I took the Sunday off, and decided to relax with a good book.
Silk Road is a very fine historical fantasy by Jeanne Larsen.
It was published in 1989 – my copy is a Henry Holt hardback I bought second hand about two or three years back, and then decided to save it for a good time.

From what I can see, the novel was not marketed as fantasy – the tag line reads “a novel of eight-century China”, and I guess this was sold as straight historical fiction.

And yet, there’s a lot of imaginative stuff, between these covers – gods and goddesses, ghosts, dragons.
There’s a nice dollop of Taoist magic, and a lot of Chinese mythology.

Against the historical background of Tang China and of the Silk Road nations, we follow the adventures of the many-named heroine.
But the novel is built as a mosaic, alternating the first-person narrative of Greenpearl’s travels with visions of heavens and hells, snippets of poetry, folk tales and other wonders.

And it is a fine story – written in a good solid style, entertaining and with lots of nicely-done details.
It somewhat replicates Chinese narrative modules, and weaves seamlessly historical facts, folklore and invention.
And from time to time reminds me with the Master Li novels by Barry Hughart – that I always considered absolutely masterful.

It’s been 25 years since this book came out – it was, apparently, the first novel by Larsen, a poet and Orientalist who at the time taught literature and creative writing.
As I did some background research writing this post, I found out more titles by her, nd I must say I’m rather intrigued by Bronze Mirror, a 1991 novel which became an opera in 2002.
There’s a lot to explore.
But for the moment, I’m more than halfway through Silk Road, and it’s great going.