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beccaelizabethToday's re-read was The Flightless Falcon, a small magics fantasy novel with a male protagonist that fails the Bechdel test. There is a female character that isn't the protagonist's mother, sister, wife, or daughter, but she gets tidied into a romance. What passes for romance is so perfunctory it's ridiculous. The main character's entire motive, what drives him for three hundred pages, is he loves his wife so much. Do we get to see that? Maybe see why? No we do not. She falls into his arms sobbing that her father is dead, which he is puzzled by because her father has been dead for months, but hey, he's a teenage male and he's hugging a girl and he suddenly realises he loves her and says he'll look after her. Cue ten years fast forward and three children.
... no, really, it has a paragraph instead of a sentence, but that's it.
The other romance consists entirely of bickering, arguing, name calling, insulting each other's intelligence, and him calling her creepy. And then they're in love. Not and then they develop feelings for each other and get over their differences, more like, lalala hate hate hate ha....eeeey, that's actually hot! *happily ever after*
... I'd like to be *facepalm* but it's actually far from the only book I've read that treats relationships like that. No, wait, I'm facepalm en masse. I don't require books to be more like slash in the porn way, but in treating relationships as a central and revealing aspect of character, that would be nice.
So, treatment of female characters, not very interesting. Relationships skimmed over. Honestly I have more idea how he interacts with his dog than with his wife, it's stupid.
The main problem though is the entire plot requires the main character to be epically and indeed near terminally stupid, and also epically ignorant. Which they set up as pretty plausible, I'm not saying there's no stupid people in the world, it's clear enough how someone could make these mistakes... sort of. Book shows how he screws up a lot and gets called a loser and comes to believe that everyone in the world is in fact smarter and more expert than he is, so when someone else comes up with a plan he goes along with it. One of life's minions, basically. It's just, why am I meant to be interested? He's being stupid. He's being clearly, obviously, gigantically stupid. I spent the vast majority of the book waiting for him to realise, or at least waiting for someone to realise. It's not exactly fascinating and tense reading.
But then it combines this with a sort of economic and political theory I found distractingly objectionable. Yes, I'm complaining about the economics of a fantasy novel, I am obviously focusing on stuff the author was tripping right past. But it sets up the town the protagonist is from as suffering a nasty recession due to industrial accident taking out its main wealth production, with lots of businesses closing and buildings going empty. The protagonist can't get work. It's the central problem for him at the start, no work, no food, family to feed. But later on he goes off adventuring and gets offered a job in two different towns. One is a new growing dock on a river, buildings going up, busy transport route. The other is the town the busy transport route goes to. These places are clearly in a different economic situation than the first town. But the character is told, and believes, that the difference is all in him. See the secret is, now he has a good attitude. When he was poor, starving, desperate, and under the impression he was a loser due to the thing where he was bad at a lot of different jobs and ran away from them due to PTSD and ended up waiting on the docks for casual work that came in at fortnightly intervals, that somehow wasn't what created his belief he was a loser, oh no, that was the result of his negative thinking. And when he started being determined and thinking positive, he got job offers! Woah! Protagonist makes mental note that employers notice a good attitude! Clearly it has nothing to do with the difference between docks that have boats on alternate days vs fortnightly, or a town on the up and up vs one in recession, or any other external factors. It's the individual worker who just needs to put his back into it! And his ability to do so isn't solely because he was fed in jail and worked hard until he had muscles, no, it's his attitude! Being starving is no excuse for having no energy! And then there was some stuff about guilds making it impossible for workers to work, ignoring the stuff where at the start the guild was supporting widows and orphans and their own PTSD suffering guild member for years, because clearly it's more important that guilds need paying and members need training and it's too hard for a serial failure to try again. Guilds r bad, somehow.
And what bugs me is I can't decide if the book actually knows the characters are talking bullshit. I mean, it's the book that showed all those obvious alternate factors. The book showed the good guild behaviour and the different cities with different economics. It has a plausible background to the differences. It's just then the characters explain it as being all about the individual positive attitude. Except these are the same characters that just spent the whole book being epically stupid. So are we meant to believe them now and think they've stopped being stupid of a sudden? Or is attributing it all to individual attitude part of their epic stupidity?
... a tour of a fairly plausible economy is a weird backdrop to a fantasy novel when they're usually about wars or maybe thieves guilds or whatever, but it was interestingly put together and made sense for the character. I just can't decide if the reader is meant to draw the conclusions I did or the conclusions the characters did. So it's either a smart story about stupid people or actually a stupid story.
Most of the book is about watching a rather gullible man stumble around trying not to starve and only surviving because people just kind of feel like helping him. Which, okay, that's nice for him. But I got bored.
Don't reckon I'll be re-reading this one soon.
Am currently debating if I should sell it for the shelf space.
... no, really, it has a paragraph instead of a sentence, but that's it.
The other romance consists entirely of bickering, arguing, name calling, insulting each other's intelligence, and him calling her creepy. And then they're in love. Not and then they develop feelings for each other and get over their differences, more like, lalala hate hate hate ha....eeeey, that's actually hot! *happily ever after*
... I'd like to be *facepalm* but it's actually far from the only book I've read that treats relationships like that. No, wait, I'm facepalm en masse. I don't require books to be more like slash in the porn way, but in treating relationships as a central and revealing aspect of character, that would be nice.
So, treatment of female characters, not very interesting. Relationships skimmed over. Honestly I have more idea how he interacts with his dog than with his wife, it's stupid.
The main problem though is the entire plot requires the main character to be epically and indeed near terminally stupid, and also epically ignorant. Which they set up as pretty plausible, I'm not saying there's no stupid people in the world, it's clear enough how someone could make these mistakes... sort of. Book shows how he screws up a lot and gets called a loser and comes to believe that everyone in the world is in fact smarter and more expert than he is, so when someone else comes up with a plan he goes along with it. One of life's minions, basically. It's just, why am I meant to be interested? He's being stupid. He's being clearly, obviously, gigantically stupid. I spent the vast majority of the book waiting for him to realise, or at least waiting for someone to realise. It's not exactly fascinating and tense reading.
But then it combines this with a sort of economic and political theory I found distractingly objectionable. Yes, I'm complaining about the economics of a fantasy novel, I am obviously focusing on stuff the author was tripping right past. But it sets up the town the protagonist is from as suffering a nasty recession due to industrial accident taking out its main wealth production, with lots of businesses closing and buildings going empty. The protagonist can't get work. It's the central problem for him at the start, no work, no food, family to feed. But later on he goes off adventuring and gets offered a job in two different towns. One is a new growing dock on a river, buildings going up, busy transport route. The other is the town the busy transport route goes to. These places are clearly in a different economic situation than the first town. But the character is told, and believes, that the difference is all in him. See the secret is, now he has a good attitude. When he was poor, starving, desperate, and under the impression he was a loser due to the thing where he was bad at a lot of different jobs and ran away from them due to PTSD and ended up waiting on the docks for casual work that came in at fortnightly intervals, that somehow wasn't what created his belief he was a loser, oh no, that was the result of his negative thinking. And when he started being determined and thinking positive, he got job offers! Woah! Protagonist makes mental note that employers notice a good attitude! Clearly it has nothing to do with the difference between docks that have boats on alternate days vs fortnightly, or a town on the up and up vs one in recession, or any other external factors. It's the individual worker who just needs to put his back into it! And his ability to do so isn't solely because he was fed in jail and worked hard until he had muscles, no, it's his attitude! Being starving is no excuse for having no energy! And then there was some stuff about guilds making it impossible for workers to work, ignoring the stuff where at the start the guild was supporting widows and orphans and their own PTSD suffering guild member for years, because clearly it's more important that guilds need paying and members need training and it's too hard for a serial failure to try again. Guilds r bad, somehow.
And what bugs me is I can't decide if the book actually knows the characters are talking bullshit. I mean, it's the book that showed all those obvious alternate factors. The book showed the good guild behaviour and the different cities with different economics. It has a plausible background to the differences. It's just then the characters explain it as being all about the individual positive attitude. Except these are the same characters that just spent the whole book being epically stupid. So are we meant to believe them now and think they've stopped being stupid of a sudden? Or is attributing it all to individual attitude part of their epic stupidity?
... a tour of a fairly plausible economy is a weird backdrop to a fantasy novel when they're usually about wars or maybe thieves guilds or whatever, but it was interestingly put together and made sense for the character. I just can't decide if the reader is meant to draw the conclusions I did or the conclusions the characters did. So it's either a smart story about stupid people or actually a stupid story.
Most of the book is about watching a rather gullible man stumble around trying not to starve and only surviving because people just kind of feel like helping him. Which, okay, that's nice for him. But I got bored.
Don't reckon I'll be re-reading this one soon.
Am currently debating if I should sell it for the shelf space.
no subject
Date: 2013-08-13 07:37 am (UTC)Is the writer stupider than I am, or cleverer? Argh!