo, must learn from the forest-dwelling sorcerer the art
of making gold from baser metals. Long ago Ramon's grandfather did the
magician a good turn; surely he will return the favor.
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.
