Christopher Stasheff: The Witch Doctor (1994)

Edition: Del Rey, 1994
Review number: 591

The third of Stasheff's Wizard in Rhyme series almost completely ignores the characters introduced in the first two novels. Indeed, it reprises a good deal of the plot of the first one, Her Majesty's Wizard, with a different central character, as Saul Bremener looks into the disappearance of his friend Matt Mantrell, finds the parchment Matt had been working on before he vanished, becomes obsessed with it in turn, and finds himself in a fantasy universe. He is meant to save the kingdom of Allustria from its usurping monarch, just as Matt was brought to the neighbouring country of Merovence to do the same thing there.

As in the other two novels, much of the interest in The Witch Doctor is derived from the way in which Stasheff takes medieval Catholic doctrine seriously. Here, it is much better integrated into the plot than it was before; the earlier novels tended to use it over frequently as an easy way out of a tight corner. Stasheff helps himself through Saul's attitude to it, formed by a rejected strict religious upbringing which leads him to initially be contemptuous of the idea that Christianity could have any meaning, and a strong determination to be his own man rather than doing the bidding of God or the Devil.

At the same time, however, the plotting is very formulaic, as characters move from one puzzle to the next as though they were taking part in a role playing game rather than a novel. The characters themselves are ciphers, even Saul being far too much like a replay of Matt. The novel is rather like the later part of the Xanth series by Piers Anthony in this respect, though it thankfully avoids most of the awful puns that are so important there.

Christopher Stasheff: The Oathbound Wizard (1993)

Edition: Legend, 1996
Review number: 335

Sequel to Her Majesty's Wizard, The Oathbound Wizard continues the story of student Matt after he has been thrust into another world in which he is a powerful magician. The best thing about the first book was the idea of a fantasy novel which took medieval Catholicism seriously, and that is carried over in a diluted form into The Oathbound Wizard. (The power of faith is somewhat lessened, probably to improve the verisimilitude of the plot.)

Matt has been unable to marry his beloved Queen Alisande of Merovence, because she cannot feel it is right for her country for her to marry one not of noble blood. (Because of the idea of the divine appointment of rulers, she usually instinctively knows the right course of action to take for the benefit of her people. Though she does feel that it would be right to marry Matt, her scruples derive from the suspicion that her love for him is overcoming her supernatural knowledge.) After three years, Matt is very frustrated, and in a moment of temper swears an oath that he will overthrow the evil usurping sorcerer holding the throne of the neighbouring kingdom of Ibile. Meaning this as a figure of speech to express his emotion, he has forgotten the spiritual power of words in this world, and so he is committed to a quest.

In this second novel, Stasheff is not quite so careful about the background as in Her Majesty's Wizard. He manages, for example, to get the names of the kings of England wrong. This is in discussion with Robin Hood, conjured up from another parallel universe, and I suspect that the reason that the king following Richard and John is named Edward rather than Henry is related to his background reading on the Robin Hood legend. The tales, now traditionally associated with Richard I's crusading, apparently developed during the reign of Edward III, and it may be that Stasheff assumed he followed the earlier kings.

As the novelty of the first in the series has worn off, the second does not seem nearly as good.

Christopher Stasheff: Her Majesty's Wizard (1986)

Edition: Legend, 1995
Review number: 150



There has been a subgenre of light fantasy as long as there has been fantasy. The novels in this subgenre have an air of gentle humour and some elements of parody, though the comedy is not usually so broad as in the currently more fashionable novels of Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt and Craig Shaw Gardner. In my opinion, the master of such fantasy, generally written by Americans, was L. Sprague de Camp; more recent books of this type include Terry Brooks' Magic Kingdom series, the dragon books of Gordon R. Dickson and Piers Anthony's Xanth series.

Her Majesty's Wizard is particularly reminiscent of Dickson's The Dragon and His George with a dash of Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger. It tells the story of Matt, a second-rate graduate student at an American university, who abandons his research to try and decipher a fragment of parchment which has accidentally come into his possession. As he finally cracks its peculiar linguistic structure, he finds himself magically transported into a world where the recital of verse acts as a magic spell.

This is a pretty typical opening for this kind of novel. Generally, the novel does not stray far from the paradigm, but where Stasheff differs from every other fantasy writer I have ever read is in the way he takes the Catholicism of a medieval setting seriously. In some ways he is not quite successful in this - the ease with which the prayer of a churchman affects events causes some problems in the plot - but it makes the mindset of his characters a lot closer to those in the ultimate source material of a fantasy novel, the medieval romances about Arthur, Charlemagne and so on. He is able to avoid the embarrassment about religious issues which makes so much fantasy rather coy on the subject; it is really unusual to see religion given something of the place it had in the medieval mindset. I particularly liked the way that the Catholic sacrament of confession was given such a strong and influential role, as it maybe should be in works based around a society in which every important person would have their own confessor.