You may have read my take on a high fantasy novelist writing middle-quality romance. This, friends and fellow readers, is the sequel and conclusion to that story.
Terisa Morgan, a young woman transplanted from her "real" world into the fantasy kingdom of Mordant, has just watched her only friend, the bumbling nobleman Geraden, escape into a mirror after being framed for murder. This escape, though miraculous, leaves Terisa defenseless against a castle full of people who believe that she aided the criminal's flight. Tensions are high, because two marauding armies are racing to that same castle, knowing that whichever takes it first will hold the position to conquer all of Mordant. Meanwhile, old King Joyse refuses to raise a hand in defense of his kingdom. It is up to Terisa alone to escape from her desperate captors and reunite with Geraden, who is her only hope of discovering how an alliance of rogue Imagers (wizards who can pull anything imaginable out of mirrors) are able to translate alien horrors anywhere they please, and whose sinister influence is behind the war that stands at Mordant's door.
I was underwhelmed with the first book; it's not nearly as awe-inspiring as Thomas Covenant, it's too complicated to be a page-turner, and it's not bad enough to be funny. This trend continues into A Man Rides Through. Many, many plots are going on at the same time; after all, Donaldson wrote these two right after the sixth Thomas Covenant, when he was at his peak in terms of subplots. The man is a hydra in that for every subplot he resolves, he creates two more. And he never leaves a thread hanging. This sounds fascinating but is really so only if the story is worth the commitment, and in the Mordant's Need plot, you need a special interest in the characters or the mirror fantasy to feel so involved. Alone, the drama does not justify itself.
Then something incredible happens. About halfway through the book, all the plots take a turn and begin to converge again. The result is like listening to a middle-grade concerto which suddenly reveals that all its disparate melodies, when played at the same time, form a cohesive harmony. It's a load of ordinary devices that fit together with uncanny precision. For a few hundred pages near the end, it's a nonstop hurly-burly of characters picking up Chekhov's guns, only to discover that their targets were wearing Chekhov's bullet-proof vests, but in turn those characters had paid for their vests by borrowing money from Chekhov's loan sharks... It goes on. Every previous action of named character is somehow justified until the plot collapses down to the climax which is a singular event.
To me this instantly makes a fantasy book worth it, but obviously there's more to a novel than structure. Terisa becomes less annoying than in the previous book, but in doing so she loses the better part of her individuality as a character. It frustrates me because Donaldson can write women brilliantly, but Terisa's function is to be a bit shallow. If ever I were to name a problem with this author, it would be his ability to intentionally fall short of his stylistic potential in order to achieve that unerring symbolic consistency.
Overall, the story is entertaining. I enjoyed the various experimentation with monsters created out of mirrors. They're a silly compromise between something grounded in the laws of reality and something from a carnival nightmare. As usual, it takes a stretch to suspend belief of some of the physics, because the magic is symbolic in function. But to me this is refreshing when done right, rather than as a lack of better imagination.
