Warrior at World's End

It happened a long, long time ago, maybe thirty years’ past. Like most little kids, I was an explorer. And where did exploration take me this day? Why, our new dining room, specifically the hutch, which is where my parents kept all the good dishes they used on special occasions. Imagine my utmost surprise when I opened the bottom center drawer, and there before me lay – a half dozen paperback books! Brand new (this was the 70s), but what drew me most were the pictures of scantily-clad barbarian women on the fantasy novels. Yeah, there were books of other genres that I was unaware of (one of the books was a novelization of the George C. Scott movie Hardcore) but the two that lured me in was one by John Norman (Google him – he’s written dozen of novels about Gor – a Conan-type world where sensuous yet submissive women are always writhing before muscle-bound men) and one by Lin Carter.

It is Lin Carter that I want to speak about here.

The Warrior at World’s End fascinated me. What exactly was this book? A history? Or a story? It was written as if it were both – case in point the footnotes on every other page! It was like an anthropology text, though I knew vaguely what that might be. But it was written with authority, and my young confused mind kept wondering – did this really happen, ancient history like the wonderful mythology stories my uncle made me read, or is this simply a fairy tale? Yet, I knew it didn’t really happen, but – my brain couldn’t wrap itself around the narrative style.

This needed investigating. So, thirty years ago, I read it, cover to cover.

And swiftly forgot about it, particularly after I read the world-shattering LoTR the following year.

Twenty-four years later, I stumbled across The Warrior at World’s End in a used book store. It leapt out at me, immediately, and I mean, quite literally, flying off the shelf and into my hands. I had to buy it (luckily, the gnarled paperback was priced at only two dollars), and I had to read it, a.s.a.p. I did, while commuting on NJ Transit trains into NYC, in two days.

Well, here follows a short review of the novel, just a paragraph, dated April 15, 2002. Note: there’s a major spoiler here, so fellow egghead-weirdo-SF-lit travelers, be warned!

I give The Warrior at World’s End a solid B+. It was a fun, quick guilty pleasure, having no redeeming social value but pure escapism to the epics of my youth. Carter has a great imagination and a surprisingly complex vocabulary for an alleged hack. He created an exotic world, kind of like an Arabic Middle Earth. His enthusiasm shows through. The characters, while slightly one-dimensional, all boast strange back stories, especially the protagonist, Ganelon. The overall storyline was well written, though if I have one complaint it was that things went too fast. This is fine for action sequences, but for background exposition, Carter should have laid back a bit and really delved into it. The 140-page book could easily have been a 350-page epic akin to the ones that Robert Jordan now puts out. But maybe anything longer would have made the reader feel more ashamed for indulging in this epic. I particularly liked Ganelon's introduction and origin, and how the Elphod (the story's main antagonist, though introduced way too late and shallowly drawn) met his demise: crushed to death by an invisible dragon coiling itself around him.

Sadly, I don’t know what became of the gnarly old paperback. Perhaps it sensed its time with me had come to an end and ducked out when no one was looking; more likely, perhaps, my wife threw it away. In any event, the moral of this story may be, simply: A book read as a child and reread as an adult is never the same book …