Month: November 2011

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Pratchett, Terry: (06) Wyrd Sisters, (07) Pyramids (re-read)

It’s kind of a mixed blessing that Wyrd Sisters was up next in the Discworld re-read. On one hand, it’s the first of the Discworld books that I felt like I would wholeheartedly recommend as a starting place for someone new, so it was welcome reading. On the other, I read it in the hospital while recovering from the birth of our second child by C-section (who is currently asleep across my left arm and lap as I type on my netbook perched on my knees), which means I was not in any state to note anything useful about it other than “hey, that was good.”

(I had thought that I also read a Witches book, Lords and Ladies, when in the hospital after our first child, but on checking the relevant entry, I only brought it with, and did not re-read until we were home.)

In a sign that I am still not fully adjusted, I’d completely forgotten that I re-read Pyramids, the next book in the series, also relatively recently, until I checked the index looking for the link above. Beyond what I said there, what I noticed this time is the extent to which Pyramids is a precursor to Small Gods, what with the gods walking around and the parody of classical Greece—I think some of the philosopher jokes may even reappear. Which is interesting from a series-development perspective, but unfortunately Pyramids does not do well by the comparison.

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Valentine, Genevieve: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

I read Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti after The Sacred Band because I was certain it would be very different, which it definitely was, and because it seemed massively unlikely to give me the same kind issues with its treatment of gender, which it did not.

Mechanique is a fantasy novel about a circus that travels through what the A.V. Club neatly sums up as “an indeterminate near-Earth that exists not so much in a post-apocalypse as in a frozen, perpetual mid-collapse.” There’s magic in the circus, but what is only slowly revealed over the course of the book (and how is almost entirely left aside, which is fine with me but may annoy others). Also revealed non-linearly is the history and relationships of the circus’s members, which then shapes their reaction to the plot, which admittedly takes a while to manifest.

The thing about this book is the prose, which the sample chapters give a very good sense of. I could never quite fall through it, myself. This is mostly personal taste, though on reflection, the fact that I liked somewhat better several short stories about the Circus (particularly “Study, for Solo Piano”) suggests that the stylization in the novel may be a little more heightened than optimal. However, despite that, I still read it twice and found that a lot of it lingered in my mind. So if the sample chapters interest you at all, I would say it’s worth trying. As Abigail Nussbaum’s more critical review in Strange Horizons puts it, the book “reaches for wonder and horror,” and even though I was not perfectly compatible with its style, for me it succeeded in attaining both.

Disclaimer: the author is a friend.

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Durham, David Anthony: (03) The Sacred Band

I have wildly mixed feelings about David Anthony Durham’s The Sacred Band.

On one hand, The Sacred Band is the end of the Acacia trilogy, which is now an epic, literally world-changing fantasy series that is complete in three volumes. That is rather ridiculously rare these days. (Sanderson’s Mistborn books, which I haven’t read? Other than that, I’m drawing a blank.) It has good momentum. There are moments that I found beautiful or moving, even when I didn’t actually like the surrounding context. And I am satisfied by the very broadest level of resolution.

On the other hand, I am not satisfied by many of the more specific resolutions, and my lack of satisfaction has been growing as I re-read and thought and mentally drafted this post. Some of them may well be the kind of thing that only bother me, but they’re keeping me from feeling that I really liked the book as a whole.

To start with something more concrete (a spoiler post will follow), this book spends a lot of time revisiting the first book, with mixed success. My reactions to these range from, “Well, I guess, but it would really have helped if there had been even the tiniest hint in this direction at the time,” to “Yeah, no, that’s a retcon, I see what you did there,” to “I don’t care how authoritatively the narrative asserts this, I will never ever believe it and nothing can make me, so there.” (Yes, my reader reactions are very mature sometimes.) There’s also more ambiguity about some of the resolutions than this analytic reader would like (though I may be overanalyzing or expecting too much internal consistency).

Another factor is more subjective and harder to explain. Let me try and back into it: the theme of this book is revenge versus forgiveness, or at least letting go. And there is something to be said for people who have access to power in an unjust system recognizing that injustice and using their power to change the system (especially when, as is so often the case in fantasy, magical ability is heritable).

But it is still a very awkward and delicate thing to have the non-elite characters fall away in this book and have most of the significant action be taken by the royal heirs. This is especially true in the Ushen Brae (Other Lands) sections, where despite all the above I am still not sure that Dariel doesn’t turn into the honky that those people needed, but I also had an issue with the way another character wielded supreme executive power on behalf of a whole lot of voiceless-by-fiat people.

Finally, though I realize it seems unfair to complain about this while simultaneously praising the book for completing the trilogy, a few things seem to be dealt with far too quickly. A couple of these are plot, and I think I would have preferred that the problems never be introduced rather than disposed of so offhandedly; one of them is one redemption too many, which made me feel that several chapters of character development had fallen on the cutting room floor. (Not that I wanted to spend more time with that character. Left unredeemed would’ve been just fine, too, and arguably more consistent with the series as a whole.)

I think the most accurate thing I can say about my reaction to this book is that I did not feel that it lived up to the potential, the promise, and the problems of the prior two books. Durham has admitted that he didn’t know how he was going to get to the end while he was writing the first two, and though I didn’t know that when I first read The Sacred Band, I was, unfortunately, not at all surprised to hear it. (I was, however, surprised to hear that he thought the ending might though be controversial or genre-defying, as I thought the overall direction was clear throughout.)

So do I recommend the trilogy? There is a lot of good about the series, which I hope the posts about the first two books adequately conveyed. But for those who were waiting to see if the series stuck the landing: I think it wobbled pretty significantly, but my opinion is based on issues that, again, often bother me more than other people. However, since it’s not the kind of series where the ending is deeply polarizing yet completely impossible to explain without massive spoilers (see: Baker’s Company series, King’s Dark Tower series), I hope that even these necessarily-oblique comments give new readers an idea whether they are likely to have the same reaction.

A spoiler post (which will assume familiarity with the book) follows.

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