Chainfire - Terry Goodkind

[handslive]

I can't help myself.  I feel like I need to say something about this book.

Sheep that I am, I've read all of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series up to this point and, because I'm stubborn to a fault, will probably plow through the next one, too.  There's no question that the quality is going down, though.

In the process of confirming that I was remembering the author's name correctly, I hit amazon.ca and (ack, can't help myself) read the reviews for this book.  To my mind, they kind of miss the point.  All of the books suffer from a kind of high school level over-explanation and "I must tell you how I reasoned this out" style of story telling.  It's like the author feels the need to ensure that the reader knows how clever he is, how he's thought through all the possibilities, and, oh look, you can't possibly tell where I'm going next because there are so many ways it could go.  So, complaints that the plot is repetitive or the writing weak seem a bit like someone wasn't paying attention earlier.

But I'm a very lenient reader, and actually he sometimes does an excellent job of employing this method.  The first four or five books were very enjoyable.  His ideas about "rules" for being a wizard, which of course the hero works out and employs in each book, managed to be a lot less trite than this sentence makes them sound.  The hero frequently had tough decisions to make, employed his principles and reasoning to make his decisions, and, while not always rewarded by this process, responded by taking responsibility for his actions.  Sad to say, my personal feeling is that these are not common traits in a fantasy hero.  I felt I could excuse a lot about the writing because of the kind of character the author was using.

However, over the last four books or so, the author has definitely moved on to incorporating other elements of what may possibly be a personal philosophy (I don't know enough about Terry Goodkind to say) about government, economics, law, and religion.  By itself that would not necessarily be a bad thing, except that the story line is built around supplying supporting evidence for the argument in the weakest, straw man sense.  Unbelievable things happen that have nothing to do with the fantasy element, but instead with human behaviour, trained skills like sculpture, and basic economics, that are too plainly meant to support the rightness of the hero's personal philosophy.  For people who complain about Starship Troopers, these last few books are not as subtle.

The most egregious example in the current book is an argument in favour of torture, and of course the rationale and resulting action of one of the characters completely supports its use with the "appropriate" results.  We're talking a fantasy equivalent of suitcase nuke and terrorist prisoner.  This is exactly the kind of action that would have been declaimed in the earlier books with consequences for the character.  Not here.

I'm a fool and will probably read the next book, Phantom, already out in hard cover.  But I can't honestly recommend them to anyone now.

Comments

[greenjavatroll.livejournal.com]

You are much more lenient than I am. I bogged on book three.