Vera Nazarian is a protegee of Marion Zimmer Bradley, but her influences are much older. Glancing over the plethora of positive reviews on the inside cover, several names crop up again and again: Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, and Tanith Lee. However, one of these names is not like the others. The Tanith Lee comparisons come from the similarities between Dreams of the Compass Rose and Lee's Flat Earth series, of which I have, admittedly, only read one book - the excellent Night's Master. And Night's Master, as well as being woefully out of print, is Lee's exercise in emulating her influences - namely, Dunsany and Clark Ashton Smith.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Jack Vance's first book, The Dying Earth, is a similar blend of Dunsany and Smith (a little heavier on the Smith, perhaps), but provided a springboard from which Vance was able to develop his own, distinctive voice. I haven't read much Lee aside from Night's Master, but even in that volume I could see that she was establishing her own prose style, as rich as Dunsany and as imaginative as Smith but very much her own.

I am not sure that the same can be said for Nazarian in Dreams of the Compass Rose. I'm seeing her influences, and she by and large does an excellent job of paying tribute to them, but I'm not seeing a distinctive voice in there. In fact, Nazarian occasionally allows herself to slip into a more pedestrian, workmanlike prose style, which I feel is a failing.

Of course, as far as Dunsany-Smith-Vance-Lee homages go, Dreams of the Compass Rose is pretty damn excellent. Like Night's Master and The Dying Earth, each chapter of Dreams of the Compass Rose seems intended to sit as a standalone short story, but by the end of the book it becomes clear how all (or at least most) of the different pieces interrelate. By and large Nazarian succeeds in making each segment of the book an integrated chapter of the story as well as a standalone short, but occasionally she fails; the later chapters would lose much of their impact if read in isolation, whereas some of the earlier chapters seem nigh-irrelevant to the main story: yes, they do all fit within the general theme (a meditation on the difference between wonder and illusion in fantasy), but the characters and incidents which take place in those few square pegs don't seem to have much relevance to the main plot strands; there was at least one case where I was left wondering why a perfectly interesting character had been entirely abandoned after the story he shows up in.

Back to the general theme: Nazarian seems to be trying to make a philosophical distinction between illusion - which is falsehood and delusion and superstition, and is bad for you (or at any rate does you no good) - and wonder, which looks a lot like illusion except that it has something of truth to it. The battleground for the conflict between truth and falsehood is a nicely realised setting reminiscent of Smith's Zothique cycle - a decadent, polytheistic counterpart to the Arabian Nights. By and large, Nazarian has learned the lesson that M. John Harrison recently tried to teach us in a contentious blog entry: that worldbuilding in fiction is meaningless and pointless if it overrules storytelling. Anyone who has enjoyed Lord of the Rings but was bored stiff by the Silmarillion knows the score here: a paragraph or two illuminating the ways of your fantasy world might impress readers, but twenty pages of it will leave them cold - and perhaps the most interesting way to show us your fantasy world is to just tell your story and trust us to pick up on things. Nazarian is unimpeachable on this count.

Don't let my doubts about Nazarian's originality dissuade you from reading this book. Dreams of the Compass Rose is a moving, meaningful, enjoyable and impressive fantasy novel which deserves to be read by everyone, and while the prose is familiar the ideas are new and sparkling. I just don't know whether Nazarian is going to prove to be a one-hit wonder or not.