TWR for the last time: Tigana
Ok. The book _does_ get better. We finally get to see more magic than a single desperate spell - a couple of snatches and a dreamland where an important battle is fought.
So I am, to a point, withdrawing the comment of 'having seen it all before' - there *is* a little bit in here that's original, and it was the bit I liked best of the book, but one brief passage is not enough to save a whole 670+ page book.
squirrel-monkey sums up my issues with the female characters better than I can. The female characters in this book (in order of appearance):
- Catriana (co-conspirator, ultimately love-interest of one of the main characters). Uses sex to try to protect a secret, uses sex to facilitate an assasination. Brief POV passages.
- Alais (love-interest for a main character; healer, virginal). VERY brief POV passages.
- Dianora (main character, attempts to assasinate a bad guy by getting close to him by arranging to become his concubine; falls in love with him and betrays her cause). Plenty of POV passages.
- Alienor de Borso (co-conspirator. Sexual predator.) No POV.
- Elena (love interest for a minor main character.) No POV.
Err, that's it. There are a couple of minor female characters, but no-one of importance. There are less than ten pages of women-only in this book, quite a bit of reflection where one POV character is on their own, and plenty of men-only scenes and conversations.
So the balance between men and women - most of the major characters male, most of the scenes male-dominated (because Dianora, on her own, reflects mostly on male characters) - is seriously off-kilter.
And that alone is a reason why I'm not keen to reread this book.
So, that really horrible betrayal, the scene that completely disgusted me on first reading, that made me put the book in a 'quite likely, get rid off' stack at a time when very few books ended there?
This time around, it didn't have the same impact. This time around, I'm a much more experienced reader: I understood how the author wanted me to read the book, and having read the ending, I was more able to follow the author's lead in this.
The first part of the book is about the plucky farmboy. He's not a prince, but he falls in with one, and can have everything explained to him. The background is a peninsula ('the Palm') of nine provinces which has mostly been conquered by not one but two evil sorcerers. One of them, Alberic of Barbadior (ouch!) is, well, barbaric. He likes opressing people and torturing them and is waiting for his emperor to die so he can take over. The other, Brandin of Ygrath, loses a beloved son and gets really mad, to the point where he sorcerously wipes out the memory of the country that killed his son and opresses its people mightily.
The good guys are the people who want to keep the memory alive and who want to free the Palm, which means taking out both sorcerers at the same time (though I'm not entirely certain why, in retrospect). So it's a 'free the people from opression' narrative.
Alberic is easy. We see the broken bodies of his victims by the wayside now and again, there's just nothing likable about him at all.
Brandin, on the other hand...
We mostly see him through the eyes of Dianora, who is clearly one of the Good People, who wanted to free the Palm from his tyranny by her own means (becoming his concubine, getting close to him, killing him when she could). Only she falls in love with him (cough, Stockholm syndrome, cough). There *is* one scene where he's cruel on-screen, but the person he kills messily just tried to assasinate him, and shattered his world a bit: he thought he knew whom he could trust (not many people), so on the first reading, I forgave him and read him as a tragic hero, someone who ultimately had become as much a victim of circumstances as the good guys, but who was not above redemption.
And the way he is written supports that, this one messy killing nonwithstanding. (And one other hint, which I seem to have overlooked. It's a 'the kings of his home country do this evil thing' and I must have overlooked it, and definitely didn't understand its significance, because it foreshadows [horrible thing].) Other than that, he's starting to soften, he acknowledges his love for his concubine, he's starting to take an honest interest in the Palm, he resigns his out-of-Palm duties and ties and declares himself a man of the palm who is willing to fight the thoroughly evil and nasty other sorcerer.
On second reading, I realised that I was supposed to read him as a villain, and that all the softening of mind he undergoes are 'oh noes, this will make it harder to throw him off' rather than part of a redemption plot. When you read him as a villain, the dastardly evilness is more in line and reinforces the author's message of 'this guy needs killed'.
The evil deed I could not move beyond was as follows:
The kings of Ygrath have fools. A Fool is someone who starts out as a healthy man, who is turned into a cripple by having his bones broken artistically, sorcerously robbed of his free will, and made to reflect the king's actions in a way that leaves him the butt of ridicule and completely without agenda.
There's no real reason give for this - it's a tradition, the evil guys have always done this evil thing that leaves them beyond redemption, and it's a real [insert evil cackle] useful way of taking revenge upon a man you *really* hate.
This actually *is* explained earlier in the book; and I must have overlooked it on first reading.
What happens at the end of the book is that we find out the real identity of Brandin's Fool: the former Prince of Tigana, featuring as a Noble Man in every sense of the word in the prologue, and beloved by his son (a major protagonist), and everybody who knew him (which includes Dianora). So he was this pitiful, disabled, ridiculed shadow of a man, until the cloud on him lifts and he kills his opressor/tormentor and is killed in return. The end.
On first reading, I'd liked Valentin, and had mourned his death. To find him so cruelly tormented at the hand of someone I had - until that point - *liked* (the narrative made it clear that Brandin took delight in tormenting him) was something I could not move beyond. This time, I knew that Brandin was a Villain, parsed the markers better, and wasn't as shocked - instead of a betrayal, it seemed an appropriate act for an arch-villain.
As it happens I dislike reading about people who are evil as a matter of course, but yeah: this time around I read a different book.
Yeah, well. Villain instead of tragic hero. The book makes more sense with this reading, but I like it less.
Which leaves the pacing, and that's worth looking at, too.
The narrative has, in retrospect, two strands. One deals with the Band Of Heroes, who form a conspiracy to take out both sorcerers and free the Palm. This is the action and finding stumbling over allies and comitting nasty acts for the Good Of The Palm thread which takes up roughly three quarters of the pages, and the 'women trying to find the courage to murder her lover and failing' thread which takes up the rest. (Much of it is backstory, on Tigana, on her and her brother, who is a main character in the main thread).
And, well, she can't succeed because she's not a Main Protagonist, so her passages read like a lot of filler/infodump (if there was a redemption plot for Brandin, they would make more sense.) But one woman succeeding thanks to her courage where an army of men couldn't isn't what the book is about, so she must fail.
The first 250 pages of the book - more than a third - are given over to planning and making sure the reader understands the stakes. Some plans have been set in motion by the Main Protagonists long before we (and the young POV focus) meet them. We then see a number of skirmishes being acted out. The Prince keeps saying 'I have a plan' but it's a plan the reader needs to take on faith - I don't believe it would have succeeded if not for some extraordinary assistance, and for Brandin's character arc.
On the one hand, you can do this in an epic, and maybe that's what the form was made for - the writer can weave a number of seemingly unrelated plotstrands together in a climax. On the other hand, I had the impression that large amounts of effort by the main protagonists could have been cut out without effect - it's not that they had _failed_, it's just that it wasn't important in the end, and that made the plot feel decidedly skewed. That the Prince of Tigana, defeated and held captive should bread free and kill his tormentor was, in a way, fitting; and you _could_ say that the infodump about Fools earlier had foreshadowed it; but for me, that wasn't clear enough. If people had asked 'what happened to the Prince' and left some doubt; if we'd seen a glimpse of his torment and the feeling that he was helpless, raging, praying for revenge with the fraction of his self that was his own, this part of the narrative would have worked much better for me. As it was, he was a bit of a deus ex machina.
The woman was too weak to kill her lover, despite having plenty of opportunities. The prince's sanity is returned to him after twenty years of sorcerous torture, he straightens, looks his tormentor in the eye, and kills him as a prince should.
This isn't the thing that makes me want to put the book away and not read it again; but it's the thing that makes me say that even if I overlook the things that me dislike the book, I still would not _enjoy_ it a great deal.
After reading all of it, I think I understand a little better why people who like it do; but I don't; and I so thoroughly don't that I'd rather seek out a new-to-me book that I end up not enjoying than reread it again.
One minor, but not unimportant fact in the book is the 'famous blue wine of'. By which the author means ice wine. How this passed not just the author's internal factchecking module, but the editor and the copy editor, I don't know. It certainly didn't give me a lot of confidence in the book.
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So I am, to a point, withdrawing the comment of 'having seen it all before' - there *is* a little bit in here that's original, and it was the bit I liked best of the book, but one brief passage is not enough to save a whole 670+ page book.
squirrel-monkey sums up my issues with the female characters better than I can. The female characters in this book (in order of appearance):
- Catriana (co-conspirator, ultimately love-interest of one of the main characters). Uses sex to try to protect a secret, uses sex to facilitate an assasination. Brief POV passages.
- Alais (love-interest for a main character; healer, virginal). VERY brief POV passages.
- Dianora (main character, attempts to assasinate a bad guy by getting close to him by arranging to become his concubine; falls in love with him and betrays her cause). Plenty of POV passages.
- Alienor de Borso (co-conspirator. Sexual predator.) No POV.
- Elena (love interest for a minor main character.) No POV.
Err, that's it. There are a couple of minor female characters, but no-one of importance. There are less than ten pages of women-only in this book, quite a bit of reflection where one POV character is on their own, and plenty of men-only scenes and conversations.
So the balance between men and women - most of the major characters male, most of the scenes male-dominated (because Dianora, on her own, reflects mostly on male characters) - is seriously off-kilter.
And that alone is a reason why I'm not keen to reread this book.
So, that really horrible betrayal, the scene that completely disgusted me on first reading, that made me put the book in a 'quite likely, get rid off' stack at a time when very few books ended there?
This time around, it didn't have the same impact. This time around, I'm a much more experienced reader: I understood how the author wanted me to read the book, and having read the ending, I was more able to follow the author's lead in this.
The first part of the book is about the plucky farmboy. He's not a prince, but he falls in with one, and can have everything explained to him. The background is a peninsula ('the Palm') of nine provinces which has mostly been conquered by not one but two evil sorcerers. One of them, Alberic of Barbadior (ouch!) is, well, barbaric. He likes opressing people and torturing them and is waiting for his emperor to die so he can take over. The other, Brandin of Ygrath, loses a beloved son and gets really mad, to the point where he sorcerously wipes out the memory of the country that killed his son and opresses its people mightily.
The good guys are the people who want to keep the memory alive and who want to free the Palm, which means taking out both sorcerers at the same time (though I'm not entirely certain why, in retrospect). So it's a 'free the people from opression' narrative.
Alberic is easy. We see the broken bodies of his victims by the wayside now and again, there's just nothing likable about him at all.
Brandin, on the other hand...
We mostly see him through the eyes of Dianora, who is clearly one of the Good People, who wanted to free the Palm from his tyranny by her own means (becoming his concubine, getting close to him, killing him when she could). Only she falls in love with him (cough, Stockholm syndrome, cough). There *is* one scene where he's cruel on-screen, but the person he kills messily just tried to assasinate him, and shattered his world a bit: he thought he knew whom he could trust (not many people), so on the first reading, I forgave him and read him as a tragic hero, someone who ultimately had become as much a victim of circumstances as the good guys, but who was not above redemption.
And the way he is written supports that, this one messy killing nonwithstanding. (And one other hint, which I seem to have overlooked. It's a 'the kings of his home country do this evil thing' and I must have overlooked it, and definitely didn't understand its significance, because it foreshadows [horrible thing].) Other than that, he's starting to soften, he acknowledges his love for his concubine, he's starting to take an honest interest in the Palm, he resigns his out-of-Palm duties and ties and declares himself a man of the palm who is willing to fight the thoroughly evil and nasty other sorcerer.
On second reading, I realised that I was supposed to read him as a villain, and that all the softening of mind he undergoes are 'oh noes, this will make it harder to throw him off' rather than part of a redemption plot. When you read him as a villain, the dastardly evilness is more in line and reinforces the author's message of 'this guy needs killed'.
The evil deed I could not move beyond was as follows:
The kings of Ygrath have fools. A Fool is someone who starts out as a healthy man, who is turned into a cripple by having his bones broken artistically, sorcerously robbed of his free will, and made to reflect the king's actions in a way that leaves him the butt of ridicule and completely without agenda.
There's no real reason give for this - it's a tradition, the evil guys have always done this evil thing that leaves them beyond redemption, and it's a real [insert evil cackle] useful way of taking revenge upon a man you *really* hate.
This actually *is* explained earlier in the book; and I must have overlooked it on first reading.
What happens at the end of the book is that we find out the real identity of Brandin's Fool: the former Prince of Tigana, featuring as a Noble Man in every sense of the word in the prologue, and beloved by his son (a major protagonist), and everybody who knew him (which includes Dianora). So he was this pitiful, disabled, ridiculed shadow of a man, until the cloud on him lifts and he kills his opressor/tormentor and is killed in return. The end.
On first reading, I'd liked Valentin, and had mourned his death. To find him so cruelly tormented at the hand of someone I had - until that point - *liked* (the narrative made it clear that Brandin took delight in tormenting him) was something I could not move beyond. This time, I knew that Brandin was a Villain, parsed the markers better, and wasn't as shocked - instead of a betrayal, it seemed an appropriate act for an arch-villain.
As it happens I dislike reading about people who are evil as a matter of course, but yeah: this time around I read a different book.
Yeah, well. Villain instead of tragic hero. The book makes more sense with this reading, but I like it less.
Which leaves the pacing, and that's worth looking at, too.
The narrative has, in retrospect, two strands. One deals with the Band Of Heroes, who form a conspiracy to take out both sorcerers and free the Palm. This is the action and finding stumbling over allies and comitting nasty acts for the Good Of The Palm thread which takes up roughly three quarters of the pages, and the 'women trying to find the courage to murder her lover and failing' thread which takes up the rest. (Much of it is backstory, on Tigana, on her and her brother, who is a main character in the main thread).
And, well, she can't succeed because she's not a Main Protagonist, so her passages read like a lot of filler/infodump (if there was a redemption plot for Brandin, they would make more sense.) But one woman succeeding thanks to her courage where an army of men couldn't isn't what the book is about, so she must fail.
The first 250 pages of the book - more than a third - are given over to planning and making sure the reader understands the stakes. Some plans have been set in motion by the Main Protagonists long before we (and the young POV focus) meet them. We then see a number of skirmishes being acted out. The Prince keeps saying 'I have a plan' but it's a plan the reader needs to take on faith - I don't believe it would have succeeded if not for some extraordinary assistance, and for Brandin's character arc.
On the one hand, you can do this in an epic, and maybe that's what the form was made for - the writer can weave a number of seemingly unrelated plotstrands together in a climax. On the other hand, I had the impression that large amounts of effort by the main protagonists could have been cut out without effect - it's not that they had _failed_, it's just that it wasn't important in the end, and that made the plot feel decidedly skewed. That the Prince of Tigana, defeated and held captive should bread free and kill his tormentor was, in a way, fitting; and you _could_ say that the infodump about Fools earlier had foreshadowed it; but for me, that wasn't clear enough. If people had asked 'what happened to the Prince' and left some doubt; if we'd seen a glimpse of his torment and the feeling that he was helpless, raging, praying for revenge with the fraction of his self that was his own, this part of the narrative would have worked much better for me. As it was, he was a bit of a deus ex machina.
The woman was too weak to kill her lover, despite having plenty of opportunities. The prince's sanity is returned to him after twenty years of sorcerous torture, he straightens, looks his tormentor in the eye, and kills him as a prince should.
This isn't the thing that makes me want to put the book away and not read it again; but it's the thing that makes me say that even if I overlook the things that me dislike the book, I still would not _enjoy_ it a great deal.
After reading all of it, I think I understand a little better why people who like it do; but I don't; and I so thoroughly don't that I'd rather seek out a new-to-me book that I end up not enjoying than reread it again.
One minor, but not unimportant fact in the book is the 'famous blue wine of'. By which the author means ice wine. How this passed not just the author's internal factchecking module, but the editor and the copy editor, I don't know. It certainly didn't give me a lot of confidence in the book.
This entry was also posted at http://beyond-elechan.dreamwidth.org/22853.html Reply wherever you want. This post at DW has
comments.