The Wise Man's Fear - The cut-flower silence of a man waiting to die

Go read this book. Right now.

Done? Okay. Let's talk.

So Pat Rothfuss is quite the guy.

He's got a way with words. The sheer amount of skill that comes out in his phrasing, sentence structure and paragraph length is just breathtaking. Rothfuss is poetic without being overwrought. He's clever without being silly. He can describe a song so well that you can hear it and magic so well that it feels like you could try doing it yourself.

His characters are well measured and structured. With a sentence here or a word there he can convey a character trait that would take a lesser author a good 10 pages to convey. And more importantly, they feel like real people. Whenever Rothfuss strays near an archetype (i.e. mean old noble guy) he'll salt something in to differentiate them. Screentime is carefully managed to leave the reader with the correct impression of a character.

I have been of the opinion for some time that Rothfuss is in fact the best author currently making use of the English language. We are privileged to live in his generation. While I was reading this book I did little else. When I walked down the street, I had my Kindle in hand reading. When my Associate turned his back, I would pick up my Kindle and read. I've been reading the book at every opportunity for the last 4 days.

Having finished it now, I am in awe of Rothfuss' skills and wonder how it is that a man of such incredible powers could make so many mistakes.

There are three ways in which the Wise Man's Fear disappoints. Let me emphasize again before I begin that this is still the best book written between the release of the Name of the Wind and now.

SPOILERS AHEAD


Flaw #1 - Plot

I really think what Rothfuss did right in the Name of the Wind was to take a step away from the World Building style of fantasy that plagues the genre these days, choosing instead to leave most of that stuff aside so that he could run a tight-plot. Even as Kvothe mucked about in the University and fought a Draccus, the plot never loses sight of the Chandrian

The Wise Man's Fear, on the other hand, does just that.

Going on a trip to Vintas to visit some Lord guy? Cool, that broadens the setting.

Fighting some bandits? Well okay, I guess that's how everybody gets their start.

Having sex with one of those slutty Great Faeries from Zelda? Oka-... wait, what?

All of the encounters are linked back to the main story just so clumsily. Kvothe getting information from the head karate lady in the one town just felt video game-ish, with Kvothe asking for what essentially amounted to a Quest Reward.

And honestly, where did the main plot really even go in this? Besides a brief Cinder cameo with the bandits and a few repetitive rumours (I know there are fucking seven of them and they don't like the Atur, let's move on), the Wise Man's Fear offers next to no new information. There's a list of names sure and you get how they knew someone was singing about them, but there's no more information about what their problem is. Honestly, I've waited for this for years and this is all I get? Surely some of the information coming in the third book could have been moved up into two.

Flaw #2 - Pacing and Kvothe's powers

A lot of the things in the book easily overstayed their welcome. Kvothe's training with the Adem is the first thing that springs to mind in this list. That was just pure World Building Fantasy. Chapter after chapter doing little more than exploring the eccentricities of these weird Karate People's culture. I don't understand the reason why that had to last as long as it did. I mean, maybe if the whole Lethani thing were linked a bit more closely to finding the Name of the Wind it would have been a bit better, but the whole thing seemed pretty arbitrary.

I also think that on one level Kvothe is getting a bit silly. In the Name of the Wind Kvothe was an eternal underdog, but now he's a Rich Magic Karate Singing Sword Man (who's great in bed). I know it's all going to fall apart nonetheless and sink him into a shitty inn in the middle of a bunch of shit farms. But did he really even need to learn all that martial arts shit? Personally I think sticking with goddamn magic would have been a lot better. That stuff he did when he used sympathy on a corpse to slit those bandits' throats was fucking awesome. I'd much rather he do shit like that then go around using obscure Karate.

I did really like the poem about beating up the 10 year old girl though.

And it was a bit of an odd choice to make the Karate moves and the sex moves have such similar names. "Thousand Hands" vs. "Sleeping Bear", etc.

Flaw #3 - Women

Okay. Let's start with the more minor problem...

So I remember Rothfuss once describing himself as a casual anime fan, but... well, I don't think that's true and that he's minimizing that. Because the first chunk of the book in the University really did read a lot like a harem anime. An Event here with Devi (Tsundere-type), another one there with Mola (Senpai-type), another with Fela (Idol-type) and another one there with Auri (Mysterious-type). Like a harem, none of these things were allowed to come to a natural conclusion. Kvothe would have a meaningful scene with one of them and you'd think 'oh okay how is this going to develop?' only to have him a similar scene with a different girl in the next chapter.

Pure harem. That isn't a major crime in and of itself, but it certainly was an odd choice.

But then there was Felurian.

I think I was hoping for a more Jonathan Strange/Mr. Norrel path into the fae lands, but I can get over that. If I could describe the way those chapters were written as anything it would probably be self-indulgent. His decision was his decision. It was certainly interesting to see Rothfuss amazing powers of writing employed in something so raunchy.

But what I don't like is what it did to Kvothe's character. Whenever Kvothe meets a pretty girl I must now ask the question 'Is he going to sleep with this lady?' On average, the answer in the WMF after the whole Felurian thing appeared to be 'yes' (unless she was underaged, which is a small mercy). Rothfuss in this regard seemed to be expressing a sort of promiscuous philosophy at times so I was glad when Kvothe's dalliances resulted in him being shut down with Denna. At least that shows that Rothfuss is aware of the limitations of that philosophy, but I nevertheless don't think that Kvothe being a man-slut serves his character very much.

Also I really don't like Denna. And her patron is almost certainly a goddamn Chandrian.

Nevertheless...

This was a fantastic book. Brilliantly written, well-structured and well-executed. I am eager to see how the plot will develop and look forward to having some friends read it already so that we can discuss questions as to Chandrian identities and where the heck Skarpi or Bast are or how Kvothe should just forget about that Denna bitch and focus his attentions on Auri.
There's more ...

The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence

Scott Lynch's The Lies of Lamora Locke and Red Seas Under Red Skies are a really good pair of books, which is surprising considering how much they do wrong.

The basic plot is that you have a Thief Priesthood preying on a fantasy city with a whole lot of alchemy and such cramed in. The main characters Locke and his gang, who are a group of con-artists that prey on the rich with elaborate confidence schemes who then get caught up in underworld politics and tangled in all manner of complications.

The characters are well-realized and human. The plot twists and turns in surprising ways and the books are most certainly page turners. I read the second one cover to cover in one sitting. But unfortunately, Lynch suffers from an affliction that many Fantasy authors suffer from. Mainly: the guy loves his fucking world building and refuses to put that shit down.



World building is an exercise that every bit of speculative fiction needs to go through. Readers need some context if they aren't going to be in some form of Earth that they're roughly familiar with. If Earth has been enslaved by alien crabs you need to establish that much before starting the rebellion against the crabs. But the problem of the last decade of Science Fiction and Fantasy is that world building was been placed at the forefront when it's supposed to be in the background.

In my opinion, nothing illustrates this trend better than Lynch. Every three chapters or so, the man would call a halt to his actual story and do some world building. He'll literally leave the real plot on a coathanger somewhere and go on for twenty pages about a random world building detail that he apparently feels is more important than his actual fucking story. It's almost always unnecessary and breaks the immersion like a crying baby in the middle of the Dark Knight.

Some examples of the shit Lynch foists on the reader in the middle of his narrative:

- The cruel aristocratic Chess-with-peasants-as-pieces game of some obscure palace
- How a bunch of hookers rebelled against their pimps
- The rituals of the freaky death goddess cult

There was one part of the second book where Locke and his friend Jean are getting trained to be seamen. The first worldbuilding detail Lynch put into that sequence was something that I liked... a seaman superstition that it was deathly bad luck to go out to sea without a cat aboard the ship, lest you offend the Iono the Lord of the Grasping Waters who apparently is very fond of cats. That was a cool detail that I thought was hilarious at the same time. I mean it's not often you see a Fantasy author taking inspiration from lolcats



But nevertheless, that one good moment was soured somewhat by the fifty fucking pages of fantasy sailor jargon ("Hard to Larsboard!") that followed it. Fuck.

Don't get me wrong, the world that Lynch has put together is pretty cool. It's got a really interesting set of political institutions, a nuanced criminal underworld, a well-realized religious angle, alchemy, clockwork machines, elaborate poisons and even a bit of diplomatic intrigue. Lynch even knows when to hold things back and keep them mysterious, as he does with a certain society of sorcerers for instance.

And fuck, he has cats in pirate ships:



But world building should be context. World building should be background. World building should be subordinate to everything else that's in the fucking story. World building should never be the story itself.

That said, the book has many virtues to make make up for this flaw. Let me go through them quickly so that I'm not just writing a negative review for a pair of books that I actually liked.

#1: Strong characters.

I'm a big fan of trickster protagonists and as the title of the first book suggests, Locke sort of embodies that. Trying to guess when he's lying and when he's not is what keeps the pages turning for me. As you read along and get a feel for his value system and personality it becomes easier to tell (which takes a bit of the joy out of it) but well-told and surprising lies are still in great abundance.

Unfortunately his world building mania does cloud into some of the more minor characters in the story. Like the Pirates (Plural! More than one!) who love Poetry and have long discussions about it. But fortunately that shit is minimized

[Note to Lynch: I get it, by the way. Lucarno is Seneca/Roman poets. The other guys were Sophocles/Greek poets. Thank you for inserting the discussion you had in a first year Classic seminar into your book. That was a very necessary thing for you to do.]

#2: Good planning.

The first two books have all manner of references to a girl that broke Locke's heart and left him, with no details or explanation. One thing that kept me reading so quickly was my curiosity about who the hell she is and why/how she did that and where she is now. In two books, Lynch avoids giving any tangible details. That tells me that he has the next five books in the series tightly planned and I strongly approve of that.

#3: Excellent fight scenes.

This one speaks for itself. Dirty thief fighting is full of quick movements, with dodges and distractions and feints. Often a fight in fantasy will rely on a character's gimmick or feel DnDish. Lynch's fights on the other hand seemed very real, with good accounts of pain, fear, hesitation and rage. I always like an author who pays attention to the physical nature of combat.

#4: Pirate cats.



Seriously. There's more ...