Fantasy roundup: A Song of Ice and Fire

Yes, the George R.R. Martin epic. I was ill in January and read it. I'm trying to not include any real spoilers.

Verdict: undecided but highly pessimistic.

George R. R. Martin's massive epic is a fantasy re-working of the Wars of the Roses, coming soon to a TV near you as an HBO miniseries. The written work itself is gigantic, taking up six brick-sized volumes. Inside is a very well-written story that follows the families of Lancaster and York in their epic struggle for the kingdom of England. While they fight each other, beyond Hadrian's Wall the Scots and undead Picts are gathering, and Prince Edward is gathering an army on the Continent to regain his kingdom. Shit, I forgot to swap in the fantasy names. Sorry. Also, there's, um, an evil Zoroastrian woman. That's my blurb. Deal with it.

The quality of writing is very good, there are memorable characters and moments, and the story does grip you badly enough that even when the flaws of the books had become glaringly obvious, I still finished it. When I say finished, I mean I read the volumes that have been published so far. The next one's coming out in 2005, and even thoguh there are still times when I get confused as to what year it is, I rarely get that confused. It's now six years late, and if I had to lay money on it, I'd bet it's never coming out.

Why? Because the book is out of control. The narration skips between several characters, which is good at first, but gets somewhat confusing before long. The main problem is that the characters change, and not always for the better. Most of the last book was spent following around characters I just don't care about, while everyone actually engaged in something important was conspicuously absent. So much, in fact, that the author added a postscript where he promised to catch up with them in his next volume, coming up six years ago! Oops.

From the originally simple story of Lancaster-versus-York, the story has expanded to the point where we've been all over the Mediterranean with Prince Edward, visited the King of Scotland's court and spent a good deal of time in the succession dispute of the Isle of Man. While some of our characters are doing that, one particularly important one has just escaped the Tower of London, another character is maxing and relaxing with the lunatic Zoroastrians on what, geographically speaking, can only be Sealand, while the queen has a half-hearted lesbian fling and goes all Civ II on us by considering switching to Fundamentalism for all the free Fanatics. Meanwhile, one character is in Venice, sweeping floors at a temple and masquerading as a fishmonger, one is being held captive in Norwich and the rest of them are just plain missing.

In short, there are so many characters doing so many things that it's genuinely difficult to keep up with the story. I could live with that, if I only cared about it. The worst thing about the books is that the central theme of this huge story of intrigue, pseudo-history and slightly disturbing sexual content is anticlimax. Nothing ever works out the way it should, everyone is always disappointed, everyone gets betrayed and everything just generally goes to hell. Now, I'm all for portraying a war, especially a civil war, as pointless. It's just that you run into trouble when you hammer us over the head with how horrible and depressing and anticlimactic everything is and still expect us to be interested in the story.

As for the story itself, quite frankly, I don't even know what the main plot of the book is any more. The story has moved on from the first book, so far, in fact, that I really don't know what the main plotline is any more, which means I don't know what's significant and what isn't. The characters I cared about have been punched in the guts with anticlimax after disappointment after actual punch so often that I've just stopped caring any more.

This, incidentally, is another reason why I'd bet money the series won't be finished. How do you bring a massively complicated story to a satisfactory ending when the overriding theme of your work is disappointment? The only real options I see are either that the story will end in a massive anticlimax, or a truly disappoiting cop-out happy ending. My money's on the character whose viewpoint we started with waking up and realizing it was all a dream.

In the end, a verdict. I don't want to say "don't read it". This is a very well-written, initially captivating work. Besides, maybe the publicity of the HBO thing will induce the author to actually finish it. But as it stands, even if the next part comes out, I'm not ready to recommend this to anyone either. Around halfway, the captivating story with its memorable characters turns into an endless, dreary slog through a horribly depressing fantasy re-enactment of the Wars of the Roses. All I can do is give my warning, and admonish the prospective reader to beware of the anticlimaxes, the disappointment and the sheer boredom.

In all honesty, even if the next part does come out, I'm not even sure I can be bothered to read it. I think I lost all interest in the story in the last part. If I'd known it only keeps getting worse, maybe I'd have stopped reading much earlier.

Come to think of it, I guess that ended up being a more definitive verdict than I thought I'd give.

Fantasy roundup: The Black Magician Trilogy

Or, next up on my fantasy book review-o-rama, at least the first two books of it.

Verdict: Don't bother.

The first book of Trudi Canavan's Black Magician trilogy follows the life of Sonea, a young slum girl. She lives in a city where the poor are kept in line by the Magicians' Guild, but it turns out she can do magic herself, and hijinks ensue. If you want a proper blurb, read the back of the book.

I liked the first book. Sonea is a decently-written, almost memorable young girl, and not only are there some good moments in the book, but you end up sort of caring what happens to her. That's why the second book is such a crushing disappointment.

This may be a mild spoiler, but it's on the back cover of the second book. The second book starts with the main character studying at the Magicians' Guild. The plot is mildly interesting, but there are several small problems and one really big one. For starters, the language gets a bit embarrassing at times, especially when one of the wizards goes on a boat with rooms in it. I admit that knowing something about sailing ships and having read some first-class nautical fiction may spoil a person, but everything even remotely sea-going in the book is, at best, not quite horribly wrong. As I said, it's a bit embarrassing.

Sonea's life in the magicians' guild comes over all Harry Potter, which I suppose is to some degree unavoidable, but therein lies the one thing that made me stop reading the book: in the second book, she's not the same character any more. In the first book, she's a tough, resourceful, streetwise slum kid, who, unlike the usual computer role-playing game incarnations of such, is somewhat believable. In the second, the street kid has been replaced with a scared, whiny little brat. To give you an idea, in the first book, when someone lays hands on her, she punches them in the face; in the second book, when a spoiled kid calls her a name, she starts crying and hides in her room.

For Harry Potter, going to magic school brought about a miraculous transformation from nerd to jock. In Cavanan's character's case, it does the exact opposite and transforms her into a sissy. Now, if the point was that her old skills and connections are useless in this strange new world and she's confused, that would be fine; I'd even expect it. What I can't stomach is that through the simple act of being accepted into a school, she completely jettisons her old personality. The plain fact of the matter is that there are two different protagonists in the first two books, and for a character-driven story, this is a bad thing. It's a crying shame, as after the first book, I was looking forward to the sequel; about a third of the way in, I couldn't be bothered to keep reading.

The first book was an entertaining read and showed promise, but on the whole, I'd advise against reading it. If you like it, you'll just be horribly disappointed by the sequel.