spaceponies

I was aware before start­ing Shadow and Claw that it was not pedes­trian fic­tion. It is not some­thing to plow through, or relax with. It is an allegory-heavy, lit­er­ary, fan­tas­tic tale. Hav­ing said that, it's about a tor­turer who is exiled from his guild, ends up with a mys­te­ri­ous and pow­er­ful relic, and then sleeps with a lot of women and com­pares them. He also oils and bran­dishes his sword a lot.

I'm kid­ding. But really, that sum­mary is as use­ful as any other.

The writ­ing is out­stand­ing. Some of the descrip­tions are so incred­i­bly vivid that I remem­ber them like I was there. And yet, often times I found myself fight­ing the urge to skim. When­ever I think about the pejo­ra­tive use of 'lit­er­ary', I think of works like this. If you don't enjoy Ursula LeGuin, you won't enjoy this.

The author invents his own vocabulary–for exam­ple, a cus­tom unit of dis­tance measurement–because the story is told under the aus­pice that it's been trans­lated from a very old, for­eign source. This is part of read­ing a clas­sic. Peo­ple of the time per­haps thought, "Oh, this is novel!" and suf­fered through, then the next writer who tried it learned that it was a once-only gim­mick. The art of writ­ing has already moved on from that idea, or fig­ured out how to do it bet­ter. The cus­tom vocab­u­lary annoyed me, and strangely I felt far more so after the end of the book. On the last page, the author trans­lates and explains the cus­tom vocab­u­lary of the book you just read, which is just what I was hop­ing the last page of a 400 page book would be. I wish the trans­la­tor had that page avail­able at the begin­ning of the book.

Sevar­ian, the main char­ac­ter, reflects at length about all the women he's slept with. I'm not mak­ing value judg­ments about this–I mean, it is not bad writ­ing, it's just not deliv­ered in an inter­est­ing enough way to jus­tify the amount of time spent on it. But then, it's one of the few con­crete things we have to hold on to the char­ac­ter about, which brings me to the biggest prob­lem in the book.

While read­ing this, I was eas­ily inter­rupted and then didn't look for­ward to start­ing again once I put it down. There's noth­ing dri­ving the story for­ward except the most per­func­tory plot. Why does Sevar­ian care about going to a cer­tain city? He doesn't. I feel the same way about this book as I did about the ear­lier works of Neil Gaiman, like Nev­er­where–a main char­ac­ter who is not emo­tion­ally invested in any­thing is dif­fi­cult to invest in as a reader. I never under­stood in the least what drove Sevar­ian, and hence the story. It was just drift­ing about in set pieces and dis­con­nected ideas.

There's grisly tor­ture, then duel­ing with toxic plant lances, then there's a play per­formed with full dia­logue, then trapped in a time­less dream prison with a robot­man , and then an ocean mon­ster talk­ing to him, and more! Much more. It's all beau­ti­ful and ethe­real and I really don't see the thread that uni­fied all the ideas. Just float­ing about.

Won­der­ful writ­ing. Won­der­ful scenes. Obvi­ously lay­ered very thickly in the telling of the story. I'm glad I read it, but more because it's a clas­sic. Still, I'll prob­a­bly pass on the sec­ond volume.

(This review of Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun' is cross-posted from my GoodReads.)