Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage – by Bardolph, Baronis and Telling.
I began this review long ago in a completely different vein, a more commonplace and recognized style of ‘review’, yet my mercurial temperament got the better of me and I decided to throw those virtual letters to the virtual wind and begin again. Yet even still, as I now re-read and leaf through this Tome of a Heretofore Unknown Personage, I’m very tempted to make specific note of many, many sections of verse… however, I realize that would be a disservice to the author… a bastardization of the medium, a cheapening of his hard work. This is something he created for people to read, to experience themselves, not something to have the magic and secrets greedily sucked out of and marginalized by over-anxious commentators such as myself. I do not want to kill the excitement and/or the mystery of the novel. It reveals itself to you at its own, very deliberate pace as it is read; it was written a certain way after all – and that way only becomes clear when experienced within the meticulously constructed context of the whole. So forgive my new found tendency to be very general when I speak of this work. I’ll focus the following observations of mine around general themes and the “essence” of the work.
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