#but I think that plotline was the distraction rather than the main event anyway

[billpottsismygf]

God, what an interesting finale. I've loved this show so much and I wasn't sure how on earth they were going to end it in a satisfying way, especially after a run of episodes that were maybe not the best, but I think they stuck the landing. I love the meta approach with Guillermo struggling to come to terms with the documentary ending and all the tributes to previous episodes. I also love that I was right about the documentary getting addressed somewhat. With all their previous documentaries that never aired and the "I hope not" about it being on television, I wonder if the documentary will ever even come out.

I haven't looked at anyone else's reactions yet, but I'm guessing there will be people angry that we didn't get canon Nandermo and I can also imagine that the hokey little hypnotism married bit will rub some people the wrong way. However, that all worked pretty well for me. Personally, I felt that the romantic tension of Nandermo fizzled out a couple of seasons ago and they would have had to dedicate a lot more time to building that back up this season for a kiss or anything to feel justified. My heart was absolutely beating a mile a minute during that goodbye scene, though. Still, I was ready to accept that pretty tragic ending of Guillermo walking out, never to return, since the notion of these two as star-crossed is achingly romantic in itself. The reveal that that was a fakeout was absolutely huge emotional whiplash, but it is probably a nicer ending for the two of them to continue being friends.

And they really will be friends. Although I adored Guillermo calling Nandor 'Master' again and his line that 'you'll always be Master to me', I think the point of the fakeout is that their relationship really has changed. Nandor is letting him share his coffin; they're sitting as equals and diving into an elaborate lair that Nandor built by himself, without expecting Guillermo to do all the work. At this point, while I still ship them romantically to some extent (and the show absolutely leaves you to imagine that that could develop at some point), I truly only care at this point that they care about each other and spend time together, and that's where we leave them. They're going to keep getting up to shenanigans as they fight crime or whatever, and they're going to do it together.

[quibliography]

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis 🎣

Synopsis: This novel is about a half-drowned cat which is accidentally brought forward in time and a 21st century Oxford history student who has to be sent back in time to Victorian England to fix the incongruity. Ned Henry, time-lagged from too many jumps and desperately avoiding Lady Schrapnell, is sent to Coventry to deliver a package to a fellow time-traveler and get some much needed rest. Instead he accidentally ends up on a train platform where he meets Terence St. Trewes and starts a series of events that twists history further away from how he knows it. Possibly, accidentally leading to the Allies losing WWII! With the help of Verity Kindle, they try to nudge events back in place, but quickly realize keeping track of the continuum is about as easy as herding cats.

My Quibs: I love almost any book about time travel and I will definitely add To Say Nothing of the Dog to the top of my list. One of the biggest reasons being that it’s a time travel book with a foundation in history and philosophy rather than science. It’s a nice deviation from all the nerd-speak. Don’t get me wrong, I love the nerd-speak. But there’s definitely an over-saturation of science in science fiction. (Go figure.) Anyways, this defining feature though threw me initially. Because, much like a time-lagged British historian, the first symptom was disorientation (maudlin sentimentality, distracted by irrelevancies, difficulty distinguishing sounds, and blurred vision). I was thrown right into a demolished church searching for a stump(?) struggling to grasp when or where or who. But once I was properly oriented to the world, I found all of it really fascinating. I loved the main characters, both Ned Henry and Verity Kindle are flawed but lovable (almost in a Tom Holland and Zendaya kind of way). But especially Ned’s internal dialogue to the reader: clumsy yet reliable with a touch of British dry sarcasm. 😍 And I loved Verity as his counter-balance: direct and competent with an underlying vulnerability. I totally ship Ned and Verity and doubly so due to Willis’ slow burn of their romance masked by professionalism. I also have zero clue about 1940 Victorian England so scenes of boating down the river or massive fetes with jumble sales were very picturesque. It had Downton Abbey or Jeeves and Wooster vibes. Plus it tends to be more humorous when a time-traveler has to bumble about trying to fit into history. And the final kicker that made me love this novel is that it’s secretly an homage to classical mysteries. Ironic, since I just finished one ode-to-Agatha novel. This time, Willis references three legends: Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy L. Sayers. (Good thing I’ve picked up at least one Lord Peter Wimsey novel. Enough to get the gist of her references.) But suffice it to say, a classic mystery novel inside a time-travel novel gets my vote hands down.

Should you read it? If you like history with a base layer of the time travel sprinkled with British humor.

Similar reads? I couldn't say. It was a refreshing read precisely because I don't know of anything similar.

(Spoiler Alert!)  One of the things I liked about TSNOTD was that I didn't even know there was something to spoil. There's a very subtle mystery plotline or maybe I didn't really care so much why the timeline was off but just more focused on how they would correct it. And I could very easily just drift along with Ned watching him bumble each decision like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. I guess I could kinda sense the "self-correction" of the continuum but also I just had faith in the author that she would correct everything in the end anyways. There wasn't tension; You know it will work out in the end. Like a roller coaster, you're surprised at each turn and dip but you don't fear it will crash. And I was always presently surprised. Even to find out the butler did it.

What did you think of To Say Nothing of the Dog?

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Review and Discussion: The Age of the Five Trilogy

by Dan H

Saturday, 05 April 2008

Dan starts another of his multi-part epic review thingys.~

This is the first installment of a two-part review/article about Trudi Canavan's Age of the Fivetrilogy. The first part is going to be about the books, the second part is going to be me rambling about religion in fantasy in general, using AotF as a starting point.

Before I launch into the review proper, I'll point out that (like most Ferretbrain reviews) this article is going to involve in-depth discussion of specific details of the plot and events of the novel series it concerns. Or, to put it more succinctly, this will contain spoilers. Potentially massive spoilers, from the outset (Rosebud is really a man!).

You may recall that I was

embarrassingly enthusiastic

about Canavan's debut Black Magician Trilogy. I'm somewhat less enthusiastic about Age of the Five. I'd say that is isn't as good, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. It's exactly as good, and that's sort of the problem. The writing is of a similar quality, the characters are similarly well realised, and the world is similarly detailed. It's just that there's a lot more of everything and, in fantasy, more is quite frequently less.

To elaborate: in The Black Magician trilogy we have a spunky heroine with great magical powers who gets drawn into an ancient magical conflict in a vaguely interesting Fantasy world. In The Age of the Five trilogy we have a spunky heroine with great magical powers who gets drawn into an ancient magical conflict in a vaguely interesting Fantasy world. Now I know that's a cheap shot, because you can always characterise Fantasy novels as having broadly the same plot (guy goes on a quest to do a thing) but there's enough similarities between the two trilogies that Age of the Five leaves you with the sneaking feeling that you've read a lot of it before, even before you take into account the fact that it's significantly longer than the earlier series. It's little things, like the fact that both series treat "magic" as this energy source that you move around with your mind, and use primarily to create forcefields and bolts of magical power. It's an aesthetic quibble I know, but I could deal with it in the BMT because they were short and character focused. In AotF we've got a much longer series, with a far bigger world, and a lot more characters, but the magic still doesn't feel magical, it's still forcefields and laser beams.

Anyway, on to the actual books.

Priestess of the White

Priestess of the White introduces Auraya, the eponymous priestess, as she is initiated into the White, the five immortal servants of the Circle - the five Gods whose priests rule the northern half of the continent of Ithania.

Perhaps now would be a good time to say a bit about the Gods, because they're going to be quite important. Basically the Five Gods - Chaia, Huan, Lore, Yranna and Saru - are a bunch of Star Trek aliens, they're glowy energy beings (that is to say "beings of pure magic") who get mortals to do their bidding but don't seem to actually do that much which is particularly divine. When we are first introduced to the Gods (through Auraya) we see them as essentially benevolent beings, although if you're anything like me you'll also be asking yourself why these five creatures who are clearly a bunch of Star Trek Aliens managed to actually build a functioning religion around themselves, and what the heck they get out of it in the first place.

Auraya is immediately plunged into the travails of government, as Northern Ithania is threatened by a group of sinister, black-clad priests from out of the South. These "Pentadrians" also worship five Gods whose names (Sheyr, Hrun, Alor, Ranah, Sraal) sound suspiciously similar to those of the "Circlan" deities. The White, however, know nothing about these people, their beliefs, their powers, or their capabilities.

This brings me to my first niggle with the series. I've discussed in earlier articles the strange absence of immigration in Fantasy - everybody just stays where they're born and never travels, so nobody knows anything about anything happening beyond their borders. This is a particular problem here: the Pendatrians run half the world, you'd think that the White would have made some effort to find out about them. It's like being asked to accept a version of medieval Europe in which the Pope is unaware of the existence of Islam.

Anyway, the Pentadrians are attacking, sending mysterious black-clad sorcerers to tear up the North, and the White have to respond by forging alliances throughout Northern Ithania to stand up to them. Auraya goes off to win the allegiance of the winged Siyee, and develops an affection for them which will stay with her throughout the series.

Oh, she also gets given a cute fluffy talking animal, which is way less annoying than it could have been. Odds on it saving her from imprisonment at some point in the future?

Overlapping the main story (the "dammit, we're being invaded by some guys we inexplicably failed to learn anything about in the past hundred years" story) are a number of other threads. Auraya is aided in her duties by her childhood mentor, later lover, Leiard. Leiard, unfortunately, is a Dreamweaver, a member of a sect which is widely despised by the White and their followers, because their leader, Mirar, was an enemy of the Gods. Their not-actually-that-forbidden-really romance provides a source of tension in the first book, and is complicated by the fact that Leiard appears to be carrying a great many of the memories of the late legendary Mirar around in his head, which he allegedly acquired while dream-linking with other members of his order. Or perhaps he really is Mirar, miraculously alive after all this time (again, would anybody like to lay bets?).

The final plot-strand in the book concerns Emerahl, an immortal "Wild" (a sorceress whose power rivals that of the Gods' chosen) as she tries to evade detection by the Gods, who would destroy her.

Priestess of the White sets the tone for the rest of the series, and some of the things I wound up struggling with are apparent from quite early on. It's a lot more ambitious than the BMT, but that means that it's a lot less focused. The main plotline ("The Pentadrians are coming! The Pentadrians are coming!") is at least resolved but there's an awful lot that's left hanging, or that just winds up being setup for things that happen in book two or three (I'm a bit of a heretic amongst Fantasy readers in that I think this is a bad thing, rather than the mark of a consummate storyteller). Emerahl in particular has very little to actually do in Priestess, spending most of her time hanging out in a brothel which is all very character-establishing, but doesn't actually advance the plot all that much. The Emerahl sections also foreshadow a lot of the "there's something dodgy about the Gods" plotlines which become important in Book 3, but it's all rather distracting in the first volume. It's hard to get invested in Defending Northern Ithania From the Evil Pentadrians when you can be pretty sure that the Gods are going to turn out to be evil anyway rendering all the fighting pointless.

Anyway, the book ends with the Pentadrians defeated, Leiard and Auraya separated, and Emerahl finally in a position to actually do something.

Last of the Wilds

I nearly gave up halfway through Last of the Wilds. I'm sort of glad I didn't, because I do still like Trudi Canavan's writing, and finishing the trilogy was a pleasant enough way to spend the end of my Easter holiday, but Last of the Wilds gave me some real trouble. Middle Volume Syndrome is a well documented problem in Fantasy, and to be fair Wilds is by no means a chronic case. It's just that it's a little bit slow, it doesn't really go that far, and it's very much bridging the gap between the introduction of conflicts in Priestess of the White and their final resolution in Voice of the Gods.

Wilds is basically an extended epilogue to Priestess and an extended prologue to Voice. Auraya dithers around with the Siyee, Leiard finally discovers that he really is Mirar, Emerahl sets out to find the remaining Wilds and ... well that's sort of it really.

There are some big plot events in the book, but they're all towards the end. In the last section of the book, Auraya finally finds out that Leiard really is Mirar, the Gods find out as well and order her to kill him, she refuses, and a chain of events kicks off which finally leads to Auraya coming to the conclusion that hey! The Gods are dodgy! Regrettably, this information comes to her after she starts having sex with one of them.

It's all right as it goes, but it still feels a bit lacklustre. The book starts to get interesting around the point Auraya resigns from the white. Unfortunately this point is also pretty much the end of the book, and the rest of the volume doesn't really do that much except mark time between parts one and three.

The one thing which Wilds does introduce into the series is a Pentadrian viewpoint character. Reivan the Thinker is a member of the academic/scientific/philosophical caste of her society, but soon gets initiated into the Pentadrian priesthood after her quick thinking stops the entire Pentadrian army from being lost in a mine (don't ask). This is on the one hand welcome (it's always nice to see the other side of these kinds of conflicts) but on the other hand a little misguided. There's a reason Tolkein never wrote any scenes from the viewpoint of the Orcs: they didn't make sense, they weren't supposed to make sense, they existed purely for the purpose of attacking the good guys at the behest of their Dark Lord. The problem with suddenly introducing a Pentadrian viewpoint is that they spend quite a lot of time saying "wow, invading Northern Ithania was a really bad idea - it's a shame that the guy whose idea it was got killed so that we can't ask him what the hell he was thinking."

The gap between books one and three duly bridged, this leaves us free to wrap everything up in the final volume.

Voice of the Gods

Voice of the Gods has better pacing than Wilds, but it's still a pale shadow of the fast-moving BMT, and it still involves rather more sitting around than I like in a novel.

Emerahl has embarked on the Quest for the Scroll of the Gods (yes, you did read that right: The Quest for the Scroll of the Gods, check it out). This is an ancient artefact which records the most secretest secrets of the Gods, and which the Gods themselves would naturally like to see destroyed. Before she goes, though, she takes time out to teach Auraya how to shield her mind from the Gods, and be immortal. You see, it turns out that Auraya is a Wild as well, and would be capable of achieving immortality even without the Gods' help.

Auraya, meanwhile, is mostly angsting about (severally) the fact that one of the Gods wants her dead, the fact that she's having sex with another one of them, and the fact that her previous lover turned out to be an immortal sorcerer who her Gods ordered her to kill.

I'm going to take a step back here and say I actually quite like Auraya, but damn if when you step back a bit she doesn't look kinda Mary Sueish. She's an insanely powerful sorcerer with hitherto unknown abilities, granted additional powers by the Gods, one of whom is actually in love with her (and genuinely in love with her, not just using her for sex like he has with vast numbers of mortal women down the ages). She walks out on the Gods who granted her the powers she relies on to do her job, but like Dumbo and the magic feather, it turns out that it was really her own power all along. I get that it's supposed to be "about power, self-realisation and freedom" (according to Trudi's website) but surely an important part of self-realisation is actually realising that you have limitations.

Once she's taught Auraya how to be uber, Emerahl gets back to the Quest for the Scroll of the Gods, which she finds in a well-managed little quest subplot (again, Canavan can do pacing really, really well, and the Scroll of the Gods arc is really nicely done, it's introduced, looked for, found and deciphered without ever becoming boring). Meanwhile Auraya is manipulated by the Evil God Who Wants to Kill Her into getting herself captured by the Pentadrians.

As you should recall (since it was only a few paragraphs ago) book two in the series introduced a Pentadrian viewpoint character by the name of Reivan, and this combined with Mirar's journeys in the south in the final volume served to make the Pentadrians significantly more sympathetic. Fortunately, while most of the Pentadrians are nice, sympathetic, sensible people, the new First Voice of the Gods, Nekaun, is an evil sadistic bastard.

Nekaun was elected in Last of the Wilds to lead the Pentadrians, and spent a large part of that book and this sleeping with Reivan (there's quite a lot of sex in the Age of the Five trilogy). It was, to begin with, somewhat ambiguous whether he actually cared about Reivan, or was just using her for sex, and as it became apparent that he was, in fact, an evil sadistic bastard I increasingly held onto the hope that maybe he would still show genuine affection for Reivan, thus salvaging some degree of moral complexity for the character. No such luck.

Auraya's imprisonment (within a Void, which is basically a D&D dead magic zone, an area with no magical energy which exists almost entirely to explain how it's possible to defeat a powerful sorcerer) results in her being stripped naked and tormented by Nekaun, the evil sadistic bastard, who eventually threatens to rape her and is prevented from doing so only by a personal appearance by his God (who, lest we forget, has a suspiciously similar name to one of the Circlan Gods, who also happens to be in love with Auraya). Were I feeling churlish I'd point out that the God in question is also a serial rapist, which rather undermines his heroism at this point.

All wound up and with nowhere to go, Nekaun then goes to see Reivan and date-rapes her, giving her the good old "you know you're into it really" speech. He then apparently bods off and rapes a couple more people for good measure.

And you were doing so well Trudi Canavan.

Seriously, Fantasy Authors, stop this, stop it right now. If you're going to introduced an unambiguous Villain character, you can communicate the idea that they're Really Really Evil without having them go around raping people. It's cheap. It's cheap and easy. Look, it's like this: by putting a rape scene in a book, you are saying "this is a serious, gritty, realistic world, where really nasty things happen and beating the bad guys doesn't automatically make everything okay again." Putting a rape scene into your light-hearted high fantasy book, in which nasty things happen but get easily reversed by magic, is a bad idea. Making a villain a rapist in order to show how evil he is is a really bad idea, because rape implies realism and unambiguously evil villains imply the opposite.

While Auraya is being tormented by the evil sadistic bastard in the Pentadrian Sanctuary, the Gods decide to start another war by the simple expedient of telling the Circlans to invade the south. The Wilds, having learned that everything the Gods have ever said is a lie (which they knew), that the Gods can't be in two places at once (which they knew), that the Voids are places where Gods were killed (which I for one had already guessed) and that you can kill a god by creating a Void on top of them, by sucking all the magic out the air (I kid you not) but you need six of you in order to "surround" them (one on each side, one above and one below, why the Gods can't move diagonally I'm not sure), decide to ambush the Gods at the battle and finish them off once and for all. Unfortunately for this they need Auraya, and she's currently locked up tighter than a playful euphemism.

Good thing she has that cute cuddly animal really, isn't it.

So Auraya escapes, and teams up with the other White to kill the Gods. Except they don't actually kill them so much as imprison them in a tiny ball of magic so that they can make sure all the Big Revelations are out of the way (the Pentadrian Gods are really the Circland Gods, the Gods don't preserve the souls of dead mortals, the Gods have been manipulating the two churches into open bloody warfare for no clear reason). Then the Good God Who is in Love With Auraya kills himself and the others by draining all the magic out of the Gods' prison, much to the consternation of the Evil God Who Wants To Kill Auraya. Then it's all over bar shouting (and Nehuan gets executed for being a filthy rapist).

In Conclusion

I know this review has been a little bit bitchy, but Age of the Five actually isn't that bad a series. As I said at the start it's not actually worse than the Black Magician trilogy, it's just that I think it would have had to be significantly better than the Black Magician trilogy in order to sustain its greater length and complexity, and it wasn't. I genuinely couldn't put down the BMT, whereas I very nearly stalled in the middle of AotF.

I did have some non-trivial concerns about the series. I've got a whole 'nother article about the religion that I'll be putting up at some point. The series also suffers from what I tend to think of as the Fantasy Absolutist Problem: people are either perfectly sane, reasonable liberals (even if they have Done Horrible Things in the Past), or they're utterly evil. It was why I was so annoyed that Nekaun didn't actually care about Reivan, it seemed that Canavan was unwilling to present her villain as anything but a monster. You get a similar thing with the Gods, Chaia is nice to Auraya and is therefore Good, sacrificing himself nobly at the end. Huan is nasty to Auraya and is therefore Evil, willingly sacrificing her own people just to upset Auraya. Auraya herself is never called upon to do anything unsympathetic - she is spared, for example, having to make the decision to actually kill the Gods herself, somebody else does that for her. It's not a major problem, they're very much High Fantasy books, drawn in broad strokes and bright colours, and there's nothing wrong with that.

In short, the Age of the Five books are good, clean fantasy fun in much the same vein as the Black Magician Trilogy. It's longer and less well paced, but still a nice piece of high fantasy with a suitably epic storyline and some engaging characters.

Even the made-up animals are kind of growing on me.

Finally: I'm terribly sorry to have to do this to you Trudi, but:

Fantasy Rape Watch

Number of Women Raped: 3

Of Whom Viewpoint Characters: 1

Number of times Protagonist Threatened With Rape: 1

Redeeming Features Displayed by Rapist: 0

Characters Shown To Suffer Long-Term Psychological Consequences As A Result of Rape or Threatened Rape: 0

Seriously, guys: stop it.Themes:

Fantasy Rape Watch

,

Books

,

Trudi Canavan

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

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~Comments (

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empink

at 02:13 on 2008-04-06Re: Serious dearth of immigration in fantasy worlds

I was going to blather on about most writers not knowing much about the nuts and bolts of immigration and how that might have some effect on things, but then I realized that research and even the tiniest shot of realism in the arm usually gets immigration and changing countries on the map. I.e., if a romance author (Joanna Bourne) can write a totally awesome story including majorly switching countries all over the place and people having strong ties in both lands, I see no reason why fantasy authors do not. The truth is, fairly ordinary people move around all the time, and have moved around since forever. The distances they move and that sort of thing may increase or decrease with policy, societal expectations and technological aids, but the fact remains essentially the same.

Apart from that, though, I'm glad I didn't bother with this trilogy now. BMT was all right, but not all right enough that I felt like reading the last book (I didn't think anything New and Awesome would happen, and the heroine was kind of irritating my by that point, so). I cannot stand ham-handed "I CAN HAZ RELIGION"-based plots in books anymore, and knowing the heroine of ATF was a priestess just kept holding me back.

Lastly, re unimaginative magic, I'm still really chuffed at the way David Abraham handled magic in his books. I'll describe his magic system with one sentence: poets are the equivalent of magicians. I think his growing series (alas. He's doing okay so far, though) is the only one I've checked out solely because of the innovative-sounding magic system. I don't mind unimaginative magic systems so much if they are supported by good worldbuilding and a good story, but when the world is wonky and the story is predictable, I'd rather just not bother.

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Arthur B

at 11:42 on 2008-04-06It's yet another case of the Fantasy Religion Problem: the more a fantasy author explicitly includes gods and religions in their stories, the more likely it is that they don't even slightly understand the whole idea of "religion" in the first place.

It's probably down to two issues:

- People who actually believe in a God or gods, and have actually thought about how deal with religious ideas in fiction, are more inclined to write about them through allegory (see Narnia) than through having gods directly appear in their stories because, amongst other things, if you believe that God is real you are going to be mildly reluctant to put words in his mouth.

- People who don't believe in God, and don't have much sympathy for those that do, tend to write about the worst aspects of religion when they choose to address religious topics - hence, corrupt priests and scheming, not-really-divine gods.

Of course, there's exceptions. The

Left Behind

guys clearly believe in God and pretty much rewrote Revelation for money (I'm pretty sure there's a line in Revelation about horrible curses for people who do that sort of thing). I'm pretty sure there's a few agnostic and atheist SF/fantasy authors who don't treat the subject of the divine with contempt, though I can't name any off the top of my head. But ultimately, authors almost always use gods in their books as an opportunity to hold forth on their ideas about religion, and if your view is that religions are fundamentally human institutions and that there's no such thing as God your ability to depict convincingly non-shitty gods in your stories is going to be hampered, unless you're willing to undertake the difficult task of writing from a point of view you don't share and lack sympathy with.

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Dan H

at 09:38 on 2008-04-07

Apart from that, though, I'm glad I didn't bother with this trilogy now. BMT was all right, but not all right enough that I felt like reading the last book (I didn't think anything New and Awesome would happen, and the heroine was kind of irritating my by that point, so).

As you may have gathered, I'm still guiltily fond of Trudi Canavan, and despite her heroines being - well - kinda Mary Suish, I still kinda like them. On the other hand if you didn't get on with the BMT I don't think you'd get on with AotF because it's more similar than it is different.

I cannot stand ham-handed "I CAN HAZ RELIGION"-based plots in books anymore, and knowing the heroine of ATF was a priestess just kept holding me back.

As Arthur points out, Fantasy authors are abysmal at religion, because as he points out they tend to be either religious, and therefore not willing to write about God or Gods directly (Lewis, Tolkein) or they're atheists, and therefore just don't get this whole religion thing in the first place.

Which is basically going to be the subject of the follow-up article.

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Orion

at 20:35 on 2011-04-13You should write that followup. I'm an atheist trying to rewrite Paradise Lost as a YA novel, I'm curious.

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Ash

at 10:12 on 2011-04-14Orion,

he did.