Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Reviews – Aug 2009

28 Aug 09 – Giving Up on Three Hearts and Three Lions

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A friend of mine recommended this Poul Anderson fantasy novel, Three Hearts and Three Lions a while back. I've finally been working my way through it.

I'm not going to finish it.

It's about a guy who wakes up in a fantasy world, and can mysteriously speak the language and ride a horse and fight (quite well!) in armor. And he's trying to figure out how he got here, and why. So he's talked to a nearby witch, who's directed him to the nearest elven lord for advice. He's attracted a dwarf and a shapeshifting girl as companions.

That's it. I'm 1/3 of the way through the book, and that's as far as we've gotten.

I don't mean to be impatient, but at some point this ceases to be worth my time. There's some fine writing, and some fine sequences, but the story's dull as dirt. The characters are fun, but none have much stake in anything.

Worse, this is not a bland novel. Anderson was a strong writer, and this world comes alive at times. I find his use of phonetic dialect frustrating (I kid you not, this is an exact quote: "'Tis naw so canny a steadin' ye're boon fawr."), but it does add richness to his characters. And the protagonist was a smart engineer in his past life, so he's constantly evaluating his surroundings to figure out the scientific implications ("He wondered what they used in place of steel. Aluminum alloys? Surely magic could extract aluminum from bauxite. Beryllium, magnesium, copper, nickel, chrominum, manganese—while doubltless correct, the idea of an elvish wizard with a spectroscope was funny enough to restore a balance in Holger.").

But, ultimately, the book feels like no more than a neat idea and a richly-imagined medieval world. And I'm sorry, but I need a little more out of that in my novels right now.

(Writers: Does this describe your novel? What could you do to give the characters a more pressing problem to deal with?)

So, this one goes back on the shelves. A pity; I loved Anderson's The High Crusade.

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24 Aug 09 – Never Let Me Go

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It's difficult to review Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go without resorting to reviewers' favorite candy phrases: heart-wrenching, melancholy, tragic, and the one that I always shudder at, tour de force.

This is partly because of its deceit. For its first few chapters, it appears to be nothing more than a woman reminiscing about her childhood at an English boarding school. Moreover, the protagonist is nothing special, and spends much of her time second-guessing her (and others') actions.

Then you begin to notice that something's a little...off. Certain life details are conspicuously absent. Some normal things are never mentioned, while others are referenced in strange ways, and there are these strange euphemisms about donations and completing.

These are the two great strengths of Ishiguro's novel:

  1. The writing is delicately structured to intrigue and reveal, despite a narrator who is rather dull herself. One learns things about characters that the characters don't realize themselves.
  2. There's a twist to this woman's life and entire world that's revealed slowly and naturally (another of Ishiguro's impressive feats), and which adds several complex layers of meaning to her memories and worries. This drives the story forward even further.

Which makes Never Let Me Go even more difficult to review. Ishiguro's subtle touch masks wonderful layers of intriguing complexity, and the twist really shouldn't be revealed in a review like this. So what can I say?

After I finished the final page, I felt like my head had blossomed open like a flower, and I felt dazed for a few hours.

I can hardly think of higher praise.

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