Not a book review
May. 31st, 2005 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handsliveI lied.
Just finished Warrior-Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, Book 2), by R. Scott Bakker. I read the first book in this series last year on the July long weekend, enjoyed it, and picked up this second book a few weeks ago in Greenwoods. It was also very good and I enjoyed it. I'll almost certainly pick up the next book when it comes out.
This is a pretty standard heroic quest in its broad strokes. Bakker has chosen what I've come to think of in the genre as "the parallel history" approach. This is the kind of thing that Sean Russell or Guy Gavriel Kay make use of where the fantasy world is a thinly veiled culture (or mix of cultures) from our own world and some aspect of the overall action follows a similar historical event. Maybe there's an actual term for this now, but that's the one I've been using in my head.
Bakker is pretty good at managing the details of culture and history that make this approach work, but kind of falls into the "name" trap. He probably has a page in his own notes listing the dozen or so major houses of the empire and the fifty or so minor houses, but then has all of them take part in battles where they are enumerated for their deeds over the three pages of ensuing conflict never to be seen again. Until the next battle scene anyway.
He's good with the battle scenes actually and it didn't seem to me that he was following any set formula for them, in spite of how that last paragraph probably sounded. (The very bad end of that particular scale is Terry Brooks. Every battle scene in every Shanara book I've read, which is probably the first four or five, was strikingly similar.)
Where he really shines is with the story that runs through the battle scenes. The story follows a central group of characters during a holy war against a nearby culture whose beliefs diverged from theirs a few centuries previously. Yes, the book is clearly based around Christian and Moslem cultures.
Probably one of the most interesting characteristics of the story is that it takes place some two thousand years after "the first Apocalypse". It's clear that this story leads up to the second Apocalypse (that's a requirement, yes?), so the cultural memory of the first one significantly informs how the characters and their cultures react. Of course, after Robert Jordan this probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but I honestly feel that Bakker does a better job of getting this right.
So, that's a bit of high fantasy which you might consider borrowing if you get the chance.
Just finished Warrior-Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, Book 2), by R. Scott Bakker. I read the first book in this series last year on the July long weekend, enjoyed it, and picked up this second book a few weeks ago in Greenwoods. It was also very good and I enjoyed it. I'll almost certainly pick up the next book when it comes out.
This is a pretty standard heroic quest in its broad strokes. Bakker has chosen what I've come to think of in the genre as "the parallel history" approach. This is the kind of thing that Sean Russell or Guy Gavriel Kay make use of where the fantasy world is a thinly veiled culture (or mix of cultures) from our own world and some aspect of the overall action follows a similar historical event. Maybe there's an actual term for this now, but that's the one I've been using in my head.
Bakker is pretty good at managing the details of culture and history that make this approach work, but kind of falls into the "name" trap. He probably has a page in his own notes listing the dozen or so major houses of the empire and the fifty or so minor houses, but then has all of them take part in battles where they are enumerated for their deeds over the three pages of ensuing conflict never to be seen again. Until the next battle scene anyway.
He's good with the battle scenes actually and it didn't seem to me that he was following any set formula for them, in spite of how that last paragraph probably sounded. (The very bad end of that particular scale is Terry Brooks. Every battle scene in every Shanara book I've read, which is probably the first four or five, was strikingly similar.)
Where he really shines is with the story that runs through the battle scenes. The story follows a central group of characters during a holy war against a nearby culture whose beliefs diverged from theirs a few centuries previously. Yes, the book is clearly based around Christian and Moslem cultures.
Probably one of the most interesting characteristics of the story is that it takes place some two thousand years after "the first Apocalypse". It's clear that this story leads up to the second Apocalypse (that's a requirement, yes?), so the cultural memory of the first one significantly informs how the characters and their cultures react. Of course, after Robert Jordan this probably doesn't seem like a big deal, but I honestly feel that Bakker does a better job of getting this right.
So, that's a bit of high fantasy which you might consider borrowing if you get the chance.
