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3.8 AVERAGE
3.8 AVERAGE
quite possibly my favorite wolfe text currently. disability justice long before the conversation was as open as it is nowadays, but rendered with intense chivalry and care, and in characteristic fashion, leading one to question the very basis of our world’s fabric to increase “the stock of harmless good cheer in the world” as justin mcelroy might say
Okay, I have only looked at the first, and read a few pages. I thought I'd see what was going on with this one first...
The answer is, incomprehensible nonsense, that grows tired by about the third paragraph. There are a few books that work with a vernacular style of writing. Pilgerman, A Clockwork Orange and Feersun Endgin come to mind. But characters portrayed only by their wonky way of talking are usually tiresome. Pratchett makes good use of it in the odd character.
But when it is the main protagonists in the first two chapters, it is seriously annoying. When I find myself reading 2 chapters of a book that fails to entertain, says nothing, and speaks in a difficult to follow lingo, I throw it away. Gene Wolfe has been good in the past. He has also been stultifyingly dull. This is one of the latter. Some reviews suggest these books are somehow original in the fantasy market. Rubbish. There is nothing new here, and the literary trick of having a boy in a man's body has little mileage any more... since Tom Hanks in Big, actually, and that was due to the skill of the actor.
Avoid.
The answer is, incomprehensible nonsense, that grows tired by about the third paragraph. There are a few books that work with a vernacular style of writing. Pilgerman, A Clockwork Orange and Feersun Endgin come to mind. But characters portrayed only by their wonky way of talking are usually tiresome. Pratchett makes good use of it in the odd character.
But when it is the main protagonists in the first two chapters, it is seriously annoying. When I find myself reading 2 chapters of a book that fails to entertain, says nothing, and speaks in a difficult to follow lingo, I throw it away. Gene Wolfe has been good in the past. He has also been stultifyingly dull. This is one of the latter. Some reviews suggest these books are somehow original in the fantasy market. Rubbish. There is nothing new here, and the literary trick of having a boy in a man's body has little mileage any more... since Tom Hanks in Big, actually, and that was due to the skill of the actor.
Avoid.
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The second volume of the Wizard Knight continues to follow Able and Co as they negotiate confrontation with the Frost Giants and the complex nature of honor and vows. For anyone who reads the first installment and wants to pick up the second I would say that it would be to your benefit to read it immediately, this book feels less like a sequel and much more like a volume 2 to one work, and I imagine based on how it was published that Wolfe likely wrote the entire thing to be read as a single volume. Mostly I suggest this because of the density of the writing style which took me a while to acclimatize myself to despite reading both books in one month.
I didn't end up enjoying this second one as much as the first because character moments never really hit as hard for me as they did in the first. Reunions that I was anticipating in particular were either entirely omitted or incredibly brief, and there wasn't a narrative payoff that I wanted. That being said I don't think that character interactions were a particular goal of this book. I think this series is much more concerned with its world-building and how it reconstructs and combines its inspirations, this second volume plays much more with Arthurian inspiration and I did enjoy the approach to Morgan le Fey and Arthur here. That being said I don't think that the world-building would be a draw for a lot of readers, it does not reimagine social, political, or economic differences from our own world to a dramatic degree through which the reader can slowly be drawn in with inventiveness and imagination. Rather, the book seems concerned with its place within the literary canon of epics about knighthood and honor. The inclusion of The Riders by Lord Dunsany in the first volume, and the dedication to him in the second work points to that. I don't fault this purpose, but it certainly isn't entertaining fantasy in my mind.
Having read the whole series I also think I can point to the aspects of the prose that I find so unusual in this type of work. The first is the way Wolfe transitions between scenes and settings. The transitions being that there aren't any. In the first volume the chapter tends to end whenever the scene changes (the chapters are also noticeably shorter) this is not as often the case in the second volume, yet rarely are scene breaks ever used. This disoriented me at times, especially when an unspecified amount of time passed or great distances were travelled with no explanation, or the explanation was offered retroactively paragraphs or pages later. I think this represents the way that the characters can sometimes 'slip' into Aelfrice or the other worlds, but it could definitely be confusing. The second thing about Wolfe's style is that there is not direct characterization for any of the characters. If you want 'show don't tell' I have never read a book that took it to as far as an extreme as I saw here. Able never offers any real statement or judgement of the characters around him, or of himself, this offers room for a lot of reader interpretation of the characters and their actions, and while Able in particular I found to be remarkably consistent, it also meant a lot of distance between the reader and the characters.
Overall I found this book among the most challenging and demanding fantasy I've ever read. If you're a person who enjoys epics whether they be Icelandic sagas, Mallory, or even Beowulf I think this may offer a similar, modern experience. For the average fantasy fan I would recommend it much more stringently.
I didn't end up enjoying this second one as much as the first because character moments never really hit as hard for me as they did in the first. Reunions that I was anticipating in particular were either entirely omitted or incredibly brief, and there wasn't a narrative payoff that I wanted. That being said I don't think that character interactions were a particular goal of this book. I think this series is much more concerned with its world-building and how it reconstructs and combines its inspirations, this second volume plays much more with Arthurian inspiration and I did enjoy the approach to Morgan le Fey and Arthur here. That being said I don't think that the world-building would be a draw for a lot of readers, it does not reimagine social, political, or economic differences from our own world to a dramatic degree through which the reader can slowly be drawn in with inventiveness and imagination. Rather, the book seems concerned with its place within the literary canon of epics about knighthood and honor. The inclusion of The Riders by Lord Dunsany in the first volume, and the dedication to him in the second work points to that. I don't fault this purpose, but it certainly isn't entertaining fantasy in my mind.
Having read the whole series I also think I can point to the aspects of the prose that I find so unusual in this type of work. The first is the way Wolfe transitions between scenes and settings. The transitions being that there aren't any. In the first volume the chapter tends to end whenever the scene changes (the chapters are also noticeably shorter) this is not as often the case in the second volume, yet rarely are scene breaks ever used. This disoriented me at times, especially when an unspecified amount of time passed or great distances were travelled with no explanation, or the explanation was offered retroactively paragraphs or pages later. I think this represents the way that the characters can sometimes 'slip' into Aelfrice or the other worlds, but it could definitely be confusing. The second thing about Wolfe's style is that there is not direct characterization for any of the characters. If you want 'show don't tell' I have never read a book that took it to as far as an extreme as I saw here. Able never offers any real statement or judgement of the characters around him, or of himself, this offers room for a lot of reader interpretation of the characters and their actions, and while Able in particular I found to be remarkably consistent, it also meant a lot of distance between the reader and the characters.
Overall I found this book among the most challenging and demanding fantasy I've ever read. If you're a person who enjoys epics whether they be Icelandic sagas, Mallory, or even Beowulf I think this may offer a similar, modern experience. For the average fantasy fan I would recommend it much more stringently.
On second read, the story is starting to make sense to me but much of the subtext and symbolism is still lost to me. This is probably one of Wolfe's most dense work (which is really saying something), despite the duology being almost 1000 pages. I wish that he had maintained the purple proseish style of his early works, as the YA voice is somewhat at odds with the scope and difficulty of the text.
I'm a man so I don't cry but I got pretty close reading this. So many very vivid scenes and so many fascinating characters. I dreamed of Vil after his appearance.
I'm a man so I don't cry but I got pretty close reading this. So many very vivid scenes and so many fascinating characters. I dreamed of Vil after his appearance.
Overall this series was a disappointment. I thought the story felt haphazard and lacked focus--shifting from one world to another or one set of characters to another very suddenly. I've heard others describe this particular quirk as being dream-like, but it didn't read that way to me--it wasn't quite haphazard enough to capture the strange logic of dreams but too haphazard to seem realistic. The strange shifts were infrequent enough, also, that it sometimes felt less than intentional (although it probably was--it just didn't feel that way to me). The layered worlds were an interesting concept but I felt Wolfe could have fleshed the worlds other than Aelfrice and Mythgathr out a bit more, possibly including in the story Able's time in Skai, etc.
I also found that the relationships between many of the characters lacked depth, particularly with Able's relationship with Disiri. They weren't allowed the time in the narrative for us to get attached to them--we knew Able was devoted to her only because he said so, not because of anything demonstrated in that actual story. By the end I realized that Wolfe may have chosen to do this since *spoiler alert* as we see at the end of the book, some of the characters were less real (in a corporeal, human sense) than others, but it didn't change the fact that it did drain the story of some emotional heft. I realize this isn't considered Wolfe's best work, and there was a lot here that got me thinking (judging by the lenght of this review, he obviously got to me a bit) so I look forward to reading more of his work and possibly understanding his style a bit more (and maybe even revisiting these books).
I also found that the relationships between many of the characters lacked depth, particularly with Able's relationship with Disiri. They weren't allowed the time in the narrative for us to get attached to them--we knew Able was devoted to her only because he said so, not because of anything demonstrated in that actual story. By the end I realized that Wolfe may have chosen to do this since *spoiler alert* as we see at the end of the book, some of the characters were less real (in a corporeal, human sense) than others, but it didn't change the fact that it did drain the story of some emotional heft. I realize this isn't considered Wolfe's best work, and there was a lot here that got me thinking (judging by the lenght of this review, he obviously got to me a bit) so I look forward to reading more of his work and possibly understanding his style a bit more (and maybe even revisiting these books).
I should preface this review by saying that I read this book about a month after The Knight. I hadn't realized that the second novel was a continuation of the first novel rather than a sequel, and although I tried to get The Wizard right away, circumstances conspired to prevent it. In the interim, I had read about 10 other novels, so the story of the first book wasn't fresh in my mind when I started the second.
All this to say that I was a little confused when I began this novel. I didn't know why Abel was presumed dead or why we were suddenly following a secondary character. Even when I figured out what had happened, I still thought it strange that we were all of a sudden following the thoughts and experiences of Toug rather than Abel. Although the story was still interesting, it did make Abel's character less compelling when he did finally appear. And then Toug is later unceremoniously dropped.
Overall, I found The Wizard less compelling than The Knight. After Abel finally leaves Jotunland, I started to get a little impatient. Too much unsatisfying dialogue between characters, too many events that seemed like page-fillers. After a few battles and wars, a tournament of arms seems very anti-climatic. And knowing that the character ascended to another world and lived there for 20 years makes the whole "I'm still just a boy" thing ring a little false.
All in all, I'd heartily recommend the first book, and be prepared to skim a lot of the second. I didn't, but I was sorely tempted to. That said, there are still a lot of enjoyable parts that hearken back to the great story that the first book was.
All this to say that I was a little confused when I began this novel. I didn't know why Abel was presumed dead or why we were suddenly following a secondary character. Even when I figured out what had happened, I still thought it strange that we were all of a sudden following the thoughts and experiences of Toug rather than Abel. Although the story was still interesting, it did make Abel's character less compelling when he did finally appear. And then Toug is later unceremoniously dropped.
Overall, I found The Wizard less compelling than The Knight. After Abel finally leaves Jotunland, I started to get a little impatient. Too much unsatisfying dialogue between characters, too many events that seemed like page-fillers. After a few battles and wars, a tournament of arms seems very anti-climatic. And knowing that the character ascended to another world and lived there for 20 years makes the whole "I'm still just a boy" thing ring a little false.
All in all, I'd heartily recommend the first book, and be prepared to skim a lot of the second. I didn't, but I was sorely tempted to. That said, there are still a lot of enjoyable parts that hearken back to the great story that the first book was.
adventurous
hopeful
lighthearted
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was a disappointment after the wonderfulness which was the first volume. It's almost five hundred pages, and the first few hundred are quite painfully tedious. The tediousness starts with pages and pages of nearly unreadable dialect, the dialect of the Knight's followers. Then there are pages and pages about the Knight (Wizard's)experiences in the land of the giants. The way he describes the giants is really unpleasant: they are an "inferior race" with no redeeming qualities. There is not a lot of action but lots of boring talk. And there are no exciting trips to other realms. The book finally picks up and redeems itself in the last two hundred pages. As someone else said, The middle of this book should get zero stars, and the end five. I guess I'll compromise with two.
