This book is a send up of the cliches and tropes of sword&sorcery-style fantasy fiction. It poses as a guidebook to Fantasyland, a place which contains all the fantasy cliches of all fantasy writing. (The title is a clear nod to the Rough Guide series of guidebooks.) The central part of the book, which contains an encyclopedia-style list of entries, is structured around the notion that the reader is on an organised Tour of Fantasyland, and explains to the tourist the arbitrary Rules which are themselves laid down by the Management. Because of this structure, and because many of the entries are written in second person ("After a month of eating [waybread] you will even be glad of stew"), I found that the book read more as a spoof of roleplaying games, with the Management standing in for the DM, than of fantasy books, with the Management standing in for the author.
The entries contain chuckles aplenty, both in the form of one-liners ("Legends are important sources of true information. They always turn out to be far more accurate than history" and, "Missing heirs occur with great frequency. At any given time, half the countries in Fantasyland will have mislaid their crown princess/prince") and overall observations written in a slightly baffled tone, such as the conundrum of how there can be towns that have become prosperous through trade given that most ships are attacked by pirates or monsters, and most caravans are attacked by bandits.
Throughout the book, standard cliched expressions are flagged as such: Elves singing "songs of aching beauty", adventurers travelling through "rocky defiles", dark lords and their "fell purposes." These phrases, the book maintains, "perform the same function as music in films."
Although this book is fun to read, it wasn't the brilliant, hilarious evisceration of the genre that I was expecting. It might sound odd given the sort of books the author writes, but I couldn't help thinking that this great idea would have been better implemented by a writer with a more deft command of humour and absurdity.
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is by Diana Wynne Jones.
