As usual, Eddison’s prose in The Mezentian Gate is unsurpassedly beautiful, flowing with the richness of Zimiamvia’s divine realms and creating a world that is bombastically larger than life, exploding with vibrant energy and emotion and wit and intelligence. A choice example can be found at the opening of chapter two:
It was eight months after that meeting in Mornagay: mid-March, and mid-afternoon. Over-early spring was busy upon all that grew or breathed in the lower reaches of the Revarm. Both banks, where the river winds wide between water-meadows, were edged with daffodils; and every fold of the rising ground, where there was shelter from north and east for the airs to dally in and take warmth from the sunshine, held a mistiness of faint rose-colour: crimp-petalled blossomed, with the leaf-buds scarcely as yet beginning to open, of the early plum. Higher in the hillsides pasque-flowers spread their tracery of soft purple petal and golden centre. A little downstream, on a stretch of shingle that lay out from this right bank into the river, a merganser drake and his wife stood preening themselves, beautiful in their whites and bays and iridescent greens. It was here about the high limit of the tides, and from all the marshland with its slowly emptying creeks and slowly enlarging flats (for the ebb was well on its way) of mud and ooze, came the bubbling cascade of notes as curlew answered curlew amid cries innumerable of lesser shore-birds; plover and sandpiper, turnstone and spoonbill and knot and fussy redshank, fainter and fainter down the meanderings of the river to where, high upon crags which rose sudden from water-level to shut out the prospect southwards, two-horned Rialmar sat throned.
This is a truly magnificent passage and we see in it Eddison’s similarities to Tolkien, Peake, and earlier pre-genre fantasy writers who understood landscape—and the artful rendering of it in literary form—to be absolutely integral to making their fantasy worlds, in some sense, real or real-seeming, and a key aspect of the verisimilitude so many fantasy writers use at the same time to denaturalize readers’ from their own world, rendering “reality” in new, critical perspectives. The scene begins with a moment in the changing of the seasons that quietly transitions readers from the big reveal at the end of the first chapter, and from there pulls the reader almost as a camera might move slowly through a forest in the opening scene of a film, lingering on tiny images and small happenings that each seem so delicately real and together prove the hapticity of this fantasy world. Eddison pulls us gently through the landscape, enlivening it with color and temperature and texture, with animal inhabitants, with the sounds of their lives, just enough that we understand what it might be like to be not just in Zimiamvia but here, on the banks of the Revarm river in early spring, until he suddenly shifts our perspective away from this temporary elysium to a lofty mountain rising high above it all—an abode of the gods, the seat of the Fingiswold palace, the birthplace of Mezentius, the god who will do the impossible and die. The book abounds with such powerful imagery, familiarizing us with the impossible, making Zimiamvia more real, perhaps, than reality…
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