Down familiar magic paths

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 20

Down familiar magic paths

Magician. By Raymond E. Feist. Granada, 1984. 545 pp. $19.95. Pug, an unknown orphan boy, becomes apprentice to a magician and learns through the discipline of magic to know himself and to control the forces of nature. His homeland, Crydee, in the peaceful Kingdom of the Isles, is invaded by mysterious aliens pouring through a space rift from another world. A small band of friends, including Pug and his friend Tomas, are led by dwarves through a maze of tunnels and mines under the mountains to seek help from their allies. Tomas, lost in the mines, discovers a dragon’s wealth, is rescued, and because of his magic armour is accepted by the elves in their remote forest kingdom. A reader can be forgiven for thinking it all sounds very familiar. Unmistakable echoes of Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Michael Moorcock, and above all J. R. R. Tolkien, sound constantly throughout “Magician,” and one could

justify dismissing it as a mere pastiche of earlier epic fantasies. It must be admitted however that in fantasy (as in most other literary genres) it is difficult to be original; after all, even Tolkien, one of the great masters, borrowed heavily from the Germanic and Norse myths and the Icelandic sagas. ’ It must also be admitted that there appears to be a steady and faithful market for such writing. Readers among the faithful will no doubt welcome this first novel by a writer who has a vivid imagination and some skill in the description of imaginary worlds. Raymond Feist has done more than merely borrow elements from earlier writers, he has managed to bind them into a consistent whole. Much of the book plods pleasantly down pedestrian paths, but there are parts where the story soars excitedly and the reader becomes involved in the intricacies and concerns of Feist’s imagined kingdom.—Margaret Quigley.