I just finished Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (speaking of "punishment...!") and subsequently picked up the last of the Kilkenny novels. What a difference... It took Dostoyevsky 600 pages to have a student commit a crime, then hem and haw ambivalently before resolving to turn himself in. By contrast, in just a handful of pages, LL plants the seeds of a full-blown range war, with multiple chess pieces in constant motion around the board. Within ten pages I had a complete grasp of the physical setting, the motivations of the characters on both sides, and the advancement of the plot. I'm not knocking Dostoyevsky, by the way. My point is merely that LL has an unsurpassed capacity for economy of storytelling, using a little to say a lot. As is typical of later LLs, this one is also chockablock with invaluable folk wisdom.
