The Murdstone Trilogyby Mal PeetCandlewick Press, 2015At the start of Mal Peet's biting, hilarious (and, alas, posthumous) novel The Murdstone Trilogy, writer Philip Murdstone is immured in his run-down Dartmoor cottage, eking out a poverty-haunted existence that was the last thing he would have imagined for himself just a few years earlier, when he was publishing a series of “lovely, sensitive” novels about teenage boys with tortured souls. The first of those novels had won awards and enjoyed a readership, but things have gone steadily downhill since then, and Philip is fully aware of the reason why: he refuses to play the publishing game by its 21st century rules. He doesn't have a website. He doesn't do Facebook or Twitter. He doesn't reach out to his fans.It's not that he's a Luddite, as Peet's lightly acidic narration informs us. “Not at all. He regularly caught the monthly bus to Tavistock with his handwritten list of Things to Find Out About and spent a good hour, sometimes more, at one of the library's computers.” Rather, the problem is that he believes the works should speak for themselves, without their author becoming their round-the-clock dedicated town crier.It's an attitude that's cost him money and popularity and, as his vigorously mercenary agent Minerva Cinch informs him, it's got to change. His book sales are flatlining, and it's time to re-invent himself. And she has a sure-fire re-invention in mind: he must write a high fantasy trilogy (so high, as she delicately warns him, that the word must sometimes be spelled with a 'ph'). In a couple of mercilessly accurate scenes, she outlines for him the program such books follow, and along the way, she regales him with stories of the success that program has brought to other writers, including Virgil Peroni, the teenage author of The Dragoneer Chronicles (“If a beardless youth and his mum can do this stuff, a writer of your caliber should find it a doddle”), a dig a certain American fantasy writer might find a bit sharp-elbowed, if he ever chanced to read it.Poor dolorous Philip reluctantly agrees, and in the aftermath of a titanic self-pitying drinking binge, he conceives of Dark Entropy, a cliche-packed phantasy novel narrated by its main character, Pocket Wellfair and as full of wizards and dark sorcery as Murdstone can make it. And he has help – from Pocket Wellfair himself, who makes a Faustian bargain with Philip in exchange for help in getting the first book written.The book is a huge success, with translation rights, Hollywood deals, and, eventually, a disorderly Ham-on-Wye appearance worthy of Kingsley Amis. And although Peet keeps his main plot bubbling along at a page-turning energy level (if this book were to become as well-known as it deserves to be, the entire fantasy genre would need a few years to recover), he also makes frequent allusions to a real-life epic battle being fought in the everyday world, where certain wizards using dark sorcery look poised to win everything:
Because, swelling and looming over the horizon of his own small tragedy, cometh the Ultimate Cataclysm. The ascendancy of the darkly glittering Californian Overlords of Cyberspace, those latter-day Genghis Khans sweeping civilization aside, burning libraries, impaling editors in long rows, razing ancient honey-colored colleges and glass towers alike in a venal and rapacious lust to control language, turn authors into drones servicing its throbbing Amazonian hive and children into passive dabbers at electronic tablets freeloading downloads. And soon, their philistine conquest achieved, the Overlords will stand there in their ironically democratic jeans and T-shirts, surveying the wasteland with their hands on their hips, at the head of vast phalanxes of slobbering intellectual-property lawyers, sneering at the last writers still able to crawl and saying, “You got a problem, you backward-looking ink-addicted Neanderthals? What was that? Who said 'copyright'? Drag that fuckin' nostalgia junkie up here, boys, and break his goddamn fingers.”
The ironies in The Murdstone Trilogy are layered two and three deep (when a Quest develops in the book's second half, the whole thing delightfully enters a labyrinth of tail-chasing snark), and all but the most die-hard Terry Brooks fans will be forced to rueful chuckles by its filleting of a genre that's become as big as it is stupid. And the generous excerpts from Dark Entropy scattered like bread crumbs throughout the text might serve to lure in even those die-hard fans … and then save them, the High Elves willing.
