Philip Murdstone is washed up. He is known as a writer of serious, quasi-literary children's fiction about sensitive, disabled boys, but his star is waning and he is behind the times when it comes to what the reading public wants. Fantasy - specifically, epic fantasy - is what sells, and Philip's ruthless agent is determined to get her client on the bandwagon to save his sinking career.
So begins The Murdstone Trilogy. Philip is not a fantasy reader, and does not enjoy or appreciate the genre, but help comes to him in the form of Pocket Wellfair, a gnome-like creature who narrates, in a distinctive and earthy style, a book that comes to Philip in a vision when he passes out drunk at a local tor. This book, Dark Entropy, catapults Philip to the top of the bestseller list and brings him fame and fortune. But it comes at a price - he makes a Faustian bargain with Pocket to acquire the novel, transmitted into his consciousness, and as he gets more desperate for additional books, he becomes more entangled in the dark business of Pocket's world.
This book is skillfully written; the narration style is arch and sardonic, though also vividly descriptive, frequently breaking out into inspired metaphors. When things take a decidedly darker turn in the second half of the novel, Peet manages to segue his narration into an uneasy, claustrophobic atmosphere - and I commend anyone who can make the vast expanse of the Himalayas seem cramped and terrifyingly hemmed-in. The parody of epic fantasy tropes, while more present in the first half of the novel, is amusing enough, although I've seen it done better by Diana Wynne Jones, who (unlike Peet) actually writes fantasy, in her books such as The Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Dark Lord of Derkholm.
The main failing of this book is the misanthropic contempt for humanity that is present in the narration. No one, from Philip to a community of Tibetan monks to the big cheeses of the publishing industry, is respite from scorn and disdain. I have happily read novels in which every character is unlikable, selfish, and not someone you would want to meet in real life, but the utter contempt for just about everyone in the book is a troubling undercurrent in this otherwise enjoyable satire. It gets particularly bad regarding the people of Devon, where Philip Murdstone lives in splendid isolation in a stone cottage on Dartmoor. I live in Devon myself (my town even got a mention in the book!), and I enjoyed the familiar names and places and feelings from the parts of the book set in Devon, including the hilarious scene in which the Tower Building of Exeter College, where I studied for two years, becomes the burning College of Thaumaturgy from the fantasy world Philip draws his books from. But the author seems to find the local people inherently stupid, small-minded, and worthy of derision. He writes out local accents and dialect phonetically, which almost never works in published fiction unless the author is someone like Irvine Welsh, and there is not an exception here in The Murdstone Trilogy. Every quirk of the local dialect is drawn out, exaggerated, and mispelled as though Devonians were speaking a foreign language. The neutral, RP-influenced Southern English of Philip Murdstone and his agent Miranda Cinch is, of course, left in correctly spelled English. But when it comes to the population of Flemworthy, Philip's adopted village, there is no such courtesy. Not only do they speak in phonetic dialect, but they are what Batman would refer to as a cowardly and superstitious lot. Late in the novel, Philip returns from several months of global travel to find that his fence is covered in various objects to ward off evil, including voodoo dolls, rosaries, and wooden crosses. They are, furthermore, so stupid that various characters cannot properly say "condensation" or "exorcism", the latter of which they demand the local priest perform on Philip's house. There is room for criticism and satire of rural England, but here, it is bitter enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Having said that, The Murdstone Trilogy is an enjoyable read, and it's quick to plough through - I finished it in a few hours. The first half, at least, is a hilarious and sardonic take-down of contemporary epic fantasy - there's even an expy of Christopher Paolini - and anyone who has found themselves slogging through an uninspired Swords and Sorcery doorstopper will find some wry familiarity in it.
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