3.5 - 4 stars

The final (unfinished) volume of Eddison’s Zimiamvia trilogy is just as serpentine as its predecessors. Once again playing with time, this third published volume actually occurs first chronologically. Eddison takes the reader back to the start of King Mezentius' life and reign. Only mentioned off-stage after his death in the first published volume, _Mistress of Mistresses_ (which is the last in the chronological sequence), he is a figure with an invisible yet palpable influence as the great “tyrant of Fingiswold” throughout the series. It's not until the middle volume, _A Fish Dinner in Memison_, that we catch a glimpse of this monarch in person, and only in this volume do we get a clear picture of his character. So far, it's quite twisty.

Adding to the temporal complexity, Eddison has the habit of moving between worlds, from the fabled land of Zimiamvia to our own Earth (which, in his story cosmology, is a fictional world or at least as fictional as Zimiamvia or any other world created for Aphrodite, the ostensible muse of all possible worlds in the Eddisonian ontology) and back again in all three volumes. This complexity at both the temporal and spatial levels is undoubtedly one of the main reasons Eddison is considered 'difficult'. However, I think the way he weaves this out-of-sequence progression into his storytelling is masterful. I would argue that one should definitely read the books (initially at least) in the published order, as mysteries and explanations slowly unfold in the sequence Eddison intended, allowing for a more satisfying overall reading experience.

This final unfinished work in the Zimiamvian trilogy once again shows us the experiences of the divine pair as they manifest in several different mortal avatars to pursue the paths of greatness and heart's desire. Even though it's unfinished, the book is highly readable. The sections Eddison managed to finish (or at least get to a fuller state of composition) read very well and bookend the unfinished sections. These latter were at least fleshed out by him with synopses and dates, so we know what was supposed to happen, albeit in precis. We are given an encapsulated history of the rise of the great King Mezentius and his ultimate forging of the three kingdoms of Zimiamvia. This would have been a magnificent book if he had completed it (and there might have been at least one or two additional ones according to Eddison's own writings about the book), but as it is, it's well worth reading.

The "Zimiamvia: A Trilogy" by E.R. Eddison offers a captivating and immersive experience. The series takes readers on a journey through a richly detailed and fantastical world. The characters are well-developed, each with their own unique personalities and motives. The storylines are engaging, filled with adventure, mystery, and political intrigue. The writing style is elegant and descriptive, painting vivid pictures in the reader's mind.

The trilogy explores themes such as power, loyalty, love, and sacrifice. It delves into the complex relationships between the characters and the consequences of their actions. The world-building is top-notch, with a detailed history, culture, and mythology that adds depth and authenticity to the story.

Overall, "Zimiamvia: A Trilogy" is a must-read for fans of fantasy literature. It offers a thrilling and unforgettable adventure that will keep readers hooked from beginning to end. Whether you're a long-time fan of the genre or new to it, this trilogy is sure to delight and entertain.

A little perfunctory research will tell you that this, the last-published volume of the Zimiamvia series, is unfinished. It consists of fairly detailed chapter summaries, things that look like chapter summaries but aren’t (I don’t care how ruthless Rosma Parry is, she’s not going to dispose of two husbands and a brace of lovers in a one chapter), finished but unpolished chapters, and some fully-completed material. It is, to steal Eddison’s metaphor, a portrait with some areas roughed in in charcoal and others nearing completion. It’s probably the most ambitious of his books.

A little elementary mathematics will suggest that, had Eddison been granted a few extra years of life, The Mezentian Gate would likely have been at the upper end of five-hundred-odd pages long; as it currently stands it’s a comparatively slender 270. Of course that’s juggling with average chapter lengths in a rather stupid fashion and assuming Eddison wouldn’t have dropped material, shunted stuff off to a fourth volume, left some of the notes as backstory, fleshed out “finished” bits, and generally buggered about with the thing. Do you think that likely? I don’t. Chances are that, in an alternate universe where Tolkien was run over by a bus in 1943, Eddison lived to a ripe old age, Peake managed to complete his Gormenghast series (because there must be balance, children, there must be balance even in fantasy), and I’m sat here speculating inaccurately on what The Lord of the Rings might have looked like had the situation been reversed, The Mezentian Gate would have felt very different. Eddison’s style is, like Peake’s, all about polish.

Which takes us where? It takes us to the book we actually have, rather than the one in the labyrinthine depths of L-Space, on the shelves of John Charteris’s study, or, I suppose, probably, somewhere out there in the Land of If. The book we have is worth reading, but it’s probably only worth reading if you have first swallowed Mistress of Mistresses and A Fish Dinner in Memison. It might be a little too rough about the edges otherwise, besides which if you couldn’t stomach the two finished books why on Earth would you bother with the unfinished one?

The book we have covers, childhood to death, the life of King Mezentius of Fingiswold and peripheral events relevant thereunto… That’s misleading. It’s better to say that it covers events across the Three Kingdoms and Akkama, largely during the reign of King Mezentius including his minority. It encompasses, therefore, the events of A Fish Dinner in Memison (almost entirely without the “Earth” sections), and serves as the back-story (in Zimiamvian time, at least) to Mistress of Mistresses. This is not as complicated as I’ve made it sound. There’s the usual combination of richly-finished (where completed) description, highly-mannered archaism of speech, Machiavellian scheming and betrayal, glorious drama, and heavy-philosophical juggling of avatars, but it isn’t as self-indulgent as the preceding volume. Which is not to say that A Fish Dinner isn’t still quite brilliant, or that self-indulgence is always a bad thing in an author. Self-indulgent is much better than boring.

Very roughly, we have the more-or-less finished start of the book (which is, mostly, very good, though I feel might have received a bit more surface gloss in places), the more-or-less finished end of the book (which is glorious), a couple of rogue chapters dealing with Fiorinda (which are also superb), and a great bulk of “arguments with dates” in the middle that serve as highly-compressed chapter summaries and so forth, and that, throwing back of an envelope estimates into the fireplace, would surely unpack into something gigantic. Part Greek tragedy, part blood-drenched soap-opera, part idiosyncratic religio-philosophy, part watching pretty girls in the sunshine, I’m not sure, really, that Eddison, who was not exactly the quickest of writers, would have had time to finish it even if he’d lived to a hundred. I’d have loved to watch him try, though.

Since it is unfinished there’s a lot less in the way of interior decoration, nature-writing, top-heavy metaphors and inserted poetry than I’ve come to expect from Eddison. His characters are still in character – Eddison is Euripedes to Tolkien’s Aeschylus, and his characters, though extreme, are truly alive. The completed sections are lush and rich and highly individual in a way that, if you love Eddison, you will love, and if you don’t… If you don’t then why are you reading this? The “arguments with dates” are a lot more skeletal, but do at least give some indication of where he thought he was going and how the writing process worked for him. It’s a much more interesting way of finding that out than ploughing through letters and diaries and whatnot, though there are people who like that kind of thing and who am I to judge?

The major problem with it, I suppose, is that there’s a lot of material that in a finished book would doubtless have been fully integrated, but that doesn’t quite fit together as things stand. What I’m choosing to regard as The Very Bloody History of Queen Rosma, for example, is presented entirely within the arguments, with the woman herself popping up only in the last couple of chapters. That means a key player in the highly dramatic scenes at the end of the book, a woman whose psychology is crucial to the way things play out, feels a little like she’s dropped in out of nowhere. It’s not an insurmountable problem, but it is there.

Five-star writing, therefore, where complete, but not enough of it for five stars overall.

Done.

One of Neil Gaiman's more brilliant concepts was Morpheus's library of unwritten books in The Sandman.

Every book that someone has ever considered writing but never actually got around to is housed there. Naturally, 99.9 percent of them have titles like 'The Best-Selling Spy Novel that I think about on the Bus that will sell a million copies and mean I'll never have to work again.'

I can't recall what happens to the books that people eventually write, but presumably they're removed from the shelves and respectfully pulped.

Either way, it's pleasant to imagine that somewhere in the library of unwritten books, there's the missing three-quarters of 'The Mezentian Gate,' and probably the other ∞-odd books Eddison planned to write about Zimmavia and its inhabitants before he unexpectedly passed away.

As it is, I think we got the best stuff.

True, it would have been nice to read a fully developed version of this crazy section.

But Eddison seemed most engaged in articulating his unique philosophy and detailing the baroque romances of his 'Olympian' characters, making it his priority to get the parts of the novel that touched on those down on paper.

Consequently, the bits we have seem to be the ones he enjoyed writing the most.

This means there are a lot more passages dedicated to Eddison's (frankly strange) thoughts about the 'divine feminine,' as the lady Fiorinda admires herself naked in the mirror*, than any dull, blokey stuff about wars or succession**.

It's fairly easy to mock, and I don't suppose that even in his most whisky-soaked state, Tolkien ever gave much thought to the color of Eowyn or Galadriel's pubic hair, but I'd truly feel a bit petty for doing so.

This isn't tacky fantasy with added fake philosophy and gratuitous t&a; it's a colossally eccentric and completely unique work, written in gorgeous and ornate pseudo-Elizabethan prose.

It's too incomplete and sketchy for a full 5/5, and a book that dedicates half a page to describing the fabrics around the heroine's four-poster bed is obviously not going to be to everyone's taste, but I think the world is a little bit richer for what we do have.

My suggestion for getting a feel for the novel would be to have a listen to this while contemplating a few Pre-Raphaelite paintings of beautiful ladies in a suitably respectful way.

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*It's fair to say that Eddison *really* loved the ladies. Several parts of this - particularly the bits with 'that oread lady, Anthea and sylph-like Camapaspe' - must have sent the pulses racing when the proofs landed in the 1940s publishing houses.

**The downside to this is that Eddison's greatest character - the 'blood-soak'd vicar of Rerek, that foxy and wolfish butcher Horius Parry' - never actually appears outside the 'argument with dates' summary sections. Ah well, he had plenty to do in Mistress of Mistresses, and should I ever be called upon to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons, I fully intend to model my approach to life in fantasy-land after his own. How can you not love a man whose response to being caught in the act of conspiring against his King is to pretend to have uncovered this nest of vipers and have been so overcome with rage that he promptly killed the lot of them before they could say a word? That's the right idea about life.

This is an unfinished work by the author, yet it is more comprehensible than the other two in the trilogy.

This tells us something about this author. It implies that despite the work being incomplete, it still holds a certain level of clarity and accessibility that sets it apart from the others.

Perhaps the author has a unique writing style or a particular way of presenting ideas that makes this unfinished piece stand out.

I read Eddison because CS Lewis liked him and I love Lewis.

By reading Eddison, I hoped to gain a better understanding of what Lewis saw in his work.

And indeed, I can also see to a small degree why Lewis loved his work.

There are certain elements in Eddison's writing that resonate with me, just as they did with Lewis.

It could be the vivid descriptions, the engaging storylines, or the deep philosophical themes that Eddison explores.

Whatever it is, it has piqued my interest and made me want to explore more of his work.

Overall, this unfinished work has given me a glimpse into the mind of the author and has left me eager to see what else he has to offer.

Boy, I sure hope George RR Martin doesn't die before finishing his epic fantasy series!

ER Eddison, an intellectual, publishes his epic fantasy series in reverse order, so that at his death it's the middle of the first book which is left incomplete. I've only previously read what passes for his hit, The Worm Ouroboros. It's an epic fantasy written by a man who'd lived through the First World War, yet it ends with the heroes wishing to go through all their battles again. This starts off politically in a rather Ayn Rand mode. The assembled, petty forces of humanity are about to bring down a majestic figure with whom the narrative is unashamedly in love. "There was in him a magnificence not kingly as in ordinary experience that term fits, but deeper in grain, ignoring itself, as common men their natural motions of breathing or heart-beat: some inward integrity emerging in outward shape and action, as when a solitary oak takes the storm, or as the lion walks in grandeur not from study nor as concerned to command eyes, but from ancestral use and because he can no other." Even if one doesn't entirely buy the implications, especially in 2020, I couldn't help but have some sympathy with the lament for "the old drift of the world, to drabness and sameness". And this is where we understand why an epic fantasy has opened on this contemporary scene. As that imposing figure says to his enigmatic lover, "If this is, as I am apt to suspect, a world of yours, I cannot wholly commend your handiwork...I think you were in a bad mood when you commissioned this one. The best I can suppose is that it may be some good as training-ground for our next. And for our next, I hope you will think of a real one." Well, I definitely know that feeling. From there, the narrative is transfigured into a grand fantasy world so overwritten and draped in fustian that it makes Tolkien look like Joe Abercrombie and Dunsany seem positively scurrilous. It's also more traditional in many ways. After all, even Tolkien, at least in his most famous work, foregrounded the little and unexpected heroes, not the archetypal great men. That's not the case for Eddison. His world, more real than Earth, opens on Pertiscus Parry, his brothers Mynius and Sidonius, names that even She Who Shall No Longer Be Named would have rejected as a bit much, and there's worse to come. In particular, Barganax and the Duke of Bork sound like they've escaped from a Ryan Browne pisstake.

These are not the only wonkinesses of tone. Eddison has a taste for antonyms that sound archaic but, if not neologisms, I've certainly never encountered in old texts myself - things like 'downcome' and 'illfare', which sometimes teeter on the edge of bathos. Despite much of it reading as the very highest of high fantasy, sometimes odd moments will intrude that would never have flown in Middle-Earth - scenes of sapphism, for instance, or even something as mundane as using the word 'vomit'. Part of it, of course, is that nowadays, even if reacting against Tolkien, we can't help but think of fantasy partly in terms of parameters he established. By those standards, the worldbuilding is distinctly iffy - made-up lands where they speak English and worship Greek gods. But of course, Tolkien's world was meant to be our misremembered past, and his heirs generally work in worlds either wholly separate from ours, or somehow parallel. Here, as in Cabell's Jurgen, our world is instead a little bubble within the story's more real reality. Indeed, when you consider that it was created after dinner by people who'd been drinking, it should hardly come as a surprise how we turned out: "crooked", "spoilt"; "our present world as a misconceived and, were it not for its nightmarish unreality and transience, unfortunate episode in the real life of the Gods". In some ways this reminded me of Grant Morrison's crippled infant universe of Qwewq, a tiny, benighted world where the superheroes exist only as fictions, but with the difference that Superman et al feel a terrible compassion for Qwewq, a responsibility to help it grow up, whereas Eddison's characters consider our world more a case of 'I think we'd all had a few, let us never speak of this again'.

That whole theme, though, is treated more fully in the series' next/previous volume, A Fish Dinner In Memison. Here it's more an interlude in a saga that feels at once like a sort of mediaeval history plus, and wholly unimportant. There's some dynastic stuff and various territories and betrayals and I can't for the life of me remember who was doing what to whom, or why. The whole thing is magnificent yet somehow sedate, like the sort of mediaeval art its cover emulates. Similarly, the details are as impossible for me to commit to memory as the wars between the later Carolingians, or the city-states of Italy. Once we get to the sections Eddison never completed, the action picks up markedly; a rare case of a writer who needed to tell, not show. When he wasn't trying so hard, Eddison could come up with memorable stuff like "He discloses himself to the Queen and makes fierce love to her. Rosma, who is now forty-one and in a perilous state of boredom, is at first infuriated but at last, saying she will ne'er consent, consents." The rest of the time, the soothing archaicism make it best suited as bedtime reading, which has been doing wonders for my slumber but further doomed any comprehension of the plot. Still, it does have its gorgeous moments - not whole scenes, even, so much as jewelled images, tapestries in prose. Inventive methods of assassination, such as getting someone drunk and putting them to bed with a bear, or playing a game of chess with certain pieces poisoned. There's a fabulously heady hymn to light and flowers, alas too long to quote in full; or, briefer, "He sat there like a man altogether given over to the influences of the time and the place, fondling the lynx beneath the chin and sipping hippocras from a goblet of silver." And it all ends with an allegorical resolution which seems almost intended as the basis for a new religion. Well, whatever the many, many other criticisms one might make of Eddison, nobody could claim he lacked ambition.

This is one of the books that make up Eddison's Zimiamvian Trilogy.

It holds a unique position. In terms of the order of publication, it is the last one, and it is also his very last work. However, when considering the chronology of the Trilogy, it is actually the first.

For those who have an interest in pre-Tolkien fantasy novels, I would highly recommend a particular reading sequence. First, it is advisable to read Eddison's separate work, "The Worm Ouroboros". Then, one should start the Trilogy by picking up this book first. After that, move on to "A Fish Dinner in Memison", and finally conclude with "Mistress of Mistresses".

What makes these novels truly remarkable is the Elizabethan/Shakespearean language that is used throughout. The dialogues, the descriptive passages, and the action - all are conveyed in this old English form. Eddison had a poetic writing style, and it requires careful reading to fully appreciate both the fineness and beauty of his expression, as well as to understand his plain meaning.

OK, this one is also quite complicated. It's not so much about the broad strokes of the story this time; rather, it's the structure of the book. Unfortunately, Eddison passed away before he could complete it. However, fortunately, he did leave behind enough notes to make the book understandable even in its partial form. Apparently, he wasn't the kind of author who starts at the beginning and continues until the end. Instead, he was one who first creates the framework of the story and then goes in and starts expanding and detailing the interesting parts until everything is finished. So in the book, there are a number of chapters at varying stages of completeness. He had at least drafted out the first part of the book, the last part, and a couple of key bits in the middle.

For the chapters that were not completed, we are mostly presented with "Arguments" - a few hundred words describing the main events of the chapter and some of their implications. There are also at least a couple of chapters that weren't fully drafted, but for which various notes and fragments exist and are presented. In the end, we have maybe a quarter to a third of the completed book, plus the assorted arguments, drafts, and notes filling in the gaps. On the one hand, it's a real shame that we didn't get the full book. Had it been completed and its potential realized in its creation, I think it would have been a masterpiece of the highest order. On the other hand, I'm at least happy that we got as much of it as we did.

The narrative is much more straightforward than "A Fish Dinner in Memison". There's a brief introduction - excuse me, Praeludium - with the Lessingham of our world, but then the scene shifts to, and remains in, Zimiamvia. If you remember, in the first book of the trilogy, "Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia", the Triple Kingdom was torn apart by civil war after the death of King Mezentius and, shortly after, his son King Styllis. "A Fish Dinner in Memison" showed some of the events immediately preceding Mezentius' death, up to and including the eponymous fish dinner. "The Mezentian Gate" shows the history of the Triple Kingdoms, as embodied in the family of the Parrys and the family of the royal house of Fingiswold, on an epic scale. It begins generations prior to the events of "Mistress of Mistresses" and ends just before that book, introducing pretty much all of the major players and moving them into their opening positions. Additionally, there are plenty of deep philosophical discussions on the nature of reality and of Love (yes, always with a capital L), and intimations that some characters may be, or at least represent, Gods in their mortal shell, all told in Eddison's inimitable prose. Plus the mysterious Doctor Vandermast and the oh-so-charming (and dangerous) ladies Campaspe, Anthea, and Zenianthe, none of whom is entirely as she first appears to be. Those Parrys really are bad eggs, by the way. Even in its incomplete state, it's a remarkably assured and ambitious book.

Thrilling! Its partial state reveals a great deal about Edison's greatness. There are two main points.

First, the overarching plot of the Zimiamvia books is frequently overshadowed by the moment-to-moment pleasures of Edison's prose. However, the detail of the argument with dates demonstrates just how thoroughly he considered the political history of his world.

Second, the fact that the part he ensured he completed first and regarded as the grand finale is a long series of discussions on leadership, love, and metaphysics reveals the true depth of his artistic and philosophical intentions. All the battles are limited to summaries of what he would have written had he not passed away. This incomplete work offers a tantalizing glimpse into the mind of a genius and leaves us eager to imagine what might have been if he had lived to fully realize his vision.