Futura 1985 PB, art by Mick van Houten
The last book in Jane Gaskell’s Atlan Saga was published in 1977, either prompted by or coinciding with a reissue of the previous novels that same year. Part of what led to my reading this last book in this series (which, for me, has been increasingly discouraging, and often powered wholly by my difficulty in abandoning something I’ve started), was the thought that, after a gap of a few years, Gaskell might have returned to Atlan with a fresh approach—something that was backed up by knowing this book was narrated not by Cija, but her daughter, Seka. And, early on, Seka (after reading her mother’s capacious but seemingly unloseable diary) in effect reviews the previous novels, calling Cija “a natural observer of life unless forced to be a protagonist, and a coward too”—so, passive, which I’d agree with, though I don’t think of her as cowardly—and concluding that “my cautious, sensible mother was an extremely silly lady”. I was hopeful, then, that Seka might be different.
Aside from the change in narrator (who, I have to say, writes exactly like Cija, so not much change there), there were a few notable differences. Gaskell allows herself more sexually explicit language, though most of it occurs in the first few pages, as though she soon tired of the novelty. Also, she has at last discovered names: we get Soursere, Quar, Ilxtrith, and Quantumex. But not all the time. One key character is referred to as “Beautiful” before being renamed “the Saint”.
1979 PB from Pocket Books, art by Boris Vallejo
But soon enough, it was clear not much had changed. For a start, Seka is a child and tied to her mother—so when Cija gets kidnapped, as she inevitably does (several times), Seka gets kidnapped with her. What’s more, Seka lost her voice in a previous book, so can’t play much of an active role in terms of asking questions, telling people things, etc. She doesn’t even show much initiative in terms of making herself known without the use of her voice. By the time Cija and Seka found themselves part of the Dragon General Zerd’s army train, heading north for another conquest, I began to feel that I might as well be re-reading the first novel. I have to admit I started skim-reading pretty early on, and only finished this novel because I looked up some reviews and criticism and found a few people saying this was the best book of the series (it may be, I had ceased to be able to tell) and that it had a visionary ending.
It did have a more fantastic ending, with Cija, Seka & co. being taken, at last, to Ancient Atlan, which seems to resemble, much more, the faerie-like strangeness of Gaskell’s first novel, the genuinely unique Strange Evil. But we’re only there for a short space, not long enough for things to develop, and for a lot of it the Atlantean Juzd is telling Cija what the deeper spiritual meaning of all her adventures has been. At this point, I tried breaking out of skim-reading mode, but whenever I did, I just couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few sentences. I’d ceased to care about any of the characters, let alone the supposed meaning of their adventures, and was just reading to see how things ended.
1977 PB, art by Bob Fowke
But, every so often, Gaskell would throw in an idea you just couldn’t find anywhere else. For instance, as the characters are passing through a funeral chamber, they see a snake, and one of the mourners says that this is the dead man’s “self-regard”, which we all have, in serpent form, wrapped around the base of our spine. It was a moment where the strangeness of this world Gaskell had created seemed to come alive, but it was never mentioned again, and the possibility of a world being created in which such a belief fitted was lost.
Throughout the series, there’s never been an overall sense of direction. Each novel is just a loose bag of episodes, each episode a loose bag of events. There are moments of interest, occasional striking ideas, but just too much drudgery overall, and certainly no sense of a mythic underlying structure, or a coherently created world.
Another thing that has driven my reading of the series has been looking at how it was received in its day, as prior to this instalment the series was coming out in the days before otherworld fantasy was a commercial genre, or even much of an uncommercial one. The initial books were, then, reviewed in the mainstream press (particularly as Gaskell was also writing non-fantasy books at the same time). But with Some Summer Lands, that’s no longer the case. Fantasy was—had just become—a commercial genre, and so perhaps was now considered beneath the dignity of mainstream reviewers. I’ve only been able to find one newspaper review. Michael Unger, writing in the Liverpool Daily Post (3 September 1977), said:
“Miss Gaskell’s writings have been compared with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, so that, plus the fact that she was once a child prodigy with her first book written when she was 14, led me to believe that she must be a formidable writer. Sadly, therefore, I have to report that the book was hugely disappointing. The only connection between Miss Gaskell and Tolkien is that both invented their own fantasy world. Miss Gaskell’s was introduced to us in her Atlantis trilogy, and her latest offering is again set in this imaginary continent. But it is really escapist writing of a style similar to many a science fiction writer.”
1986 DAW PB, art by James Gurney
Ultimately, the view I most chime with seems to be John Grant’s, from the St James Guide to Fantasy Writers (1996). After calling Some Summer Lands “this fascinatingly bad book”, he goes on to say “Yet there are also sections in which Gaskell seems at last to have become interested in her Atlantean epic” — which makes me realise how one of the things I’ve felt throughout is to wonder why Gaskell was writing this, when she didn’t seem interested in it, except at brief moments.
Oddly, I feel as though I could still read something by Gaskell—her vampire novel, Shiny Narrow Grin, sounds interesting. But, having been aware of the series since my epic-fantasy-reading days began in the 80s, I have to admit it’s just so unlike I expected it to be. I was at least hoping to encounter something with the originality of pre-genre fantasy, combined with the growing air of imaginative and individual freedoms created by the 1960s social revolutions; but the result has been, if anything, more the dreariness of the kitchen sink 60s than the wild imagination of the psychedelic 60s, and dreariness is not what I come to fantasy for.
