The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss

By the time I read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind, it had been out for four years, garnered a critical mass of critical acclaim, and been followed up by a sequel both half again as late as expected and half again as long as its predecessor. The Wise Man’s Fear picks up almost exactly where the first book in the series left off. By way of summary: Kvothe, an extraordinarily intelligent and precocious gypsy child is orphaned by the brutal attack of a præternatural group called the Chandrian. His eventual enrollment in a university of engineering and magic lead him on a number of adventures both profitable (in many ways) and detrimental on his way to investigating and avenging the death of his parents. When we last left him, he had inadvertently called the True Name of the wind, which is the purest and most real form of magic.

If you have not read my review of The Name of the Wind, I would suggest doing so in order to understand why, immediately after finishing it, I read The Wise Man’s Fear, and why I felt so compelled and excited to do so. Though the second installment in the series came out a full four years after the first, and this in turn bodes poorly for the timetable of the third and final entry, I could not help but see what Rothfuss had in store for young Kvothe, whom I had, despite my general cynicism, come to care deeply about as a character. Rather than summarize the plot, which is large and intricate, I’ll instead cover some of the major themes, either narrative or responsive.

Kvothe hit puberty?

When dealing with adolescent protagonists as they grow (see: Harry Potter, Bella Swan), authors are left with the difficult task of narrating their eventual entry into the sexual world—either by praxis or imagination—in a way that is both convincing to readers (who, we must bear in mind, are generally familiar with at least one of the two forms) and not damaging to the general tone of the story, if such a danger is even applicable. Thus far, the story of Kvothe has been largely appropriate for all ages, short of its implied violence. Though there were women (all of them superbly attractive and attracted to Kvothe, natch), our young protagonist’s approach has been one of either disinterest or gentlemanly courtesy. Rothfuss must have been faced with the difficult problem of acclimating Kvothe, now 16, to the looming problem of his genitals; either because the author could think of no subtle way to do it or just because he likes narrating sex, Kvothe finds himself trapped in Fae (i.e., the land of the Fairies) with an ancient magical sexbot named Felurian, who teaches him the entire Fairy Kama Sutra of sex techniques, and is enraptured by Kvothe the Virgin’s innate sexual talent. Yes, this is ridiculous as it sounds. Over to Daniel Hemmens:

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She’s the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you’ll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he’s awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you’d be mad or dead” and he’s like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he’s definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn’t be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn’t sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

Faced with the notion of introducing Kvothe as Lover (even Kvothe as Legendary Lover), we really have two options: one is to admit Kvothe into the bed of some barmaid or peasant girl, where he stumbles and fumbles his way through the account, only to improve quickly and dramatically with practice. This would be in accordance with Kvothe’s story so far.

The other would be to have Kvothe learn, automagically, everything about sex and the fairer sex from the magical sex goddess. This would, although less in keeping with the tone so far, be an easy deus ex machina for Rothfuss to skirt the issue and have his protagonist emerge from the other side suitably versed in the carnal arts.

As Hemmens notes, however, the solution Rothfuss chooses is—bafflingly—to have Kvothe the young bumbler, Kvothe the romantic idiot, be so innately brilliant at sex that he wooes a centuries-old sex goddess, and still automagically increase his practical knowledge of physical intimacy by manifold. It’s a wild turn toward ridiculous wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the salt to this nasty, gangrenous wound is Kvothe’s time in Ademre, the warrior-culture village where uniformly attractive women have sex as casually as you or I might blow our noses.

This sudden preoccupation with sex commandeers the latter half of the book, even though it seems to serve no purpose; indeed, it fails even to seem prurient or lurid, instead lending a sense of ridicule or burlesque to the book, as though listening to an inadvertently-knowledgeable child talk about how he is going to marry his first-grade crush and pee inside of her.

Whatever happened to the Chandrian?

While Kvothe is spending all his time in bed with every attractive woman in sight (except, notably, his long-time squeeze Denna), he is very obviously not doing what we all expected him to do, which is to continue his obsession with the group of demigods that killed his parents. The Name of the Wind saw Kvothe’s efforts stymied by the censored selection of books available to him in the University; because The Wise Man’s Fear sees him, after 300 pages or so, sent temporarily away from the University to “chase the wind” for a bit, it’s not unreasonable to readers to hope that the story will take our young heroes to exotic locales where he will begin to unravel the mysteries of the evil Chandrian—a search which, we can only assume, will come to a head in the third book.

But there’s almost nothing about the Chandrian to be found in The Wise Man’s Fear. Yes, Kvothe encountered one of their number leading a clutch of bandits; yes, he gets a juicy tidbit about them from the Maer (Mayor?) of Vint, for whom he is a servant for a long period of time. But our expectations—that we would know more about the Chandrian on page 900 than we did on page 1—are unfounded.

By the end of the book, we’ve established that Kvothe

• Is good at sex (and likes it)
• Learns how to fight from an Adem mercenary
• Is still in the Friend Zone with his crush, Denna.
• Is getting better at True Names, even though he still only uses them during extreme duress.

But that’s it. Kvothe just increases his powers and talents incrementally, as though we’re watching Rothfuss level up a World of Warcraft character.

Oh, I get it… Kvothe isn’t so great after all…

Though I noticed the trend during the first book, I saved its mention for this review because the notion really becomes apparent during The Wise Man’s Fear; namely, the initial impression we are given of Kvothe—a legend in his own time, rivaling Taborlin the Great—seems less and less truthful as he tells his story. Some bits of rumor or dispelled outright as Kvothe tells the corresponding true story behind some ridiculous bit of fiction; other times, it’s simply implied that a distant reference is being countered by a suspiciously similar and reasonably less fantastical one. What’s more, the “current” Kvothe (who is relating his story to The Chronicler) has been designed by Rothfuss to be a dejected, largely powerless schmuck who doesn’t at all resemble the fiery-spirited Kvothe of the story.

In other words, the initial disparity that Rothfuss creates, which causes readers to desire to understand why the Kvothe legend and the real Kvothe seem so different, may not simply be due to an RPG-like progression of skills and power as we might assume; it might, in fact, be an unfortunate misunderstanding all along, and that Kvothe the Narrator is still a schmuck who simply happens to have a good memory and is pretty good at sympathetic magic. That would—ha ha!—be a clever deconstruction of fantasy tropes and our linear expectations of power and character, although it would certainly make for a disappointing story. All of this remains to be seen, of course, and despite what seems like a number of deep faults with the second installment in the series, I find myself anxiously awaiting the conclusion.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The Name of the Wind came up, a little unexpectedly, on a list of the top 100 or so science fiction and fantasy books of all time. These are about as common as oxygen nowadays, but this particular list was from NPR, so I stopped to read. Among the obvious Tolkien, Heinlein, Herbert, Orwell, and other thoroughly entrenched authors were some surprises. I first learned of Gene Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, which was new to me but an old book with its sci-fi bona fides. Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind was more puzzling, being the debut novel of an unknown writer, published a mere four years ago. My curiosity was piqued.

It would be a mistake to say that Rothfuss breaks new ground with The Name of the Wind, the first part of a planned trilogy called The Kingkiller Chronicles. To the contrary, most of the appeal of Rothfuss is that, as a well-versed fan of science fiction and fantasy, he knows to cherry-pick the most interesting bits of all his various and sundry interests. The result is a mélange of influences, for better or worse.

This is a dangerous game to play. Christopher Paolini, author of the Inheritance cycle which ended this year, wrote from a similar position, and while the books were certainly successful, they were also uniformly awful—an uninspired pastiche of Middle Earth, Star Wars, and Pern. Because there was nothing unique about the books, and the characters similarly uncompelling (I found myself wishing for the untimely death of no smaller number of them), they were little more than lengthy Tolkien fan-fiction. From the very beginning, we knew that Eragon would eventually beat the evil Galbatorix; since the plot itself was invented by Paolini on the fly to suit whatever ends he felt at the time, the muddled mess in between Eragon’s discovery of a dragon egg and the final battle of the fourth books was narrative masturbation.

Rothfuss handles this with significantly more grace—or at least he does so far. The series is told as an extended flashback; from the very beginning, readers know that Kvothe, the hero with flaming red hair, is a living legend. We don’t know what he’s done, aside from a few tall tales, but we can intuit from the name of the series that regicide will ultimately be involved. We also come to understand, early on, that Kvothe is now living as an innkeeper under the assumed name of Kote. A strange and compelling scene indeed. Eventually, Kvothe relates his story for posterity to a writer named The Chronicler, and the book is mostly told as a story, punctuated by interludes in the present.

By way of a brief plot summary: Kvothe’s story begins when he is young boy, traveling with his family as part of a collective group of musicians and performers known as the Edema Ruh (think of gypsies, negative connotations and all). When a magician (“sympathist”) briefly traveled with them, the precocious Kvothe learns about magic and science. When his entire troupe is slaughtered by an ancient group of bogeymen known as the Chandrian, young Kvothe becomes a street urchin in the large city of Tarbean, homeless and wretched, before he finds his way to The University, which teaches sympathetic magic and other, more mundane topics. The rest of the book details Kvothe’s first few terms at the University.

This all sounds perfectly mundane, but I found myself drawn to Rothfuss’ story; I couldn’t put it down until I finished it, and I’m not the only one. The reasons are subtle, but important.

Whence Kvothe? Since we know immediately that at some point, Kvothe becomes legendary, with apparently unrivaled power, it’s important as readers for us to understand how he goes from a smart and precocious child to the stuff of myths. Especially when Kvothe spends much of the book desperately poor, beaten up, fearing for his life or his status in the University; even by the end of The Name of the Wind, the Kvothe we know doesn’t begin to approach Kvothe qua Legend. It’s a trap that Rothfuss sets; until this disparity between our a priori knowledge of Kvothe and the story of Kvote as Narrator is resolved, there’s a dramatic tension that holds us. A lot—even too much—time is spent with Kvothe worrying about his money as he lives a penny at the time.

Everyone loves ginger kids.... right?

Magic done right. Magic is easy to write, but it’s also boring. Anybody can cast Magic Missile; that, for instance, Harry Potter can wave his wand and do just about anything, makes the magic itself that much less compelling. Rothfuss’ approach to the topic, then, splits into a number of fronts. The more mundane kind of magic, known as “sympathy”, is a blend of traditional magic and more modern ideas like thermodynamics or quantum entanglement. A sympathist (not a magician) uses magic to link two similar objects; by using a handful of ash from a roaring fire, for instance, a sympathist can use its heat to start a fire even when spatially distant from said fire. The quality of the link depends on the similarity from the items, and when desperate, a sympathist can use the heat from their own blood to power a spell. This is a tricky form of magic whose uses and drawbacks aren’t immediately obvious, and so we can’t necessarily predict when or how Kvothe will be able to use them.

A love story, sort of. It’s not too long before Kvothe introduces Denna, a young girl about his age who is likewise a wanderer. The relationship is frustrating to readers because Kvothe remains solidly in the “Friend Zone” while Denna is courted by tens (hundreds?) of men and patrons; yet it is obvious to readers (and even to the characters themselves) that they’re crazy about each other. When Kvothe the Narrator first introduces the subject, however, he does so with an import that implies his relationship with Denna (who is only ever referred to in the past tense) will come to mean a lot more than the romantic-comedy foibles Rothfuss gives us in the first book.

Chicks dig rock stars. Perhaps the most unique—perhaps I should simply say “surprising”?—aspect of Kvothe’s story is that Kvothe is a highly skilled lute player, actor, and singer. His instrument of choice—a lute—features heavily in the story, and is the catalyst for his meeting Denna. Rothfuss’ invented world is gaga for musicians, and Kvothe’s performances routinely move people to tears and/or wild applause; this is perhaps a little difficult to swallow, but we accept it because Rothfuss is at least consistent in his treatment of the subject.

There’s magic, and then there’s magic. I’ve already talked about sympathetic magic, which is a compromise between traditional fantasy thaumaturgy and steampunk science; in fact, the two meet more obviously in the art of “artificing”, which involves engineering mechanical objects which utilize sympathetic magic to do things—”sympathy lamps”, for instance, which use small amounts of the bearer’s body heat to produce a flameless light. But there’s another kind of magic to be had which is more important in Kvothe’s case. A widely-told legend in Kvothe’s universe is that of Taborlin the Great, who “knew the names of all things”; by “names”, we mean of course “True Names”, which is a convenient label for a metaphysical understanding of an object, and which has been used to greater or lesser degree in both other fantasy novels and in real-world myths and legends. Kvothe’s first knowledge of this comes when he botches a sympathetic link and essentially suffocates himself when learning magic from the wandering sympathist in the beginning of the book. The sympathist, who knows that Name of the Wind (you see?), called upon it to undo the binding. From that point forward, Kvothe seeks the Name of the Wind, and it isn’t until the end of the book that he calls it very much by accident and falls under the tutelage of the quirky Master Elodin, the University’s Master Namer.

All of these unsolved mysteries, taken as a whole, are enough to make The Name of the Wind extraordinarily compelling. There’s no small amount that Rothfuss does wrong in his writing, and I hesitate to say that The Kingkiller Chronicles will enter into the fantasy canon, but there’s no denying that the first book in the series is an engaging, playful, thorough beginning to what I hope will be an equally thrilling series.

Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolf

What is one to make of a book entitled The Shadow of the Torturer? This famous 1980 novel by Gene Wolf, the first of a four-part series, is paired with part two, The Claw of the Conciliator, to form Shadow & Claw.

The title is not sensationalistic in the manner of some recent books, but genuinely reflects the topic of the book. The “hero”, Severian, is in fact a member of the “torturer’s guild”, and does in fact torture and execute a number of people. That he commits a grievous offense against his order/build—by allowing one of his charges to commit suicide—is the most we can say about Severian as a human being; there is not much otherwise to recommend him as a protagonist.

Wolf’s The Book of the New Sun, of which Shadow & Claw comprises the first half, is considered a canonical book of science fictional fantasy. I use a wishy-washy phrase like that because the text is difficult to pin down in either camp. The immediate text, that of sword-swinging, castles, and magic, seems like something firmly fantastical, a direct child of the sword-and-sorcery genre. And yet, Wolf drops subtle clues and sidelong references to the story taking place in the far, far future (with the sun noticeably dimmer), and mechanical contraptions that sound vaguely like engines or firearms, and manned spaceflight.

Unfortunately for readers, much of the world-building that goes on is entirely in the form of subtle clues; having read through the first two books, I still cannot say for sure what Wolf’s created world is aside from a far-future dystopia; the rules which govern Severian’s universe remain largely unspoken, and we learn very little of them by praxis. In my research of the series, I’ve found this to be a common complaint; I can only hope the picture becomes clearer in the second half.

As I mentioned, Severian is a young apprentice of the Torturer’s Guild; perhaps in part to his youth or Wolf’s desire to make him a protagonist we could relate to, early Severian takes care of a disabled dog, and falls in love with Thecla, a prisoner and subject of the guild’s ministrations. When he affords her the limit of his power as a torturer apprentice—a contraband knife with which she can take her own life—he is unofficially booted from his guild, but given the trademark fuligin (a color “darker than black”) cloak and a sublime executioner’s sword known as Terminus Est, and sent to a distant city called Thrax to serve as a lowly executioner.

This new sojourner Severian seems a different man than the apprentice we know; he is clipped in manner, amoral, and swift to anger. He is no longer an immediate foil to the corrupt world in which he lives: a empire run by an Autarch whose power is so absolute that citizens are compelled (either by fear or mandate—it’s not clear which) to follow every invocation of his name with some ridiculous honorific like “whose forbearance knows not walls nor seas” or “whose pores outshine the stars themselves”. This state of affairs reminds me not a little of North Korea, where a repressed citizenry are compelled to worship Dear Leader as a god, inventing stories about birds mourning his death, &tc. Severian then, becomes a protagonist not because he seems to be one, but because the narrative centers around him, and Wolf’s continuing hints make it clear that he’s supposed to be one.

Also, his mask is ridiculous

After a number of strange, rather disjointed adventures, Severian ends up in the service of Vodalus, a revolutionary and a traitor to the Auturch, whose life Severian saved in the opening pages. Early on, Severian professed to follow Vodalus, even though we’re never quite sure what Vodalus stands for aside from being against the Autarch; I suppose our innate sympathy with the little guy—Rebels v. Empire—is supposed to inform our feelings as readers. Vodalus tasks Severian, who is still technically on his way to Thrax, to deliver a message to a servant in the Autarch’s massive castle-cum-city, the House Absolute. Captured by guards, they are thrown into the “Antechamber”, essentially a prison, and at this point the story begins to get really strange; I won’t go into details, since they would only be more confusing in this context, but it has to do with Koreans, robots, space-travelers, and lots of allusions to Kafka. Severian meets the Autarch himself, and swears service to him (isn’t it rather difficult to swear service to Vodalus and the Autarch at the same time?).

There is a long interlude wherein Severian and his traveling companions perform a play, the entirety of which is reproduced in the book, and I’ve never seen a more absurd stretch of obviously-allegorical but maddeningly-opaque verbiage. Imagine Waiting for Godot but with the entirety of the play imbued with the febrile incoherence of Lucky’s monologue. Given how the story has progressed thus far, this seems duly appropriate.

Jonathan McCalmont writes,

The great mystery behind The Shadow of the Torturer is that there is no mystery. It is an entirely solipsistic piece of writing that does not seek to comment upon the real world or the human condition. It has no deep spiritual meaning or political significance. Instead it is a monument to the author’s skill at controlling the perceptions of his readers. His use of pseudo-mystical imagery seeks us scurrying here looking for hidden meanings, his repetitions of certain phrases and images make us consider them to be somehow significant. We read and re-read his words trying to make sense of them and when nothing concrete can be coaxed from the text Wolfe benignly pats us on the shoulder and says that it is not easy trying to work out what someone as clever as him is trying to say.

While I cannot deny the possibility that the second half of the series will tear away the veil, so the speak, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement.

(If you enjoyed Jonathan’s superb write-up of The Shadow of the Torturer, see also his critical reading of The Claw of the Conciliator).

Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Boxset by Bryan Lee O'Malley

I should disclose right away that prior to the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I had never heard of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s superlative graphic novel(s). The only reason I watched it, in fact, was a combination of my friends’ rave reviews (despite lackluster box office performance) and the fact that I absolute adore directory Edgar Wright’s previous films. My reaction to the film was positive and visceral, as it seems to hit all the right stylistic notes, and of course its contents were a geekfest of epic proportions.

The Scott Pilgrim series came in six parts between 2004 and 2010, with the last entry arriving a mere month before the movie’s debut. Though the movie is named after the second book of the series, its plot comprises the entire six books, so either my information is wrong or O’Malley let the screenwriters in on the secret well in advance.

It’s difficult to talk about the graphic novel without talking about the movie, at least for me, since the I enjoyed latter the both first and tremendously. Upon beginning the graphic novel, I was immediately struck both by how spot-on the casting was for the film and how faithful the movie was to the graphic novel, at least until about halfway through, at which point the movie appeared to diverge for the sake of time. I will now stop talking the movie, since there’s nothing more obnoxious than someone reviewing one medium by prattling about a different one.

Everything about the story of the Scott Pilgrim series is great. I say that unabashedly, even though it sounds rabid and not very helpful. Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old Canadian slacker with no job, who plays bass in a crappy band (the Sex Bob-Ombs), lives in a run-down apartment with a gay roommate named Wallace, dates a 17-year-old Chinese schoolgirl named Knives Chau, and—worst of all—lives in Canada. In other words, Scott Pilgrim is a loser, and we have very little reason to like him other than (a) we sometimes like losers and (b) he’s good at other things, like fighting robots.

Everything changes when he meets Ramona Flowers, a hipster chick with dyed hair and rollerblades, fresh from America, for whom he falls like a hammer-head. In order to date Ramona, however, Scott must defeat her Seven Evil Exes. This takes the form of literal fights in the style of anime and video games; in fact, much of the fantastical aspects of Scott Pilgrim come straight from that geek tradition, and the whole series is full of such references, either generic genre references…

Did they have skateboards in Fallout...?

…or even very specific but unstressed references to particular games, such as this obvious (I think) allusion to Final Fantasy VII…

Come this spring.... I'm leaving this town for Midgar.

What’s so interesting about Scott Pilgrim is the way O’Malley blurs the distinction between what happens literally in the comic, and what is a fantastical representation of something mundane. Scott Pilgrim, for instance, fights Ramona’s evil exes until they burst/explode into a pile of coins—of course we aren’t supposed to take this literally…. right? Remember too that Scott Pilgrim is a scrawny loser, and yet he’s renowned in his small town as a fighter. This makes sense only when you consider the real/fantasy fights as a proxy for the sort of video game expertise so valued by Scott Pilgrim‘s likely readers. Even more interesting, though, is that although O’Malley appears to initiate a sort of contract with his readers in which we agree to suspend our disbelief and accept either that Scott Pilgrim literally fights people in the manner of Anime or read the fights as an interesting metaphor for social turmoil, it becomes clear later on in the book that the representation of these fights, especially when told through the lens of Scott’s memory, is unreliable.

Realistically, would the tale of Scott Pilgrim be interesting without the videogame physics? The mithril skateboards or extra lives or subspace purses? I don’t necessarily think so—at least not in graphic novel form. And yet by the end of the book, we’ve come to realize (or at least I did) that boss fights and other such geeky fantastika aren’t nearly as interesting as we thought, and in the meantime we’ve come to care for Scott and Ramona and the rest of the roster, even though their problems are stupid and dramatic soap opera nonsense. It’s a dirty trick, of course, but it’s also a small slice of genius on O’Malley’s part.

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

When I reviewed The Magicians last year, I noted that, despite my mixed feelings for Lev Grossman, which includes an outright antipathy for his notions of good storytelling, I was nonetheless impressed by the novelty of what he’d accomplished with his new novel. Almost an anti-bildungsroman, it took every good aspect of magical tales and flushed them down the toilet—ostensibly as a creative way of writing the general malaise that affects the unambitious or ambivalent.

This review may contain spoilers if you have not read the first book.

The Magicians nonetheless seemed like a one-shot contrivance: Grossman’s ass-over-teakettle turning of the boy-meets-magic trope is quite clever, but won’t surprise anybody twice. Grossman’s gifts as a fabulist are less than exemplary (e.g., his world-building is virtually nil), so I was curious just what he’d find to write about in a sequel. As it turns out, the answer is “everything and nothing”.

The Magician King finds Quentin, our anti-hero, back on one of the four thrones of the magical kingdom Fillory, and bored out of his skull. Thirsting for an adventure, he embarks on a voyage to a far-flung island of Fillory, ends up questing for Seven Golden Keys, and suddenly finds himself, along with his traumatized former crush Julia, back in the Real World. This present a problem, since they have no way of returning to Fillory.

Julia herself is a centerpiece of the novel, though she was largely absent from the first book. Grossman tells the tale how she learned magic the unofficial way, populating a series of flophouses for amateur magicians to learn her craft rather than attending the prestigious Brakebills College, Quentin’s alma mater. In a series of vignettes which pepper the main narrative, readers learn the slow process by which Julia became an excellent magician and manages to lose her humanity, both literally and figuratively, leaving her a bit “emo”, to say the least. One gets the impression that she will become important by this series’ (trilogy’s?) end.

Yeah, but what's magic done for me *lately*?

But the main narrative of The Magician King is rather unfocused; though it by and large consists of Quentin and Julia attempting to return to Fillory and complete their Quest, it simultaneously sets up a much larger conflict which will likely form the primary antagonist of the final novel; the premise is interesting, insofar as it’s the first fantasy book I’ve ever read which talks about the fundamental nature of magic; it’s also maddeningly glib and vague, which I can’t yet determine to be either shrewd writing or sheer ineptitude on Grossman’s part. The idea of the series turning into a bona fide fantasy story is somewhat at odds with the sneering, palatially-hollow thesis of the first book.

In other words, The Magician King is a long description of the interstices between the lewd and brazen disappointments of the book and whatever fiery conclusion is yet to come; if The Magicians set up the characters without any real story, then The Magician King sets up a (potential) story without any real characterization to speak of, unless you count Julia’s backstory. There isn’t a rising action in the way of most famous cinematic middle-children like The Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers, so other than a sense of general but undirected unease about the plot and the remote possibility of empathy with the characters, who, as we’ve established, are assholes, The Magician King ends with an ersatz finality, with a narrative roadblock dropped in front of Quentin the audience knows will be swiftly overcome, and an impending disaster that’s only important because Grossman tells us it’s important, not because we’ve come to realize it on our own.

In Grossman’s article for the Wall Street Journal in July of this year, he gives some insight into what drives his creative process. Wizards and faeries and magic wands are all de rigueur, of course, but all Grossman indicates that all good fantasy has more to do with character development than swords and sorcery:

But what’s the point, when you can just use magic to fix everything? It’s just wish-fulfillment [says a hypothetical hater of fantasy novels]

The more fantasy you read, the more you notice that even after the hero comes of age, it is rare that all those fancy powers that he has gained solve all his problems. It’s not about wish-fulfillment, or at least it’s not just about that.

Harry Potter’s problems don’t end when he becomes a wizard, they’re just beginning. The moment that I look for in a serious fantasy novel is when the hero realizes that yes, I can now speak to animals or move between worlds or bend the raw energy of the unknown to my will. But my problems remain the same. At which point the hero realizes that magic is the easy stuff. The real battles, the hard battles, are the ones that get fought on the inside.

To whatever extent I can call Grossman a talented writer, I think he did a novel job of getting this across in The Magicians by co-opting a currently popular genre and subverting it with this notion. But while The Magician King plays with these same notions, the novelty is gone, and despite Grossman’s intentions of repositioning his series more firmly in the fanasty genre this time around, with slightly less cynical subversion, one can’t help get the idea that characters are doing little more than farting around. If this is the setup for an explosive third novel, it’s the most mind-numbing and arbitrary rising action I’ve ever read.

Only time will tell if Grossman manages to turn his story arc into something grand and vindicating, however darksome, or if it will end up a muddled mess of boneless characters and fuzzy math. My suspicions point me toward the latter, though I yearn to be wrong this time around.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

In 2009, you cannot write a book about young magicians without knowing that your book will be held up against the Harry Potter series and probably discarded. Since J.K. Rowling dropped her cultural bomb on us all those years ago, we’ve already seen a glut of second-rate wizardry series, just as Stephenie Meyer’s already-execrable Twilight Series launched a tidal wave of slapdash “vampire” novels trying to catch even a sliver of the current mania. Ironically enough, when Grossman did a piece on Meyer for Time, he gushed and flattered and compared her to Rowling in a way that will be important later.

Lev Grossman is not a stupid man; his admiration for Meyer notwithstanding (and I hold the hope that it’s more recognition of her pop lit. cachet), his book reviews for Time are usually pretty good, and he seems like an all-around sensible guy. It seems unlikely, then, that he would dash out yet another book about teenage wizards and expect, without any sense of irony, for it to be lauded and praised. No, what you’ll find is that The Magicians is one part pastiche, one part bildungsroman, two parts satire, and one part miserable, myopic teenage pop lit.

If you’re going to write about teenage wizards and magic in 2009, then, you have few options:

1. Accept that you’re writing imitative schlock, like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson or Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap.
2. Include just enough self-abuse and satire as to elude such charges; Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles are a good example of this, though of course they predate all the recent wizardry zeitgeist by a considerable margin. Grossman knows about Harry Potter and Narnia; his readers know about them; and even his characters know about them and reference them.
3. Don’t really write about wizards at all. Believe it or not, this is the tack that Grossman chose.

Michael Agger, writing for the New York Times Book Review, said that the book could “crudely be labeled a Harry Potter for adults”; Grossman himself said you could “glibly but not inaccurately describe as Harry Potter meets The Corrections for shots of synthohol in Ten Forward.” It’s a specious comparison, even if done crudely or glibly, in the sense that the Harry Potter series is entirely about magic and wizardry, the characters of which happen to be engaging and dynamic. In Grossman’s novel, all of the magical aspects are purposely thin and facile, serving only as a shell for Grossman’s real interest, which is character drama and existential angst.

The Magicians begins with Quentin Coldwater, a smart but troubled 17-year old with an affinity for magic tricks, bumbling his way into Brakebills, an invisible school for young magicians. There are no 11-year-olds here; this is a college, with equivalent ages, and the entrance exam is difficult. Quentin, whose abilities up to this point included only faro shuffles and disappearing nickel tricks, manages a sudden burst of impressive magic that secures him one of twenty spots in the freshman class. Were this a typical wizarding novel, one might be inclined to believe that Quentin is secretly a master magicians, whose world-changing potential is just waiting to be unlocked, but this is not the case. In fact, Quentin is a screwup, at best a capable magician; his ultimate importance in the scheme of things ranks even lower than the main character, Thornmallow, of Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall (1991).

Quentin, like most of the other magicians in this secret world, were fans of the early 20th-century Fillory series, five books written by a reclusive Anglophile named Christopher Plover—an obvious nod to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Quentin, a high-performing student, suffers from typical teenage angst: he doesn’t like his perfectly pleasant parents, his crush won’t reciprocate his affection, and he doesn’t quite know what he wants to do with his life; he feels as though he is waiting for some shoe to drop, for some new and different phase of his life to begin. Brakebills offers that to him, at least at first.

Rowling spent a lot of time world-building; the notion was taken to the extreme in Susanna Clarke’s Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which is one of the best novels of magic I’ve ever encountered. Grossman avoids most explanation of how magic works, how the magical world is different from the regular world, or how magicians have influenced history. In fact, all five of Quentin’s years at Brakebills are condensed into a sort of summary: we get a sense that he is competent enough at doing magic, but mostly it’s a lot of rote exercise. Much more time is spent on Quentin’s friendship and eventual romance with Alice, a mousy girl but excellent Magician. Though an improvement over his life in Brooklyn, Brakebills ends up being another kind of monotony for Quentin: the magical world isn’t radically different from his old world. The relationships are the same, and his own place in societal structure is the same. In fact, there doesn’t really seem to be a “wizarding world” in the same sense as Rowling’s universe; one is told that the magical world controls some large corporations, but mostly magicians either go undercover in normal life, or spend their time on ridiculous pursuits like Alice’s parents.

The only incident of magical note is a point when Quentin’s class is visited from a mysterious creature in a grey suit known as The Beast, a magical entity of tremendous power who eats one of the Brakebills students alive and then disappears. This scene in particular made me think of Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall and hold out the hope that Quentin would end up being an important character, but by this point I had resigned myself to the notion that The Magicians isn’t about magic at all; it has magic in it, but it’s really just about what it’s like to go from a child to an adult. Substitute the magical college of Brakebills for the the insular college world of any big university: the sudden freedom from parents, the uncertainty about one’s future, the sexual and substantial experimentation, and then suddenly graduation and the weightless sensation of being responsible for your own destiny, alone out in the world. Whether Brakebills and Fillory are some extended metaphor or merely easy narrative structure, they are clearly only incidental to the story—a not and a wink from Grossman indicating his private joke that he understands how alternately sick and excited we are for these prefab magic stories, and wouldn’t it be interesting to twist them to a surprising purpose?

Meyer and Rowling do share two important traits. Both writers embed their fantasy in the modern world–Meyer’s vampires are as deracinated and contemporary as Rowling’s wizards. And people do not want to just read Meyer’s books; they want to climb inside them and live there. James Patterson may sell more books, but not a lot of people dress up like Alex Cross. There’s no literary term for the quality Twilight and Harry Potter (and The Lord of the Rings) share, but you know it when you see it: their worlds have a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there.

Grossman’s world has no such integrity, I assume by design. In fact, the world Grossman creates is so bleak and monotonous and terrible that one seems all the more sad for reading it: the existential crisis that plagues Quentin and his companions is dreadful and depressing enough, never mind the misadventures and misfortunes they find in the magical world. It’s as though he wants to tell the new generation of workforce-bound students that he understands their plight, and that it will never get better. In the end, that’s what The Magicians seems to be: little more than the worst commencement speech ever given.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I’ve read Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell once before; at the time, I focused on two major points. The first was the oft-repeated canard that the book was some clever hybrid of Harry Potter and Jane Austen; as the world was swept up in a fever pitch of Harry Potter mania at the time, I’m sure this made all the sense in the world for every single reviewer alive to say. What better way to bridge the space between your audience and the book than to anchor it to the cultural zeitgeist? The second point was to belabor my initial aversion to the book, couching it defensively in criticisms of Clarke’s (obviously purposefully) Victorian prose.

Having read the book a second time, I can say with some confidence that I was a twit for making either of those two points.

For let’s face it: the Harry Potter comparison is fatuous. They are similar only insofar as they both feature magic; trying to illustrate one in terms of the other would be like comparing Top Gun to Airplane! because they’re both about fixed-wing aircraft. Whereas the Harry Potter universe was an entertaining romp through a somewhat traditional fantasy environment, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is, if not altogether new—see Patricia Wrede’s Magic and Malice—then at least vanishingly rare.

What Clarke has done is much more in the grand tradition of Tolkien: plot is really a secondary device which exists only so that the author can build worlds, languages, and histories around it. Clarke’s footnotes rival those of David Foster Wallace; some are merely citations which point some datum in the text to a (fictional) book in which it is found, while others are full-fledged stories which build up a canon of folklore. In this alternate history of England, magic played a fundamental role in its origins. A dark and mysterious figure known as John Uskglass, the Raven King, ruled England for 300 years before disappearing. Uskglass is emblematic of the relationship between “Christian” England and the alternate world known as Faerie, where magical beings known as fairies live; a Christian child kidnapped and raised in Faerie, he returned to England as a teenager with a new sort of magic that became the practiced magic of England until its use slipped into antiquity and the practice of magic ceded to the mere study of the history of magic.

This is the state in which the book begins: England in 1806, which Clarke depicts to the hilt, has gentlemen who call themselves “magicians,” though their only real activity is studying the available histories of such English magicians as Thomas Godbless or Martin Pale; it calls to mind the Philological Society in London which preceded the Oxford English Dictionary, full of intellectual men harumphing at this or that irregularity in English speech or orthography. This changes when a small, unpleasant scholar named Gilbert Norrell announces his ability to do practical magic—that is, cast spells—and that when he proves his ability to this Magical Society, they must forever disband and cease calling themselves “magicians.”

That Norrell would be so inimical to the study of magic or the existence of magicians, however misnamed, is a curious point; in fact, it is the first of many occasions that Norrell—who is indeed a very intelligent and capable practical magician—proves himself something of a secondary villain in the story. Norrell wishes for the revival of “English Magic,” though he wishes himself the only magician, and therefore not only the sole executor of magical knowledge and power, but also recipient of all the glory, laud and honor due such a personage.

The character of Jonathan Strange isn’t officially introduced until the second part (though the footnotes allude to his being a magician), and his rise produces a conflict that is far more interesting to me than the main narrative thread. It has a great deal to do with Clarke’s excellent world-building, and the way she constructs the concept of magic in this world. Norrell, though the first magician in quite some time to perform practical magic, builds and enforces a strict orthodoxy that flouts the conventions of English magic after Uskglass. It was common for some of Norrell’s historical predecessors, for instance, to take a number of fairy servants; fairies, though chimerical and occasionally wicked, could be powerful magical allies. As Clarke puts it, magic is the natural state of being for fairies, who have strong inclinations to it but a natural lack of reason; normal men, on the other hand, are possessed of the exact opposite. Norrell views fairies as inherently and consistently wicked; so too does he scoff at most of the darker and more dangerous magic described in his books. By buying most important and rare magical books, Norrell is effectively able to control knowledge of magic; once he becomes famous throughout England as the first (and only) practical magician in many generations, he is at his leisure to set the direction of magical study through various publications. Most of all, he spits invective at the Raven King, whose influence, power, and importance Norrell attempts to repress: the magic of the Raven King is, after all, fairy magic.

Jonathan Strange, a younger and more rebellious magician, appears virtually out of nowhere, having taught himself magic from such scarce books as he could find (all the best ones, of course, being sequestered in Norrell’s four- or five-thousand book library); he is, though still very much a proper gentleman of the era, representative of the wilder, darker, and more passionate aspects of the art of magic. Though eventually tutored by Norrell (who takes great pains both to keep most of the best books from him and attempt to instill Norrellite orthodoxy in the brooding gentleman), Strange’s ideas about magic are in direct contradiction of Norrell’s: Strange is fascinated by the Raven King, wishes to consort with fairies, and actively desires to spread the knowledge of practical magic to anyone who wishes to learn. As Strange writes in his oft-mention book, there is no magic without the Raven King. It was precisely John Uskglass’ synthesis of Fairy magic with English/Christian logistical skill that made him such a powerful ruler.

As I mentioned in my last review, the magic of John Uskglass is very Germanic; like most Germanic fairy tales, it ties magic and power very closely to nature—that is, alignment with stones, skies, trees, animals, &c. is the source of power in fairy magic. To an English gentleman in the early 19th century, this was far too mean and base a thing for proper magic, and Norrell’s magic therefore happened to be heavily abstracted and book-based. Strange, meanwhile, had no compunction about aligning himself with nature, just as he had no objection to joining Lord Wellington on the front line in the Napoleonic Wars. The conflict between the styles of Norrell and Strange strikes me as a textbook example of organic, grassroots (literally, in this case) ideas against entrenched, scholarly ones. Norrell is Latin or Latinate French, the language of scholarship and law; Strange is Germanic English, the language of the commoners. Norrell is the Catholic Church, crafted of ritual, hierarchy, and privilege; Strange may be a Protestant, translating the Bible into colloquial languages and removing some of the barriers between the pulpit and the pews.

Class conflict is not a new idea, though I’ve never before heard of it being applied to the practice of magic in a fantasy novel; in this way, I suppose, Clarke’s story about magicians parallels the conflicts that existed in this era: like the Jane Austen she so admires, Clarke gently lampoons the sexism, classism, and ridiculous notions that affected the entrenched nobility and privileged class. Magic, like just about every other observable difference, can become the basis for disenfranchisement—consider, for instance, that while Norrell is unamenable to expanding the rank of practicing magicians, he is particularly resolute in his distaste for female magicians.

What I admire the most about Clarke is the way in which her writing—footnotes and all—has the effect of immersing the reader entirely in her world. “Martin Pale” is an entirely fictional character and his books are likewise invented; yet the consistency and solemnity with which he is referred, quoted, and cited within the text makes it all too easy to forget that he is a figment of Clarke’s wonderful imagination. The novel is filled with stories that don’t necessary go anywhere or illuminate any dark corners—they’re like footpaths from the main road which quickly cede to brambles—but it’s that very peripatetic, discursive nature that gives the book its character: a history book plucked from two centuries ago, thoroughly convinced of its accuracy. It does not feel like a book of fantasy; it feels like a book of history. As Nicholas Tam says, “In so many ways, it is the history of England, but with the exciting, imaginative bits blown up under a magnifying glass, and given voice and shape.”

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede

I seem determined lately to cover books I discovered in the sixth grade. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, while better as a single volume, was originally marketed—still is—as a series of four books for young adults. I chose the fourth and final book in the series, Talking to Dragons, as the subject of a book report. It was entertaining, I suppose, but surprisingly typical—even formulaic: young man quests with sort, meets beautiful girl, and saves kingdom. One got the distinct impression, however, that a deep, satirical vein ran throughout, though I was perhaps unable to fully appreciate it at the time.

I am unable to remember if I discovered the existence of the four-part series first, or if my father already had it. In any case, my first complete experience with the The Enchanted Forest Chronicles was the 1993 Guild America printing, which combined all four books into a single one, and made it feel much more like a proper novel. It was also at that point I realized just how much Wrede was satirizing the entire fantasy genre, creating both a simple storyline for young adult readers and a much more playful—occasionally contemptuous—story for wizened veterans of the fantasy genre. Is it Tolkien? Not even close; as far as structure or quality goes, it’s honestly not even as good as Wrede’s other works, but it’s a delightful romp nonetheless.

It’s almost appropriate that I read Talking to Dragons first, since that was in fact the first book Wrede for the series (1985), but then heavily revised it when she wrote the other three as prequels. It’s no wonder, then, that the final book is so different in structure and point-of-view.

The basic plot of the series follows Princess Cimorene, who is a very non-traditional princess (read: feminist) in a canonically Grimm universe. She runs away from home and becomes the voluntary captive princess of the dragon Kazul. Over the course of the series, and she meets and weds Mendanbar, the young King of the Enchanted Forest. She learns to hate wizards, who are all pretty much evil; she does, however, befriend witches and magicians (who are totally different from wizards). There are all elves, dwarves, and any one of a number of creatues along the way. In addition, the books are packed with references to stock fairy tale constructs. One recognizes too many fairy tale characters and scenarios to enumerate, but clearly the series is fun, even if it is sometimes a bit stilted or repetitive.

If I had to level any criticism, it would be the punctuated equilibrium of Wrede’s characters. In the span of a given book, we might be treated to a sort of combative, witty reparté between two characters, and within only a chapter or so at the end, they decide they are madly in love and decide to wed; the mechanical aspects of the fairy tale, then, are apparently unimportant compared to making the characters interesting until they ultimately fulfill their circumscribed roles.

Being generous, then, I will posit that The Enchanted Forest Chronicles was always the shell of a traditional fantasy with traditional fantastic elements that was written in such a way as to make its very occurrence somehow unique and satirical; Wrede’s participation in—and simultaneous spoofing of—the conservative fantasy model, can be vexing, as the reader is never sure to what source to ascribe his or her reactions. Is it bad? Or bad on purpose? Is it fantasy, satire, or self-satirizing fantasy? Or is it just a fairy tale for cynical, modern readers?

There are constructions in this/these book(s) I haven’t seen done elsewhere; Wrede isn’t simply a hack with an annotated copy of Grimm and a word processor. She’s quite a good writer, and I would therefore ascribe any literary shortcomings to design rather than fault; I would even surmise that she had to keep herself from making a more intricate or nuanced plot into order to stay true to the twisted-fairy-tale angle that she aiming for .

While hardly an involved read, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles is fun and inventive, and will appeal to those who—like me—hold a special place in their hearts for fairy tales. A recommend diversion, especially if you can find the all-in-one edition.

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Every year or so, I usually try to read a really awful book as part of my ongoing reading project. Back in 2006, I read James Frey’s excremental A Million Little Pieces; in 2008, I read Dan Brown’s unholy The Da Vinci Code. This year I read Twilight.

I do this for a number of reasons. First and probably foremost, I’m an asshole, and enjoy telling people that they have awful taste; in order to do that, however, I really do need to read that awful dreck first.

I was almost entirely unaware of Twilight until it wriggled its way into Hollywood, at which point the hysteria for this miserable dross was almost overwhelming. A book about vampires in love, written for young (female) adults, managed to capture the hearts and minds not only of its target market, but about 70 million hearts and minds around the globe.

Meyer is not the first person to accomplish a feat of this magnitude: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, unarguably a book for adolescents when it began, became extraordinarily popular with readers of all ages. And not without good reason: Rowling’s books, though hardly a treasure trove of literature, had the benefits of being entertaining, genuinely engaging, and filled with characters who we loved or reviled appropriately.

Meyer is also not the first person to make money from a vampire chic: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (originally a book in 1976 that nobody really cared about) made vampirism suddenly sexy and desirable, at least if you want to get bitten by Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt. For several years after it came out, it was almost impossible to distinguish between brooding Goths and regular movie-going shills.

Neither is Meyer the first person to write a book for young adults (or older, for that matter) about the difficulty of relationships. Much hay has been made in Meyer’s defense that Twilight is a delicate metaphorical treatment for the uncertain of teenage romance. Which is true, but only insofar as Striptease is a treatise on domestic violence or Flavor of Love is a metaphor for the existential angst of age.

No, in fact, there is nothing original about Twilight. Meyer’s been out-sold by J.K. Rowling, out-vampired by Anne Rice (or, for that matter, Bram Stoker—even Richard Matheson), and out-romanced even by authors like Jerry Spinelli. It’s not that Meyer is unaware of what makes a good book. I can see her trying: character development, suspense, romance, even humor. Unfortunately, Meyer isn’t really very good at writing any of these things; she uses such stilted phrases as “The shape of the door slowly took shape,” she mistakes redundancy for detail (“When I woke up, I was confused. My thoughts were hazy”), and thinks that developing a character consists of having them repeat the same thoughts over and over again.

Isabella is the new girl at school in Forks, Washington, having just moved there to be with her estranged dad. She’s ghostly pale, doesn’t dance, is clumsy, and is the sort of ostentatious brat who brags (to herself, anyway) about not being “normal.” In other words, her description is that of the poor chubby girl you knew in high school who died her hair black, wore a Slipknot t-shirt (or, if you’re older, a The Cure t-shirt), and went out of her way to self-alienate as a defensive mechanism. We all know these people; maybe you are/were one. However trite this narrative setup is, it is at least realistic….. until her first day, when no fewer than three boys start to vie for Bella’s affections. This figure does not include Edward Cullen, the devastatingly handsome vampire who falls in love with Bella, and whose affection (as well as Bella’s mutual lust) forms the basis of the plot. Notably, Edward is actually a century old, and only appears to be 17 years old; while it’s easy to forget that he isn’t a young man, I think Edward’s apparent immaturity is a gaping plot hole.

Ask yourself if it’s likely that a stock misfit character just happens to be the center of widespread male attention, or if—as I suspect—Twilight just happens to be a virulently awful piece of wish fulfillment fantasy. This is a rhetorical question: Twilight is a bit like an extended daydream, an updated Harlequin romance for a darker and morbid audience who, instead of a preferring muscled pirate stealing your Victorian virtue, enjoys a hair-gelled vampire talking about how damned good your blood smells. Well, gosh, ladies, no wonder you’re moist!

To recap thus far: Meyer is an awful writer spewing out mediocre claptrap stolen from much better writers before her (see also Christopher Paolini). Twilight represents a petty, ridiculous kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that reveals the worst in its readers. As my brother has argued, however, is this much different from traditionally male wish-fulfillment fantasies? I just saw Taratino’s Inglourious Basterds, which is the equivalent of Jewish porn. Is hyperviolent Jewish wish-fulfillment better than Meyer’s odd sort of buttoned-down angsty tween wish fulfillment? I would argue that the execution is better, if nothing else—also that Tarantino’s wish-fulfillment was, while fictional, not necessarily farcical. But that is a philosophical debate best left for another time.

In the case of Twilight, there is little to redeem it. It combined the horrendous writing skill of Dan Brown with the plaintive, whining sort of characters favored by Christopher Paolini—the kind whose narrative deaths you fervently wish for. It is not merely a curious conceit from a subpar fabulist, but apparently indicative of a much larger issue with its readership—namely that they all, on some level, want to be popular misfits, and they all want to meet and seduce handsome, brooding, dangerous young men who inexplicably fall in love with them. The entire affair is infuriating and not a little sad. Clearly, if you’ve got any sense, and you aren’t simply reading the book out of morbid curiosity, run as far as you can from this terrible dross.

Brisingr by Christopher Paolini

It may interest you to read my review of the previous book in this series, Eldest.

You might recall that I’ve been reading Christopher Paolini’s mediocre Eragon series (first and second books) as a sort of guilty pleasure, having hooked myself into finding out how the damn thing ends.

I read the second part in the series back in March, and I don’t know if it’s simply that I’ve become somewhat more bitter in the intervening months, but I feel as though—if it’s possible—Paolini’s prose has become even more stilted and difficult to digest. One would think that with practice, age, and a good editor, Brisingr would be a joy to read, swimming in concise, glorious prose and a quilt of character interaction that rivals Dos Pasos. The truth is that Brisingr is terrible. At 784 pages, it’s about 700 pages longer than it needs to be; most of its time is spend in entirely unhelpful world- or character-building that is ineffective. The minute (and yet maddeningly vague) details of dwarven culture; pages upon pages of ridiculously fabricated words that would make Tolkien groan and squirm; drawn-out battles involving Eragon’s brother Roran that are so tedious I wish the character would die already so we could get on with the story.

It doesn’t help that Brisingr is the third book in a four-part series that was originally only supposed to be a trilogy: you can think of it as the first half of a very long book, meaning that its own narrative arcs are shallow and unengaging, serving only to entice you read the final book, wherein all the loose ends will ostensibly be tied up. In Brisingr, Roran fights some battles, Eragon visits various friendly spots, and there’s a half-hearted battle at the end. That’s it; really. I’m not kidding.

What’s even worse, Paolini seems to have discovered a fondness for the sort of narrative device wherein he begins to describe an action and then cuts away; later, he might have a character describe portions of it, but the action itself (usually the cool stuff, like battles) is gone for good, superseded by a lot of folderol and excruciatingly stilted dialog between the increasingly irritating characters. I seem to have had a lot more patience in book one, when these were new personalities with lots of promise, but Paolini’s rough treatment of them has robbed me of my charity. A good example is Eragon himself, who only matures as a character by means of a punctuated equilibrium—that is to say, he does very little until some magical force makes him leap ahead in his abilities, but meanwhile he stays as much of an irritating teenager as ever. It seems as though Paolini is terrified of trying to narrative a riveting battle sequence, or of trying to grow his characters with any sort of nuance. In the former respect, he reminds me a little bit of Stephen King, whose 1500-page The Stand was also about 1000 pages too long, taken up mostly by characterization that never went anywhere. Novelists should remember that sometimes brevity is the best style of all.

I feel as though Brisingr was little more than a staging ground for Paolini’s finalization of the series, and a sort of gauntlet for fans to suffer through in order to sate their curiosity as to the fate of its main characters….. though if Paolini’s history of plot-stealing is any indication, we can easily guess how events will play out in Book 4. The Eragon series is an “I am your father” or a “When is a legend legend?” from a plagiarism suit.

I’ve seen the Wikipedia entry. Its 9-paragraph summary captures pretty much everything Brisingr has to offer. If you’ve been reading along for the sheer joy of Paolini’s prose, I’m sorry. If you’ve been reading out of an obligation to know how things end, you may save yourself time by simply reading the summary of this and waiting for the final book to satisfy your morbid curiosity. In a word, Brisingr is tinder.