The Last Magicians

John Jakes

Signet Books, 1969

Reviewed by John Hocking

I came of age in the Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s fantasy had its first major surge in popularity, spearheaded by the re-issue of J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard in mass market paperback editions. I ate it all up, and, while admiring Tolkien, preferred the mythic blood and thunder of Conan and his horde of imitators. Yep, you wouldn't believe it today but there really were hordes of imitators. And I missed very few of them. The Last Magicians is one of the few I didn't read.

It has an excellent pedigree; it was published in 1969 and dedicated to the author's fellow members of S.A.G.A. That's the Swordsmen and Sorcerers Guild of America, didn't you know? This informal group included Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Jack Vance, and John Jakes. They wrote short stories for their own series of anthologies (Flashing Swords 1, 2, 3 etc.) and dedicated books to one another. Jakes wrote damn near everything before he hit the bestseller lists with his sprawling historical novels, and this body of work includes a handful of moderately engaging Conan-inspired tales about Brak the barbarian. And he wrote The Last Magicians, a Signet paperback that saw a single printing before vanishing into obscurity.

The book is pure, uncut Sword & Sorcery; a self-consciously vigorous blend of Edgar Rice Burroughs plotting and Robert E. Howard action, set in a Tolkien-styled fantasy world, and starring a disillusioned wizard-warrior who reads like a watered down version of one of Michael Moorcock's doomed anti-heroes.

So it's not the most original thing I've ever read.

Jakes likely powered through this novel with some speed as it wears its flaws on its sleeve. The prose is uneven. The diverse cultures of the "Worlde" are dealt with in a cursory fashion. The sorcerous menace threatening the planet is a standard issue Otherworldly Evil out of Tolkien by way of H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt. An attempt to redeem the (rather self-indulgently grumpy) hero's personality through the love of a good woman is hackneyed and flat. Although the protagonist is a wizard, the author cannot be bothered to describe anything about the nature of magic, its source, or anything else about it except that it's hard to do and gives our hero a pounding headache.

Yet there is something here: Good old-fashioned forceful storytelling, for starters. The narrative plunges ahead over all obstacles and objections. The author's scenes of action are driving and intense, usually taking a cue from Howard and making it very tough on the hero. And one admirable trait shows through in virtually every Jakes book I've read: The man can create genuinely hateful villains and he never stints on cathartic confrontations with them. The whole may be standard stuff, and unlikely to impress anyone who wasn't in love with the genre, but there are moments of a raw sort of magic. In sporadic scenes, for a few paragraphs at a time, Jakes really can conjure one of the quintessential elements of Sword & Sorcery--the fiery, unironic depiction of an impossibly vivid clash between a heroic, but qualified, good, and a villainous, nigh unqualified, evil.

If nothing else, The Last Magicians reminded me of why I have always loved Sword & Sorcery. And why I always will.