Review: Brave (2012)

Look out! Spoilers! If you haven't yet seen this movie, you may not want to read further.


Brave, Pixar's most recent film, follows the adventures of the Scottish princess Merida, whose imminent betrothal drives her to a drastic attempt to break out of the fate imposed on her by society and by her mother, Queen Elinor. Because this is a primarily literary blog, I'm going to focus mostly on the plot and other elements that most directly affect the story. That said, the best way to summarize my opinion is to say that everything except the plot was nearly flawless. The animation, voice acting, music, and other elements I probably didn't notice all came together to make it a beautiful piece of cinema; that's unmistakable. It's a much bigger task to sort out the point of what actually happens.

Before seeing the movie, I had a plot predicted in my head. It was Brave as I would have written it, shaped by all the preview footage I had seen. In it, Merida begins as a stereotypical Disney princess: beautiful and strong-willed, but forced into a marriage she doesn't want. But she's made of sterner stuff than most Disney princesses, and rather than having her change handed to her by a ridiculous prince, she strikes a Faustian bargain with an evil witch, knowing full well that it will upset her kingdom, but not caring. Somehow her family is turned into bears, as the previews indicated, and the repercussions aren't as easy to face as she had anticipated. The climax of the movie would involve Merida, now having gained the knowledge of the consequences of her various actions, would learn to set aside her personal desires for the good of the kingdom. This could have involved a marriage, but preferably there would have been some other integral element.

The actual plot is much more haywire. To begin with, Merida is a lot more clueless than I had expected. In fact, she's downright idiotic. I'm aware that she's a teenager, but I think most of my high school class could have anticipated that, perhaps, the pastry brewed by the magical bear-themed villain might have something to do with turning the person who eats it into a bear! Lots of fairy tales involve hubris, but usually it's not nearly this specific or predictable. Many other parts of the film, including Merida's speech to the clan leaders, showed a similar pandering and lack of creativity. Pixar isn't usually a company that dumbs down its movies for a child audience, but I'm afraid that's what happened here.

Merida's parents, Queen Elinor and King Fergus, were very well done, and I especially enjoyed the Queen's personality when she becomes a bear. This middle part of the movie held me the most. Merida is aware of the damage she's done and is actively trying to repair it, and she and her mother are bonding in a creative way. It greatly helps this part that Elinor occasionally becomes "a bear on the inside, too," so that there's less silliness and more urgency.

The resolution was the sloppiest part. Things stop making sense in the last five minutes, after Mor'du dies. If legends are lessons, then the giant bear was the only thing keeping a sense of sanity tucked into this movie.

First: Merida completely forgets about the words the witch gave her to break the spell. If that was a message and not an incantation, it should not have been phrased that way, because it left the tapestry bit feeling like a cop-out.

Then she doesn't have to marry anybody, and all the clans go home happy. This means that there are no consequences, or in other words, that if you're angry about your betrothal, you can publicly humiliate your family by turning half of them into fuzzy animals and tricking your parents into trying to rend each other limb from limb. They will forgive you for everything, and all of your political allies will be too confused by the deus ex machina to remember why they sailed into the movie in the first place.

In the parting shot of the movie, one of our blue will-o-th'-wisp friends waves just to remind the audience that we have no idea of his motives. I guess this could be symbolic, but I'm not totally convinced.

There are plenty of core elements of this film that I enjoyed. The biggest one is that the plot is not driven by the machinations of a significant villain. This is true of fairy tales: the hero wanders into wacky events and leaves them having grown, as we do in real life. It was also primarily driven by women, which, though not intrinsically better in itself, is too lacking in the film world. And, of course, it was quite an adventure to watch, even while I remained skeptical of some of the plot devices. Even what I thought was flawed was enjoyable at the same time. I'd recommend this movie to anybody, as long as you're not looking for the same kind of moral weight Pixar put into Wall-E.

My Two Big Fantasy Influences, Part 2

Stephen R. Donaldson

Hey, look! It's an author of what ordinary people would call fantasy! Stephen R. Donaldson is most famous for his series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, The Gap Cycle, and Mordant's Need. Of these, I've read only Thomas Covenant, but those books are inextricably at the top of my list of favorites.

Thomas Covenant is a leper who has lost everything and lives as an outcast in a midwestern American town. One day, he blacks out and wakes up in the Land, a world where beauty and health are tangible forces, like color or gravity. Covenant believes he is losing his mind, and although his experience is detailed and convincing, he tries to remain certain that he is trapped in an elaborate dream. But to the inhabitants of the Land, Covenant is the only living person who can defeat their immortal enemy, the Despiser. Covenant therefore must find a way to save these people without admitting they are real.

The first and best part of Donaldon's writing is his ability to think of scenarios like that. Instead of putting his characters in trouble by having them captured by brigands or chased by wolves (although his stories contain elements of these), he writes them into psychological obstacle courses. His short stories, as I've discussed, take these issues in hand, but Covenant is what really makes a masterpiece of it. Donaldson's short story "Gilden-Fire," originally part of book 2 of Covenant, was actually removed from that book because it accidentally implied a resolution to the question of the land's reality. His "real world" characters: Covenant, Troy, Linden, Joan, and Roger, are never let off the tightrope between accepting or rejecting the dream.

Does this sound familiar? Probably.

The criticism I read most often about Donaldson is about his verbosity. There are websites devoted to the archaic words that only he still uses. This kind of problem goes two ways. If you're not in love with the books, then the vocabulary is probably going to push you further away, because you won't be motivated to look up the word if it's not clear from the context. I strongly prefer it, and find it highly poetic. The problem is that I can't (and shouldn't) replicate it perfectly in my own writing, nor are my books the appropriate setting for that kind of language, so it's a challenge to emulate without copying.

Donaldson is able to get away with this style in Covenant and not quite in his short stories because of the concrete elements that make up the Land. What some science fiction writers and even a few of fantasy get wrong is the complexity of symbolism. Symbols tend to become less real as they become complicated, unless they're a direct analogy, like parodies or political satire. Dragons, for instance, can mean nearly anything unless they're hammered down in a certain style; Tolkien, for instance, gives Smaug the dragon the direct speech patterns of an upper-class Englishman of old money, so that his message is clear enough. But real symbols are much more than a one-to-one substitution that fits the text, and high school English classes aren't likely to admit this.

Take stone, for example. Stone in Covenant has substantial qualities than actual stone does. Giants can sing to stone and make it move or float, and some stones can harness the energy of the sun in order to perform ritual magic. This doesn't mean that Donaldson means stone to be a metaphor for jet fuel or something more powerful found here on Earth. Stone, in essence, is just a metaphor for itself. To respect the power of stone as part of the story is to notice a basic underlying pattern in the elements of our own world. This, too, is fantasy.

Thomas Covenant fans are sometimes described, even self-described, as hopeless masochists, because of the incredibly depressing course each of the characters follows. It's no mere thrill ride, however. Characters do not turn up dead for no reason, nor is Covenant battered with misery just to evoke an emotional response from the reader. If you are looking for a sob story, Covenant is not your man, largely because he's not very likable. Instead, the books are a great example of the wise advice of the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: "No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of." Thomas Covenant is neither sweet nor innocent, but through reading them and then looking around, I've seen what I'm made of, what people are made of, and what the world is made of. I can give a book no higher praise.

My Two Big Fantasy Influences, Part 1

Bill Watterson

You probably know him, if not by name. Bill Watterson is the author of Calvin and Hobbes, widely argued to be the funniest, most insightful newspaper comic strip ever written. Not a lot is known about the man, mostly owing to the fact that as the ball dropped in Times Square and 1995 turned into 1996, he disappeared from the cartooning world, the press, and his fans, all of which have had trouble finding him ever since.

My love of Calvin and Hobbes goes back as far as I can remember. I can recall many evenings of sitting on the couch with my dad, each of us alternately reading a strip out of the various collections we had. I still own that copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, probably printed around the time Watterson pulled the strip out of publication. Calvin and Hobbes is probably what made me want to be a writer.

As far as it pertains to fantasy, I'm not talking about sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, or even what tries to be Tolkien. Like I say too often, fantasy's biggest problem is in trying to be a separate thing, and most authors don't succeed in failing to write the genre. I sure don't. That is, I may try, but I can't seem to get my books to escape the fact that they are fantasy, to give the reader a taste of the book's essence without crowding out the flexibility of imagination. The writers who earn the title of "genius" are the ones who can discern essential truths and communicate them with the reader, to allow the real world to speak back to them as they weave literature, which is a conceptual tapestry, something made up, that represents something fundamentally true. Watterson, in my opinion, is a master of this art.

It shouldn't seem strange for me to hold a cartoonist to such a high standard. One thing I've learned from Watterson's essays, as well as from contemporary cartoonists like Ryan North and Aaron Diaz, is that comics are a medium just like any other, and not a genre. This is mostly true. It's also true that people's expectations of literature shape what that literature becomes, like it or not. It's almost certain that Calvin and Hobbes survived its initiation into the world of newsprint because it had a small, goofy family and a talking animal, as newspaper readers expect and want to see. It works because it's trite and it's trite because it works; newspaper comics are "safe" media, rarely doing any sort of thinking outside the box (haw, haw). Calvin and Hobbes amazes me because it accomplished both.

Then there's the question of Hobbes. Some people understand it, and some people don't. One way to explain it is this: my sister, who has been reading The Lord of the Rings, recently asked me who Tom Bombadil is. She read the only chapter in which he appears, but his description there was not enough for her. And so we've run into the problem that comes with reading with so much assistance from classrooms, fan wikis, author interviews, and so on: it's now assumed that there's a right answer to every piece of a plot, some level of tangible objectivism. Guess what: there ain't. As my professor for Criticism told us, fiction isn't real. Tolkien did go farther than any other author in charting his legendarium, but he left the monsters on the map and the gaps in history that don't let us take certainty for granted. Tom Bombadil's origin is never quite explained, only hinted at.


This leaves Hobbes in a powerful place of balance. Overtly, Watterson's technique is simple: when Hobbes is alone or in the company of Calvin and nobody else, he is drawn as a live tiger; when someone other than Calvin is looking at him, he is drawn as a stuffed animal. It's not wrong to say that Hobbes is just a stuffed animal, and it's not wrong to say that he's a tiger. Watterson did not intend him to be a toy that comes to life whenever Calvin is around, but nearly everything else is fair game. This reconciliation of what would be a paradox, this act of balance, is exactly what I mean when I talk about the illustrative fabric of fantasy. As long as Hobbes' existence isn't pinned down logically, he makes Calvin wise. When he can be explained, he stops making sense.

Watterson's style is another thing I've sought to live up to for quite some time. I don't draw comics, but I love his determination to break panel conventions where it helped the strip, and his refusal to force the story into newspaper-proscribed structures. This is less about rebelling and more about knowing how to let your work come forth naturally, without constraint. His other kind of style, the storytelling one, is a compromise I've never been able to hit. I tend to use overblown words too often, which kill the message. Watterson uses overblown words to make his strip hilarious. Vivid, poetic description is a wonderful thing, but it can't seem out of place, and for some reason it always feels right coming out of Calvin's mouth.

Headphones

Here I'm standing in the elevator, at the cash register, on the train.

And I'm wearing headphones.

The guitar roars; the drums pierce the membrane of the sky until it sunders, but

Only I can hear it.

The music fills me up,

Focuses me

And gives me something to do.

I have a touch screen for a temperament

And songs rather than emotions.

Who wants to be human

When the world can consist of only beats and lyrics?

Now I'm strolling down the sidewalk, pacing back and forth, shivering in the rain.

I'm still wearing headphones.

Wrapped in song, I forget myself until she looks at me; the volume drops so

Only I can hear it.

My thoughts begin to thrum,

Taking on a tempo and a rhythm.

If not for these speaker levees, they'd burst out,

Flood the vicinity

And tell everyone how I'm feeling.

Who cares about one man

When his spirit can be so neatly packaged

Behind plastic plugs and a pounding piano?

There you are, approaching me, and in the chaos of the crowd we brush elbows.

You're wearing headphones, too.

The bass batters down your eardrums and the glass wall of space between us until

Even I can hear it.

You must be crazy

To hammer the sense out of

Your brain like that,

To let a genre so distant from you as me

To hear the color of your soul.

Who needs to speak

When thoughts are spilling out of her ears?

Could you please lower your volume?

Review: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

Great Scott! Here I set a precedent for this blog: a review of a book you actually may have read (sorry, Christine).

I've heard mixed oral opinions of The Hunger Games for the past two years. I've been told it's the next Twilight or the next Harry Potter. Other people have had good things to say about it. The fact that it was made into a Hollywood movie means that everyone agrees that, at least, it's lucrative.

The Hunger Games follows the trials and tribulations of Katniss Everdeen (most of the names in this book are equally irritating), a sixteen year-old girl who lives in a dystopian future where most of Panem, a place that was once North America, is ruled by the rich, merciless Capitol. Panem is built rather like a game of Settlers of Catan, in which each geographic region produces exactly one resource for the Capitol to take and redistribute to everybody, keeping most for itself. The rest of the setting is unimportant, except for the Hunger Games themselves. In this event, which is mandatory viewing for every citizen of Panem, two teenagers from each district fight to the death in a giant, role-playing game-esque free-for-all. It's up to Katniss to find a way to survive the games at the same time as sticking it to the Capitol.

Because most of the hype pertained either to teenage romance or box office dollars, I was surprised by how good this book was. Of course, it's consciously a young adult book, so it's necessary to be more lenient with some of the awkward narration or times the moral is explicitly spelled out.

With this in mind, the dystopian world of Panem is surprisingly well established. The futuristic power relationships feel less traditional, like in Frank Herbert's Dune, than actually futuristic. I love the connection Collins made between the Colosseum games and reality TV, especially how she synthesized the real deaths in the former with the fake airs put on by the latter. For me, this was the best aspect of the book.

The worst aspect, other than the names, was the general shallowness of character. It sometimes bothers me when authors think it's okay to pass off one-dimensional characters because they're writing for children; Collins isn't nearly as guilty of this as some authors are, but she's far from perfect. Katniss is one of the best examples, fluctuating between cluelessness and total understanding of the system, as the narrative requires. Her personal connection to the action is somewhat too simple, considering she's the narrator. Of course, she cares about her family, doesn't want to fight to the death, hates the spoiled competitors, etc., but she comes out of the Hunger Games without a clear understanding of what she has gained from them. This may have been part of the message, but the message itself should have been clearer than "this kind of spectacle is evil."

Altogether, though, the plot held together quite nicely. I was particularly impressed by the details of the Games themselves; most of Katniss's survival skills and the conditions of wilderness existence were actually spot-on (except for shooting fireballs, but things like that were intentional). There was a nice balance on many counts of the plot of the Games: Katniss' strategy, the interaction of the characters' personalities, the actions of the game-makers, etc.

To cap it off, it was definitely a thrilling read for me. Although it hasn't been my favorite book of the summer, it kept my attention the best by far. Her narrative pace is perfect to keep the reader on edge, never quite sure when the next fight scene could break out. And the chapter cliffhangers, while overt, are all effective.

So: I'd recommend this book to nearly anybody, but especially to those who want to stay in the know about popular young adult fantasy and want somewhere to turn away from Harry Potter or Twilight. It's worth the time to read.

Ursula K. Le Blog

The following is my comment on this blog post by fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin:

I could hardly pretend to be a fantasy nerd without admitting there are those authors who know more about it than others. Tolkien and Lewis, Gaiman and Beagle: the best writers recognize that in an age where ideology is trickier, quality fantasy is not genre-driven, but has necessary tools built in. These tools are the implicit admission that anything goes, that neither the reader nor shallow, specialized criticism is the ultimate arbiter. The key is walking the tightrope of humility between existentialism and agnosticism.

Ursula K. Le Guin ranks near the top of fantasy theorists, in my esteem: on par with Joseph Campbell, and with a similar perspective. This short post of hers accurately catches why fantasy is so relevant to modern science and ideology in certain ways not even science fiction can do, but it misinterprets a handful of key points.

   I've always had difficulty grappling with speculative fiction's role as a metaphor for reality. And it is a metaphor, in exactly the same way that any fiction is a metaphor for reality. As I rant nearly constantly, the coinage of the term "speculative fiction" implies that there's fiction that isn't speculative. (The term refers to fantasy, sci-fi, horror, dystopia, or anything else that doesn't limit itself to current scientific understanding.) This split wasn't always there. Shakespeare didn't care whether fairies were real when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he needed a love potion to confuse Lysander and Demetrius. Mary Shelley was a sci-fi writer in her time because Victor Frankenstein would have lacked depth if he'd just had an ugly kid. College professors still assign these because they've been canon for so long, but a genius like Vonnegut has to be treated with the tongs of postmodern criticism, and that's because he takes the time to wink and tell the reader exactly what he's doing. Most writers just expect you to keep up.

   My only problem with Le Guin's argument is that it wavers between points of nihilism. She admits that "somebody's geometry" has to be in play in a fantasy story. That is, the reader has to understand it. But beyond that, anything goes. I disagree. I would replace her assertion, "It doesn't have to be the way it is," with a question, "Is it really the way it is?"

  Le Guin gives science the benefit of the doubt, and I find that perfectly reasonable. Science is a broad enquiry, a humble admission that we don't yet know everything. And we never will, with emphasis on the everything. The pursuit of knowledge is undoubtedly noble, but the contention that we're already there is the worst hubris I've ever seen firsthand. It's unscientific to say, "Look back at those medieval chumps, how they believed in spontaneous generation!" Science is a process, and as individual people we try to do our best with what we have. The best scientist, just like the best fantasist, is someone who always has questions. In another thousand years, 2012's understanding of the universe will seem just as primitive as people without microscopes. The potential stagnancy, the feeling that we've done it all, fits the status quo that Le Guin protests.

Interestingly, and she admits this, both of the authors she mentions were Catholic. There are many people who place religion and science as opposites, but both Tolkien and Chesterton knew that science and religion are both tools to discover deeper meaning. Le Guin, who has one of the broadest knowledges of anthropology of anyone I've ever read, probably sees religious people as those grasping at air. Some probably are. But most religions, as well as non-religious spiritualities, are not generated spontaneously, but rather founded on real experiences that clash not with science, but with old discoveries that we call "laws." The monk, the fantasy author, and the researcher are now equally Galileo.

And, as with all science or math that has any value, fantasy shouldn't exist for its own sake. Dungeons and Dragons is pure neurosis if role play isn't included. Le Guin's stories stretch beyond the Archipelago to our own fears of being locked in the dark or lost at sea, and our own hawkish pride. This is the geometry that fantasy preserves: the physics don't have to make sense when they sit on the shoulders of the moral.

Review: Beneath the Heavens by Christine O'Neill (2012)

You may remember when, in a fit of stress-induced crankiness, I established R.A. Salvatore's Starless Night (not to be confused with Starry Night) as a stock example of what fantasy should not be. Today, I have an example of what, in many respects, fantasy should indeed be. I present: Beneath the Heavens.

Before I spoil the dust jacket summary, I should clear up some things that color my reading of this book differently from most other reads. First: the author, like me, is a college student rather than a full-time, New York Times bestseller. Second: like me, she self-published. Although I've since washed out the residual taste of that experience, I still have mixed feelings about the concept. Finally: she's a personal friend of mine.

All this meant that no matter how hard I tried, the time I spent reading this book bombarded me with questions about whether my writing is on the right track. It's simply easier in this case than with an author whose experiences completely fail to overlap with mine. Let's dive in, shall we?

Beneath the Heavens is about a group of people who come together to ride the Miracle Line, an expensive train reserved only for the terminally ill. Their destination is the Everlands, a legendary place that is supposed to cure any illness. There, the passengers discover not only miracle cures but also a society that seems too idyllic to be true. But they only begin to suspect a darker secret beneath the surface when the new arrivals begin to turn up murdered...

The job of all fantasy writers is to bring something new to the reader while also learning a bit from the history of the genre. Homer's epics are often cited as the two works that have defined Western fantasy even in modern books: the Iliad is the War, and the Odyssey is the Journey. While it's fun to stick to these concepts, the first thing I enjoyed about Beneath the Heavens was the fact that it doesn't focus at all on either of these. It's not even predominantly a murder mystery, although that factor is the main plot driver. No, what I took most out of this book was the relationship between the characters and their illnesses. Each one has a different case which brings out his or her inner qualities–good in some cases and bad in others–in powerful ways.

The fantasy world here is another enjoyable point. It's roughly analogous to the real world, with all the names spelled wrong, but done in a charming way. One thing that helps is the little amount of time spent dwelling on the functionality of the fantasy. Many modern authors butcher this aspect of fiction. When forced to justify fantasy against realism, it's easy to try too hard to make the fantasy seem realistic, when it's far more natural just to accept the fact that there's a dinosaur running next to your train, or that the term "miracle cure" isn't such an exaggeration.

Not to oversell this book, I should point out that the writing style frequently didn't thrill me. Too often there are points of confusion between the semi-antique speech of the setting and the teenage slang of the main characters. Hardly anyone doesn't have an awkward-sounding line somewhere.

But to cap it off, the characters are great. Among my favorites are Karishma, an "Yndean" woman undergoing a complicated pregnancy; Tiernan, a teenager with severe schizophrenia; and especially Fritz, the socially-terrified engineer of the Miracle Line. The entire ensemble cast is great, once you can sort out who's who.

There you have it! I'd certainly recommend this book, especially to young writers who want to read a peer in action. For me, that's one of the best motivators there are.


If you're interested, check out Beneath the Heavens at Amazon.com or at Christine's website!

William

The epicenter of the human soul

Contains a rift so deeply absolute,

Science confereth on’t the name “black hole,”

Though ‘f nature, ever she’ll be in dispute.

Upon this vast I stumbled once ago,

Borne thence on certain heedless whorls of Time.

My vision grasped a nexus, where below

All human thought compressed to one sublime.

The sole imperfect blot on this ravine

Was three playfellows hanging from a tree

That o’er th’ unfathoms perilously leaned,

Link’d arm in arm, and knuckles gripping knee.

The farthest, and the aptest to let slip

Was a fiancé of the purest brow.

Above, a raven lady with a grip

Could anchor total mountains to that bough.

And twixt the twain, who kept them both in hand,

A bachelor to’s incriminating ruff

Scream’d out against the hourglass’s sand,

But every word was swallow’d by the bluff.

With no unlisted hand to hold his quill,

It slipped, and splattered ink that oozed like blood,

And hung i’th’ wind, as on a silent sill

Constructed o’er the soul’s conclusive flood.

He railed at me to rescue him with rope

And save the lives of his attractive mates,

That beauty might survive. He hung on hope

Against the purchase ‘f worlds’ worser fate.

But knew I none could fain o’ercross that span

Within which chaos shudders to a close.

This tragedy I shouted to the man,

Who bellow’d back in verses fit of prose,

“Go to’t, thou rascal! Pigeon-liver’d red!

Know’st not the plight my willsome hand could save?

Or seekest etchèd doom upon thy head,

Printed on face, and afterward on grave?”

From’s frothy mouth and from’s yet flutt’ring pen

Abounded glamours two or three times wide

Who capered weightless ‘cross th’ abysm again

And over, sightless bridging the divide,

Then sank they only slowly toward the dark,

Resounding rather from its seamless walls,

And rattled wisdom as the mongrel barks,

And faded as first prince of autumn falls,

But ever their impression did remain

In will-o-wisps, in meanings without term.

That roughèd joiner ‘f glamours rent with pain

To see his progeny his dread affirm.

He wept. I called to him, “Lament you not!

Their plight was beautiful.” He shouted back,

“Alas! I knew them well. Ere I begot

Their noble forms, I knew not how to lack

A minute painlessly. When I gave birth

To their mistake and torment, I was eased

For but a moment. Now returned to Earth,

Those models wrack me with upset reprise.

Their loss carves out a coffin of my heart.”

I soothed him. “Sir, in smoke I see them yet.

Neglect will not their faces tear apart,

Nor will their ghosts allow me to forget.”

He smiled. “’Tis done. Beloveds, disappear.”

At that the trio plunged and sank away.

And I alone remain on th’edge to hear

His screams reverberate even today.

Review: Starless Night by R.A. Salvatore (1993)

In my eternal pursuit of the ideal fantasy stories, I frequently need to stop and address what fantasy should not be. Unfortunately, this is synonymous with what most modern fantasy is.

Starless Night fits the bill.

Starless Night is the second in the Legacy of the Drow series, which itself is lost somewhere in a long series of glorified Dungeons and Dragons fan-fiction by R.A. Salvatore, Wizards of the Coast's most lucrative writer. For those not in the know, a "drow" is a dark elf in the universe of D&D, who inhabits an underground realm and who is generally a crafty and evil son of a gun. Most of Salvatore's books center around Drizzt, a drow who resents his heritage and embodies all things virtuous as he fights for the good of pretty much anyone who comes his way and wants to kill "bad guys." Oh, and he's also the best swordsman on earth.

These tiny tidbits are basically all you need to know to read Starless Night, even though it's the second in a series. My excuses for reading it are weak: I own a copy, and I try my darndest to read anything that falls onto my bookshelf. I'll probably finish the whole box set of four, griping all the way.

In Starless Night, Drizzt makes his way back to the Underdark, the home of the drow, to confront his past and to put himself in danger so that his friends (an elf, a man, and a dwarf! (and a hobbit rip-off)) are spared the ire of his distant relatives. Now, in spite of everything I hated about this book, the Underdark is pretty cool. It's a series of maze-like catacombs that are so expansive that they house entire civilizations. While nearly every fantasy book employs some such device (I'm no exception), Salvatore devotes a lot of well-spent time to establishing the complex ecosystem that has evolved in a place without light. All of his creepy-crawlies, bigger monsters, and sentient humanoids have adapted some form of infrared vision, acute hearing, or way of moving silently. Realistic natural selection aside, it's pretty well fleshed out.

And that's about the only aspect I admired. The rest of it falls under canned fantasy tropes that do worse than simply clog up the story. They actively make it worse. For example:

-Friendship. In some form or another, friendship has been passed on through legend as an indicator of loyalty. Just think of the bonds formed around King Arthur's Round Table. One reason it survives as a trope of fantasy is that fiction concerned with realism often also shuns ideas that espouse value judgments. Postmodernism loves deconstruction. However, another reason is that friendship can be a really cheap motivator, especially when it isn't supported, as in this case. Drizzt and his friends are almost as big of jackasses as their enemies, and he rarely spends time thinking about why he's chosen the side that he has. He hates the dark elves for their cruelty, but even Cattie-brie, the other main protagonist of this story, kills dozens of people in this book alone. Yet Drizzt wants to protect her innocence.

-Drizzt is the best fighter in the world, but his fight scenes are ridiculous. Salvatore loves describing sword fights. This means that Drizzt takes an average of two or three pages, and sometimes many more, to defeat any enemy he comes across. I have two problems with this. First, if he's so incredible, wouldn't it be easy for him to beat most of these Storm Trooper-esque characters? I could understand a prolonged fight with someone who's close to his level, but not with the nameless soldiers added only for action sequences. That kind of trope doesn't work in book format. Second, and this takes it a bit beyond what I originally said, why is everyone in this story defined by the way they fight each other? I'd prefer if they had, well, personalities, or perhaps at least interests other than death. This problem wouldn't bother me so much if it were limited to D&D fan-fiction like this book, but it's so pervasive that people tend to think that violence is an exclusive staple of fantasy.

-The magic makes no contextual sense. Writers like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis have understood that magic in a story needs to indicate a cosmic pattern beyond what the individual characters can understand. In Starless Night, magic indicates a pattern of "this character wants a fancy new way to kill people." Most of their magic indicates something of human design; the writer creates it as a plot device in the same way a factory creates a part to increase production, but which means nothing on its own. It's flashy but empty.

There are many more things wrong with this book, but these are the main issues that pervade modern fantasy and diminish its teaching value. It bothers me also because I remember The Highwayman, also written by Salvatore, to be quite good. All in all, I would not recommend this book or any of the Dark Elf series.

Poetic Fantasy

To dream of dragons ere I sleep,

To dream that stars beam in the deep,

To dream to listen to a fé,

I go on dreaming anyway...


Poetry has been a part of writing fantasy since long before "realistic fiction" emerged as a genre. In fact, poetry has been a part of culture far longer than prose. Before widespread literacy, rhyming patterns and image-based narration were the best tools for ensuring that oral traditions could be passed verbatim along generations. I don't know very much about the history of the transition to prose, but in British literature, many of the epic romances that have founded our written culture lace their prose with poetry as a way of recognizing the most precious values of the world contained in letters. Thanks to Tolkien, modern fantasy authors draw on Medieval British culture more than any other culture in history, and poetry is part of the package.


For me, poetry is the most difficult part of writing fantasy. I'm bad at poetry to begin with. There's a sense of dream, of logic without explicit narrative structure, that I tend to seek out, but what I write always reveals that I'm trying too hard. Then I need to have a reason to write the poem. On its own, that's a relatively easy question: what's on my mind? But writing poetry to include in a book is virtually ghost writing. I'm saying something not just on behalf of myself, but on behalf of a character or culture I've made up, and the words and images I use need to match this. And when it's all done, it needs to make sense to the reader. Talk about compromising priorities!


All my favorite fantasy authors are good at this, and I don't think that's a coincidence. I'd be interested in hearing some more authors, anyone at all, who can pull this off well.