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A review by noahapples
The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
2.0
I've heard that Tolkien had these crazy charts he drew up that tracked what every character was doing at every hour of the day throughout their adventures in Middle Earth, and maps that tracked minute troop movements and showed excruciating details of landscape. This book, and ultimately the whole trilogy, feels like it has every ounce of Tolkein's dedication to craft, but none of Tolkein's charm. It's a relatively "tidy" book lengthwise, but at the expense of any kind of heart; there's no six-page description of a feast... but there's also no six-page description of a feast, if you know what I mean. I thought Kay's under-edited, over-whimsical writing in the First Book was over the top, but at least it had personality.
It's, like, a masterful story I guess, but do I really care about anyone in this book? Maybe one guy who dies? Idk.
The characters literally teleport or fly or ghost travel or whatever from plot point to plot point, and most conflicts are resolved by deus ex magic ring. Whatever faint emotional attachments I had or strings of likability that stuck around for anyone tenuously in book two are gone here, replaced by rote action or weird forced drama that has basically #@%$ all to do with the events taking place in the book. There's also a dumb black & white good/evil dichotomy that's basically never explained and explicitly has no nuance, like there are just beings that are "good" and "bad" by the nature of their existence.
Here are some questions I was left with: Why is Kay insisting on telling his weird King Arthur fanfic in the middle/all around/instead of his original fantasy epic? Like [female] characters are literally replaced by mythological symbols and dehumanized completely because they're part of a different story that he's decided should go here instead of the one he was telling.
Why even have the main set of protagonists come from "our world"? It ultimately just becomes a thin excuse to have things explained to them.
Here's one I'm just not going to let go of: How is Loren able to make himself a well respected academic figure in Book One but not have access to other worlds like any other time after bringing the protagonists across? Why is Fionavar an old-timey fantasy world if they exist contemporally with our world? What are the other worlds like? They must have cool shit there too, right? Seriously though, why doesn't Kim just Baelwraith up some machine guns or a bomb and take out Mogrim's army real quick if the book has decided she's "a summoner" all of a sudden? Why, Guy Gavriel Kay? Why?
It's, like, a masterful story I guess, but do I really care about anyone in this book? Maybe one guy who dies? Idk.
The characters literally teleport or fly or ghost travel or whatever from plot point to plot point, and most conflicts are resolved by deus ex magic ring. Whatever faint emotional attachments I had or strings of likability that stuck around for anyone tenuously in book two are gone here, replaced by rote action or weird forced drama that has basically #@%$ all to do with the events taking place in the book. There's also a dumb black & white good/evil dichotomy that's basically never explained and explicitly has no nuance, like there are just beings that are "good" and "bad" by the nature of their existence.
Here are some questions I was left with: Why is Kay insisting on telling his weird King Arthur fanfic in the middle/all around/instead of his original fantasy epic? Like [female] characters are literally replaced by mythological symbols and dehumanized completely because they're part of a different story that he's decided should go here instead of the one he was telling.
Why even have the main set of protagonists come from "our world"? It ultimately just becomes a thin excuse to have things explained to them.
Here's one I'm just not going to let go of: How is Loren able to make himself a well respected academic figure in Book One but not have access to other worlds like any other time after bringing the protagonists across? Why is Fionavar an old-timey fantasy world if they exist contemporally with our world? What are the other worlds like? They must have cool shit there too, right? Seriously though, why doesn't Kim just Baelwraith up some machine guns or a bomb and take out Mogrim's army real quick if the book has decided she's "a summoner" all of a sudden? Why, Guy Gavriel Kay? Why?