Tanith Lee: When the Lights Go Out
Tanith Lee - When the Lights Go Out
Tanith Lee has two kinds of books, the ones with lots of plot and little imagery and the ones with lots of imagery and little plot. When The Lights Go Out doesn’t have a lot of plot: Girl runs away, becomes priestess. While some of Lee’s books have just two or three images worth remembering, I left this book full of film flags. It was one of her ice cream books. It went down as easy as ice cream and just as sweet and creamy. Some of her recent books, particularly young adult or book club ones, don’t have the magic of her earlier works but When The Lights Go Out, published in 1996, does. Lee’s imagery is so beautiful, so precise, that I can see the things she describes in my mind. They transport me to the scene. I’ve long claimed that Shakespeare was Christopher Fry in his last life but in this one she’s Tanith Lee.
I think some reviewers, those who prefer the newspaper reporter’s spare prose, have criticized Tanith Lee’s use of the English language. It’s too lush for them. Lee sees the world in all of its colors but for some critics the world is black and white, or no more than 16 shades of gray. They think her descriptions are overdone. So more and more she has deserted the imagery that is her greatest skill, to conform her work to reviewers’ tastes. That is our loss but in When the Lights Go Out, she hasn’t done that. It’s one of her better things. Not her best, but lovely to read.
… the Thames, dirty silver as an ancient spoon…
…waves moved softly in transparent fans.
High up, the seagull called the scream of unvoiced human agony, on her behalf, to the ears of a God too far away to realize she had suffered.
The gull waddled along the sill, and jumped off, as if throwing itself to its doom.
…the knives of sunlight glinting.
Sea grey. Caps of cream like old curtain lace, and filmy greenness extinguishing. Then the cold sky turned a clear hot orange, fading up like smoke into violet. And the sea reflected, a chameleon, lying graciously. The sea was not any such colour, not even when she came in wearing red—
The sail bent like a wing.
…he saw…flame like a dart between their young jewelry eyes, a look.
Christmas stars on the tree of darkness.
Bells ran like knives in icing sugar air intense as vodka.
…under the full white ice of the moon…
The sea below, stilled by freezing. A crochet of ice against the beach…
A spray of water like diamonds.
The sea was loud. It crashed – a thousand goblets shattered – to the stones…
Snow and frost still drew in the shapes of things, the tiles on roofs, the pinkened coils of the stones along the beach.
She wound the serpents of her moon-pale arms about his neck.
The vivid red of the flames and the liquid ribs of the sea reflecting…
…and in their eyes the jewels of the lights.
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© Alllie 2009
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