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Mar

10

A Big Fuss About Rothfuss

Filed Under Website Review 

There’s a hoary old cliché about football (the Beckham style - Victoria if you prefer your games spicy) that it’s a game of two halves. 

Anyway, this game began with me reading a brick by a new author who’s being touted as the next big thing to hit publishing. So, here it is, folks: The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, Day 1) by Patrick Rothfuss (Daw, April, 2007). Frankly, I don’t usually even try to pick up books this big. The risks of damaging a wrist tendon are significant. Nevertheless, I laid this on my lap and opened it, finding a mere 672 pages. Daunted, I began reading, expecting it to be torture peine fort et dure so that I could rescue myself by replacing it on the shelf (it being more sturdy than I).

So the first half of the game is the plot. Imagine taking every boarding school component from Charles Dickens to Enid Blyton to J.K. Rowling. We’re going to start our boy off in the “school” as a penniless orphan, but make him very bright. He’s quickly going to fall foul of a rich kid and start a feud. The staff will be ambivalent about him but, when he shows ability, quickly progress him through the ranks. Think Hogwarts because this “University” teaches magical skills to those who show promise. And why Dickens? Well, our boy is going to start off happy up to the age of eleven and then fall on hard times which, like Oliver Twist, forces him on to the streets as a beggar. I could go on but I think you’ll have the message by now. 

And, to make it worse, the character development lacks any real credibility. Let’s start with a quote from Abenthy, the arcanist who begins to teach him basic skills, “He will leave his mark on the world as one of the best. . . [at] whatever he chooses.” So this boy is already outstanding and will only get better. Next, let’s accept the reality of the trauma caused by the death of his parents. As an aside, the reason for his survival is “obscure”. He is at the mercy of ruthless killers who are intent of removing everyone who had heard the song about Lanre and who could literally kill him in the time taken to speak one word. No matter who or what is coming, his death should be inevitable. There are better ways of managing a scene both to show the young hero the reality of what he is going to be up against when he seeks revenge and to treat readers as having intelligence.

Naturally, as a survivor, he goes first into a fugue and then a feral state, living wild and with no real application of will or intelligence. But, mere survival goes on too long and his transformation back to bright kid is so instantaneous, you wonder why he was ever so depressed in the first place. Worse, when he gets to the University, he excels using skills taught to him by Abenthy when he was a happy camper even though they have lain completely unused ever since, but he fails to exploit his musical and acting abilities to earn some money which makes him look breathtakingly stupid all over again. My first conclusion is that this behaviour is dictated by the misplaced desire to pad out the text (which is too long already). 

But we could conjure a different explanation for this total lack of credibility. Perhaps the narrator is unreliable (see Wayne C Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction for the theory and “The History of a Self-Tormentor” in Little Dorrit for an example http://dickens.thefreelibrary.com/Little-Dorrit/2-21). The structure of the book allows for this. We start off with our hero as an innkeeper. A “news hound” tracks him down and asks for his story which he then proceeds to tell. It’s a narrative within a narrative with breaks for food and interruptions as drinking (and other) company joins them in the inn. Since the hero is telling his own story, he could have a motive for presenting a less than honest appraisal of himself and his background that is not yet apparent to us. Although why he should want us readers to think him so stupid is currently beyond me. Alternatively, as his companion Bast says, if people around him think him a hero, that’s how he acts. The natural corollary is that he’ll tell his story as a loser if that’s how he now thinks of himself. In his own words, he’s telling the story of his “triumphs and follies” with the emphasis on the latter. So the form is the story he tells is not consciously driven, but simply comes out in the least flattering way. Hmmm, I’m not really convincing myself here!

So, if your primary motivation for reading a chunky novel is to find an engaging narrative, forget it. This is unoriginal, annoyingly unconvincing and full of plot whose only purpose is probably to produce this “epic” length.

Half time - after a quick shower and a pep talk from the manager we come back out on to the field with the writing.

The writing?

What can I say?

This is a first novel, but it’s one of the best written books I’ve read so far this year! Add in the fact that it’s high fantasy which is very easy to get wrong, and it becomes all the more impressive a debut. Even seasoned professionals can go hyperbolic and ruin the atmosphere of a fantasy with overwritten prose. But this author manages to avoid the standard pitfalls and has produced a beautifully mannered style, peppered with interesting flashes of intelligence and wit. The leitmotif running through the book is silence. An individual may fall into silence, there may be a companionable silence between friends, there is silence as a portent of threat, and so on.

It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

or

Thus it was that three students made their slightly erratic way back to the University. See them as they go, weaving only slightly. It is quiet, and when the belling tower strikes the late hour, it doesn’t break the silence so much as it underpins it. The crickets, too, respect the silence. Their calls are like careful stitches in its fabric, almost too small to be seen.

or

. . .the innocent silence that had gathered like a clear pool around the three men was beginning to darken into a silence of a different kind.

Anchoring the tone of the book in silence is a clever metaphorical ploy. Words spoken break the silence. Words written do not. What is it, then, that fills the silence that threatens to envelop every one of us? Physically, we can be lonely if no-one speaks to us. We can be alienated if we are ignored or people say the wrong things (by our standards), or secretive if we are not forthcoming. Internally, our past is the narrative that informs our future if we hear what it’s trying to tell us. And therein lies the rub because we need to be listening to ourselves. What? We need to be talking to ourselves and listening. Oy veh! Surely, silence is us taking a break from all those painful emotions that are messing up our lives. But the silence is also an invitation to start a conversation. Or as a metaphor, silence is the warp to the weft of sound, and the resulting crossweave is what fills our lives and gives it shape. So it is, then, that the hero of this book uses words to say how he has lived his life, or not, because what he does not say is just as important as what he does say. Indeed, sometimes his silences are more informative than what he claims as truth.

So does this combination of two halves make this a good book? 

Well, not really. The plot is so deeply flawed that I don’t think the author can recover the situation by pretty writing. But the overall effect is to encourage me to want to read more. This is his first published book. We can forgive him (if not his editor) for turning in a beginner’s book. As he develops, he can only get better (at least, we can hope so). The next book in the series is due out in the new year and I’ve already asked my bookseller to lay in a copy for me as and when the publisher releases it into the wild. I’m also trying to channel Charles Atlas to learn how to build up my muscles so that I can pick it up safely when it arrives.

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One Response to “A Big Fuss About Rothfuss”

  1. Zaragulo on June 29th, 2009 9:52 pm

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