Book review--Talyn
One of the bad side effects of working for a publishing company is that it kills your desire to read. I don’t know how editors do it--they read for a living, and many of them read additional books on the side. I guess an absolutely insatiable need to read is what drives them to be editors in the first place.
Which isn’t to say that I don’t read all the time--certainly I read as part of my job, and piles of nonfiction live on the back of my toilet, but in the past decade or so, I somehow forgot how to read novels. Or...forgot how to enjoy them, sort of. I might think it’s because I’m a writer, and that in the last 10 years or so, I’ve given a lot of thought to the art and craft of writing, and that kind of wrecks my ability to read for fun, except that this phenomenon is common in the industry, even amongst those who aren’t writers.
Anyhow, it was very surprising and pleasing that I managed to read three whole novels in the past three months (yeah, yeah, go ahead and laugh). I’ll be reviewing them in the next few posts.
The first book I read, back in December or January, was Talyn, by Holly Lisle. Grade: C
This is an average grade for a slightly-better-than-average fat fantasy novel. Que? you say. Better-than-average story and worldbuilding, less-than-average execution (okay, in truth, probably not less-than-average, merely average. But it’s less-than-what-I-think-should-be-average. Just because a conspicious number of other writers fail to be as good as I think they can be, doesn’t mean I’m going to let Lisle off the hook of my outrageous standards).
I’m going to start with the stuff that didn’t thrill me, and finish with the stuff I did like, since I prefer to end on a positive note.
This is a big book, 200K+ words. Unfortunately, it isn’t 200K+ words worth of story.
The book’s editor, the lovely and charming alg, said in her blog that she thought despite being a long novel, it had no extraneous words. I disagree. There are no extraneous scenes, nothing I would chalk up to auctorial self-indulgence; every scene has a clear and obvious (sometimes too obvious) purpose. There are, however, constant extra words, which persistently poked me in the eyeballs. I couldn’t help thinking this novel could have been trimmed 10% by a ruthless line-editing.
Opening the book at random, I easily find an example:“I hope you get better quickly,” Gair said. The old man had been kind to Gair and his men when he had no reason to be. When he had plenty of reason not to be. Gair liked him.
The slight redundance of the second and third sentences doesn’t bother me; it’s part of the narrative voice, the way Gair would think. But--“Gair liked him”? Really? I would never have guessed from context. [/sarcasm] That sentence is pure author insecurity, hammering home the point just in case the readers are idiots.
That sort of thing is all throughout the book, Lisle telling us things she has just shown us. I understand an author’s desire to be clear, but it kept going just one sentence too far. Sometimes one paragraph too far. I appreciate that in first-person narrative the narrator is naturally going to talk about her feelings and thoughts, but Talyn (the first-person narrator of about 75% of the book) did tend to run on. There are only so many treatises on the theme of “this is what it means to be Tonk” that I want to read.
Now, one might reasonably say that I’m too sensitive to that sort of thing, because I am a writer and I think about that. OTOH, I would say that the effect is felt by the reader regardless; it’s only because I took the time to analyze why my attention would wander that I can point to the words or paragraphs where I got bored.
The other thing that really bugged me, and this took me a while to figure out after I had finished reading it, was that it is a strictly linear narrative. One thing happens, then the next thing, then the next. There are a few minor bits of foreshadowing, but not much happened that made me say, “Oh, hey! This ties into that thing ten chapters ago! Wow, I should have seen that coming!” Even the one moment that does tie into something much earlier in the book, the notion that the taaksmen escaped from the Faverhend via underground tunnels, is sort of blown off, because the point at the moment it’s explained isn’t “Oh, this is how everyone from the Faverhend escaped!” but rather, “And here are these underground tunnels that give the protags access to anywhere in town, but the bad guys have no clue about them. Convenient, no?”
Everything that caught the protagonist by surprise was long-obvious to the reader (Gee, you think maybe the Feegash are mind-control experts?), and any aspects of it that didn’t quite mesh with the reader’s assumption went off in the wrong direction and weakened, rather than increased, the tension. (Oh, it’s not all the Feegash, just Skirmig. Okay, so they just need to kill him.)
I’m kind of amazed how such a linear plot can consistently fail to surprise. But part of surprise is anticipation, and I never felt a sense of anticipation, never felt sufficiently engaged with the story to be wondering breathlessly, “How are they going to deal with that thing?” Each problem was resolved in order, Talyn developing new powers as necessary, or Lisle pointing out convenient aspects of the worldbuilding (e.g. the aforementioned tunnels) when they solved problems and moved the plot along to the next phase.
And that was what finally clued me in to what bugged me. No scene ever did more than one thing. The problems kept piling on--just as Talyn and Gair would solve one issue, some other complication would crop up to make it ineffective or turn it against them. This should be the stuff of nail-biting stories, right? Wow, things just keep getting worse for the protags! Except that after the first few neatly-packaged solutions, I never felt more than an academic curiosity. I just waited patiently, knowing that sooner or later Lisle would pull their fat out of the fire, with no real change to the characters other than the one that was signaled earlier: somehow, despite the enmity between their people and the laws forbidding it, Talyn and Gair would get together. But even as they were falling in love, I didn’t feel any magic in it, precisely because it was hugely telegraphed. THEY WILL FALL IN LOVE. THEY WILL OVERCOME SOCIAL OBSTACLES AND EVERYTHING WILL WORK OUT. THEIR PERSONALITIES WON’T CHANGE MUCH IN THIS PROCESS.
I think I would have liked it better if the ending had been bittersweet and despite falling in love, Talyn and Gair could not be together. I would have loved it if one of them had died--and not out of any animosity for the characters, but because that would have been unexpected and therefore emotionally interesting. It also would have been logical, because Lisle’s ability to keep piling on difficulties for the characters is quite good, and I often found myself saying, “hmmm, I wonder how they’ll get out of this.” Unfortunately, a lot of the ways of solving those difficulties came off as deus ex machina, or whatever is the Latin translation of “the author pulls a convenient solution out of her ass.”
I sometimes got tired of Gair insisting that the Eastils wanted to conquer the Tonk and bring them liberal enlightenment, because Gair, who is otherwise extremely likable, didn’t strike me as stupid enough to believe such a flimsy story. I wanted a better explanation for the Eastils’ motivation, or for the given explanation to be more believable. But the Tonks have the same strong magic as the Eastils, and have held them off for hundreds of years. It seems easier to me that people consider opponents to be backwards if they aren’t able to compete militarily, as 19th Century American settlers considered the Native Americans, or the Victorian British considered, well, everyone. There’s nothing quite like getting one’s ass handed to one to start thinking that hey, maybe these opponents ain’t so backward as we think.
But okay, I could handwave that away, since most of the book is in Talyn’s POV, and the action all takes place in the Tonk Confederacy. The Tonk reason is sound: they used to own the whole landmass until the damn Eastils took half; the Tonk are only reclaiming what is theirs. Further, Tonk culture is superior to all other cultures, and those stupid Eastils are weak and decadent because they have lots of gods and different cultures all piled together, and how the heck can any civilization survive that has no sense of itself as a people? That sort of “we’re better because we’re us” reasoning has plenty of grounding in Earth cultures, and is easily believed.
My only other quibble with the book was the different POVs. It wasn’t enough to swap between Talyn and Gair; Lisle had to cast Talyn’s narration in first person and Gair’s in third. This caused me a few bobbles when moving into Gair’s POV. I think it would have worked better with both in first person. But points to Lisle for trying something different.
The book’s strengths lie in the worldbuilding and themes. If Lisle is occasionally heavy-handed with the “both sides in a war are both right and wrong,” theme, it is nonetheless a worthy one and not one that’s been done much in Fantasy novels, which tend rather to the “we are Good, they are Bad” view of the world. The folks on both sides of the conflict are sympathetic, and Lisle does an excellent of job of masking any author opinion by appearing both critical and approving of both sides at different points. Both POV characters are clearly unreliable, products of cultures that have been indoctrinating their soldiers for hundreds of years.
The plot was overall very interesting and not the same ol’ same old. The Tonks and the Eastils have been at war for 400 years, in a kind of stalemate with a DMZ between them. Then the Feegash, a pack of outsiders, arrive, offering to broker a peace and usher in a new age of productivity, trade, and wealth. The Tonk military can’t believe this story, and totally don’t expect their government to go along with this plan, but the Feegash prove to be very convincing and peace is declared. The military are disarmed (or they voluntarily leave to go be mercenaries elsewhere), and everyone starts adjusting to this totally new way of living: peace (or at least non-war).
However, the Feegash keep making little changes, things that eat away at personal freedoms and force new rules on the Tonk. Meanwhile, Talyn meets and begins a relationship with Skirmig, a Feegash man who claims to be a minor official in the Feegash delegation. Skirmig inspires a bit of sexual violence in Talyn in their first sexual encounter. (How do I define “a bit”? I dunno. Lisle is maddeningly coy on this point, not getting into many specifics. Talyn, as the narrator, tells of her feelings and reaction to it, but that actually made it more distant for me than if a third-person narrator had shown it. People who claim first-person narration puts the reader closer to events are not paying attention.)
Anyhoo, despite pretty much not wanting to get involved with Skirmig, Talyn finds herself getting involved with him. She moves in with him. Stuff happens, and she starts to realize that Skirmig is a Very Bad Man indeed, and that he’s been mind-controlling her and wrapping her in illusions and so on. During this period, we are also following the fate of Gair, a POW from the Eastils, and his fate in prison as the jails are privatized under the Feegash. Eventually, Gair and Talyn’s stories collide, they realize that Skirmig is the Big Bad, and they join forces to fight him.
Ultimately this is a plot about enemies uniting against a particularly repugnant mutual enemy. It’s a good plot. I wish it had been used in a better book.
Another strength of the book is the magic system. The Tonks and Eastils fight via a magic system akin to long-range missiles, with complementary defensive shields protecting whole towns and regions. The militaries have ordinary infantry as well, recon/commando units, long-range magic sensing units, command that works through magical communication networks--in short, a magical equivalent of small-scale modern warfare. Tonk (and, presumably, Eastil) magic works only in groups, so that they can keep each other’s spirits from wandering off into magical never-never land and leaving comatose bodies behind. By contrast, the Feegash--or the one Feegash we really get to know--have an individual magic that can’t even see the View (never-never land), and consequently can’t draw on the power of it. Their magical skills are small-scale and subtle and personal (e.g. mind-control).
Some other folks have complained that Talyn is a Mary Sue because she turns out to be super-extra-powerful with the Feegash form of magic. No, no, says I. The Tonk/Eastil form of magic is much harder than the Feegash form, and they’ve been breeding magic warriors for four hundred years. When Talyn learns the Feegash system of magic, it’s the equivalent of someone who runs marathons with 100lb weights suddenly running an unburdened 5k race. Lisle continues this logic, having the other Tonk warriors learn this new magic as quickly as Talyn learned it.
So, in summary: good ideas, mediocre execution. The novel plods steadily from plot-point to plot-point, with never a feeling of crazed auctorial inspiration or a spark of real life. Readable, but not re-readable.