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A Shadow All of Light A Novel Fred Chappell Books

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A Shadow All of Light A Novel Fred Chappell Books

Chappell has a poet’s facility with language, and I was happy to see him turn it to a fantasy tale. I loved his Appalachian stories, and here he portrays an Italianate setting with vivid character, from its sly bravos and petulant artists to its society of cats, pirates and unusual and deadly flora. With a touch of adventure and light use of the fantastic, there are echoes of Vance and Leiber here, but it's very much its own thing. Sciomancy, the art of shadow mastery, is an imaginative and clever idea, and had me thinking more than once of the shadow I take for granted that follows me.


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A Shadow All of Light A Novel Fred Chappell Books Reviews

I thought "A Shadow All of Light" was the best fantasy novel I have read in the last few years. It is an odd book--really a book of interlocked stories that gradually turn into a novel. What I loved was the fun and exuberance of the style as well as the ingenuity of the plot and characters. I loved the writing page after page. It's written in a sort of comic high style--think Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange" meets "The Lord of the Rings." Chappell's book gave me all the pleasures of fantasy along with those of literary fiction.
I found this book to be entertaining. Imaginative writing kept me interested enough to turn the page, pick up the book again and to defend it's position in my hands when my son tried to abscond with it. This author is new to me and I ordered the book from my local library after reading a review in World magazine. Today I will put a copy of it in my cart to purchase later.
Fred Chappell brings together various strands of his long and varied writing career in the richly textured novel-in-stories that is "A Shadow All of Light." A speculative work set in an alternate Renaissance Italy, it traces the arrival of a country bumpkin who has taken the name Falco, seeking to apprentice himself to the master of shadows, Astolfo. In a picaresque series of adventures, Falco is challenged, humiliated, threatened, chastised - in short, he matures and becomes an adept in the art of harvesting and managing shadows.
Many of these tales appeared in other forms in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction." They are threaded together to bring us to a spectacular climax as Falco leads a high-stakes gambit to save the endangered city that has become his home.
A special gift for cat lovers resides in these pages - I won't spoil it, except to say that the transformation of Mutano and the story of the King of the Cats is marvelous!
For those who know Chappell's work in speculative fiction, this is a welcome return. Those who best know his Appalachian tales will respond to this tale of a rural boy becoming a sophisticate. And those who are fans of his poetry will recognize in this story a parable for how a weaver of tales - is not a writer a thief and curator of shadows? - is shaped by apprenticeship in the word.
Falco is a young man from the country with high ambitions. He travels to the port city of Tardocco with the intention of becoming an apprentice to a master shadow thief. Almost immediately he meets Maestro Astolfo, the most well known of all shadow dealers, who sees a great deal of potential in Falco and agrees to take him on as an apprentice.

Maestro Astolfo is a unique man. Secretive with a power of observation and intellect that would rival Sherlock Holmes himself. As Falco trains and learns more of the Maestro, he cannot help but wonder if the rumors he hears are true and just how far Astolfo’s knowledge goes.

Set in a pseudo 17th-18th Century Italy, A Shadow All of Light is told in a series of short stories. Each short story chronicles a time in Falco’s training and eventual partnership with Astolfo as he learns the art of shadows. Through the stories we see Falco grow and mature from a brash young man in the beginning to an older married man in the eventual end.

If I have one complaint about the book, it would be that the speaking style of the characters is rather stilted. Their speech is obviously based on speaking patterns of the time and can be rather odd to the modern ear. I found it to be very reminiscent of reading Shakespeare and there were several times I had to reread a sentence a few times to understand the meaning.

The action itself was well written and well paced. There were also numerous humorous moments that made me smile.

A Shadow All of Light was another of those books that came to me as a recommendation. Being a fan of Sherlock Holmes, I often find it interesting how authors will take his well known skills and fit them to another character. Maestro Astolfo is one such character in that he has taken a lifetime of study and applied it to become the most well known and richest of shadow dealers.

If it weren’t for the sometimes awkward speaking style of the characters, I would have gladly given A Shadow All of Light full marks. As it is, I do recommend this book to most readers. I just advise them to take their time and go slowly and enjoy.
Okay read
Fantastic tale marvelously told.
This is a fun, elegantly written, mind-bender of a story, full of pranks and inventive twists on consensus reality. At the level of allegory, it is a provoking meditation on representation, reputation and story-telling (think Plato's allegory of the cave and its use of shadows). An altogether satisfying departure from reality and descent into the heart of such reality as we can know.
Chappell has a poet’s facility with language, and I was happy to see him turn it to a fantasy tale. I loved his Appalachian stories, and here he portrays an Italianate setting with vivid character, from its sly bravos and petulant artists to its society of cats, pirates and unusual and deadly flora. With a touch of adventure and light use of the fantastic, there are echoes of Vance and Leiber here, but it's very much its own thing. Sciomancy, the art of shadow mastery, is an imaginative and clever idea, and had me thinking more than once of the shadow I take for granted that follows me.