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The Knight - partial review
Feb. 7th, 2007 09:22 pmThis book marks the first of Neil Gaiman's recommendations that hasn't panned out, and also a valuable lesson in "life's too short".
The Knight by Gene Wolfe is described by Neil as "important and wonderful", whereas I found it dull and remarkably uninspiring. I made it through 200 pages in the hopes that its wonderfulness might manifest part way in. However, I reached the "life's too short" stage this evening when I had to wait twenty minutes for my train and couldn't bring myself to read any more of the book.
Its flaw lies mainly in its narrator. Now, first person narrative is a tricky thing as it means there is only really the narrator to capture the reader's interest, rather than the usual array of different characters you see the thoughts of in third person books. This book's narrator falls foul of both style and characterisation in my view, in that the way he tells the story is very annoying and he is also both stupid and mean. I have no interest in finding out what happens to him, since everything he does in the first 200 pages is idiotic or unpleasant or both.
The style issue is that the book is meant to be a (very, very long) letter to the narrator's brother. Because of that, he often addresses the reader directly as "Ben" and he also refers to things in a slightly odd way. Every few pages, he will say things like, "This event took place because the people there were in thrall to [character that hasn't been mentioned before], but I didn't know that then so it made less sense at the time." I'm sure all these random references are explained later in the book but I really couldn't be bothered to find out. More annoying are the numerous occasions when he declines to describe certain events "because it will take too long." Thus, several passages of supposedly important storyline (battles, encounters with weird strangers, descriptions of places) are missed out altogether. The narrative is also strangely remote for first person, with the narrator not seeming to really connect with the events and people surrounding him - such that I began very quickly to wonder why I should care about them when he evidently doesn't.
Overall, not one I'd recommend, though obviously Neil Gaiman begs to differ.
He says, "It's a fantasy, with swords and dragons and elves and giants, and a noble knight, which takes all the elements I thought were hackneyed cliches beyond redemption, and makes them new and strange and cool."
I say: paradoxically both too strange and too boring for me.
The Knight by Gene Wolfe is described by Neil as "important and wonderful", whereas I found it dull and remarkably uninspiring. I made it through 200 pages in the hopes that its wonderfulness might manifest part way in. However, I reached the "life's too short" stage this evening when I had to wait twenty minutes for my train and couldn't bring myself to read any more of the book.
Its flaw lies mainly in its narrator. Now, first person narrative is a tricky thing as it means there is only really the narrator to capture the reader's interest, rather than the usual array of different characters you see the thoughts of in third person books. This book's narrator falls foul of both style and characterisation in my view, in that the way he tells the story is very annoying and he is also both stupid and mean. I have no interest in finding out what happens to him, since everything he does in the first 200 pages is idiotic or unpleasant or both.
The style issue is that the book is meant to be a (very, very long) letter to the narrator's brother. Because of that, he often addresses the reader directly as "Ben" and he also refers to things in a slightly odd way. Every few pages, he will say things like, "This event took place because the people there were in thrall to [character that hasn't been mentioned before], but I didn't know that then so it made less sense at the time." I'm sure all these random references are explained later in the book but I really couldn't be bothered to find out. More annoying are the numerous occasions when he declines to describe certain events "because it will take too long." Thus, several passages of supposedly important storyline (battles, encounters with weird strangers, descriptions of places) are missed out altogether. The narrative is also strangely remote for first person, with the narrator not seeming to really connect with the events and people surrounding him - such that I began very quickly to wonder why I should care about them when he evidently doesn't.
Overall, not one I'd recommend, though obviously Neil Gaiman begs to differ.
He says, "It's a fantasy, with swords and dragons and elves and giants, and a noble knight, which takes all the elements I thought were hackneyed cliches beyond redemption, and makes them new and strange and cool."
I say: paradoxically both too strange and too boring for me.
