Or, How the Mighty Have Fallen
The Meat
We've all had the experience—some book or movie a younger
version of ourselves encountered long ago, some nerdy pleasure forever wrapped
in the soft glow of our childhood, inseparable from the sense of wonder with
the world we felt so strongly in those days.
For me, one such movie was Willow,
a story my rational mind could recognize, even at the time, as a trite rip-off
of Lord of the Rings but one with
which I emotionally felt permanently bonded (Madmartigan, objectively, is way
cooler than Aragorn, after all). Among
books, the series of Midkemia (and Kelewan) novels written by Raymond E. Feist
holds that special place in my heart.
What a magical origin story in Magician!
What exciting later adventures awaited Pug and Tomas! I treasured these books so
much as a child that in a weird way they almost became part of my identity.
And that's why, when I read Feist's most recent Midkemia
novel, or as I like to think of it, The Book Which Shall Not Be Named, I found
myself in the midst of a full-blown, cold-sweats, can't-fall-asleep-out-of-terror,
existential crisis. How can he who
created something so amazing just a couple decades ago be the very same entity
who vomited up 400 pages of drivel in 2011? Have the pod people seized control
of his body, forcing his listless hands and dead, lifeless eyes to keep working
in a cruel parody of the craft of writing?
 |
| How Madmartigan looked after reading A Kingdom Besieged |
I imagine how I felt, on reading You Know What, would be
akin to the bitter disappointment an avid basketball fan, having seen Michael Jordan
in his glorious prime, might feel if he saw Jordan totter onto the court as an octogenarian
and wheeze out a few half-hearted layups.
It's not mere horror—it's almost a personal
betrayal, since if Feist (or Jordan) is capable of such an awful performance
now, the signs of his badness must have been there in his earlier efforts too, right?
Which means I must have been an idiot as a child to admire his writing style
and world-building skills! But perhaps I
have it the wrong way around: Feist really is—or rather, was—capable of
greatness, and simply has fallen on hard times creatively, stylistically,
structurally, etc. After all, barring
the alien mind control theory, the same Ridley Scott who spawned the
infuriatingly incoherent Prometheus
and the appalling Robin Hood also
managed Alien and Blade Runner in better times.
And just like Scott's early versus recent work, Feist's
books, old and new, all have much the same elements (powerful heroes of various
skill sets—Pug the magician, Jimmy the Hand or descendants as thief/spy, Condoin
guys as leaders, etc., pitted against demonic multiworld/dimensional threats)
which, in a clever configuration, can produce a masterpiece like Magician (or Alien)...but in a slapdash arrangement fizzle out as Talon of the Silver Hawk (or Prometheus). The once-great author/auteur, in his
befuddled mind, uses all the same pieces, but has lost the ability to put the
puzzle together, and now lacks the creativity to go beyond the world he made
years ago and dream new dreams.
Weep for Feist—how far he has fallen! How sloppy his writing
has become, how formulaic his plots, how uninteresting his characters. My
theory? Blame video games. He stopped writing full-time so he could help create
several games based on the Midkemia world(s), notably Betrayal at Krondor (excellent) among many others (most of which
were utterly forgettable/bad). Unsurprising, given this context, that he a)
devotes far less time to the craft of writing new novels, b) creatively he's
permanently stuck in Midkemia revisiting old characters and their far less
interesting children and grandchildren, etc., and c) has written less a novel
and more a novelization of a game concept: generic characters no reader would
identify with who are exposed to a range of uninspired role playing-esque encounters. One can almost hear the dice tumbling...and d)
to make matters still worse, he's suffering from RJS (Robert Jordan Syndrome):
this entire book feels like mere build-up for the next book. But I read it to the end--why, you ask? It's not unlike when you're outside taking a walk and suddenly you get hit by a meteorite: you see the edges of the ghastly wound it's left and you try to look away, but even though you know it's just going to freak you out, you have to look down at that horror, because you have to know how bad the damage is...
The Math
Objective Quality: 3/10Bonuses: I award you no bonuses...and may God have mercy on your soul
Penalties: -1 for returning yet again to Midkemia and making it suck, -1 for shattering my childhood illusions with a combination of terrible, formulaic writing, recycled plots and characters, and RJS
Nerd Coefficient: 1/10 Crime against humanity (and disillusioned former lovers of Midkemia in particular)
[This book enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the only books, if not the only one, given such a low score by Nerds of a Feather. For an explanation of why 1/10 is such a rare score, see here.]
