Rhialto the Marvellous

Jack Vance Rhialto the Marvellous (1985)
This one is part of the Dying Earth series, as it's called, which I picked up purely because Matthew Hughes cited it as a significant influence on his Raffalon stories - which I can see now that I know what to look for. I tend to avoid anything involving wizards as a general rule, but as with Hughes' writing, this is clearly something else. More than anything it reminds me of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in being set in the improbably distant future amongst a community of peculiarly eccentric beings with strange powers. That being said, it's quite different to Dancers while being similarly distinguished as betraying no tangible influence from Tolkien or any of the usual pointy-hatted suspects.

What actually seems to distinguish Vance from everybody else - at least everybody else that I've read - is the language, ornate, luxuriant, decadent and never afraid to use an archaic term if it suits the sentence, or even to just make something up. With that which is described being at least as strange and ornate as the composition of its description, Rhialto is a delight to read, resembling surrealist fiction as much as fantasy, conjuring images as much resembling traditional Japanese art as Heironymous Bosch as Yellow Submarine; and it's nothing if not witty.

A big-bellied old man with grey wattles sidled a few steps forward. He spoke in a wheedling nasal voice: 'Must your disgust be so blatant? True: we are anthropophages. True: we put strangers to succulent use. Is this truly good cause for hostility? The world is as it is and each of us must hope in some fashion to be of service to his fellows, even if only in the form of a soup.'

The only downside here is arguably that the language is such as to require the reader's full and undivided attention, because it can be otherwise quite easy to lose one's footing and slip, mid-narrative, and a little of Vance's prose goes a long way. Then again, if that seems like it might be a problem, you should probably stick to Terry Brooks or one of those guys.