A Book Review

Fantasy breaks fresh ground: Quid and Harmony by Allan Smith

Allan Smith has taken the much visited fantasy genre and conjured a genuinely original story with wonder, horror and romance played out on the textured tapestry of a world precariously at risk. To make goodness convincing, and particularly to make it interesting, is much harder work than to show evil. Both good and evil catch breath here. The flip-flop interface of worlds is bewitching and the pace relentless. Music, uniquely powerful music played and danced, seamlessly laces the plot. The pages had little time to settle as I read this book.

Readers will discover this author is a smith of evocative words. He took his apprenticeship with the humbling act of seeking wide opinion, professional and otherwise, through many revisions over eight years. The love of fine craftsmanship and the long gestation of this book is evidence of his unwillingness to compromise.

Quid and Harmony is full of more inventive twists than the road among the Tasmanian hills where Allan built his first house. In a way, the ‘notes’ for this book accumulated long before he began pecking at his laptop. His rambling house on a hillside is among the first of those ‘notes’. From the secret passageways built behind walls (legendary among the children of his friends) to architectural detail, one finds his written world equally convincing and fascinating. There is the affectionate making and playing of many musical instruments. Over the years Allan has finished guitars, lutes, and other more fanciful pieces. His friends remember his recumbent bicycle experiments. The print version at least, ended in success… an other-worldly transport device called a laze-along that glides to the aid of fugitives deep in tunnels of the city.

The characters live. We exult with the exuberant Quid. We’re inside the numbness, panic and protest, as Harmony comes to knowledge of her identity. We accompany Harmony, kidnapped and carried beyond hope.

My favorite character is Iris, the plucky little scrubber who pursues her getting of wisdom, pivotal, it turns out, to the very rescue of her world, gleaned from books borrowed in secret. The exalted Librarians, for all their learning, do not recognize what transpires in the nook beneath their feet.

Allan baits his lines of plot with revelations and surprises. Many of them. There is theology here evoking C. S. Lewis. Gleaming insights are embedded in incident and in dialog. How deftly Quid turns on its head the presumption that there could be nothing worse than death and suffering.

I readily visualize a movie, ducking in my mind’s eye from the animated advance of the lola’s steaming reptilian bulk on the wide screen. The sinister city of ice. The music. The singing. I can feel the power of the dance.

Quid and Harmony is the first of a trilogy and I am already grateful that my appetite for more will not go unsatisfied. I suggest you elevate your feet tonight, pour a glass of port, catch a whiff of fresh ink, the flash of the elegant cover and crack open page one. Forget about the morning’s to-do list. You’ll be up too late tonight.

Steve Isham is a Tasmanian artist and publisher.