Eleanor Arnason's writing is an unsettling mixture of the beautiful and
the loony. Her characters bring a kind of clear-sighted insanity to their
problems that is both absurd and plausible. For instance, the clinging Gothic
heroine of "The House by the Sea," who misses her most recent
lover:
Those were dark months. Even the merry antics of my troglodyte tumblers
couldn't cheer me. The house seemed cold and drafty, though it had excellent
central heating. I took up embroidery to help pass the time, took holovision
courses in Amerindian cooking and flower arranging and tried to get the
family library in order. Nothing helped.
(Query: is that funny out of context? I don't know. When I first read "The
House by the Sea" I didn't think any of it was funny. I could tell
that it was intended to be funny, but the drippy heroine was an unpleasant
person, and I couldn't seem to find her horrible plight distant enough to
be funny. When I re-read it a few months later it seemed to have undergone
a sea-change. The heroine was just as unpleasant, but the exposure of Gothic
"sensitivity" as exasperating instead of endearing had turned
into the central comedy of the story).
More often, in addition to being bizarrely reasonable, the characters are
fair-minded, nice people. For instance, the author of the story-in-the-story
of "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons," who is worried by her attraction
to her story's hero: "It's never wise to get too involved with your
characters. Besides, I'm not his type . . . . I could, of course, kill him
off . . . but this solution, while popular among writers, is unfair."
Or even the neurotic dragons in The Sword Smith who (rudely, by the
standards of Nargri, a sane dragon) undertake to settle someone else's moral
dilemma. The come up with an unacceptable solution--one of the two in conflict
must die--but a reader can't help admiring their passion for justice. Anyway,
this one can't.
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