Lord Dunsany Re-read: A House on Go-by Street
Bill Ward and I are continuing with our Lord Dunsany re-read with a follow-up to one of Dunsany’s greatest, “Idle Days on the Yann.” Here’s a link to the Gutenberg edition of Tales of Three Hemispheres, one of Lord Dunsany’s later (and to my mind weaker) collections. Towards the very end of the collection are “A Shop in Go-By Street,” and “The Avenger Of Perdóndaris.” Next week we’ll be discussing “Avenger.” This week we read “Go-By Street.”
Howard: This was the first Lord Dunsany story I’ve read where I felt tension. I thought I’d read it before, but it seemed new to me, because I honestly was waiting, breathless, to see whether the narrator could get back to the Yann. There was less distance between the reader and the events this time than I’ve felt before in a Dunsany story, perhaps because I could relate so well to the narrator’s desperate search for a way back to the land of dreams and the magic he found there. And I exulted with him when he found the way, and I enjoyed with him the delights along his path and all the marvelous little Dusnany-esque asides, like the dreams of dead poets and the sleeping gods and how forlorn Time will be when the Gods are finally dead, and the fate of those who prophesy the word of dead gods.