Fatal Revenant - a Spoiler-ish review
Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2007 12:51 pm
[spoiler tags removed, read at own risk - dlbpharmd]
Let me say at once that I love this book. That needs to be said immediately because what follows might otherwise read like a disappointed and even cruel review because there are many reasons why this book shouldn't work. Yet the fact remains that for me it does work very well. I could not put it down. The author has managed to pull off something quite quirky and original at this late sage in the saga, well justifying the decision to return to the Land. Yet it defies the mechanics of the genre and even the laws of good story telling so much that, in my more cynical moments, I wonder if it's only my fanboy desire to read these books that keeps the whole thing afloat. Others must judge.
So that said, let's turn to the story. I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, but there are some, and be warned - there will be more spoilers in some of the responses to this post that are capable of ruining your enjoyment of the book.
This is the most plot driven book of the Covenant series. The machinations and agonisings of the central protagonist are so drawn out and complex that they dominate the book - no, they are the book. Barely a paragraph goes by without Linden Avery lost in a fresh reverie of confusion, weighing in the balance another throwaway comment by the latest enigmatic passing potentate before diving into a conversation with yet another of these mysterious cosmically charged beings that continue to multiply throughout the story. Eventually one longs for a chapter of character development among the mere inhabitants of the land who sometimes dangle along behind the barking mad Sunsage, but you have to get almost three quarters of the way through the book before we see anything much from ground level. This story is all about the big powers, their interventions, absences and intentions. Now, given that this 'what on earth is going on' narrative drives the book like a 700 page murder mystery, there can't really be a proper review without an examination and exposition of the plot. But the whole fun of the book is trying to work out how things fit together, so there's a higher than normal duty here for a reviewer to keep plot spoilers to a minimum. One can therefore see why the author has been so careful about not releasing clues about the books in advance, even to those who want to be spoilered, and I want to respect that logic here.
All of which makes it very hard to discuss the most interesting parts of the book in any meaningful way - in particular the central enigma of the book - what has happened to Thomas Covenant? We waited an entire book to see our star turn, Elvis himself back from the dead with his unpredictable and often vicious post modern responses to Tolkien sword and sorcery that we know and love. Let's face it, we grew up with Thomas Covenant, we love Thomas Covenant, and that Linden Avery, she's no Thomas Covenant. Even with her slightly implausable 'mother love for brain damaged kid' thing shoe-horned into her already established neurosis, she can't do crazy obsessive like the big man can. I don't really find her as charismatic a character, no matter how many times Liand says otherwise, so I was looking forward to seeing her take the back seat for a while.
No such luck. There's no easy way to say this. Thomas Covenant groupies are going to be upset by this aspect of the book. It's all still from Linden's POV, and Covenant is now so different from the man she idealises in her memory that she, and we, have to get to know him all over again, but from the outside looking in. All that from the perspective of a woman (I think) gradually transforming into her suicide father, so that you don't quite know how much of it is that Covenant really has changed and how much of it is her. In a sense the Covenant she remembers barely features in this book, a theme complicated by the fact that my memory of Covenant is very different from hers. And the author throughout plays in a compelling way with our complex desire to understand what's changed and thereby 'find' the Covenant she and we love.
And that's the most I can say about Covenant without spoiling the plot, which is woven into these themes rather tightly.
All of the above might suggest this book is a disappointment. Quite the contrary - it was utterly enthralling from beginning to end. Apart from several stumbles when exposition weighed too heavily (which I hope will disappear from the published version) I found the writing very much on song. Donaldson's ability to describe the Land is once again rich and textured in a way that Runes of the Earth was not, and his ability to capture the dilemma of the protagonist is effective and compelling. His capacity to surprise and intrigue the reader in ways both outrageous and subtle remains intact. And there's a star turn in virtually every chapter, which is a mixed blessing but it certainly never gets boring. The dialogue is well written and mostly engaging - which is good because there's an awful lot of it. His characterisation works well on the too few occasions where it happens, and strengthens a somewhat unlikely plot. But hey, this is fantasy - unlikely plots are allowed so long as they work.
But yea gods - what a plot. It's so complex that it makes your nose bleed. I feel sure that when I read it again it won't make sense, but for the life of me I can't put my finger on why just now (the technical term for this amongst writers is 'Fridge Logic'.) In particular there is a whole new nationality of mysterious magicians called the Insequent whose only apparent function is to serve as plot devices, retcon the otherwise inexplicable, and provide some exposition to the permanently bamboozled and wrong-footed Linden (for which read us, the readers.) And the writer appears to be making up the rules of time travel as he goes along. We're told that caesures cannot go back beyond the breaking of the laws of life and death, even though the Demondin came through one. We've been told, or at least it's been strongly suggested, that only White Gold can manipulate time, but we now see that not only can Jeremiah manipulate time, but so also can at least two other characters.
But my biggest criticism of this book is that it feels overpacked, especially with dialogue between Linden Avery and all these other powers of the Land. Linden is still bickering with any one of half a dozen of her various cosmic stalkers even during the action scenes. Some of this seems gratuitous. In particular, one chapter featuring an encounter with the (albiet intriguing) Viles seems irrelevant to the plot and clumsily contrived in order to inject a bit of urgency into the proceedings. And even during that action, Linden can't stop her constant solipsistic cross-examinations like she's some freshman law student. That would be marginally less irritating if her ever-esculating capacity to ignore plain and obvious clues didn't make these dialogues so unnecessary. But that's to criticise her character rather than the book itself. As numbness was Covenant's theme before, blindness is Linden's defining characteristic now.
To make space for this overpacking, there's a real sense that the author has cut out what might be termed 'the boring bits,' just as he did in the last book. Few epic journeys are required to get from A to B and none of them long. Not much time is spent on the lesser powered characters, with the exception of Stave and the Manethrall. Inconvenient characters, not the least of whom are the Demondin, get disposed of peremptorily as soon as their plot purpose is served. But this kind of furious pacing is necessary if you're going to jam this much plot in and remain a vaguely interesting read.
And an interesting read is what it is. By the time we get to where we're going, there's a real sense of looming disaster, and that both the author and Linden are credibly set upon an over-the-top atrocity that is both unpredictable and inescapable. The book, to no-one's great suprise, ends on a gigantic cliff hanger which successfully trumps the last one, as any rattling good yarn should.
I loved reading Fatal Revenant, I can't wait for the next one, and in the end that's the only judgement that matters. But I prophesy that there will be plenty of people who aren't going to feel the same way.
Let me say at once that I love this book. That needs to be said immediately because what follows might otherwise read like a disappointed and even cruel review because there are many reasons why this book shouldn't work. Yet the fact remains that for me it does work very well. I could not put it down. The author has managed to pull off something quite quirky and original at this late sage in the saga, well justifying the decision to return to the Land. Yet it defies the mechanics of the genre and even the laws of good story telling so much that, in my more cynical moments, I wonder if it's only my fanboy desire to read these books that keeps the whole thing afloat. Others must judge.
So that said, let's turn to the story. I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, but there are some, and be warned - there will be more spoilers in some of the responses to this post that are capable of ruining your enjoyment of the book.
This is the most plot driven book of the Covenant series. The machinations and agonisings of the central protagonist are so drawn out and complex that they dominate the book - no, they are the book. Barely a paragraph goes by without Linden Avery lost in a fresh reverie of confusion, weighing in the balance another throwaway comment by the latest enigmatic passing potentate before diving into a conversation with yet another of these mysterious cosmically charged beings that continue to multiply throughout the story. Eventually one longs for a chapter of character development among the mere inhabitants of the land who sometimes dangle along behind the barking mad Sunsage, but you have to get almost three quarters of the way through the book before we see anything much from ground level. This story is all about the big powers, their interventions, absences and intentions. Now, given that this 'what on earth is going on' narrative drives the book like a 700 page murder mystery, there can't really be a proper review without an examination and exposition of the plot. But the whole fun of the book is trying to work out how things fit together, so there's a higher than normal duty here for a reviewer to keep plot spoilers to a minimum. One can therefore see why the author has been so careful about not releasing clues about the books in advance, even to those who want to be spoilered, and I want to respect that logic here.
All of which makes it very hard to discuss the most interesting parts of the book in any meaningful way - in particular the central enigma of the book - what has happened to Thomas Covenant? We waited an entire book to see our star turn, Elvis himself back from the dead with his unpredictable and often vicious post modern responses to Tolkien sword and sorcery that we know and love. Let's face it, we grew up with Thomas Covenant, we love Thomas Covenant, and that Linden Avery, she's no Thomas Covenant. Even with her slightly implausable 'mother love for brain damaged kid' thing shoe-horned into her already established neurosis, she can't do crazy obsessive like the big man can. I don't really find her as charismatic a character, no matter how many times Liand says otherwise, so I was looking forward to seeing her take the back seat for a while.
No such luck. There's no easy way to say this. Thomas Covenant groupies are going to be upset by this aspect of the book. It's all still from Linden's POV, and Covenant is now so different from the man she idealises in her memory that she, and we, have to get to know him all over again, but from the outside looking in. All that from the perspective of a woman (I think) gradually transforming into her suicide father, so that you don't quite know how much of it is that Covenant really has changed and how much of it is her. In a sense the Covenant she remembers barely features in this book, a theme complicated by the fact that my memory of Covenant is very different from hers. And the author throughout plays in a compelling way with our complex desire to understand what's changed and thereby 'find' the Covenant she and we love.
And that's the most I can say about Covenant without spoiling the plot, which is woven into these themes rather tightly.
All of the above might suggest this book is a disappointment. Quite the contrary - it was utterly enthralling from beginning to end. Apart from several stumbles when exposition weighed too heavily (which I hope will disappear from the published version) I found the writing very much on song. Donaldson's ability to describe the Land is once again rich and textured in a way that Runes of the Earth was not, and his ability to capture the dilemma of the protagonist is effective and compelling. His capacity to surprise and intrigue the reader in ways both outrageous and subtle remains intact. And there's a star turn in virtually every chapter, which is a mixed blessing but it certainly never gets boring. The dialogue is well written and mostly engaging - which is good because there's an awful lot of it. His characterisation works well on the too few occasions where it happens, and strengthens a somewhat unlikely plot. But hey, this is fantasy - unlikely plots are allowed so long as they work.
But yea gods - what a plot. It's so complex that it makes your nose bleed. I feel sure that when I read it again it won't make sense, but for the life of me I can't put my finger on why just now (the technical term for this amongst writers is 'Fridge Logic'.) In particular there is a whole new nationality of mysterious magicians called the Insequent whose only apparent function is to serve as plot devices, retcon the otherwise inexplicable, and provide some exposition to the permanently bamboozled and wrong-footed Linden (for which read us, the readers.) And the writer appears to be making up the rules of time travel as he goes along. We're told that caesures cannot go back beyond the breaking of the laws of life and death, even though the Demondin came through one. We've been told, or at least it's been strongly suggested, that only White Gold can manipulate time, but we now see that not only can Jeremiah manipulate time, but so also can at least two other characters.
But my biggest criticism of this book is that it feels overpacked, especially with dialogue between Linden Avery and all these other powers of the Land. Linden is still bickering with any one of half a dozen of her various cosmic stalkers even during the action scenes. Some of this seems gratuitous. In particular, one chapter featuring an encounter with the (albiet intriguing) Viles seems irrelevant to the plot and clumsily contrived in order to inject a bit of urgency into the proceedings. And even during that action, Linden can't stop her constant solipsistic cross-examinations like she's some freshman law student. That would be marginally less irritating if her ever-esculating capacity to ignore plain and obvious clues didn't make these dialogues so unnecessary. But that's to criticise her character rather than the book itself. As numbness was Covenant's theme before, blindness is Linden's defining characteristic now.
To make space for this overpacking, there's a real sense that the author has cut out what might be termed 'the boring bits,' just as he did in the last book. Few epic journeys are required to get from A to B and none of them long. Not much time is spent on the lesser powered characters, with the exception of Stave and the Manethrall. Inconvenient characters, not the least of whom are the Demondin, get disposed of peremptorily as soon as their plot purpose is served. But this kind of furious pacing is necessary if you're going to jam this much plot in and remain a vaguely interesting read.
And an interesting read is what it is. By the time we get to where we're going, there's a real sense of looming disaster, and that both the author and Linden are credibly set upon an over-the-top atrocity that is both unpredictable and inescapable. The book, to no-one's great suprise, ends on a gigantic cliff hanger which successfully trumps the last one, as any rattling good yarn should.
I loved reading Fatal Revenant, I can't wait for the next one, and in the end that's the only judgement that matters. But I prophesy that there will be plenty of people who aren't going to feel the same way.
