![]() Journeys of self-discovery appearing in every genre, teaching us about the main character as well as ourselves. The journey takes many forms: Gilgamesh searching for immortality Dante’s trips to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory and Wyatt and Billy’s road trip in Easy Rider, among many others. These voyages speak to human beings’ desire to answer fundamental questions about their place in the world. John Myers Myers takes a novel approach to this genre in Silverlock. His main character learns about himself by participating in the lives of other literary figures.Ī chance event and a preliminary literary allusion start the story in Silverlock. This rollicking adventure begins with a shipwreck on an island where notable characters of literature, history, and folklore coexist Hamlet and Oedipus, Don Quixote and Doctor Faustus, Becky Sharp and Daniel Boone. SIDELIGHTS: John Myers Myerss popularity rests for the most part on a single book. The dreadfully dull A.Clarence Shandon (B.A., Business Administration) is on board the Naglfar (several days out of Baltimore) and threatened by shipwreck. Silverlock and The Silverlock Companion, NESFA (Framingham, MA), 2004. Already, Myers Myers is hinting at the primary component of the book - the Naglfar is the ship that Loki pilots to Ragnorak. After the ship sinks, Shandon is thrown together with the mysterious Boyan Taliesin Golias. Golias saves Shandon’s life and becomes his guide and traveling companion through the strange country known as the Commonwealth. This journey is one of self-discovery for Shandon, with the living literature he meets serving as the catalyst for his development. He will be amused by the wicked wit that illumines the vast panorama, and intrigued by the challenge it offers his own learning.From that point, the literary and mythical allusions come so fast and thick, it’s almost impossible to keep up.Īfter Golias rescues Shandon from a life as a pig (compliments of Circe), he and Shandon are thrown together with a Viking raiding party. And in the discovering, the literate reader will have a wonderful time. Clarence Shandon came to the Commonwealth, exchanging his everyday name and Chicago-bound life for that of a traveler beyond time what great ones of old legend and modern story he encountered, and to what purpose what loves he knew and what fights he fought what trials befell him in the Pit, and what truth he discovered when at last he won to the Hippocrene Spring-these are matters of such crowding variety and implicit significance as the reader must discover for himself. Always it is fresh and bold in concept, superb in its execution. In content, it is something between a many-peopled, incident-studded story of high emprise, and a morality for our time. ![]() ![]() In form, it is sheer headlong narrative, with occasional clangorous verses woven into its fabric. This is the same defense Taliesin makes for Silverlock, on trial for attempting to reach Hyppocrene without reading all. In essence, this is the tale of Silverlock's wanderings in the Commonwealth, the land of immortal heroes real and imagined, in search of his true destiny. In this richly picaresque story of a modern man's fruitful adventurings in legendary realms of gold, John Myers Myers has presented a glowing tapestry of real excitement and meaning. SILVERLOCK is one of the all-time great fantasy classics.
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