Fritz Leiber and his The Swords of Lankhmar (1968) proved to be my boon companion during my recent European vacation. I'd packed a stack of books, carefully chosen, from Lord Byron to Julius Caesar to Steven Erikson for the long flights, train rides, and potential deluges, but a last-minute snatch of Leiber's novel from a stack in my study as I was headed out the door proved the best choice of all. I read around in Byron for Venice and for the Rhine, read around in Caesar for my Germans and Celts, read around in guide books and historical studies of Hadrian's Wall and such, but a slow passage by passage working through with Fafhrd, the Gray Mouser, and the diabolical rats of Lankhmar was the most satisfying of all. Leiber's wit, his sense of humor and of rascally honor, his characters and characterization, and the plotting--this one early novel of Newhon, remember--all that, each element, stirred and teased me and pleased me as never before. This is a novel I've read and enjoyed at least twenty times before, but The Swords of Lankhmar had never truly impressed me until this particular slow reading.
And the reading was slow, for I was busy traveling and sight-seeing, walking and paddling, the cobbled streets and crowded canals of a handful of European cities and towns--Venice, Munich, Bacharach, Edinburgh, York--as well as palaces and castles and pubs. All of those places fit with the images of Newhon and Lanhkmar, with Leiber's fantasy world and its mix of Hellenistic, Medieval, and Renaissance qualities in manners, clothing, and architecture. (So easy to picture the two heroes ambling down the back street of a town on the Rhine or even a Scottish close off the Royal Mile.) As a normally quite fast reader, I was reminded to slow down, to savor the sentences and phrases, to note the particular wittiness of a line or the tactical wisdom of a portion of a plot pattern. And, since rats are a particular menace in The Swords of Lankhmar, I even welcomed my one actual rat sighting in a canal of Venice, though we did have to back-paddle to make sure the little fellow didn't climb upon any of our kayaks. (He pulled himself out of the water and into a crack in some foundation.)
I also followed a hint from Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus novels, and picked up a novel by Scottish author Muriel Spark: The Girls of Slender Means (1963). A very different sort of book than Leiber's, but equally witty, equally bound by action and circumstance and character, Spark's novel is a valuable find for me. Leiber works far more broadly, of course, and with entertainment his main goal, while Spark delves more deeply, for all her light touches of manner and speech, and leaves her reader in a literary place beyond expectation; at least, she did that to me, for me. A wonderful juxtaposition, a fortuitous pairing.
