2016 read #8: The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman.

The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman
478 pages
Published 2002
Read from January 12 to January 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I enjoyed the previous Ellen Kushner novels I've read, Thomas the Rhymer and especially Swordspoint, the first volume in this series. Kushner's style is distinctive: lush, sensual, cultivated in its carnality. A short story written in collaboration with Sherman, "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," was likewise promising, among the best entries in its anthology. True, The Fall of the Kings was published some fifteen years after Swordspoint -- a worrying gap between a heretofore standalone novel and its followup -- but Kings retains many of the attractions of Swordspoint, and adds ample new charms of its own: Sexy dudes politicking and fucking their way across a fantasy city; academics and students in a university on the threshold of discovering the scientific method; sexual magic thick with imagery borrowed from Cernunnos and the Green Man; a back-alley knife brawl that ends in a blowjob. There's even a lesbian pirate who comes in and gets shit done. The last thing you'd expect is for Kings to be dull. And yet, for much of its middle section, the same scenes played out with little change; characters spun their wheels; the central historian character, despite his bold new method of locating original sources, takes over three hundred pages to figure out what was obvious to the reader pretty much since the prologue. At one point I literally fell asleep reading it (though, to be fair, I was really sleepy at the time).

I bet you could remove 200 of Kings' 478 pages and not lose any emotional resonance, and only minimal amounts of sensuality. Not every book needs a relentless pace or brisk plotting, but after a certain threshold, "padding" doesn't seem an inaccurate term.

Right around the time our central academic finally figures out where the book has been going this whole time -- and, equally or even more importantly, the lesbian pirate figuratively kicks down the door and takes over the novel, a hundred pages before the end -- The Fall of the Kings finally lives up to its promise and its pedigree, and becomes the swashbuckling homoerotic fantasy politics novel we've all of us wanted. Because of that, I'm willing to forget the snoozer it had been during those interminable middle passages. And something I wouldn't have guessed a mere two days ago: I'm excited again for the next installment!