LYONESSE

LYONESSE by Jack Vance. Berkley, $6.95. This latest effort has all the qualities Vance devotees cherish: vivid clarity in description, clever, colorful protagonists, fully realized societies complete with Vance's trademark footnotes, and headlong, exciting plotting that has footloose freedom without becoming slipshod.

It's true that Vance has only one voice: a carefully crafted, mock-archaic one. Vance characters, from wizards to galactic effectuators, always speak with the same sense of antiquated, polite calculation. In LYONESSE, a pair of housecats are given the power of speech, and when they immediately pipe up with a uniquely Vancian courteous peevishness the effective is irresistably (and deliberately) hilarious. It's a voice that has served Vance well, and has even been borrowed wholesale by Michael Shea without becoming tiresome.

Vance's works have always had a veiled darker side; they are replete with wine-sipping perverts whose sidelong glances and polite insinuations hint at unspeakable vices. Vance is a writer of rare perception; although he created many of the parameters of modern fantasy, he is clearly aware of their exhaustion. His answer, like Shea's, is to turn up the amps.

Thus we have a female character whose suffering innocence almost reminds one of deSade's Justine. There is a definite, quiet cruelty in this book that is presented with an alarming sense of relish. Characters are blinded, tortured, branded, buggered, thrown into wells and left to die. Women and children especially are singled out for torment; one long section is a Tanith Lee-esque black fairy tale, and its peculiar viciousness is cynically funny. At last Vance even turns on the reader, for the book's ending is a cruel joke. It hints at books to follow, but since Vance's languorous attitude toward sequels is legendary, his audience is probably doomed to a long session on the tenterhooks.