I finished
Turtledove's
Beyond the Gap and the subsequent two in the series earlier this month, and I do NOT recommend them. There is a nice premise behind the whole series, and I'm not giving anything away to explain that a glacier melts to the point of splitting, leaving a gap, through which a band of "adventurers" can be tasked to explore. They set out from a quasi-Medieval culture (perhaps more like Dark Age with barbarian lands adjacent; it's a mix), ostensibly to search for a "Golden Shrine," but discover a good deal more, plunging their land into a multi-nation, multi-cultural war. This is fantasy, with magic of several different varieties, and might be tempting to gamers--should be tempting to gamers--but it's so clunky with repetitiveness and colloquial anachronisms that I was jarred out of immersion nearly every other page. There are some elements that I enjoyed, mostly to do with the magic in use, but the great majority of ideas were retreading old ground and not with new twists to make the familiar fresh. Some of the repetitiveness might be contributed to Turtledove following just one hero. I understand his wheelhouse is using many woven story lines to tell an over-arching tale but I recall jumping into his Worldwar/Colonization series in the Nineties and enjoying the first book only to find him repeating himself once it continued in book two. I dropped that series at that point. Once I was into this Opening of the World series, I felt the need to finish, not just the book but the whole three-book series, but it was in that can't-look-away-from-a-train-wreck feeling, not compelled by enjoyment. I really wanted to like it but was ultimately disappointed.
Due to a thread in the General Forum, I took a break in September from Turtledove to revisit Horace Walpole's
The Castle at Otronto. I knew it had been a slog to read back in the day but it's a short book, a novella actually, so I figured I could grit my teeth and have at it. The attraction, I suppose, was because [MENTION=1645]mmadsen[/MENTION]
dug a quote up from
Fantasy: The 100 Best Books regarding the so-called "iceberg principle" of castle construction in novel(las) like it from the Gothic genre that I never felt was quite accurate. To join that discussion, I felt a re-reading of
Otronto was in order. I think the reading, along with some knowledge of the novels
Dracula and
Frankenstein, supported my objection to the claim though it might be worth delving into some other Gothic novels to understand whence they might have derived the notion that spawned the theory. Maybe there are other Gothic novels that include vast subterranean complexes of which I am yet unaware. Please enlighten me if you know.
Fortunately, I followed it up all that chore-like reading with
Bernard Cornwell's
Stonehenge. I'd been seeing so much praise for his work in these threads over the years that I figured it was time I did something about it. I looked over his bibliography and chose a number of books to add to my list (I like to keep things Ancient through Medieval for period/setting, or fantastical offshoots along those lines). I started adding into my eventual-reading list with his standalone works like
Stonehenge and
Agincourt. I figured if those suited my tastes I'd add The Saxon Stories, The Warlord Chronicles, and The Grail Quest novels. Well, I very much enjoyed
Stonehenge and it was refreshing to read smooth, simple prose after that choppy Turtledove text. Cornwell has a gift for using language to just the extent necessary. He gets his story across by giving a firm sense of place, then letting the characters develop without trying to foist them upon the reader. There was a time early in the novel where he violates POV but once he narrows the focus, he remains mostly consistent throughout the remainder. I think one of the eyeopeners was how well the characters can be drawn in a approx 2000 BC setting (the abbreviation used in the subtitle). Obviously, the title lets the reader know time and place, so my first fear was that aside from a main character or two, most of the supporting characters would blend together. These are borderline-Bronze Age cultures, so diversity would be tough to engender. I was mistaken. The characters, both male and female, from beginning to end kept me invested. This is certainly assisted by Cornwell launching into the events of the story right from the outset. There's no lengthy exposition to coddle the reader, nor is it necessary. Cornwell weaves plenty of description into other passages to keep a reader engrossed. There are a few places where exposition is a definite necessity in the narrative, particularly when describing some of the engineering of the titular location, but it is done concisely and in a manner that feels logically accurate, though I cannot personally comment on the precise nature of what it would really take to execute such engineering feats. I think I am going to find that Cornwell is an author I can regularly read without worrying if I'm throwing away my leisure time. I should be able to get to
Agincourt in November.
However, next in the queue is
Ken Follett's
World Without End. The mini-series has been produced and will air soon and though I likely won't catch it until it comes to DVD, I want to read this before viewing the series. I know myself well enough to realize that I often won't go back to read a text once I've seen a version of the story in a visual medium. To my mind, I'm in for the stories and having absorbed the story in the condensed form of a movie or television, I find it hard to then place the text higher on my list than the countless other stories I would like to experience in my lifetime. It might seem to be a strange dichotomy, but the reverse isn't true. I often will read a book and still be able to enjoy a movie based on it, and I rarely quibble over liberties taken to bring what an author has done on the written page to the screen, large or small. I can be quite forgiving in that way. Anyway, I'm a couple chapters into
World Without End and so far it is holding up to my expectations. I saw
Pillars of the Earth when that series came out and, uncharacteristically, decided to follow up and read that Follett novel earlier this year which I enjoyed immensely, so I have high hopes.
).
