book commentary: Lord Sunday (and series)
May. 19th, 2010 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo, you ask, I loved the Sabriel books, should I read Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series?
No, I say, don't bother, and here is why: they're just not that cool. I think it's great for Garth Nix that he managed to sell a seven-book series - that's got to be good for the income and he presumably has mortgage payments like the rest of us - but there isn't enough story here to justify dragging it out. Occasional moments of nifty world but it felt like a mishmash of random ideas, which it turns out is entirely justified by the plot (bored immortals making shit up), but didn't engage me. The climax of orgiastic armageddon [1] at the end fails to be as powerful as it might be if we'd ever cared about the world in the first place. The whole virtues and vices gimmick never really paid off in a satisfying way. The main character, Arthur, doesn't have much personality or agency - I've never actually played a video RPG, but seeing as his main action is to go around collecting allies who then solve his various problems, I could see this working as an RPG, and then the big choices at the end could be actual *choices* with a couple of different endings and maybe they'd have more impact that way?
[1] No, seriously, literal spurting and gushing of Nothingness. I have a whole mess of thoughts around end-of-the-world fantasies which I hope to post further about in the future, but in brief, departure-of-magic narratives in fantasy literature serve a conservative agenda and despite the liberation and release of apocalypse narratives they're another form of the departure-of-magic story.
No, I say, don't bother, and here is why: they're just not that cool. I think it's great for Garth Nix that he managed to sell a seven-book series - that's got to be good for the income and he presumably has mortgage payments like the rest of us - but there isn't enough story here to justify dragging it out. Occasional moments of nifty world but it felt like a mishmash of random ideas, which it turns out is entirely justified by the plot (bored immortals making shit up), but didn't engage me. The climax of orgiastic armageddon [1] at the end fails to be as powerful as it might be if we'd ever cared about the world in the first place. The whole virtues and vices gimmick never really paid off in a satisfying way. The main character, Arthur, doesn't have much personality or agency - I've never actually played a video RPG, but seeing as his main action is to go around collecting allies who then solve his various problems, I could see this working as an RPG, and then the big choices at the end could be actual *choices* with a couple of different endings and maybe they'd have more impact that way?
[1] No, seriously, literal spurting and gushing of Nothingness. I have a whole mess of thoughts around end-of-the-world fantasies which I hope to post further about in the future, but in brief, departure-of-magic narratives in fantasy literature serve a conservative agenda and despite the liberation and release of apocalypse narratives they're another form of the departure-of-magic story.
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Date: 2010-05-20 02:19 am (UTC)I stopped buying the Keys to the Kingdom books after 1 or 2. I stopped reading the library's copies after 4.
*sigh*
Oh, and don't bother with Shade's Children, either.
Nix does have a good book of short stories which are suitable for younger children (T has enjoyed listening to them): One Beastly Beast: Two Aliens, Three Inventors, Four Fantastic Tales.
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Date: 2010-05-20 02:20 am (UTC)Oops. Bad HTML, no, no!
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Date: 2010-07-13 02:14 am (UTC)I'd say, therefore, that there are people out there who would really like this series, but the fact that someone loved the Abhorsen trilogy isn't a good indicator, because the Abhorsen trilogy holds together much better at the level of plot and character.
Sabriel also reads to me like a video game, BTW — preferably an action adventure RPG in the style of the more recent Zelda installments, since it largely features a lone protagonist working her way across a forsaken kingdom fighting a variety of different forms of undead monsters using a sword and a collection of magical tools... I hope that, if there is going to be a movie (moderately likely), they make a decent video game out of it.