I was tempted to focus today on a genre of materials I’ve been looking at in archives for some time and the latest examples of this genre that I’m grappling with, but I’m more than a year away from finishing my manuscript on that topic and I’m unusually leery about the thought of laying out my thinking.
So I’m going to quickly run through a fantasy novel I read recently instead.
Why did I get this book?
Cover design plus the staff at a book store I go to in the Philly suburbs had a recommendation tag under it.
Is it what I thought it was?
It is, for both good and bad. (e.g., I was afraid it would have some generic flaws of fantasy fiction, and it does, but it is also readable almost despite itself.)
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I might read the sequels? The author is able to make a story readable even when falling into highly conventionalized cliches.
Quotes
“It’s been fourteen years, last night. Fourteen years since King Antoine took me hostage; fourteen years since I’ve seen or heard from my parents. It’s the only night I allow myself to remember them, and the only night I dare to look my fear in the eyes and remember why I’m here. And as usual on this night, I haven’t slept at all.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
A great deal of fantasy remains built around a protagonist who is the Chosen One, the prophesied savior, the person with the magical heritage that can change everything, who has no idea that they are special and then typically discovers who they really are when they’re a teenager or a young adult.
This is one of those stories and it has all the drawbacks as well as some of pleasures of that plot structure. The protagonist in this book has been a hostage to a hostile king (who has treated her well personally) since she was a young girl. She’s aware she has a slight facility for a forbidden kind of magic, but has no sense that she is actually destined to be a ruler with a tremendous power to commune with the land and with ancestral spirits. I have to admit that I’d almost rather read a story at this point of a highly trained, intensely self-knowledgeable messiah who is just kind of sick of being prepared for their unique power—there is something notionally off-putting about the idea of a young adult suddenly awakening to their very special specialness and then uncovering the true nature of their power (which, of course, always turns out to be something esoteric and forgotten) and managing to do what almost no other wielder of that power ever did before, even before we get to this being a cliche whose appeal often rests on a kind of wish-fulfillment from readers who feel their special-specialness might someday usher them into both respect and power. (This sort of character always ends up being the leader that everyone follows willingly and lovingly, because they always find a way to win out in a situation where everyone else has failed. The unshielded thermal exhaust port or something thereof.)
Writing this sort of main character also often forces the author to develop the character as naive, shallow, misguided, and especially as resistant to their destiny. This protagonist can’t work if they’re eager for power or if they right away recognize what’s going on when the action starts—we wouldn’t like them, or wish for their success, if they seem savvy and ready to rule or save the world. (Plus they wouldn’t serve as an expositional point of entry to the world the author is building: a wise and knowing character doesn’t have to have an internal narration about their confusion about what’s going on, or beg for explanations from the other characters.) But the result—as in this novel—is that the protagonist can come off as frankly a bit stupid and certainly as immature and oddly privileged even if they are the equivalent of a farm boy or girl, a holy fool covered in bristling plot armor.
I suppose I’m a sucker for this kind of plot when it’s done in a readable way—as in this case—simply because it’s comfortable and because it doesn’t have some of the darkness or grimness that a good deal of post-Martin fantasy has acquired. I kept wondering if there were going to be any slightly darker twists such as the love interest being a completely deceptive betrayer, or the morally upstanding father turning out to be a cynical manipulator, or the evil princess turning out to be quite sympathetic. Nope! Maybe that’s for the best, to just have the good guys win, albeit with a couple of deaths along the way to up the stakes. I did have a moment at the beginning of the novel where I thought it was going to be more about court intrigue and honestly that felt like a better direction to go—it was a promising opening.
This is also a book that unabashedly revels in the overlap between the plot structures of conventional romance novels and a fair amount of fantasy fiction: there is the unexpected love interest in the beginning who the protagonist is reluctantly drawn to, there is the dutiful possible betrothal to a decent but not desired partner, and then there is the consummation of the relationship to the slightly dangerous love interest after some travails and fears of betrayal. It’s fine but considering that the entire book is spent inside the head of the protagonist, the whole arc is something she doesn’t seem reflective about, even to lay down the usual “I never expected to be in love! But I am!” tracks beyond a dutiful minimum.
I did appreciate that the basic conflict between kingdoms is resolved efficiently—this is not loaded down with thousands of pages of bloat, and whatever the sequel is about, it will have to be about the next turn of some larger wheel in the overall world the author is building. There’s also some interesting work done with the major named antagonist and the protagonist’s mother that could probably have opened up some more emotional and narrative complexity, including in the protagonist, if it had been given more room to breathe.
This all sounds more negative than I might have wished—I read it, it wasn’t unpleasant to read, and I might read more. Oddly, it would be a good novel to read if you wanted to engage a kind of “standard representative” of a lot of what’s on the shelves in the fantasy section of a large bookstore.