A Game of Dark

William Mayne

A Game of Dark is a book whose first chapter is somewhat likely to send readers packing. It did me, at least for a couple of weeks, but I eventually picked it up again, and am relatively glad I did.

The book revolves around Donald Jackson, British schoolboy with a relatively miserable life. When he's fantasizing, Donald enters a sword-and-sorcery medieval world where he becomes Jackson, who soon after his arrival in a strange land finds himself a page to Bonebreak, the new Lord of the place, whose job is to go off and kill a large white worm that keeps eating the villagers. The two stories continue on in parallel throughout the book, though the climax is far from the earth-shattering revelation the book jacket would have you believe.

The transition periods between reality and fantasy are both the book's main strength and its weakness. While the technique is very well-known (almost to the point of being considered cliché), it's not actually all that often used, and is usually a pleasure when one stumbles upon it-- Mayne slips his character from reality to fantasy between sentences, or at times in the middle of a sentence. Unfortunately, this is quite jarring in the first chapter; there's a much better delineation a little farther on in the book that would have served much better as the beginning transition. Still, for all that, once you've caught on to what Mayne's doing, it's relatively easy to follow.

The characters are for the most part decently drawn, though only Donald ever truly achieves three-dimensional status. Still, this is a far cry from most of the stock sci-fi/fantasy stuff we read as kids during that era; at least there's one character you could bring home to mum whom she couldn't use as a sewing pattern.

Probably worth checking out if you stumble across it, but not really one to go out of your way for.