Nine Tales of Raffalon

Matthew Hughes Nine Tales of Raffalon (2017)
My initial impression of the Raffalon tales first featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction were of a sword and sorcery take on E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief. The author himself happened upon this observation and set me straight, explaining that he regarded the setting of his tales as renaissance more than medieval and what I misread as significantly influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels. This made a lot of sense once I read Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous which inhabits the distant future of Earth's final years with magic having returned to human society, which has itself resumed a mostly pre-technological economy. Anyway, it turns out - as I now realise - that I hadn't fully grasped the proverbial stick and that the Raffalon stories quite deliberately inhabit the very same world as Vance's magicians; so it all makes sense now.

Rather than merely playing with someone else's train set or indulging in mimicry, Hughes explores aspects of the Dying Earth which Vance didn't seem to touch on, at least not in Rhialto the Marvellous. Where Rhialto at least inhabits the surreal world of reality warping wizards, Raffalon relies upon his wits to get him by in the semi-feudal lowlands of craftsmen and wandering pugilists; and it works because Hughes writes with the sort of elegant wit and wild invention which worked so well for Vance, whilst retaining what I've come to recognise as absolutely his own voice. Raffalon is funny without feeling the need to pull faces, and the stories wrap the reader up in all sorts of logistic knots before leading us to conclusions we could never have predicted, all of which makes for immensely satisfying reading, high on roughage and essential vitamins. Fantasy has never really been my genre of choice, but Raffalon is an exception, and I can confidently say it's because it's rare to find an author so convincing or so well versed in his craft as is Hughes.