HERE, THERE BE DRAGONS

This ambitious fantasy falls short of the mark. Three young men meet in 1917 London, and find themselves embroiled in a dangerous quest to protect a magical book. The men are fantasy authors C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, and the fantasy world they’ve entered will be familiar to many. They encounter gods and monsters from Greek, Welsh and Egyptian myth, fauns, satyrs and talking beasts alongside rings of power and talking packs of cards. Unfortunately, the muddled mishmash leads to something rather less than the sum of its parts; there’s no rhyme or reason to the interconnectivity of the stories. Moreover, in a world magically created by those writers who comprise “much of the cultural and scientific history of the entire human race”—a list composed nearly entirely of northern European men—is there any reason that an evil overlord straight out of British mythology has Asian features? Clumsy racial stereotyping was forgivable in 1917, but much less so nearly a century later. (Fantasy. 11-13)