A Spell for Chameleon

Piers Anthony

All right, I'm willing to admit that maybe I gave up on Piers Anthony a little too easily; I made it through approximately ninety-four pages of A Spell for Chameleon before I decided that my goal to read the entire Xanth series in 2006 was doomed to failure. And maybe I feel a little more let down than I should just given the novel itself. Why? I've been waiting to read the Xanth novels since approximately 1980. (Not that I couldn't read them, for whatever reason; I just never got round to it.) Fast-forward twenty-five years, I've been reading all these spectacular book titles and thinking, "I've really got to read those some day." Well, at one point I decided that 2006 would contain that day, and if I was going to get through the twenty-seven novels, I'd better start early in the year. (Note: by the time you read this, I believe there are twenty-nine Xanth novels, and a thirtieth coming later this year; I was going on old info.) And I did. And...

A Spell for Chameleon follows Bink, on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, when one must either possess a magic talent or be cast out of Xanth. Bink can't find his magic power, so he embarks on a quest to go see the Good Magician Humfrey to see if, in exchange for a year of service from Bink, Humfrey can discover what his power is. Or, of course, whether he's destined to exile.

The quest novel is a tried and true genre, the literary equivalent of the road movie. Everyone knows what the rules are. We keep reading quest novels, and watching road movies, to see what variations the author throws in. I got the feeling that this was was supposed to be funny and (somewhat) raunchy. It succeeds at neither. It's possible that A Spell for Chameleon feels worn and cliched because I'm reading the book almost thirty years after its publication, but I don't think so; I think it's worn and cliched because it was all old by the time it was published, a coarse amalgamation of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Pierre Louys, but without Burroughs' imagination or Louys' flair.

I still plan to try the Incarnations of Immortality series this year; I hope it's better than this.