ack Lutwidge Limekiller (that middle name inherited from the Charles Dodgson side of the family) is a young, burly, fairly handsome and blond Canadian expatriate living in the warm, sunny and very supernatural country of British Hidalgo, down Central America way. Having had enough of his snowy northern birthplace, Jack chucked everything for a life spent adventuring in the southern seas. Buying a small boat, the Saccharissa, whose first mate is Skippy the cat, Jack earns his living with some desultory cargo hauling, some equally tentative tourist chaperonage and whatever other makeshift work he can cobble together. But at this time in the history of British Hidalgo—a country just big enough to get one's arms around—the living is fairly easy and cheap—if one doesn't mind sleeping under thatched roofs on a steady diet of beans, rice and fish. This idle existence leaves Jack plenty of time for dealing with the numerous occult forces that erupt into his life.
In "Bloody Man," Jack witnesses a tiff over fishing rights between two tribes—the Black Arawaks and the Baymen. But Jack is busy with the assignment of building a cabin for a retired archbishop in a lonely venue, and does not pay much mind to the conflict. Until he encounters the thing that drove the Black Arawaks out of their traditional territory and into the Baymen waters: the cursed spirit of crimsoned Captain Blood. By the time of "There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me," Jack believes he's found a soulmate in the form of a local whore named Bathesheba. But when Bathesheba proves unfaithful—yet true to her own nature—Jack flees heartbroken into the bush, there to encounter the mysterious "jumby" of which the natives dare not speak.
Once upon a time there was a legendary trader in British Hidalgo known as Bob Blaine. A sharp operator, Blaine eventually fled with money that was not rightly his. Could the legend of this man be connected somehow to the one-eyed fellow named John Samuel, who manifests himself on Jack's ship one night? And if so, what binds both men to rumors of a child half-manatee, half-human? Jack finds out at the risk of his life in "Manatee Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight." In "Sleep Well of Nights," Jack begins having disturbing dreams, dreams where he is lured underwater by a man with a pike. These dreams prove prophetic when Jack pays an unexpected visit to the Iguana Church, in the presence of a beautiful American woman named Felix Fox.
Having fallen in love with Felix and she with him, Jack finds himself at loose ends in "Limekiller at Large," while Felix is away. A nighttime raid on a turtle's nest for its succulent eggs uncovers a small fortune in gold. But what comes to hand so easily can just as easily disappear. The final story, "A Far Countrie," finds Jack and Felix invited out to a party on the island of Galleons Caye, home to a certain Major Deak. Forewarned against making the trip on this particular ill-omened day, Jack and Felix nonetheless persist. On the island they learn the grisly true origin of the place's distorted name, and risk their relationship being forever tainted.
In addition to these six long stories, this volume contains introductions by Lucius Shepard and Peter Beagle, afterwords by editors Henry Wessells and Grania Davis (once wife to Davidson) and by Davidson's son, Ethan. Lastly, the reader gets a snippet of Davidson's travel memoir of British Honduras, the real-life inspiration for Jack Limekiller's adopted land.
Erudite tales of a land that time forgot
Although the plot sketches in the preceding section of this review convey with fair accuracy the kernels of Davidson's stories, they completely neglect the real allure of his fiction: Davidson's unique voice, his impeccable, unduplicatable style, his brilliantly interlocking narrative constructions and his world-weary yet insatiable appetite for life and its wonders. This is what makes Davidson's fans so enamored of his work.
First, the voice. Davidson (1923-1993) was immensely well read, of course, yet also vastly experienced in the rough-and-tumble real world. His time spent living in the British Honduras left him with a vivid cast of characters and unique social customs and locales that he could intermix with legends and superstitions derived from books. The result is stories that are both anchored by the material world—the reader comes to feel the reality of British Hidalgo from the very first tale—and yet infused with literary fancies. Davidson's sometimes melancholy tone is, as Shepard notes, muted in these stories, although the final one is tinged with a growing rift between Jack and Felix, leaving both of them "very far from Eden."
Davidson's style requires close attention on the reader's part, boasting as it does some of the exotic constructions of a Jack Vance or James Branch Cabell. Consider the parsing of a sentence like this one: "He realized and acknowledged that she would, anybody, everybody, would, sometimes, often, seldom, now and then, late or early, have to go." And that's not even a particularly elaborate example. But Davidson's style has the effect of insinuating information into the reader's mind very slyly and impactfully, more so than the blunt instrument of some best-seller.
Davidson's narrative sleight of hand provokes amazement even from his fellow professionals. The way, say, that "Silky-Tree" opens with a seeming irrelevant tale about a certain Peter Pygore and yet circles back to that individual by the climax, where he is now deemed essential, is a miracle. Every story except perhaps the simplest, "Limekiller at Large," is like this, and will ignite firecrackers of delight once all the links fall into place.
As for Davidson's appetite for life and his simultaneous disdain and revulsion for the more tawdry aspects of it (not that he didn't appreciate them too), the reader will leave this book feeling along with Jack that life is harsh at times, yet overall quite a wonderful thing.
Many of Davidson's plots hinge on the theme of misunderstandings or failed or garbled communications. So it's paradoxical that he would erect ornate screens of verbiage that might conceal his true meanings from his readers. But what Davidson is trying to prove, I think, is that only the meanings you ferret out with some effort are worth anything. Davidson made the generous assumption that all his readers were as smart and engaged with life as he was, and that's a rare compliment.
