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hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 125-126
125. Rowena Cory Daniells, The King's Bastard.
It appears to me that there has arisen a specifically Australian tradition of High Fantasy - Trudi Canavan, Jennifer Fallon, Karen Miller - and it is this mode which The King's Bastard, the first book of a trilogy, follows.
Byren is the second son of the king of Rolencia. Minutes younger than his brother the heir, he has no ambitions whatsoever, and is baffled by the tension that begins to grow between them, a tension which is exacerbated after the arrival of a royal cousin (under the bar sinister) at court. Tensions are also evident in the lives of his younger brother, Fyn, who is pledged to a monastery, and his sister Piro, who has no desire to marry for politics. Piro is also hiding a dangerous secret: her talent for "Affinity," an ill-defined sort of magic, much as Byren's disinherited friend Orrade is hiding his (in Rolencia generally reviled) attraction to men.
There are several problems with this book, leaving aside how superficial I find the worldbuilding. (How many people actually look at how complex pre-industrial societies are? Never mind politics in a court of any size.) The worst problem is that Byren is Too Stupid To Live. Given every indication that he should not trust certain persons, he continues to do so. In addition, he is TSTL in other ways.
The second problem is the Random Seer. Random Crazy Seer is random, and pops up all over the place in the first fifty (?) pages, for no apparent reason other than the auctorial convenience of heavy-handed foreshadowing. The third problem is the fact that the treatment of gender made me want to bite someone.
I'm not, in general, well-disposed to High Fantasy unless it's thoughtful about its themes as well as its construction. (There was a time when I was younger when this was not so, but we all change in time.) Much of it seems tired and hackneyed to me, drawing far too uncritically on the shallowly-received tropes of the European middle ages. In Bastard's case, this is compounded by its position as the first part of a trilogy. The setup is insufficiently compelling for the limited amount of payoff available, and while I'm mildly curious about what happens next, I don't have much emotional or intellectual investment in actually finding out.
...Well, that was curmudgeonly of me, wasn't it? *may in fact be annoyed today*
nonfiction
126. Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing, New York, 2002.
I don't imagine it's Csordas' fault that the jargon-laden language of anthropology gives me a headache. Nonetheless. Diverting as discussions of healing in contemporary Christian Charismatic and Navajo cultures are, I, for one, would have preferred a rather more accesible style of book.
125. Rowena Cory Daniells, The King's Bastard.
It appears to me that there has arisen a specifically Australian tradition of High Fantasy - Trudi Canavan, Jennifer Fallon, Karen Miller - and it is this mode which The King's Bastard, the first book of a trilogy, follows.
Byren is the second son of the king of Rolencia. Minutes younger than his brother the heir, he has no ambitions whatsoever, and is baffled by the tension that begins to grow between them, a tension which is exacerbated after the arrival of a royal cousin (under the bar sinister) at court. Tensions are also evident in the lives of his younger brother, Fyn, who is pledged to a monastery, and his sister Piro, who has no desire to marry for politics. Piro is also hiding a dangerous secret: her talent for "Affinity," an ill-defined sort of magic, much as Byren's disinherited friend Orrade is hiding his (in Rolencia generally reviled) attraction to men.
There are several problems with this book, leaving aside how superficial I find the worldbuilding. (How many people actually look at how complex pre-industrial societies are? Never mind politics in a court of any size.) The worst problem is that Byren is Too Stupid To Live. Given every indication that he should not trust certain persons, he continues to do so. In addition, he is TSTL in other ways.
The second problem is the Random Seer. Random Crazy Seer is random, and pops up all over the place in the first fifty (?) pages, for no apparent reason other than the auctorial convenience of heavy-handed foreshadowing. The third problem is the fact that the treatment of gender made me want to bite someone.
I'm not, in general, well-disposed to High Fantasy unless it's thoughtful about its themes as well as its construction. (There was a time when I was younger when this was not so, but we all change in time.) Much of it seems tired and hackneyed to me, drawing far too uncritically on the shallowly-received tropes of the European middle ages. In Bastard's case, this is compounded by its position as the first part of a trilogy. The setup is insufficiently compelling for the limited amount of payoff available, and while I'm mildly curious about what happens next, I don't have much emotional or intellectual investment in actually finding out.
...Well, that was curmudgeonly of me, wasn't it? *may in fact be annoyed today*
nonfiction
126. Thomas J. Csordas, Body/Meaning/Healing, New York, 2002.
I don't imagine it's Csordas' fault that the jargon-laden language of anthropology gives me a headache. Nonetheless. Diverting as discussions of healing in contemporary Christian Charismatic and Navajo cultures are, I, for one, would have preferred a rather more accesible style of book.
