Thoughts on the Curse of Chalion
I'm going to be starting to contribute to a group blog project that kind of came out of nowhere, which will be starting with our discussion of The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold as we read it. I'm currently through chapter three, here's what I've thought so far!
The setup for the novel seems pretty traditional. The author is doing a good job showing rather than telling, building our idea of the setting with scenes from daily life rather than via infodumps. That's nice and all... but the setting is exactly the same as every other setting. We're introduced to an order of knights that is aloof from peasants but not really evil, a character with a troubled past and a wide variety of skills that will make them capable of figuring out what to do in every situation that comes up, and an ominous form of death magic with great power and great cost. Through the next couple chapters we see the naive and forceful young woman, the matriarch balancing her power within her domain against a patriarchal system, and a little bit of depth and a softer side to the god of death. These tropes are a bit more modern than the rest we've seen of the setting but they're still played very straight and common as anything.
All of this is well established, but it's also fairly typical. I have yet to really distinguish this book from the countless others I've read. By the end of the third chapter we have some characters established with their relationships intact and a view of the world. As a first fantasy novel this would be a lovely setup. But as a 50th or 500th fantasy novel one could get the same amount of exposition in with five pages, letting the reader's memories of other books fill in the rest of the details.
It's probably better not to, but this is the part of the book that I'd sort of fly through on a reading that I wasn't reporting on, and think not much of until much later on.
PS-
I'm not adding any tags to this post under the assumption that in the future my writing on the topic will be curated at
https://polytopicreflections.wordpress.com/.