Recently my brother challenged me to give Andre Norton another try, as a lot of her stuff is back in print. And I have, and I’ve been reasonably surprised–there’s more to her work than I had remembered. More embarassingly, it’s become clear that the reason I didn’t like some of her books on first attempt is that I was too young (and too impatient) to appreciate them. Now, the series for which Norton is best known is her “Witch World” series; my siblings had a number of books from the series, including the present title, and though I had tried to read it several times I never got very far. The blurb was interesting–a man from our world, a fugitive, is transported to a strange land in another universe, a land of magic and witches. But somehow the book itself never grabbed me.

Whilst visiting Portland last fall, with all of the riches of Powells Books spread before me, I decided it was time to give Witch World and its sequels another try.

Simon Tregarth, soldier of fortune, is being hunted by some men who have betrayed him. Expecting to be taken at any time, he stops for one last fine meal–and is contacted by a man who offers him a chance to escape, forever. If he will but sit on an ancient stone, the Siege Perilous, it will transport him to another world…and not to any world, but to the world where he will best fit in. He arrives in a desolate location in time to save a young women from the fangs of the Hounds of Alizon. She, it develops, is one of the nameless witches of the land of Estcarp. He adopts her land as his own, and devotes his skill at warcraft to defending Estcarp from its many enemies.

There’s more here than I remembered, and less than I had hoped. Norton is a consummate storyteller, and writes with a spare and lean voice in which every word tells. It’s easy to see why I didn’t like the book as a kid; I was a voracious reader, but I see now that I wasn’t a good reader. I surfed along the top of the paragraphs, catching the gist of the story and leaving behind everything that didn’t advance the plot–or that didn’t fit my preconceptions of what the book was supposed to be about. You can’t read Norton like that; she doesn’t tell you twice, and she doesn’t rub your nose in what’s going on. You must read her prose carefully, or you’ll miss things.

That said, I found the book to be rather pedestrian–if it’s better in the small details than I remembered, it’s by no means her best. Still, I liked it well enough to return to Powells and pick up three more from the series. More on those another time.