"Changes," or Why I've Lost Patience with The Dresden Files
The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher has been a vice of mine for years. The quality of the books can be uneven, but overall it had a cast of memorable characters set against a vivid backdrop of modern urban fantasy. It was also the basis for one of the most kickass roleplaying games of all time. Overall, I thought it was a solid supernatural mystery whose scope grew increasingly epic as the series went on.
But now that I've read Book 12 of the series, Changes (which has the distinction of being the first purchase on my Kindle app), I don't want to continue with the series anymore. Partly it may be series fatigue, but some of the details of crafting and development bothered me or just left me cold. I have no desire to buy Book 13, Ghost Stories, and probably won't pick the series up again unless I hear something really good about it. The following are the reasons the series lost me.
1. Poor writing
For starters the writing is so much worse than I remember, with unnecessary adjectives and adverbs everywhere, stilted and often preachy dialogue (though I have been noticing the preachiness since White Night), and stretches of exposition that should have been handled with foreshadowing and action instead of big blocks of infodump. The exposition/reminder on the Grey Council was especially awful, several phone-screens of reminiscence dumped right in the middle of dialogue.
There is also way too much repetition of "bubbled" or "burbled" for things like laughter and barking. All that "shambling" has got to stop, too. I associate the word with zombies and Bigfoot, and while it's cute once or twice for tired human characters or big beasts, it went far beyond two repetitions.
These are all things that could have been caught by a reasonably diligent editor or the author himself. Maybe that kind of effort isn't cost-effective for commercial fiction, where getting a book out sooner may be a smarter financial decision than putting effort into editing and new drafts. In other words this book appears to have undergone less editing than decent fan fiction, which makes it hard to justify buying future books in the series when I can get fanfic for free.
To be fair, maybe I'm noticing these things because of my own growth and not because Mr. Butcher's craft got any worse. My writing style underwent a change after I read Stein on Writing, and now I notice things like unnecessary adverbs and cliches everywhere. I've also been beta-reading for others, which gave me an editor's eye for elements like repetition and dialogue. Whatever the reason, the writing has become a major turn-off for me.
2. I don't give a damn whether the kid dies or not.
So Harry Dresden has a kid. (Pretty sure this doesn't count as a spoiler, since it's in all the promotional materials.) This was a major draw for me and a chance for some real character development, but I didn't like the way it was handled. Dresden's daughter was a MacGuffin, an idea of a child and not a real character. I suppose it should have been wrenching at my heartstrings how he had this long-lost child and wanted to save her at any cost, but mostly I was just bored. Maybe it's because I don't have children, maybe because I'm a big Grinch, but the implication that blood ties were all-important overriding just felt tired without any new twist or freshness on an age-old idea.
[Now we do get into spoiler territory.]
The obsession with blood takes on particularly obnoxious undertones toward the middle and end of the book, first when Dresden suspects Maggie might not be his daughter and it takes no less than an Archangel's assurance of paternity to get him all fired up again to save the girl. This, far from being heartwarming, just showed me how tenuous Dresden's tie to the child is. He has always been protective of children, and certainly saved a number of kids (like Ivy) who weren't his flesh and blood. I always felt this protective impulse was what made him such a noble character. Here, though, it's made pretty clear that his main drive is not mercy or love but the pull of kinship, and while it's an understandable motivation it didn't move me.
What I really hated, though, was the revelation that Dresden's mentor Ebenezer McCoy was also his maternal grandfather. While Harry was going on and on about how this explained so much about why Ebenezer was always there to defend him and such, I was mainly thinking that this development cheapened McCoy's character and his relationship to Harry. For one thing, "secret ties of blood" is just a really old device, and for another it seems to overvalue blood ties. Couldn't McCoy, himself a wizard who regularly shattered the Rules of Magic, have sympathized with and risked his neck for young Harry without a hidden agenda? The urge to preserve one's bloodline seems simple self-interest to me and not genuine selflessness, so the big reveal just left me cold.
I didn't feel this way about the revelation that Thomas was Harry's brother, and here's where I think the difference lies. Thomas's reasons for risking himself for Harry were never adequately explained, and didn't make sense until the family relationship was revealed. McCoy's dedication to Harry, on the other hand, was already explained through his own motivations and personality. I had always admired the character's goodness and courage, and the revelation that he broke the Rules of Magic added an intriguing layer of grey to the character and his motivations. So the grand-parentage seems unnecessary from a character and story point of view, and the overuse of this device now leaves me wearily wondering how many other relatives are lurking out there.
3. White people slaughter brown people. Joy.
Look, I get that The Dresden Files books are mostly about white people. Its cosmology draws heavily on European mythology, and its main characters are descendants of Europeans. I enjoy that aspect of it, or I wouldn't have bought twelve freaking books. I liked that indigenous American myth also played a role in Turn Coat, my favorite book in the series, and it wasn't played in a horribly cliched or hackneyed way. By and large the series is a fun romp through European folklore and mythology, and that is its main strength.
[South of the border, it all went south.]
But once the plot moved to Mexico-ward, the whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth I'm not sure I'll ever pick up a book in the series again. It started with the decision to dress Harry as a Conquistador for his meeting with Duchess Arianna Huffington of the Red Court. This is considered an excellent choice because Arianna has a burning, centuries-long hatred for the Europeans. At no point does anyone give a thought to what the Conquistador getup symbolizes for many. You know, laugh-out-loud stuff like genocide, the destruction of entire cultures, and the enslavement of native populations.
In this context Susan's fashion choice to dress as a (presumably) Mayan woman just felt creepy, especially after Lea called her Harry's concubine. I have to wonder if Mr. Butcher knew Conquistadors and Spanish settlers regularly took native women as concubines, and whether he was playing on this historical fact with the clothing. Because if he did, that amps up the creepiness factor to the eleventh. And it seems almost impossible for him not to know after the research he must have done for the book.
Things got even more surreal during the Climactic Battle where the Red Court are all done up in Mayan trappings including the clothes, the pyramid, and the human sacrifice, while our mostly-Alabaster Brigade heroically rush in to kill them left and right. Because we've never seen anything like that before, and the image isn't disturbing at all for people with a working knowledge of history. I mean, why would it be? Everyone knows brown people who dress funny are fair game.
Perhaps conscious of the cultural insensitivity of the setup, the White (naturally) God did make a preachy outburst in the middle of battle condemning the Red Court for its crimes against the Mayans. So it's not the natives the righteous white guys have a beef with, it's the bad vamps who human-sacrificed them pretending to be gods--so we're cool, right? At least it's in character for the White God that He doesn't seem to frown as hard on the Europeans' crimes. From my churchgoing days I know He abhorred human sacrifice, but seemed genuinely fine with genocide, slavery, and rape.
And yes, the Mayans, like many others, practiced human sacrifice, the banning of which was a positive development of the European conquest. But it doesn't sit right with me that this is explained away as a vampiric practice, as though the Mayans did not have their own socio-cultural-metaphysical reasons for engaging in human sacrifice. It's also rich that the Mayan nobility, which the Red Court imitates and no doubt (in the Dresden universe) was crawling with Red Court vampires, is pegged as the uncaring, exploitative ruling class when history tells us that the European-descended elite of South America, seeing themselves as European and not South American, oppressed and exploited the native population to the point of destitution and destruction. It just seems like either colossal ignorance or willful blindness, and I'm not sure which is worse.
By this point I was reading with the mentality of someone who can't look away from a train wreck. As I watched Harry Dresden, in Conquistador garb no less, kill hundreds of Mayan or at least pretend-Mayan vampires, I came to this realization:
There's a difference between a work being about a group and excluding people who are outside the group. Up to Book 11, TDF was to me a series about European myth and Americans of European descent, and I loved reading about this modern riff on European heritage. With the developments in Changes, though, TDF for the first time felt like an experience that excluded people like me, non-whites for whom racism and colonization are present-day issues. (Though these issues are not nearly as immediate for me, a middle-class educated member of a majority race in a prosperous democracy, as they are for many, many others.) I don't believe this alienation was malicious or intentional on Mr. Butcher's part, but that doesn't make it any less real.
All this isn't to say Changes didn't have enjoyable moments. The moral dilemmas and extreme choices characters (particularly Harry) are driven to, always a strength of the series, made for an entertaining and moving read. The main motivation for these actions left me cold and that diminished the effect, but that's probably my damage more than anything else. (Read: Daddy issues.) The twist near the end was unexpected, exciting, and ultimately tragic. The far-reaching changes Harry went through promise all sorts of new developments for the character. So a lot of the magic was still there, but I wasn't reacting to it the way I used to.
In the end the biggest changes, going into the book, were not in the series but in me. I've changed as a writer and reader, and my political views now seem inextricable from the literary. TDF is a good series, I just think I've grown away from it. I wish the books and the characters all success, and look forward to finding other books to love.
But now that I've read Book 12 of the series, Changes (which has the distinction of being the first purchase on my Kindle app), I don't want to continue with the series anymore. Partly it may be series fatigue, but some of the details of crafting and development bothered me or just left me cold. I have no desire to buy Book 13, Ghost Stories, and probably won't pick the series up again unless I hear something really good about it. The following are the reasons the series lost me.
1. Poor writing
For starters the writing is so much worse than I remember, with unnecessary adjectives and adverbs everywhere, stilted and often preachy dialogue (though I have been noticing the preachiness since White Night), and stretches of exposition that should have been handled with foreshadowing and action instead of big blocks of infodump. The exposition/reminder on the Grey Council was especially awful, several phone-screens of reminiscence dumped right in the middle of dialogue.
There is also way too much repetition of "bubbled" or "burbled" for things like laughter and barking. All that "shambling" has got to stop, too. I associate the word with zombies and Bigfoot, and while it's cute once or twice for tired human characters or big beasts, it went far beyond two repetitions.
These are all things that could have been caught by a reasonably diligent editor or the author himself. Maybe that kind of effort isn't cost-effective for commercial fiction, where getting a book out sooner may be a smarter financial decision than putting effort into editing and new drafts. In other words this book appears to have undergone less editing than decent fan fiction, which makes it hard to justify buying future books in the series when I can get fanfic for free.
To be fair, maybe I'm noticing these things because of my own growth and not because Mr. Butcher's craft got any worse. My writing style underwent a change after I read Stein on Writing, and now I notice things like unnecessary adverbs and cliches everywhere. I've also been beta-reading for others, which gave me an editor's eye for elements like repetition and dialogue. Whatever the reason, the writing has become a major turn-off for me.
2. I don't give a damn whether the kid dies or not.
So Harry Dresden has a kid. (Pretty sure this doesn't count as a spoiler, since it's in all the promotional materials.) This was a major draw for me and a chance for some real character development, but I didn't like the way it was handled. Dresden's daughter was a MacGuffin, an idea of a child and not a real character. I suppose it should have been wrenching at my heartstrings how he had this long-lost child and wanted to save her at any cost, but mostly I was just bored. Maybe it's because I don't have children, maybe because I'm a big Grinch, but the implication that blood ties were all-important overriding just felt tired without any new twist or freshness on an age-old idea.
[Now we do get into spoiler territory.]
The obsession with blood takes on particularly obnoxious undertones toward the middle and end of the book, first when Dresden suspects Maggie might not be his daughter and it takes no less than an Archangel's assurance of paternity to get him all fired up again to save the girl. This, far from being heartwarming, just showed me how tenuous Dresden's tie to the child is. He has always been protective of children, and certainly saved a number of kids (like Ivy) who weren't his flesh and blood. I always felt this protective impulse was what made him such a noble character. Here, though, it's made pretty clear that his main drive is not mercy or love but the pull of kinship, and while it's an understandable motivation it didn't move me.
What I really hated, though, was the revelation that Dresden's mentor Ebenezer McCoy was also his maternal grandfather. While Harry was going on and on about how this explained so much about why Ebenezer was always there to defend him and such, I was mainly thinking that this development cheapened McCoy's character and his relationship to Harry. For one thing, "secret ties of blood" is just a really old device, and for another it seems to overvalue blood ties. Couldn't McCoy, himself a wizard who regularly shattered the Rules of Magic, have sympathized with and risked his neck for young Harry without a hidden agenda? The urge to preserve one's bloodline seems simple self-interest to me and not genuine selflessness, so the big reveal just left me cold.
I didn't feel this way about the revelation that Thomas was Harry's brother, and here's where I think the difference lies. Thomas's reasons for risking himself for Harry were never adequately explained, and didn't make sense until the family relationship was revealed. McCoy's dedication to Harry, on the other hand, was already explained through his own motivations and personality. I had always admired the character's goodness and courage, and the revelation that he broke the Rules of Magic added an intriguing layer of grey to the character and his motivations. So the grand-parentage seems unnecessary from a character and story point of view, and the overuse of this device now leaves me wearily wondering how many other relatives are lurking out there.
3. White people slaughter brown people. Joy.
Look, I get that The Dresden Files books are mostly about white people. Its cosmology draws heavily on European mythology, and its main characters are descendants of Europeans. I enjoy that aspect of it, or I wouldn't have bought twelve freaking books. I liked that indigenous American myth also played a role in Turn Coat, my favorite book in the series, and it wasn't played in a horribly cliched or hackneyed way. By and large the series is a fun romp through European folklore and mythology, and that is its main strength.
[South of the border, it all went south.]
But once the plot moved to Mexico-ward, the whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth I'm not sure I'll ever pick up a book in the series again. It started with the decision to dress Harry as a Conquistador for his meeting with Duchess Arianna Huffington of the Red Court. This is considered an excellent choice because Arianna has a burning, centuries-long hatred for the Europeans. At no point does anyone give a thought to what the Conquistador getup symbolizes for many. You know, laugh-out-loud stuff like genocide, the destruction of entire cultures, and the enslavement of native populations.
In this context Susan's fashion choice to dress as a (presumably) Mayan woman just felt creepy, especially after Lea called her Harry's concubine. I have to wonder if Mr. Butcher knew Conquistadors and Spanish settlers regularly took native women as concubines, and whether he was playing on this historical fact with the clothing. Because if he did, that amps up the creepiness factor to the eleventh. And it seems almost impossible for him not to know after the research he must have done for the book.
Things got even more surreal during the Climactic Battle where the Red Court are all done up in Mayan trappings including the clothes, the pyramid, and the human sacrifice, while our mostly-Alabaster Brigade heroically rush in to kill them left and right. Because we've never seen anything like that before, and the image isn't disturbing at all for people with a working knowledge of history. I mean, why would it be? Everyone knows brown people who dress funny are fair game.
Perhaps conscious of the cultural insensitivity of the setup, the White (naturally) God did make a preachy outburst in the middle of battle condemning the Red Court for its crimes against the Mayans. So it's not the natives the righteous white guys have a beef with, it's the bad vamps who human-sacrificed them pretending to be gods--so we're cool, right? At least it's in character for the White God that He doesn't seem to frown as hard on the Europeans' crimes. From my churchgoing days I know He abhorred human sacrifice, but seemed genuinely fine with genocide, slavery, and rape.
And yes, the Mayans, like many others, practiced human sacrifice, the banning of which was a positive development of the European conquest. But it doesn't sit right with me that this is explained away as a vampiric practice, as though the Mayans did not have their own socio-cultural-metaphysical reasons for engaging in human sacrifice. It's also rich that the Mayan nobility, which the Red Court imitates and no doubt (in the Dresden universe) was crawling with Red Court vampires, is pegged as the uncaring, exploitative ruling class when history tells us that the European-descended elite of South America, seeing themselves as European and not South American, oppressed and exploited the native population to the point of destitution and destruction. It just seems like either colossal ignorance or willful blindness, and I'm not sure which is worse.
By this point I was reading with the mentality of someone who can't look away from a train wreck. As I watched Harry Dresden, in Conquistador garb no less, kill hundreds of Mayan or at least pretend-Mayan vampires, I came to this realization:
There's a difference between a work being about a group and excluding people who are outside the group. Up to Book 11, TDF was to me a series about European myth and Americans of European descent, and I loved reading about this modern riff on European heritage. With the developments in Changes, though, TDF for the first time felt like an experience that excluded people like me, non-whites for whom racism and colonization are present-day issues. (Though these issues are not nearly as immediate for me, a middle-class educated member of a majority race in a prosperous democracy, as they are for many, many others.) I don't believe this alienation was malicious or intentional on Mr. Butcher's part, but that doesn't make it any less real.
All this isn't to say Changes didn't have enjoyable moments. The moral dilemmas and extreme choices characters (particularly Harry) are driven to, always a strength of the series, made for an entertaining and moving read. The main motivation for these actions left me cold and that diminished the effect, but that's probably my damage more than anything else. (Read: Daddy issues.) The twist near the end was unexpected, exciting, and ultimately tragic. The far-reaching changes Harry went through promise all sorts of new developments for the character. So a lot of the magic was still there, but I wasn't reacting to it the way I used to.
In the end the biggest changes, going into the book, were not in the series but in me. I've changed as a writer and reader, and my political views now seem inextricable from the literary. TDF is a good series, I just think I've grown away from it. I wish the books and the characters all success, and look forward to finding other books to love.