Land of Unreason Author:Sprague de Camp, Pratt The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung taught that we should play more attention to dreams, myths, folktales and stories of the extraordinary. These fantastic narrations are often dismissed as 'mere fancy', of no value except to entertain children and the weak-minded. But according to Jung the fantastic appeals to the unconscious. It provides an outle... more »t for the less logical, more intuitive, side of ourselves. The unconscious is often neglected and suppressed in our ultra-logical, materialist, conscious world. If ignored for too long our unconscious will break out in rebellion, resulting in psychological disturbance. So if you find the stress of modern life too much De Camp and Pratt's book may be just what the doctor ordered. The authors have drawn heavily on folklore to create a strange, dream-like world that is entertaining, intriguing and sure to make you smile. The book is called and this is indeed a place where worker-day logic does not hold. The unconscious can find plenty of events here that don't obey conscious reason, but none-the-less have an intuitive rightness, a hidden order of their own. This is certainly not a book for children. The hero is an adult who has a cynical, tempestuous girlfriend back in Spain. King Oberon dallies with a beautiful, winged sprite, his lover, who he hides from his wife. The pleasures and pains of adult life are clearly depicted. This is a book to delight the adult unconscious mind.
The plot of the novel moves along very nicely and is never dull. We meet a great array of characters most of who are disconcerting in their unreasonableness. As Barber travels through Fairyland he looses some of his conscious up-tightness and enters into the spirit of the intuitive unconscious. This is certainly not a book of Nobel Prize winning themes, inspiring symbolism or astounding structure, but it is very successful in what it sets out to do.« less