The Dark Tower, The Hands of the Emperor, The X Tree Mysteries

[cimorene]

I sputtered to a stop a third of the way into the third of Ovidia Yu's historical Singapore tree series (The Paper Bark Tree Mystery). I was side-eyeing by the end of the second novel (The Betel Nut Tree Mystery), because it had the same plot outline as the climax of the first (The Frangipani Tree Mystery), which is, briefly and unspoilerishly, that at the beginning of Act Five the heroine comes up with a theory of who she thinks the murderer is and is so positive that, even though she doesn't have strong evidence, she goes to confront them verbally by herself (shades of Nancy Drew) in the full belief that they will confess; instead of which she ends up held at weapon-point by the ACTUAL murderer, who villain monologues for long enough to explain everything before the day is saved. This is a perfectly respectable outline, but twice in a row? And she doesn't even pause and take backup with her, or have second thoughts such as 'Wait, I don't really have any support for this theory - what if it was someone else?' in the second book? So the heroine continues being just as thick for the first thirty percent or so of the third book. I may finish the book after reading some other stuff as a palate cleanser, though. I really appreciate all the content about race and gender and how much colonialism and the British suck.

I finally read The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard (after having it on a list somewhere for years), which I did enjoy a lot! I saw the author refer to her subgenre (can't remember where) as "cozy fantasy", and that name struck me as potentially useful - because I get what she means and I do like that subgenre - and yet threateningly twee. There's a self-identified genre known as "cozy mystery" and all the works I tried in it were too twee for me to stand for more than a chapter or so - like being stuck in a crowded bus in the wintertime near several people wearing gallons of Twee perfume. Anyway, The Hands of the Emperor isn't really that twee, which is a good sign, at least - I mean, it's self-identified, right? But of course there could be a parallel example in cozy mystery that I just didn't happen to find. Anyway, I did enjoy this book a lot, as I was saying, but it had a strong dose of wish fulfilment fantasy in it: very special protagonist being repeatedly dismissed or disregarded by various people who are Bad because they don't realize how Special he is, and the progress through the plot is, in a way, just a series of episodes where he gets to righteously confront and defeat all of them, usually telling them off eloquently or having this done on his behalf by someone else. There's a whole subplot about his specialness being unappreciated by his large extended family, who belittle and mock him (but this is shown to have been with love all along... side-eyeing). I did enjoy reading it a lot though, and will shortly begin another book in the series.

I finished reading Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. Epic dark fantasy, my wife's childhood favorite. Uniquely enough, he wrote the first novel when he was nineteen, and published the first three novels in the 1980s and early 90s (the fourth, Wizard and Glass, in '97), then in 1999 had a brush with death (was hit by a car) and it made him determined to finish the whole thing - and also evidently changed the significance of the whole thing, as the final three books were published pretty close together and are palpably different. They're also, IMO, unbalanced, and I think the big weakness in them is caused by a sub-plot involving interdimensional travel to the scene of the car accident and an attempt to save Stephen King's life. (In the fictional universe, their intervention causes him to be injured instead of killed in the accident.) There are a LOT of people mad about the end of The Dark Tower, the series, which is expected, perhaps, but I was really surprised to find that a lot of them are mad mostly or entirely about what you might call the final scene or sequence, which they seem to think was either a cheap twist or a poorly thought-out improvisation, when in fact it follows naturally from the themes and everything that has happened in the story. Not everyone is completely explicit about what it is that pissed them off, of course, and many more probably haven't separated the issues out in their minds. Still, I expected more to zero in on the things that I think are the big problem with the end:

1. That the big bad, the Crimson King, dwindles away to nothing, not like a twist but in a way that doesn't really hang together - not like the Wizard of Oz (which is explicitly referenced in Wizard and Glass), but just sort of inexplicably goes from a primordial and magical being who might be an embodiment of Chaos and is definitely supposed to be a giant spider working to topple all civilization and order... into the inhabitant of a medieval castle who turns out to be a little old man jumping up and down and yelling like Rumpelstiltskin.


2. That the secondary big bad, Mordred, the prophecied magical son of both the hero and the Crimson King, never manages to do anything to harm the heroes at all. (Literally at all! One dies in killing him, but this is at the very end of the book.) He's also just pretty flaccid. He gets enough page time to be genuinely unpleasant, but not enough to be a credible threat; not even enough to plot or plan any severe setbacks for our heroes that are defeated such as those the Man in Black arranges.


3. The whole plot gets sidetracked into the save Stephen King's life plot. Obviously the series is now partly about this to King. It is the epic series that he feels he was born to write, and he considers time he spent writing easy or less 'worthy' things to have been lazy or cowardly wastes of time on his part. And because he was born to write this epic story, perhaps, and the idea of him having been born to write it and nearly not getting to now appears in the story, the story becomes about the nature of story. This stuff isn't all bad, and in fact it's fun to read, but looking back on it, it becomes meandering and it diverts the flow of the story while eating up page time and theme in the books that would otherwise have gone to the villains. Because the villain is chance or fate that might have prevented King from writing the series now, in a sense his survival is the only important measure of success for the characters... but he had already survived in order to start writing and so the characters being pasted into that scene can't have any true tension for the reader! In his afterword to the final volume, King declares that he didn't mean to be pretentious, and that he felt metafiction was inevitable when he came to write the conclusion of the saga because so much of what he has written has held echoes of The Dark Tower series - particularly references to the aforementioned Crimson King and Man in Black, who are recurring villains in various universes. I allow that his conclusion that a Stephen King must exist in the universe of the Dark Tower is acceptable as a way to explain these references throughout his oeuvre. But I reject the idea that he had to be written into The Dark Tower as a god figure who was writing the story into being, whose death would have doomed the multiverse to chaos by leaving their quest to save the forces of order unfulfilled. The use of a fictionalized King as a deus ex machina who leaves signed notes and gifts for the characters... it didn't HAVE to be a bad idea, but I don't think it worked, perhaps because he didn't go far enough with it; the series has fictionalized King explicitly deny that he's God (or its God) by saying he is a sort of channel for the things he writes and not their originator, but doesn't grapple with how that can be reconciled with the idea that he's written them all into being and his death would have doomed the Dark Tower multiverse to relapsing into the primordial chaos.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

You make me glad I abandoned the series after book 1! I could tell it wouldn't be my thing.

Thanks for the review!

[cimorene]

If you meant The Dark Tower, I think the second and third books are more enjoyable than the first and that the problems start after the fourth really, but I didn't enjoy the fourth very much. But the second and third books are a really engaging team building adventure, or really more what the kids these days call found family. They don't stand alone - they refer back to the first book and they end near the beginning of their quest to save the multiverse - but they have a solid structure and an understandable and satisfying ending, I thought. The whole series and probably all of the writer's work contain more body grossness and animal harm than I like - in that way his style is very much not my thing - but the worst examples of all that come from the fourth book and later.

[vass]

HOTE: my most recent fandom! Your criticisms are all entirely accurate.

Out of curiosity: which other book in the series are you reading next, and have you been spoilered yet for Artorin Damara's secret name? (The one he tells Cliopher he'll tell him one day.) If you have not been spoilered for it, I strongly advise avoiding the AO3 tags for this fandom until you've read one of the books that reveals it. His canonical tag is the equivalent of Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader, and (I think?) this has been the case since this canon's equivalent of the year The Empire Strikes Back came out. Being spoilered won't ruin the experience (I was spoilered already) but it is a fun reveal.

[cimorene]

The author's website advised reading The Return of Fitzroy Angursell before the immediate sequel, so it only took a page to realize.

[cesy]

I am enjoying this series so much, too.