Jan’s Place

This sprawling novel is inventive, ambitious, fast-paced, not completely coherent, but always engaging. My hat’s off to Simmons for bringing his love of literature and a belief in the transformative power of artists to the sci fi genre. (Don’t let this make you think the novel is airy or arty; it actually has a lot in common with Simmon’s hard-boiled detective novels.)

The preceding book, Illium, introduced a mix of Homer’s Illiad, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Tempest, and Marcel Proust with Greek and Trojan heroes on a terraformed Martian landscape. This world is ruled by petulant Olympian gods with a penchant for quantum manipulation and a strange unexplained relationship to events on a future Earth. I simply didn’t believe Simmons could pull this all together in one more novel, but he has largely done it. While some holes remain, and the author had to rely on too many deus ex machinas to pull the plot threads together, the conclusion is satisfying. If you enjoyed Illium, you will find this equally engrossing.

My only complaint with the writing is an overdone pseudo-science that features the word “quantum” way too often. Apparently anything can happen if you invoke the magic Q-word. This is one time I think leaving the science a little vague might have been better, since the heart of the book isn’t science at all. This flaw is more than made up for by a large cast of interesting characters that Simmons never loses track of, and a page-chomping cinematic style that charms and lures you on.

By the way, don’t skip the long Marcel Proust quote — you will understand the novel far better, and you may never look at a great work of art quite the same way again.

While Lord of the Rings is a great fantasy book, I have always thought it somewhat marred by its capitalized and underlined Good and Evil. I suspect Jacqueline Carey of an urge to re-write it and address this flaw. Godslayer has numerous parallels to LOTR. For Sauron it has Satoris, a Shaper god ruling a dark kingdom of undead men, troll-like Fjel, and the misshapen and abandoned of the world. Arrayed against him are the races of men, elves (the Ellyron), and dwarves, under the distant rule of Satoris’ siblings, the other six Shaper gods. For Gandalf it has Malthus; for Frodo and Sam it has two small desert dwellers on a journey into the heart of Satoris’ kingdom; and for Gollum it has … I wasn’t sure until I read Malthus describing a sorceress: “She may yet have some small part to play in this.” Got it.

But there is no clear-cut good and evil here. Satoris is a Promethean god, who gave the gift of reproduction to the race of men, and is hounded by his siblings for refusing to withdraw it. (Why they want him to withdraw it is never made exactly clear.) The darkness of his kingdom comes from his own wounds, despite which he tries to provide haven for his followers. While Good might seem to reside on the side of men, elves, and dwarves, their case against Satoris is shallow and unexamined. It’s no secret why Satoris is hounded, but men apparently are not capable of thinking through what it would mean if Satoris gave in to his siblings — oops, no more children, for a start. Apparently they’re too caught up in their honor to notice this little problem. I appreciate the attempt at moral ambiguity in the story, but the potential tragedy of loyalty and vengeance introduced in the first book degenerates into muddled thinking in the conclusion. Perhaps Carey could have successfully drawn it all together by revealing that Haomane, the Big Brother Lord of Thought, has suffered a tragic brain injury. That would explain why no one’s thinking clearly.

The book is enjoyable to read if you like a moody, medieval style. It’s well written, and while it has a few too many self-conscious “betimes” and “begats,” Carey largely succeeds with an archaic writing style. The book’s main failure comes where LOTR excels — in the depth of history and back story. The cosmology of the Shaper gods doesn’t make much sense. (The Fjel are supposed to have no gift of thought, but are actually just a little slow; while elves, supposedly denied the gift of reproduction, have children occasionally — does this mean that the gods only give the gift of being a little better at something?) At times a misty veil covers important aspects of the story. (What the heck DO the dragons know? “All thingsss musst be as they musst…” just doesn’t work after awhile. And why are the Shaper gods in hiding? We never find out.) Since this book is supposed to be the conclusion of the story, I have to think that the author herself doesn’t know and tries to cover this up with soft brushstrokes and mood lighting. If you want to take on Lord of the Rings, you’d better have that Winsor Newton Triple-0 worn down to nothing. Soft brushstrokes just won’t cut it.

I was inspired to dredge up my soggy blog by the discovery that janmcdonald.com had become available. I bought the domain name and plan to get my artwork and travel pages posted in the near future. In the meantime, thanks to Wordpress, it’s fairly easy to revive the blog. I will load up a few book reviews I’ve written lately soon.