Books: Lost Shadow

THE CHARWOMAN’S SHADOW —Lord Dunsany—Putnam ($2).

The slovenliest man in all Britain writes some of its loveliest prose. Lord Dunsany takes childish pride in the sag of his coat and the splay of his collar, what time he gets lost on a golden road to nowhere, beholding faery sights. Shadows are among his specialties. For The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) he invented a whole zone of twilight, where unicorns browsed and cabbage-roots were thunderbolts. Now he writes of a crone, cheated of her shadow by a magician of old Spain, and of a romantic worldling who came to the magician’s wood to learn the making of gold for his sister’s dowry; of how this lad, one Ramon Alonzo, did not rest until he had rummaged through the magician’s spellbound shadow-box and found that which ends the story as all fairy tales should end. There is a certain philosophy of shadows woven through the pages, but the book is mostly music.