Kirith Kirin
May. 19th, 2004 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI seemed to have stalled out half way through reading a book. Kirith Kirin by Jim Grimsley. I bought it because it turned up on Amazon Recommends and I have pretty much everything by my favourite authors already so I wanted some random new people. I do not intend to get any more by this guy. In fact I dont currently intend to finish the book. I've tried about a half dozen times and not managed more than a page or two.
On the plus side- gay romance, and magic.
On the minus side- I wouldn't actually call it romance, just some guy obsessed with some other guy with neither of them knowing each other and a whole distant yearning thing going on. Like a whole novel about a high school crush. Well, half a novel. And the magic tries to be technical, presumably in an attempt to make us believe it more, but actually just making it look like a level based RPG and detracting from the action.
There isn't a whole lot of action to detract from. The book is written in first person, and theres hints now and then that it is a memoir written from some distant future point, so you know whoever it is survives and gets famous and all that. This removes all suspense that might otherwise be built in to the whole study up on magic bit, because the 'twist' is just TOTALLY INEVITABLE and the only one who doesnt know about it is the central character. The kid (and he is a kid, too young to be courted, hence the whole distant yearning bit) just kind of drifts along and... I know, I keep using the word distant, but that is the main thing you get from reading this stuff. Never, even once, are you right there with the guy living an adventure. Always one step removed.
Repeatedly something happens, kid reacts with something that almost adds up to 'wow' except half the point is the kid isnt as wowed by it as the average person would be, then it takes time out of the narrative to explain to us why we the reader should also be wow. If the author had put time into world building at the start we could have an actual genuine reaction, but no, tells us how to react. And there is the perfect set up for telling us such world building basics- the kid's gran tells him stories in the 'quiet cosy world kid is soon to be ripped from through circumstance' bit at the beginning of the book. Only we only get the titles of the stories. If instead we got maybe a dozen extra paragraphs he could have set up the rules so we know, for example, that people with one name are regular people but people with two names are immortals and touched by god. I just said that in a sentence, it cant be that hard to turn it into an interesting paragraph. But no, we meet a bunch of these two names and *then* get told why two names is significant. As if you wandered along through the royal tour and then get told 'by the way, that bird with the shiny hat, ruler of the free world' AFTER ignoring her because surrounded by similar things.
Also he is yet another of those authors who learnt all the wrong lessons from Tolkien. JRR was a strange person who built up languages then made a world for them to fit in to. For him, this worked. They had rules and consistency and gave a pattern of difference to each and every culture. Instead many many authors trying to follow him invent words that are utterly unpronounceable in English, do not tell us what these words refer to, then rely on them to convey wondrous strangeness. To people actually living in these worlds the words are not strange. They are the equivalent of coffee or tea or cocoa. So why have them boil up something unpronounceable when you do functionally mean TEA?
Huge political things are going on in the background, even bigger cosmological things are happening quite close to home, and I just cannot bring myself to care because I have to slog through words I cant even think of a pronounciation for and this huge chasm of seperation between the 'I' telling the story and the world around him. I do realise this is probably on purpose because the kid is all adrift and seperate from this new world, but that is a pretty good reason to tell the story from the outside and let us care about the kid and the world and all on our own. 'I' stories irritate me anyway because they seem to manipulate how I the reader should be reacting. This one seems to tell me I should not be reacting, and hey, it works. Total lack of investment.
Too much strangeness and distance to no reason, and absolutely no heart. Main characters who care for their dog, horse, king and potential love interest in descending order of importance just totally put me off.
And yet if I dont finish this book it will be the first since English Lit class to not get read all the way through (if you dont count my new skim reading method for Buffy tie in novels) so I just cant seem to shove it on a shelf and forget about it.
On the plus side- gay romance, and magic.
On the minus side- I wouldn't actually call it romance, just some guy obsessed with some other guy with neither of them knowing each other and a whole distant yearning thing going on. Like a whole novel about a high school crush. Well, half a novel. And the magic tries to be technical, presumably in an attempt to make us believe it more, but actually just making it look like a level based RPG and detracting from the action.
There isn't a whole lot of action to detract from. The book is written in first person, and theres hints now and then that it is a memoir written from some distant future point, so you know whoever it is survives and gets famous and all that. This removes all suspense that might otherwise be built in to the whole study up on magic bit, because the 'twist' is just TOTALLY INEVITABLE and the only one who doesnt know about it is the central character. The kid (and he is a kid, too young to be courted, hence the whole distant yearning bit) just kind of drifts along and... I know, I keep using the word distant, but that is the main thing you get from reading this stuff. Never, even once, are you right there with the guy living an adventure. Always one step removed.
Repeatedly something happens, kid reacts with something that almost adds up to 'wow' except half the point is the kid isnt as wowed by it as the average person would be, then it takes time out of the narrative to explain to us why we the reader should also be wow. If the author had put time into world building at the start we could have an actual genuine reaction, but no, tells us how to react. And there is the perfect set up for telling us such world building basics- the kid's gran tells him stories in the 'quiet cosy world kid is soon to be ripped from through circumstance' bit at the beginning of the book. Only we only get the titles of the stories. If instead we got maybe a dozen extra paragraphs he could have set up the rules so we know, for example, that people with one name are regular people but people with two names are immortals and touched by god. I just said that in a sentence, it cant be that hard to turn it into an interesting paragraph. But no, we meet a bunch of these two names and *then* get told why two names is significant. As if you wandered along through the royal tour and then get told 'by the way, that bird with the shiny hat, ruler of the free world' AFTER ignoring her because surrounded by similar things.
Also he is yet another of those authors who learnt all the wrong lessons from Tolkien. JRR was a strange person who built up languages then made a world for them to fit in to. For him, this worked. They had rules and consistency and gave a pattern of difference to each and every culture. Instead many many authors trying to follow him invent words that are utterly unpronounceable in English, do not tell us what these words refer to, then rely on them to convey wondrous strangeness. To people actually living in these worlds the words are not strange. They are the equivalent of coffee or tea or cocoa. So why have them boil up something unpronounceable when you do functionally mean TEA?
Huge political things are going on in the background, even bigger cosmological things are happening quite close to home, and I just cannot bring myself to care because I have to slog through words I cant even think of a pronounciation for and this huge chasm of seperation between the 'I' telling the story and the world around him. I do realise this is probably on purpose because the kid is all adrift and seperate from this new world, but that is a pretty good reason to tell the story from the outside and let us care about the kid and the world and all on our own. 'I' stories irritate me anyway because they seem to manipulate how I the reader should be reacting. This one seems to tell me I should not be reacting, and hey, it works. Total lack of investment.
Too much strangeness and distance to no reason, and absolutely no heart. Main characters who care for their dog, horse, king and potential love interest in descending order of importance just totally put me off.
And yet if I dont finish this book it will be the first since English Lit class to not get read all the way through (if you dont count my new skim reading method for Buffy tie in novels) so I just cant seem to shove it on a shelf and forget about it.
