Black Gate

I’m a sucker for anthropomorphic fantasy. You know, stories that feature animals with human speech and personalities. Some of the best fantasy ever created has been in this fine tradition.

Watership Down. Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge. The Secret of Nimh. The Wind in the Willows. The Redwall books. The Lion King. Ratatouille. 101 Dalmatians. Joyce Maxner and William Joyce’s Nicholas Cricket.

Is there anything new in anthropomorphic fantasy? Anything that doesn’t come from Disney and Pixar, anyway? Yes there is. Exhibit A: the debut novel from Howard L. Anderson, about which Mary Doria Russell says: “If Larry McMurtry had written Wind in the Willows, he might have come up with something almost as wonderful and moving… This is a novel that defies analysis and summaries.”

Having escaped from Australia’s Adelaide Zoo, an orphaned platypus named Albert embarks on a journey through the outback in search of “Old Australia,” a rumored land of liberty, promise, and peace. What he will find there, however, away from the safe confinement of his enclosure for the first time since his earliest memories, proves to be a good deal more than he anticipated.

Alone in the outback, with an empty soft drink bottle as his sole possession, Albert stumbles upon pyromaniacal wombat Jack, and together they spend a night drinking and gambling in Ponsby Station, a rough-and-tumble mining town. Accused of burning down the local mercantile, the duo flees into menacing dingo territory and quickly go their separate ways — Albert to pursue his destiny in the wastelands, Jack to reconcile his past.

Encountering a motley assortment of characters along the way — a pair of invariably drunk bandicoots, a militia of kangaroos, hordes of the mercurial dingoes, and a former prize-fighting Tasmanian devil — our unlikely hero will discover a strength and skill for survival he never suspected he possessed.

Any reading experience featuring a Tasmanian devil, drunk bandicoots, and a “pyromaniacal wombat” gets my immediate attention. Albert of Adelaide was published in July by Twelve/Hachette Book Group. It is 223 pages for $24.99 in hardcover, or $12.99 for the digital edition.

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I first met Yves Meynard at the World Fantasy Convention in Montreal in 2001. Yes, that was the year of 9/11, when the entire country stopped flying for weeks. I still remember my flight into Montreal… it was scarcely a month after the attacks and the cabin was virtually empty. You could wander around and take whatever seat you wanted.

Sadly, the same was more or less true of the convention. The World Fantasy Convention typically sells somewhere around 1,000 memberships, but a lot more were sold than used that year. Some estimates put the number of attendees at around 200. Whatever the case, it was the smallest and most intimate convention I’ve ever attended.

Which wasn’t wholly a bad thing. I remember the convention chiefly for the many great conversations I had. I’d lived in Ottawa — less than two hours away — until 1987, and this was a chance to re-connect with Canadian friends, including Mark Shainblum, Don Bassingthwaite, Claude Lalumiere, Rodger Turner, and Charles de Lint. In short order, I found myself introduced to some of the best French Canadian fantasy writers on the scene, including Jean-Louis Trudel and Yves Meynard.

I hit it off with Yves immediately. He was a fellow editor, the literary editor for French Canadian SF magazine Solaris, and his widely-praised first novel, The Book of Knights, had been published by Tor in 1999.

He was already being recognized as a major talent. Ursula K. Le Guin called The Book of Knights “An unpredictable, brilliantly imaginative, and very engaging fantasy,” and Locus magazine, commenting on editor David Hartwell’s annual accomplishments, said:

In terms of both mature craft and originality of imagination, Hartwell’s major discovery this year has to be the French-Canadian writer Yves Meynard.

Yves turned out to be a fascinating guy with a deep appreciation of Canadian fantasy in both French and English. He wrote fluently in both languages, a skill I envied, and we had several great talks.

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