The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
298 pages
Published 1986
Read from February 3 to February 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Contains spoilers for The Summer Tree as well as the current volume.
So
you end the first volume of your epic fantasy trilogy with a glimpse of
your heroes -- who, mere weeks ago, were simple Toronto yuppies --
throwing themselves into an unplanned, last-ditch rescue mission into
the very bowels of the impenetrable lair of the Dark One, a literal evil
god who hates everything and everyone and has literal god powers and
can wipe your heroes out and crush them with a thought. How will you
ever manage to get them out of this jam?!
Why, by skipping months
ahead, to a point where your heroes are safely back in Toronto,
figuratively thinking "Man, that was quite an escape!"
In my Summer Tree
review, I mentioned how tedious "Dark Ones" are. Not only are they the
most over-done fantasy cliches ever, they create the Superman problem in
reverse: they're so overpowered, they have to be sidelined in order for
your good guys to last longer than a White Castle Crave Case on an Ohio
family's dinner table. I'm willing to cut Kay some slack -- he was
writing before modern fantasy fiction, as we understand it today, really
took shape. That doesn't mean I have to enjoy his villain, though.
What was oddest about this volume was the pacing. The Summer Tree was brisk without feeling rushed. Within the first thirty-five pages of The Wandering Fire,
by contrast, the damsel in distress (shudder), rescued so conveniently
between books, has given birth to a possible antichrist (shudder), and
our heroes have slipped into Stonehenge and summoned both Uther and
Arthur Pendragon, hey guys, no big deal, just out here summoning the
heroes of legend, lol. Arthur's introduction was so rushed, and so
reliant on archetypes to fill in the blanks, I never developed a mental
picture of him; for the rest of the book I couldn't stop visualizing him
as Billy from Adventure Time, right down to his voice. I'm not
saying I'd prefer, say, Robert Jordan's pacing (summoning Uther and
Arthur Pendragon would take approximately 6,000 pages if Jordan were
writing it), but I do like my fantasy series to feel a bit more... epic.
Like something weighty and complexly magical is going on, grinding
inexorably deep in the heart of the world. This book gave the impression
that all the accumulated wisdom of the One True World, its millennia of
magic and scholarship, meant nothing until some '80s yuppies stepped in
to manage things. At this rate, in the next book they'll have defeated
the evil god and kicked back in the den with some chilled Bartles &
Jaymes in time for Miami Vice.
Kay's coke-binge pacing (sorry, everything about this series makes me think of the '80s) wasn't bad,
per se, it was just a different way of getting things done, and took
getting used to. This installment didn't even eke out 300 pages, for
crying out loud. The book felt more fleshed out by the middle, though,
and all in all it was as enjoyable as the first volume in the series.
And in parts it was unexpectedly moving.
A footnote: I mentioned in my Summer Tree
review how Fionavar reminded me of Roger Zelazny's Amber -- both are
the "one true world" in a sprawling multiverse of stories and worlds.
Here I should point out how the Fionavar books prefigure the Wheel of
Time. Much is made of how the same heroes are reborn, the same tragedies
repeated, the same stories woven through the loom. Considering how much
of the early Wheel of Time volumes is a rehash and recombination of
older fantasy stories, I find it kind of hilarious that the titular
Wheel itself isn't even original.
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