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A review by jayshay
Lamentation by Ken Scholes
2.0
This gets two stars from me cause it didn't convince me to read (or listen to) the next four books in the series. None of the characters were particularly compelling. They all suffered from high fantasy woodenness. Neb, the orphan boy is probably supposed to be the most sympathetic of the characters, but comes off as a whiner. These character deficits wouldn't matter if there was an interesting plot, but there weren't enough twists and turns to keep my interest. The city of Wind Wir? gets crisped by the baddie at the beginning of the book and then the good guys whack him down for the rest of the book. The anti-climatic final scene with the main baddie is at a trial. Perry Mason in the 1100s. Yes, there are hidden conspiracies and a greater evil, but those are back-loaded to the end of the book. Realistically an author has maybe fifty pages to hook a reader, I gave him 368 pages and Scholes still hadn't delivered for me.
That a man is shaped not only by his own choices, but the choices of those around him, to vaguely quote a character in the book, is a worthy theme, but it gets played out to a improbable lengths here with one character seemingly in complete control of another character's development and life course. This is the gimmick of an evil or not-so-good character being a genius seemingly in control of EVERYTHING that happens - there is no chance, no factors outside of this dude's control. I can buy magic and dragons and steam-punk robots, but this I just can't swallow. It's a symptom of an author who is being such a control freak that he squeezes the life out of his story.
Petronus (the wise old man, former Pope of the Androfrancine order) finishes his sermon with "...to dream in the Now." Which is kind of a groany little statement in itself. Much is made in the book of not looking back, of protecting the light, or on the other hand letting the light die, killing the light. Of using the light to read trashy sf stories late at night when you should be sleeping... I just couldn't make sense of all this talk. The monks in the book are protecting the light (knowledge from the old high tech civilization that blew itself up) but the light is also dangerous, so they are protecting the survivors from the light. Of course wouldn't some of this knowledge help improve the life of this medieval society? If it is at all like medieval Europe, the life expectancy must be pretty grim, there is probably a really high infant mortality rate. But the order is keeping the lid on this stuff or maybe just some of it? The problem is, how do you hold back the 'bad' knowledge and let the 'good' knowledge out? I don't know if this was really addressed. The issue of whether folks really want some paternalistic order holding back knowledge, presumably preventing fledgling scientists from redeveloping science isn't mentioned in this volume.
Then there is the group that wants to kill the light. Are they saying they want to flush all the knowledge? To they want to get rid of rationality as well? Go to some dream-ruled happy land with probably even less indoor plumbing and sanitation systems? A fantasy medieval world is fun to read about but I'd want to get my people to a better standard of living pretty quickly. Of course this is high fantasy so we're really only focusing on lords and ladies here. Me, I'd be peasant number four, the one with the nasty skin rash and a bad sounding cough.
The ideal of some characters by the end of this book is to not look to the past but to 'dream forward', but just what the heck does that mean? It is like some weird ass political slogan. Funnily, at the end of the book when there is talk about the tortures being put out of business this fantasy takes on a post-Bush, beginning-of-Obama kind of vibe. Perhaps reality will hit with volume two, but I'm not sticking around to find out. Especially after Rudolfo ends his final musing with "and he saw how a Lamentation could become a Hymn." (Don't know if the words were capitalized, they just sounded that way in the audio.) Scholes probably thought it was pretty clever getting the title of the current volume and the final volume in a neat little package. No, that is way way too cute and neat and precious. Stop it!
**I enjoyed Scholes' short story 'Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky' (which you can listen to at escapepod.org, it's #187). Any guy who can get you rooting for Hitler (in an alternate history) does have some saving graces.**
That a man is shaped not only by his own choices, but the choices of those around him, to vaguely quote a character in the book, is a worthy theme, but it gets played out to a improbable lengths here with one character seemingly in complete control of another character's development and life course. This is the gimmick of an evil or not-so-good character being a genius seemingly in control of EVERYTHING that happens - there is no chance, no factors outside of this dude's control. I can buy magic and dragons and steam-punk robots, but this I just can't swallow. It's a symptom of an author who is being such a control freak that he squeezes the life out of his story.
Petronus (the wise old man, former Pope of the Androfrancine order) finishes his sermon with "...to dream in the Now." Which is kind of a groany little statement in itself. Much is made in the book of not looking back, of protecting the light, or on the other hand letting the light die, killing the light. Of using the light to read trashy sf stories late at night when you should be sleeping... I just couldn't make sense of all this talk. The monks in the book are protecting the light (knowledge from the old high tech civilization that blew itself up) but the light is also dangerous, so they are protecting the survivors from the light. Of course wouldn't some of this knowledge help improve the life of this medieval society? If it is at all like medieval Europe, the life expectancy must be pretty grim, there is probably a really high infant mortality rate. But the order is keeping the lid on this stuff or maybe just some of it? The problem is, how do you hold back the 'bad' knowledge and let the 'good' knowledge out? I don't know if this was really addressed. The issue of whether folks really want some paternalistic order holding back knowledge, presumably preventing fledgling scientists from redeveloping science isn't mentioned in this volume.
Then there is the group that wants to kill the light. Are they saying they want to flush all the knowledge? To they want to get rid of rationality as well? Go to some dream-ruled happy land with probably even less indoor plumbing and sanitation systems? A fantasy medieval world is fun to read about but I'd want to get my people to a better standard of living pretty quickly. Of course this is high fantasy so we're really only focusing on lords and ladies here. Me, I'd be peasant number four, the one with the nasty skin rash and a bad sounding cough.
The ideal of some characters by the end of this book is to not look to the past but to 'dream forward', but just what the heck does that mean? It is like some weird ass political slogan. Funnily, at the end of the book when there is talk about the tortures being put out of business this fantasy takes on a post-Bush, beginning-of-Obama kind of vibe. Perhaps reality will hit with volume two, but I'm not sticking around to find out. Especially after Rudolfo ends his final musing with "and he saw how a Lamentation could become a Hymn." (Don't know if the words were capitalized, they just sounded that way in the audio.) Scholes probably thought it was pretty clever getting the title of the current volume and the final volume in a neat little package. No, that is way way too cute and neat and precious. Stop it!
**I enjoyed Scholes' short story 'Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky' (which you can listen to at escapepod.org, it's #187). Any guy who can get you rooting for Hitler (in an alternate history) does have some saving graces.**