Prospero and Roger Bacon, the two main characters in a story that seems crammed with wizards, were wizards. They knew seven different runic alphabets, could sing the Dies Irae all the way through to the end, and knew what a Hand of Glory was. Though they could not make the moon eclipse, they could do some very striking lightning effects and make it look as though it might rain if you waited long enough.
We're taking a break from Poul Anderson for a moment, in part because the third book on the list (The Broken Sword, coming up next) hasn't arrived yet and in part because I really got a hankering to read about magic users. Personally, I like my mages like I like my scotch: well aged and made using a process I don't fully understand. Robes and floppy hats are a must. Wands are large, twisted and gnarled, none of these twigs maneuvered by a flick of the wrist. In my home campaigns, magic is a dangerous, unpredictable force of nature wielded only by those crazy and wise enough to have survived years of training, and I can respect a book that treats its power as dangerous both to the target and the caster.
I'm not going to get too deep into the story of this book, because I'm not quite sure I understand it myself. Perhaps that was Bellairs' intention. I will go so far as to say that the premise is fairly simple: two wizards find out they have been placed under a curse, and set off to defeat the evil sorcerer. Me losing the plot, therefore, had less to do with the complexity as it did with the absolute weirdness of the world it's set in. Our main characters face every challenge — from raising the dead to dispelling illusory towns to checking in on a Red Sox game — with the sort of bored nonchalance that you or I would do if asked to describe our daily routine. This position is understandable when you realize that we're talking about men with decades of magical training, but Bellairs is unabashed about not holding our hand when it comes to the world he's built. In fact, so much of the book is spent referencing things that are never explained that it sometimes gave me the feeling of reading the middle book in a series. Time is meaningless, as the aforementioned Red Sox game indicates, as is space: the book is set in the South Kingdom, a fictional land of 7 kings and countless duchies that is also adjacent to France and the island of England, which is besieged by either pirates or Mongols, I forgot which. This book is absolutely bonkers, but in a good way, like a half-remembered fairy tail from one's childhood.
It doesn't help that he first paragraph of the prologue, quoted above, does not lie with regards to the number of wizards in this book. Nearly every person our heroes reference or encounter is a mage of some sort — off the top of my head, I count 6 out of 10 named characters as possessing some magic ability — but for those expecting high-flying, world-rending magical battles, I recommend you look elsewhere. Magic in this world is more subtle, reflected early on in a hilarious passage wherein Prospero recites a spell that rattles all the pans in the house and causes all the clocks to chime: a spell, Prospero laments, that he has never found a use for. It makes sense, in a strange way: in a world where magic is as much a force of nature as gravity, it stands to reason that the vast majority of spells would be utterly useless, or at least incredibly specific in their use. I've always thought that a system like that, wherein magic users don't gain new spells but instead learn how to better control and manipulate the spells they already know, would be really interesting in play. Sort of like sympathy in The Kingkiller Chronicles, the test of a master wizard would be not in how much magic they can wield, but in how much they can wield safely.
The Face in the Frost is, ultimately, an exercise in world-building. It takes a few ideas and stretches them to their breaking point, and for that I have to begrudgingly respect it. I've never been one to demand strict explanations from my fantasy works (call it Gygaxian Naturalism if you will), because I find they often don't affect the plot to any significant degree. Think of it like Star Trek: you [TECH] the [TECH] to stop the [TECH] from overloading, and as long as you don't go into any further detail, the suspension of disbelief is never broken. The OSR, and rules-light games in general, seem to have embraced this philosophy in regards to world-building and dungeoncraft, and I for one believe it makes for a better game in the long run. To that end, I have to say that Bellairs book, for all its eccentricities and inscrutability, is as monumental as so many other sci-fi/fantasy authors have said it is.
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