Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

I picked up Mark Helprin's book "Winter's Tale" last year, mainly because of its title. I'd been working on a play since 1999 that used Shakespeare's play "A Winter's Tale" as inspiration and as a challenge.

So the title caught my eye and I picked it up.

I finished it this weekend at Cannon Beach. The book is ... wild. It starts in the 1890s or early 1900s and then leaps 100 years forward to 1999. Many characters from the first part come back. A flying white horse runs to the rescue. And the scenery, the imagination, and the joy of discovery are on every page.

It's a fantasy novel, but I cringe to write it that way. It's a fantasy novel, but that's like accusing Dickens of writing fantasy because he had ghosts in A Christmas Carol. It's got some magic and wonder, but shame on the book that doesn't.

Actually, I don't mean that literally. Hardhitting, in your face reality has its place too, but even there is a certain element of wonder, I suppose. I think what I'm defensive about is the term "fantasy novels," which make me think of Tolkien knock-offs and elvish archers on horseback. But there are good novels where the author has imagined a new set of rules that govern the world, and this is one of those.

And it is good. It is weird, too, as you might expect from what I've said so far. Even reading it, and being prepared for it, you're going to be left head-scratching a few times at some truly surprising turns. But it will stick with me for a long while.

Here's the NYT Review from 1983 (when the book came out). Notice it's not behind their firewall anymore. Good for them. The review does contain this rather stellar line:

THERE'S far more that I would wish to say about the book - so much more that I
find myself nervous, to a degree I don't recall in my past as a reviewer, about
failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance. ... ''Winter's
Tale'' is a great gift at an hour of great need.

And here's a recent mention of it at the NYT again, when they did a survey trying to find the best work of American fiction in the last 25 years. It received multiple votes.

Here it is on Amazon.

If 700 pages is your kind of read, and if you love New York (or want to) here's a book for you.