Traitors' Gate by Kate Elliott
574 pages
Published 2009
Read from November 30 to December 5
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Spoilers for the entire Crossroads Trilogy ahead.
One thing I forgot to criticize in my review of Shadow Gate
was the aimlessness of certain characters' movements. Journeys, it
almost goes without saying, are the bread and butter of Tolkienist
fantasy (and the Arthuriana and romantic traditions Tolkien drew from).
Handled well, they can be routine but effective storytelling frameworks,
providing momentum to an adventure tale, raising the stakes as the
heroes near their goal or get driven back from it. Handled poorly,
wanderings can be baldly obvious means of forcing awkward exposition or
unneeded worldbuilding detail into the story, or -- worse -- a way for
characters to kill time and remain occupied until the plot finally needs
them. That last scenario was painfully obvious in this series.
For instance: A character named Keshad is introduced in Spirit Gate,
the first book, in a caravan returning to the Hundred, finally able to
buy himself and his sister out of debt slavery. Once they're free,
Keshad prevails upon his sister to accompany him with no specific
destination in mind, so long as it's away from those who have
held them captive -- even though, in this case, it means wandering
stupidly and stubbornly deeper into a war zone. Then a dude on an eagle
catches up with them and tells them Keshad bought their freedom with
something he couldn't sell because Plot Reasons, so after chapters of
traveling, Keshad and his sister simply turn around and head back to the
city they just left. Nothing really happened in those travelogue
chapters, from a storytelling perspective. Sure, Keshad learned his
sister had changed over the years (into a fearless and impossibly
skilled sex assassin, because Fantasy Fiction), but that could have been
revealed in one scene, maybe as he was securing her freedom, and
nothing else in those chapters furthered the story. And then (I forget
whether this happened in the first book or the second, but regardless),
Keshad -- now stuck reluctantly with our heroes -- volunteers to go
spying in a pseudo-Seljuk empire, the very place he was leaving at the
beginning of Spirit Gate. Almost as soon as he's back again, he
penned up with other outlander traders during some sort of dynastic
commotion, his spying mission foiled as easy as that, thanks for
playing, have a copy of the home game. At the start of this book, he
gets turned around yet again and sent as an escort right back into the
Hundred, where he proceeds to dither around in that selfsame first city,
bellyaching about being in love with someone he saw for a split second.
Add the fact that the character is annoying as well as useless, and you
begin to see some of the deep structural problems with the Crossroads
Trilogy.
Yet... I dunno, I can't bring myself to wholly dislike
this book. Keshad's loop-de-loops were particularly annoying; the
unimaginative "every woman looks the handsome man up and down and licks
her lips" introductions could inspire a drinking game; the setting and
the supernatural possibilities of ghosts and giant eagles and immortal
Guardians got tapped of their potential, after a fashion, and kind of
sputtered out with increased familiarity. Much of the dialogue is
cluttered with forced exposition. ("Hey captain, you remember our plan,
which we are currently carrying out, and we are currently doing this,
right now, as I'm speaking, as part of that plan." Not an exact quote,
but you get the flavor.) Almost all the characters were annoying in one
way or another: Joss for being such a one-note
womanizer-with-a-sad-backstory, Anji for being a controlling jerk toward
his wife (though he became more interesting as he made his not entirely
unexpected Genghis Khan move), Mai for being a robot most of the time,
Shai for not living up to his potential as a dude who can see and hear
friggin' ghosts, everyone else for being so one-dimensional and either
being flirty or stoic all the time, depending on their racial
background. Yet there were genuinely exciting moments sprinkled through Traitors' Gate, and maybe one or two moving scenes as well. So... part of me still kind of liked it.
This book wasn't all that much worse than Shadow Gate,
except in the matter of excessively expository dialogue, but I've
noticed a trend in my ratings: The final volume in a trilogy gets
saddled with something of an overall grade for the series. I don't quite
hate the Crossroads Trilogy, but it did not meet my expectations.
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