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Aug. 18th, 2006 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
godreamWeird spam header of the day: "funeral home continental breakfast"
So I read Lord Valentine's Castle on the beach the other day, and adored most of it. Especially the first half, I guess, and especially for its fantastic array of characters.
The end, though, didn't hold me as much as the beginning. Our hero is making his way towards and up the mountain that his castle and his throne lie atop, the final conflict approaches, and yet somehow I didn't feel the tension building. Maybe a lot of that lack is that the protagonist, Valentine, is a pacifist: nothing makes him quite as unhappy as being forced into battle.
And the other half is probably the Roger Zelazny blurb on the back cover: "A grand, picaresque tale" et cetera. Zelazny's one of my favorite authors, and with his name a reminder on the back, reading this saga of a displaced lord making his way up a mountain to his throne, of course I was drawing parallels to Nine Princes in Amber, Corwin scaling Kolvir with Bleys in his first attempt to overthrow his brother Eric.
(It's been an awfully long time since I re-read that book, so bear with me...)
Neither battle ends with the enemy vanquished, exactly. Corwin loses and is captured. (Hey, it's only the first book of the series, he can't win yet!) Valentine somehow makes his way to the enemy captain, an old friend of his, and convinces him that Valentine is the true Coronal and the one he should be fighting for -- which is (of course) super typical of the character, makes total sense, we've seen evidence of the guy's ridiculous charisma and hatred of bloodshed throughout.
It still felt like cheating, somehow -- though I didn't feel incredibly emotionally invested in the battle to start with, I guess, after having been told so often "boy, battles sure do suck". Post-battle we're told that "every casualty brought a stab of pain to Valentine," but none of the main characters get killed off, in spite of the fact that (improbably?) all of them seem to be in the thick of it. There's this immense army of redshirts -- on both sides -- and Silverberg wants us to believe they're not redshirts to Valentine, but at the same time we have to contrast the images of the vast army with those of Valentine and his old childhood buddy (the enemy captain) sitting around laughing and chatting and renewing their friendship.
(Corwin's got redshirts too, but he admits it freely: he doesn't care about the little guys. He feels a little bad that they're all going to die but that's what he recruited them for. Which is cruel but narratively honest?)
Maybe it's the lack of a bad guy? Halfway through the novel we find out that Dominin Barjazid, son of the King of Dreams, is the Big Bad. We don't see him at all until the final showdown, which starts intense: "I made you pretty, didn't I?" says Dominin, reminding us that he's (we think) masterminded the plan that dumped Valentine identity-robbed on the other side of the planet. Cool. So Dominin does his best to intimidate, dark and power-mad; Valentine tries to win him over... and then eight pages before the end of the novel we get a switchoff: really it's the shapeshifting indigenes of the planet who are the real Bad Guys. One of them is the power behind the throne, manipulating Dominin; the conflict we've been reading the last few pages isn't the important one. (The Real Bad Guy gets away too.)
I'm not sure I can argue Eric (Corwin's brother and rival) as three-dimensional, at least not in NPiA. But I feel like his buildup is much more effective: we hear about him through all sorts of people's eyes, as well as through Corwin's returned memories. Corwin fences with him briefly before the final battle, a pre-fight fight that lets us see they are of similar capabilities and lets us actually meet the antagonist before the climax.
Dominin spends most of LVC pretending to be Valentine, so he can't really be all that outright malicious without exposing himself. Okay, we hear about how he's not doing such a fabulous job as ruler, and of course we know he's stolen Valentine's identity, which isn't very nice either. But, well, I don't find myself wanting him to lose quite as much as I want Eric to lose... and since if Valentine really wants to win, it's well-disguised by his general warm-and-fuzzy-ness, I don't find myself wanting him to win as much as I want Corwin to win. Or maybe I just sympathize better with assholes.
*shrugs*
It was a really good book nevertheless.
The other thing I wondered about while reading: in the movie Mirrormask, one of the supporting characters is a young juggler named Valentine -- which seems to stretch coincidence somewhat. I wonder if it was a deliberate homage of some sort on Neil Gaiman's part?
So I read Lord Valentine's Castle on the beach the other day, and adored most of it. Especially the first half, I guess, and especially for its fantastic array of characters.
The end, though, didn't hold me as much as the beginning. Our hero is making his way towards and up the mountain that his castle and his throne lie atop, the final conflict approaches, and yet somehow I didn't feel the tension building. Maybe a lot of that lack is that the protagonist, Valentine, is a pacifist: nothing makes him quite as unhappy as being forced into battle.
And the other half is probably the Roger Zelazny blurb on the back cover: "A grand, picaresque tale" et cetera. Zelazny's one of my favorite authors, and with his name a reminder on the back, reading this saga of a displaced lord making his way up a mountain to his throne, of course I was drawing parallels to Nine Princes in Amber, Corwin scaling Kolvir with Bleys in his first attempt to overthrow his brother Eric.
(It's been an awfully long time since I re-read that book, so bear with me...)
Neither battle ends with the enemy vanquished, exactly. Corwin loses and is captured. (Hey, it's only the first book of the series, he can't win yet!) Valentine somehow makes his way to the enemy captain, an old friend of his, and convinces him that Valentine is the true Coronal and the one he should be fighting for -- which is (of course) super typical of the character, makes total sense, we've seen evidence of the guy's ridiculous charisma and hatred of bloodshed throughout.
It still felt like cheating, somehow -- though I didn't feel incredibly emotionally invested in the battle to start with, I guess, after having been told so often "boy, battles sure do suck". Post-battle we're told that "every casualty brought a stab of pain to Valentine," but none of the main characters get killed off, in spite of the fact that (improbably?) all of them seem to be in the thick of it. There's this immense army of redshirts -- on both sides -- and Silverberg wants us to believe they're not redshirts to Valentine, but at the same time we have to contrast the images of the vast army with those of Valentine and his old childhood buddy (the enemy captain) sitting around laughing and chatting and renewing their friendship.
(Corwin's got redshirts too, but he admits it freely: he doesn't care about the little guys. He feels a little bad that they're all going to die but that's what he recruited them for. Which is cruel but narratively honest?)
Maybe it's the lack of a bad guy? Halfway through the novel we find out that Dominin Barjazid, son of the King of Dreams, is the Big Bad. We don't see him at all until the final showdown, which starts intense: "I made you pretty, didn't I?" says Dominin, reminding us that he's (we think) masterminded the plan that dumped Valentine identity-robbed on the other side of the planet. Cool. So Dominin does his best to intimidate, dark and power-mad; Valentine tries to win him over... and then eight pages before the end of the novel we get a switchoff: really it's the shapeshifting indigenes of the planet who are the real Bad Guys. One of them is the power behind the throne, manipulating Dominin; the conflict we've been reading the last few pages isn't the important one. (The Real Bad Guy gets away too.)
I'm not sure I can argue Eric (Corwin's brother and rival) as three-dimensional, at least not in NPiA. But I feel like his buildup is much more effective: we hear about him through all sorts of people's eyes, as well as through Corwin's returned memories. Corwin fences with him briefly before the final battle, a pre-fight fight that lets us see they are of similar capabilities and lets us actually meet the antagonist before the climax.
Dominin spends most of LVC pretending to be Valentine, so he can't really be all that outright malicious without exposing himself. Okay, we hear about how he's not doing such a fabulous job as ruler, and of course we know he's stolen Valentine's identity, which isn't very nice either. But, well, I don't find myself wanting him to lose quite as much as I want Eric to lose... and since if Valentine really wants to win, it's well-disguised by his general warm-and-fuzzy-ness, I don't find myself wanting him to win as much as I want Corwin to win. Or maybe I just sympathize better with assholes.
*shrugs*
It was a really good book nevertheless.
The other thing I wondered about while reading: in the movie Mirrormask, one of the supporting characters is a young juggler named Valentine -- which seems to stretch coincidence somewhat. I wonder if it was a deliberate homage of some sort on Neil Gaiman's part?
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Date: 2006-08-19 02:22 am (UTC)Two species -- yes, I think you're right. Corwin and Bleys go and find a shadow with a brother-gods myth, right? And then totally abuse it, 'cause sometimes the long-prophesied heroes are just assholes out to take advantage of suckers. I walked among Shadows, and found a race of furry creatures, dark and clawed and fanged, reasonably manlike, and about as intelligent as a freshman in the high school of your choice-sorry, kids, but what I mean is they were loyal, devoted, honest, and too easily screwed by bastards like me and my brother. I'm so re-reading those books as soon as I can get my hands on my copies.
(So who *is* really the best qualified to run the place? Benedict, if I remember right?)
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Date: 2006-08-19 02:26 am (UTC)Yep, that was the deal. :)
Half.com has these books for ridiculously cheap, if I recall correctly. (I'd offer to lend you one of my copies, but they're all packed way somewhere.)
And yes, I'd say Benedict. I'm not even exactly sure he'd want it, but he's definitely the best qualified.