Franklin's Maxim at work...with a little help

kw: book reviews, science fiction, fantasy, picaresque tales

After reading a book and collection by Matthew Hughes, set in his Archonate milieu, I just had to pick up the Fool books: Fools Errant and Fool Me Twice. The Fool in question is young Filidor Vesh, nephew and heir of the Archon. Franklin's Maxim, fyi, is "Nature keeps a hard school, but a fool will learn in no other, and scarce in that." Filidor's uncle, having long since given up on more traditional forms of tutelage, brings him, over and again, into intimate contact with Nature and culture of as many forms as possible. It's a kill or cure method, and of course (for the author is the master of the narrative) it works. I just takes a few iterations.

Reading Hughes in the past, I'd been struck by his literary style. I just put my finger on it: it reads very much like 19th Century translations of Jules Verne. Yes, I know modern scholars very much impugn these old translations, and are hurrying to retranslate all of Verne. But those translations were produced with a particular English audience in mind, and serve well in that context.

So, in this two-volume coming-of-age tale, well stocked with exaggerated societies—human and not—of a variety much beyond anything Jonathan Swift might have devised, young Filidor must contend with around a dozen kinds of culture shock, far-future creatures such as enormous beavers and mastiff-size ants, several sorts of enigmatic "ultramondane" (i.e. space alien) folk, and assorted brigands, wizards, and thieves. While one or two last-minute rescues stretch one's credulity, in the main the narrative carries one along into a realm where all seems quite sensible, though it is far from coherent to poor Filidor.

The title of the second book comes from the aphorism "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Filidor expresses this at one point in the story, but finds he is only half right: a very rough "half", but just the right one.