R.A.MacAvoy – Tea with the Black Dragon
September 17th, 2010 by Sara
A story about a dragon…but with a twist in the tail tale.
This book was one of those things that I had heard about numerous times from people, but had never actually seen. On the day I bought the book (from a charity bookshop, I’ll admit), I saw the same title in two other places. I took it as a sign and began reading as soon as I got home. Typically, life got in the way and it took me another month and a half to actually finish the book, despite it being only 166 pages long.
Although it is quite firmly in the Fantasy genre, it isn’t like anything I’ve ever read before. Set in modern day (or at least, modern in the 80’s, when this was written) America, the book follows three characters. Martha Macnamara, her daughter Elizabeth, and a mysterious, seemingly Eurasian man Oolang Long. Getting a call from her daughter, Martha flies across the country to San Francisco and stays in the luxury James Hotel, whereupon she meets Mr. Long. Quickly the two become friends, and when the book’s events begin to unfold, it is the quiet, respectful form of Oolang Long who must risk everything he has to save his new friend and her daughter.
One of my first thoughts about the writing style of this book was how it seemed to flirt with post-modernism. This isn’t to say that it is written in stream of consciousness, or it’s all doom and gloom with little hope for anything else…but there are one or two allusions to earlier pieces of writing which are easily missed. (I would have probably missed them myself if I hadn’t studied them recently). The pace of the book rolls along in a nice manner. It’s not so slow as to feel sluggish, but not too fast that you have to re-read pages to figure out how it’s suddenly ten years in the future on a different planet.
The characters are given back stories in a manner which doesn’t expect the reader to go through a page and a half of text in one go. Rather, things are given in small chunks as and when they are needed, serving to make the characters rich and multi-dimensional. By the end of the book, I found myself rooting for the main characters, going so far as to actually be wanting a loophole for them to be able to get out of the sticky situation they find themselves in.
The word ‘prophecy’ made me twitch for a moment near to the end of the story. It’s a cliché sort of ‘get out of jail free’ card which – in my opinion – is used far too often in fantasy novels. In this instance however, I wasn’t entirely sure as to why it was used, since it was mentioned less than a handful of times, and it didn’t seem to have a great amount of bearing on the story. Give an extra point to Ms. MacAvoy in that regard. The way in which the author also manages to weave fantasy and reality in a subtle way which doesn’t make you want to roll your eyes at clumsy storytelling.
All in all, I found it a peculiar type of book. Not really like anything I’ve ever read before, although that certainly isn’t a bad thing. If you see a copy, definitely pick it up and spend a few hours reading it. The different layers of the book in terms of characters, style and plot have ensured that this novel has a place on my bookcase instead of a place in the nearest charity shop.
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