Silverberg, Robert: Lord Valentine's Castle
Lord Valentine's Castle
Writer: Robert Silverberg
Genre: Science Fantasy, Fantasy
Pages: 506
Lord Valentine’s Castle was the first book that my mentor recommended to me for this term at Seton Hill. And when he told me the writer’s name, I smiled and nodded and scribbled quickly, glad to recognize a familiar name. But it wasn’t until much later when I remembered why Robert Silverberg was familiar; it’s because I do not like this writer.
Now, I’ll be completely fair: the first thing I read with his name on it was a joint effort with Isaac Asimov called Nightfall. Great concept, absolutely horrible execution. In fact, if you were to ask me what my most hated book was, Nightfall would be one of the first two books that would immediately come to mind. I know the novel was based on a short story I’ve never read, but I cringe at the thought of doing so. At the time, I had never read any of Asimov or Silverberg, so I had no idea where the blame lay in the blunders of the novel, but it left a bad taste in my mouth for Silverberg.
Then, last year, I read a short story of his in an anthology, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy. The story was called "A Sorcerer’s Apprentice", and I realized that Silverberg wasn’t a bad writer. I just didn’t like him.
Reading Lord Valentine’s Castle was hard for me. I put it off as long as I could, and when I finally picked it up, my sense of his work that I gathered from his short story was confirmed: Silverberg is a good writer. Technically, he’s almost fabulous, with the exception of his love for the word “seemed” and odd overuse of the word “awesome”. He also surprised me in giving me a main character with amnesia without telling us right away that the main character had amnesia. Show, don’t tell: glad to see this rule was in use back when I was born.
But the difficulty I have with Silverberg’s work is its episodic nature, the embellishment of setting no matter where we are in the story, the predictable nature of the plot and also, contrarily, the aimlessness of the plot. And worse, absolutely nothing about the story, the characters, or the situation compels me as a reader. Nothing engages me.
Lord Valentine’s Castle is science-fantasy, through and through. However, it is far more fantasy than science fiction, and worse for my tastes, the kind of fantasy I easily get bored with. Once I picked up on the fact the main character had amnesia, and learned the character had the same name as the visiting Coronal, I knew right away this was a story of mistaken identity. Sure, the back of the book pretty much gives this away, but even so, I count on the characters to pull me through easily recognizable plots, and in this case, no one stood out. Don’t get me wrong: all were distinguishable, and all were well-drawn (though I won’t say very three-dimensional), but nothing about them, especially Valentine, made me want to see this book through the end. I finished because I had to, not because I was engaged.
The setting also made it difficult. I’ll be the first to admit that setting is my weakness, and I’ll even skip passages in Lord of the Rings if it means moving forward, but I’ve read setting done well. Here, it was described very well. Like I said, Silverberg is a good technical writer. But I was so bored. There wasn’t a town passed through that wasn’t described, and if a town was looked over, it was listed as an item in a series: one might call this “fantasy-map syndrome”, where a writer has created a map of a fantasy world, with all this cool stuff in it, and the characters wade through it, but to what purpose? Why hear about towns that have no bearing on the plot? There were several instances where it would have been nice to fast forward through some scenes, not just for their excessive description, but for the fact they slowed the book down.
I have a theory about books that is pretty universal in the things I read. It might take a while to get into a book, but I can always guarantee that the last hundred pages will fly by. At this point, the reader has everything they need to pull them through the final conflict, and the pages fly by because the reader wants to find out how it all ends.
Not so with Lord Valentine’s Castle. It plodded. It took its time. You could say it was all character-building, but I have a hard time believing it. And the description: while the reader had not yet visited the places described, why--oh why--must we get so much description when all I really want is to see how all of this will turn out?
This is where the plot’s aimlessness really shines. In fact, it’s the imitative fallacy: we have a main character who is a aimless wanderer, and the plot so aimlessly wanders. It goes in the vaguest sense of directions, and while the reader knows that the only outcome of the book is for Valentine to overthrow his imposter, it sure takes a long, wandering time to get there, and again, the reader is stuck in scenes that, while exciting for some, really have no bearing on the plot.
So what did I learn from this? Well, I saw a science-fantasy with more basis in fantasy than science. Good to see, though I’ve pretty much decided my own work will be far more science than fantasy. Setting, well, I know how not to describe it. This kind of embellishment may have been popular at the time, but nowadays, it doesn’t work. Well, certainly not for this reader.
Unless I can’t help it, I won’t be reading any Silverberg again any time soon. Again, good technical writer. He does know what he’s doing, and I can’t fault him for that. But he doesn’t engage me in the slightest, and that’s a shame. However, perhaps I can take this one lesson: that no matter how great a writer you are, there will always be people who don’t dig your work. It’s no fault of the writer (for the most part, cause in this case, there were flaws), and all that writer can do is continue to write toward their best with each and every tale they write.
Now, despite my negative reaction to this book, I recognize that this is simply not the kind of thing I prefer reading. I know several people who would likely enjoy this, especially those who write epic fantasy. There are some nice touches to go with the nice writing, some aspects of originality. Nothing that compelled me to keep going, but others, especially those more sympathetic to the genre, will most likely find this book fun and fascinating.