Summary
Madouc is the third and last novel of Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy, after Lyonesse (also published as Suldrun's Garden) and The Green Pearl. The trilogy is set in the mythical Elder Isles in the Dark Ages, a generation or two before King Arthur. In the first book fairies stole the infant Dhrun, son of Princess Suldrun and Prince Aillas, and left a changeling in his place. That changeling is Madouc, raised as a princess of Lyonesse at the court of the scheming King Casmir and Queen Sollace, and she has grown into an irrepressible girl.
When a maid questions her birth, Madouc sets out to learn her pedigree. Lost in a forest, she discovers that her mother is the fairy Twisk, though her father remains a mystery. Casmir, furious that she will not marry as he wishes, makes her hand the prize in a quest for the Holy Grail. Madouc heads off on her own account, with a stable boy she has named Sir Pom Pom, who is after the Grail himself, and a stranger named Travante, who is searching for his lost youth; their road leads to Throop, a three headed ogre, and Pom Pom does find the Grail. Around them the larger story closes: the witch Desmei moves against the wizard Murgen, and part of the Isles sinks into the sea before Shimrod intervenes. Madouc uncovers Casmir's plan to have Dhrun killed to defeat a prophecy and exposes it. Casmir goes to war and loses; Aillas unites the Elder Isles, Casmir ends his days in a cell, and at the celebration Twisk identifies the wizard Shimrod as Madouc's father.
Vance's prose is ornate, formal and dryly ironic, full of elaborate courtesies and sharp comedy, and the plot runs on several threads at once. It reads best after the first two books, though Madouc's own story holds up alone. Kirkus called it "romantic fantasy at its brilliant best." It suits readers who enjoy language for its own sake, and anyone who wants a fairy tale told with a cynic's eye.
Historical Context & Significance
Madouc won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1990, and it is often listed under the series name as Lyonesse: Madouc. Underwood-Miller had published the hardcover in 1989, and Ace followed with a trade paperback in 1990. The finalists it beat were Dan Simmons's Carrion Comfort, Gene Wolfe's Soldier of Arete, Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard, Jonathan Carroll's A Child Across the Sky and Charles L. Grant's In a Dark Dream. The first volume, Lyonesse, had been a World Fantasy finalist in 1984, losing to John M. Ford's The Dragon Waiting, and a Nebula finalist as well.
Vance, born in San Francisco in 1916, had been publishing since the 1940s. He had won Hugo Awards for The Dragon Masters and The Last Castle in the 1960s and the World Fantasy Award for life achievement in 1984, and he was named a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1997. Legally blind since the 1980s, he kept writing with the help of software. He died in Oakland in May 2013, aged 96.
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