villainous clan of goblins has laid waste to the once-mighty Gowdlands. To seal their triumph, they cast a hex that drains all color from the kingdom. The bleak, monochromatic landscape has demoralized the few remaining pockets of resistance. Worst of all, the Gowdlands' most powerful wizard, Susnam Evyndd, is dead, turned to cinders by the dark magic of the Mundurucu clan.
But the late, great wizard still has one trick up his sleeve. A posthumous spell transforms his loyal pets--a dog, three cats, a songbird and a boa constrictor--into human form. The bewildered band of ex-animals must somehow succeed where their master has failed, by restoring color and hope to the Gowdlands.
One place remains untouched by the Mundurucu's hex: the Shalouan Falls, where an eternal rainbow arcs in the mist. It turns out that the rainbow is a gateway into the Kingdoms of Light. Evyndd's intrepid former pets tumble into the scorching, aptly named Kingdom of Red. Beyond this crimson realm, they learn, are five other kingdoms. At the far end of this world is the Kingdom of Purple, which is reputed to have a wondrous museum containing a specimen of everything in existence--including the object of their quest: white light.
Though in human form, Evyndd's former pets retain many of their animal traits, and as a rule, dogs, cats, birds and snakes don't get along very well. Yet only by working as a team will they be able to prevail over the many dangers lurking in the kingdoms of light.
An invigorating animal odyssey
Alan Dean Foster, prolific author of The Dig, the Catechist trilogy and numerous movie novelizations, invests considerable imagination in each of the Kingdoms of Light. He might have devoted a whole book to each kingdom, though it's better that he didn't. What could have been a bloated saga is instead a modest, flawed, but engaging adventure.
The Mundurucu clan is a delightfully nasty gang of villains; Foster manages to make them both comical and fearsome. Oskar, the melancholic leader of Evydd's transmogrified menagerie, makes an endearing hero. Without his suitably dog-like loyalty, the human race would surely be doomed. (You can't really depend on the goodwill of cats when the forces of darkness blight the land.)
The chromatic kingdoms boast an impressively surreal rainbow of perils. In the Kingdom of Orange the travelers risk being tickled to death by the relentlessly mirthful natives, while in the Kingdom of Yellow they find out the hard way that the inhabitants have good reason to be afraid of their own shadows.
While inventively depicted, the kingdoms have an excessively dreamlike aspect that robs the narrative of its urgency. The six kingdoms are obviously contrived to illustrate the unique qualities of each of the six major characters. Foster's relentless whimsy gets to be oppressive, and his prose throughout the kingdoms tends toward a uniform purple. The novel's most gripping passages, ironically, are those set in the comparatively pedestrian Gowdlands, where the Mundurucu wreak their gleeful mayhem until Oskar and company's nicely unceremonious return.
