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Don't take this the wrong way, Smurfin'. It's not a criticism of your tastes, but I felt Alan's statement that the author needs to learn how to write was unfairly dismissed.
I've skimmed the prologue, and I'm not passing judgement this early but I can see what Alan means on the basis of that introduction - the author does need to learn how to write. I'm hoping it picks up as the novel proper begins, but it's the most awkward, immature opening to a book I've ever read. I remember first reading Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic and being surprised at how distant the characters were from the reader. Pratchett clearly hadn't found his voice at that stage and couldn't paint a realistic picture for the reader. In comparison, in the prologue to A Game of Thrones, GRRM doesn't seem to have a voice. Like a writer of the most amateurish, cack-handed fan-fiction, he seems to want to write something but doesn't know what or how to.
I'll pick out a few points as evidence.
"Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit."
Okay, so the author is telling us here that this character is such a complete w*nker that we're not going to care whether he lives or dies, or at least that's what I'd assume his motives to be. Unfortunately, it's not just the characters who use such vacuous, imbecilic phrases.
Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest.
A character might show his own sense of superiority, his stupidity or his sexuality by glancing at another character with disinterest, but why do I need to know that he glanced at the sky? What part in the scene is the sky about to play that Ser Waymar Royce is foolishly overlooking? In the idiom of GRRM - answer came there none. None of what follows is worth reading.
Here comes the first piece of evidence that this is equivalent to really bad fan-fiction:
Will could sense something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear.
"You could taste it". Well, no I couldn't, because I wasn't there. Don't drag me into this scene - I'm the reader. If the author wants to speak directly to the reader then he should say, "you could have tasted it if you'd been there." However, I don't think that is GRRM's intention. I think he just hasn't worked out yet that this usage of "you" is a colloquialism, and what he intends to say is "one could taste it."
Now, that's just bad grammar. What's really wrong with that phrase is that no one - not I, not Will, not GRRM - could actually taste Gared's "nervous tension", not unless the man was a walking Van der Graaf generator. It's an empty, meaningless phrase, topped only by the end of the sentence: "perilous close". It's "perilously close", or should be unless the author is writing in the vernacular of serfdom, which he's trying very hard not to.
By this point in the prologue I realised I was reading an eight year-old's response to a school assignment. Yet it got worse.
The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water.
Too many commas, stories don't come rushing back (the effects they had on you do), and a cliche for good measure.
Until tonight.
Not a sentence.
There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise.
Or got his hackles up?
A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.
Trees are living things. Bad simile.
... something cold and implacable that loved him not.
This is such a poor and misplaced attempt to use Tolkien's "high" idiom in a narrative that is base and conversational that I metaphorically vomited. In fact, my bowels turned to water at this point.
Will wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander.
His commander. Not mine. I wasn't there. His or one's commander.
Especially not a commander like this one.
Like "until tonight", earlier, this is straight out of the Dan Brown guide to writin'. It's not a sentence. It's certainly not a paragraph.
He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife.
As graceful as a knife? What an appalling grasp of analogy this man has. An inanimate straight edge cannot have grace as an attribute. Gah.
He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants, black moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail over layers of black wool and boiled leather.
Yeah, we get the idea. He likes black. A lot.
soft as sin.
OFFS.
Will reflected as he sat shivering atop his garron.
Astride, surely, or was he standing on the saddle?
He studied the deepening twilight in that half-bored, half-distracted way he had.
I'm paying attention, you know. Half-distracted study. More not-paying-attention than studying, wouldn't you say?
Mallister freeriders had caught him red-handed in the Mallisters own woods, skinning one of the Mallisters own bucks
This was on the Mallisters' land, then, was it?
No one could move through the woods as silent as Will...
Silently, not silent.
"when I was half a boy"
Does that mean something or is it another empty phrase?
I'm bored now. It continues like that, including "the Others" (your characters may be superstitious fools but don't presume that using a euphemism instils a sense of dread in me) and "the Other halted", "kept the silence" instead of "kept his silence", "a high, thin sound at the edge of hearing, like an animal screaming in pain" when two swords clash, and "His moleskin glove came away soaked with red" (this is the black moleskin glove, right?).
This is such a short passage and yet it's riddled with churlish, amateur, awkward writing. The author doesn't appear to be able to construct a sentence with more than one clause, which makes the rhythm stilted and childlike. It doesn't compare favourably with The Da Vinci Code, let alone serious fiction like LotR.
Smurfin', you didn't ask me what I thought but you asked Alan and when he told you, you weren't impressed. Indeed, to say of Tolkien, "anyone who thinks it's great writing now has clearly never read a good book in the last few years" is unnecessarily antagonistic and, if I may say, not a little supercilious.
I haven't commented on GRRM's pacing and plotting because I've read only one very short sequence, but he fails utterly to get the basics of writing right and if his book continues in this vein then I really have more mature things to waste my time on. Tolkien is not to everyone's taste, but to hold this kind of writing up as an example of what is better is, in my opinion, a mistake.
Alan - Ancient Evenings sounds more up my street. I'm in the middle of Robert Harris's Pompeii at the moment, but it's a re-read and easily discarded. I enjoyed his Imperium as well, but I'm saving Lustrum for my summer holidays. I've also enjoyed a number of Bernard Cornwell's novels (excluding the Sharpe series, which I've never tried), including the Warlord chronicles, the Grail Quest novels and the Saxon stories. Stonehenge was a little cracker, too.
Both: there are many readers who specifically do not read Tolkien because it's fantasy. It may well take place in a false reality but, as I said earlier, so does all fiction. The point about Tolkien is that it maintains an extreme degree of verisimilitude and it is very easy to suspend disbelief when reading it. It reads like an historical fiction, not like a book about magic and eldritch. To pick out one point, that (to my knowledge) no other Fantasy writers appear capable of emulating - his characters' names resonate with their languages and peers and forebears. This removes the kind of jolt you get when trying to read lines of dialogue spoken by characters like "Ser Waymar Royce", "Mance Rayder" or "Ephron Vestrit" and makes the text flow so much more naturally. It is quite common for readers of Tolkien to be appalled at the level and content of writing in the Fantasy genre. To approach Tolkien from the perspective of Dungeons & Dragons is like asking some second-rate schlock horror director to make a movie out of it. It's no wonder they struggle to enjoy The Silmarillion or Unfinished Tales.  |
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Author: Smurfin
Author
To claim otherwise hints at another thread in the book forum - "Are you a book snob?"
25-11-2019 04:34:08