Charles de Lint or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Words
It was the early 1980s. I’d just moved all the way across the world, from England to New Zealand and I was feeling more than a bit discombobulated. It was the little things that kept tripping me up – rotary dial telephones were still a thing in those days, and the dials were mirror images of the dials I’d grown up using all my life in England. So now, where my finger expected to find a 9, it kept finding a 1 instead. It was all very disconcerting…
“It’s the Coriolis Force,” quipped a work colleague. “That’s the reason why water swirls down the drain anti-clockwise when you cross the equator into the Southern Hemisphere. It has the same effect on telephones.”
It made as much sense sense as any other explanation for the way this strange country at the bottom of the world actually worked.
I’d brought a suitcase full of books with me, but it wasn’t very long before I’d read them all. I began to experience story withdrawal symptoms. The majority of my library was still somewhere on the high seas, making its slow and steady way across the world. It would be almost a year before it finally rejoined me in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city. Strangely, Wellington is actually one of New Zealand’s smaller cities – several others are much larger in terms of both land area and population density. This reversal of normality is probably the fault of the Coriolis Force as well.
One day, wandering idly around the city, I stumbled across a bookshop in a small shopping mall called The Willis Street Village. There was a display of SFF books in the window. Most of them were American paperbacks. The shop, it transpired, was run by an eccentric expatriate Dutchman called Rolf Huyser who made his living by importing books in bulk from America and selling them to local SF fans. Immediately I felt more at home in this topsy turvy city than I had before. Here was something familiar in the middle of all the strangeness. It seemed that the Corlolis force did have some beneficial side effects after all. I went in to browse.
At first glance I was disappointed. I already owned most of the books on the shelves. Others appeared to be part of some interminable fantasy sequence or other. I tend to steer clear of those on principle. I hate the nervous tension caused by unresolved plot lines. Generally speaking, if a book doesn’t stand alone I don’t buy it.
There was one nicely fat book sitting on the shelf in splendid isolation. Moonheart by a writer I’d never heard of – Charles de Lint. French, I thought. An aristocrat, I thought. Cool!
I picked the book up and read the blurb. Then, as is my habit, I read the first page to see if I liked what I saw.
“If you’re enjoying it that much,” said a voice with a faint Dutch accent, “perhaps you might consider buying it?”
I looked up, the spell temporarily broken. I glanced down at the book. I was thirty pages in to it and showing no signs of slowing down. Now look what the Coriolis Force had made me do! Rolf Huyser’s suggestion seemed like a good one, so I paid for the book and took it away with me.
Twenty four hours later I was angry. I’d finished the book in record time and I wanted more and I wanted it now! Five hundred pages wasn’t nearly enough! The book had punched all my buttons in exactly the right sequence and I was hooked.
I hurried back to the bookshop, but there were no more Charles de Lint books on the shelves. There was nothing else for it, I’d have to read Moonheart again. Somehow that felt very, very right.
Over the years Charles de Lint has written a considerable number of fantasy novels, all of which I’ve devoured and all of which I’ve greatly enjoyed. He’s even committed the cardinal sin of writing a never ending series known as the Newford stories, named for the eponymous city in which the adventures (largely) take place. But it’s easy to forgive him for that – being the clever and cunning writer that he is he has made every book in the series a stand alone novel and the books can be read in any order whatsoever.
I’ve now lived in New Zealand for many more years than I lived in England. These days it’s the country that I call home and I’m very happy and comfortable here. I’ve grown quite accustomed to the way that the Coriolis Force shapes the strangeness that even now sometimes takes me by surprise.
But I’ll never forget how Moonheart settled me down and kept me company and thrilled, chilled and delighted me in those uncomfortable early days.
© Alan Robson
I’ve been an SFF fan ever since I was a small child. Personally, I blame my mother. One day she handed me a book and said, “I think you might enjoy this.” It was The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham, and she was quite right. I’ve never looked back. A close friend, amused by the fanaticism with which I indulged my hobby, used to refer to me jokingly as the bearded triffid. The nickname stuck.
I write a regular book review column for a small New Zealand magazine. In between reading and writing, I go for walks with my dog, Jake.
Celebrating CdL 