cover image Lorien Lost

Lorien Lost

Michael King. St. Martin's Press, $22 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-14349-7

Set in London of 1871, this beguiling if uneven debut, a parable on the dangers and powers of the artistic imagination, fuses fantasy and romance in a recreation of the style and spirit of Victorian adventure novels. Eccentric recluse Milton Radcliffe, an art collector gifted with the ability to step inside the world of his paintings, becomes obsessed with a portrait of Lorien, wife and model of the famous but publicity-shy artist Jonathan Larking. After a fire destroys his painting of Lorien, Milton launches an expedition to locate Larking's cottage hideaway in Devonshire, where a life-sized statue of Lorien is stashed away. In Milton's journey through Larking Land-both a protean realm of the imagination and a challenging concrete reality-the recluse-turned-adventurer is accompanied by Heather Feur-De-Lys, an opera soprano who knew Lorien as a little girl. Thulemander, a 14th-century Wessex cartographer, periodically materializes to taunt Milton, who encounters dragons, other bizarre creatures and apparitions on a quest that extends from Madam Tussaud's waxworks to a secret tunnel where he, Heather and a police inspector discover an enormous, serenely smiling head, the Golden Child. Although King, a California graphics designer, resorts to half-baked symbolism, dead-end subplots and two-dimensional characters, his yarn-charmingly illustrated with 50 Victorian engravings and ornamental designs-captivates with its imaginative vision and lyrical prose. (June)