Feist, Raymond E.
Flight of the Nighthawks
The Darkwar, Book 1
Well, it’s been a while
between drinks, and I vaguely recall enjoying ‘Magician’ all those years ago.
Jordan-like Feist is wringing this cash-cow dry: we’ve still got the same hero,
but we’re up to grandchildren now.
Has Feist matured over the
years? Silly question.
Even my version of the book
has on the cover, ‘File under guilty pleasure’ – so at least the publisher is
acknowledging that this really isn’t something to proudly endorse.
This book is almost insulting
in the clichés it throws up. It’s beyond the trappings of the genre – swords,
sorcery, faux-medieval setting – and deep into stereotype and transparent
techniques. To get really condescending for a minute, it’s highly adolescent:
oooh, look, here’s two teenage boys who link up with a hero, so they get
trained to be great fighters, have adventures, and meet beautiful promiscuous
girls whose clothes keep unaccountably falling off. The daydream also includes
lovely mummies and daddies that pause now and then to give everyone hugs and
say how wonderfully they’ve done.
The baddie is the laziest
aspect of a lazy book. He has no motive, could be anyone, has unexplained
ludicrous powers, and, here’s the best bit, is always available for the next
book because when you kill him in a big climax he comes back to life! Since
he’d already done this a couple of times before in this book they imply that this
time they’ve actually found out how to kill him for good. No, actually, they
don’t imply it, they downright say it. So, this
climax must be really important, not
like the other ones in earlier books that didn’t turn out to be. But, gee whiz,
who would have thought it … he does pop
up again so you’ll have to buy Book 21b. How transparent is this??
Meanwhile you’ve also got
lots of glib dialogue – reminds me of the sort of thing you hear on NCIS
(classically adolescent), or in books by Guy Gavriel Kay or the appalling Terry Goodkind.
You know, grandiose empty threats, impressive sounding but ultimately stupid
observations (eg. “We’d be dead by now if they wanted us to be,” said by the
heroes about the supposedly supreme assassins, the ‘Nighthawks’, but:
a)
Ah, they *do* want them dead, there
is no advantage to them leaving them alive, and they try to kill them a few
times;
b)
Whenever we do meet the Nighthawks
they tend to fall down as easily as any other faceless body-count enemies,
being slain, for example, by two kids who’ve never actually had combat against
trained fighters.)
It’s not as utterly horrible
as some other attempts, but there’s the ubiquitous practise of describing
people as extremes of intelligence or sophistication or wit or insight or
whatever, but never actually having them say anything to justify such praise.
For example, we have bit of philosophy from the leading thinkers of several
worlds – all about how you good and evil need each other. Riiigght. Nobody
quite delving into the implications, “So you’re saying, for example, that
someone who looks after their kids really needs
the occasional paedophile to come along when their back is turned. Uh, OK.”
Many of the personalities are
interchangeable, perhaps understandable for some of the minor characters, but
Nakor, for example, is supposed to be key and intriguing. Feist sets him up as
this keenly incisive detached observer. How? Did you notice that he says just
about every line, ‘with a grin’. Not even occasionally, ‘with a smile’, or
‘amused’, but always, ‘with a grin’. This wears a bit thin after the first few
times.
Plotwise, of course, anything
could happen any time: gods, bandits, war, hugs. You might even bump into an
Irishman or an Aussie. It happens because it feels nice, not to be part of
something particularly cohesive. But the nice feeling isn’t ultimately
satisfying – the guilty pleasure idea does work if you think of it as a fat
bloke on a couch having too many doughnuts – to a point where even the
doughnuts don’t give him that much pleasure any more (and, to stretch this
metaphor even further, not as much pleasure as someone with some more
discernment has sitting down to a rich meal).
Feist is pleasing a market,
and ably – doubtless this sold by the tonne. Maybe he’s aware how superficial
these things are, but who’s to argue with a guy paying his bills – I know I do
some pretty bland things in my day job. Still, it would be nice if he pushed
himself to a higher level, I think he’d still sell even if he did write
something as good as David
Gemmell or Ursula
LeGuin.
November 2008