fantasy – Page 2 – Triple Take

J’s Take on The Key to the Kingdom Vol 1-4

In addition to reading The Key to the Kingdom for Triple Take, I just started watching a bunch of anime. I’ve gone through about half of “Princess Jellyfish”, which is fun, by the way. I also have a lengthy Zorro series. Because, Zorro! Anime! Also Stardriver, which I haven’t started to watch yet.

It occurred to me while reading and watching that Japanese anime and manga won’t be the same again. What’s happened there and is still going on is one of those culture-changing events. I’m sure the anime and manga will still be brilliant, but it’ll be different. Different how, I don’t know. The perspective of time is the only thing that’ll tell us that.

If you want to donate, you know where to do it. But also just take a little time this week to realize/remember how awesome Japan and Japanese creators are.

The Key to the Kingdom is interesting in that it’s a more traditional Western fantasy story. King dies, throne is up for grabs. So the young prince and a bunch of other contenders for the throne go on separate quests to try to find the ‘key to the kingdom’. And, of course, there’s dragons!

Landor is in the middle of a war, which some would term a civil war, to try to unite the neighboring lands that were once part of it. So when the king dies, they rather have to put up a strong front, or their enemies will take advantage. So when the young prince (the older prince and heir also died) says, no way, I don’t want it, they’re all kind of stuck. Not that they really wanted a 13 year old who can’t hold a sword to be king, but you sort of need someone, don’t you? So the council or whatever decides to make it a 2-year quest. Whoever finds the magical, rumored key to the kingdom — as long as they’re of royal blood, of course! — will get to be king. Or queen. And if the two years expires with no one finding it, then the prince will take over. Presumably older and wiser.

This bit I had trouble with. Are those neighboring countries just going to sit back while half the nobility is off gallavanting around? Or wouldn’t they take advantage of the lack of ruler for TWO YEARS and invade and cause general havoc? But no one seems concerned about this.

So Prince Asta sets off with swordsman Baddass and he’s off to go to a place his older brother, the heir apparent, told him to go to. Rather than specifically seeking out the key. Though he stops in at a library and whatnot on the way. And childhood friend and girl is also off having her own adventures and trying to become queen.

And then there’s dragon men. Or dragon tamers. Or dragon speakers. Or actual dragons. It’s all a little confusing. And probably meant to be. These guys are plotting, but are they plotting to help someone find the key? Or to bring down the entire kingdom? Or are both those things the same thing?

I like most of the characters. I also liked that Prince Asta, though people call him a spoiled little prince, is only kind of that. He doesn’t whine his way about the countryside. He’s not naive and ignorant. He just isn’t much for holding a sword and going into battles. And he is only 13!

The end of volume 4 seems to bring us to the point of the climax. I haven’t yet read the final volumes. Hopefully it will all come together satisfactorily.

The artwork is shoujo and pretty. Since it’s a fantasy world, the mangaka can really play with clothing and jewelry and hair and all of that. I wish there were more color pictures.

I have 2 quibbles with the translation. One, it seems the translator was going for the sort of pseudo-British, pseudo-medieval, fantasy-ish kind of language. And I found it distracting, especially at first. I think less would’ve been more in this case. Just a flavor of the language is fine. (Then again, maybe the heavyhandedness of it was present in the original and thus it’s a truer translation.)

I also noticed some copyeditting problems. You know: it’s instead of its. All ready instead of already. Noticed that more in the first two volumes.

One word to CMX: Your promos for other manga in the back? Not doing it for me. I don’t really care if SoandSo is going to hook up with SoandSo in Volume 6 of Manga Y, if I don’t even know what Manga Y is about! I think it would be more effective if you gave a summary of the manga in general, not the specific volume.

I would like to see this as an anime. I think the dragon men in particular would be very pretty in action. And I bet the music would be cool too.

The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

The Plot
Thursday Next lives in a world where time travel is possible, cloning is something everyone can do, and where the general population is as passionate about the arts as they are about religion in ours. As a result, literary forgeries, copyright infringements and book piracy are high profile crimes, and Next is a LiteraTec, a detective whose main focus is on dealing with all crimes involving literature. But even she is surprised when crimes against literature turns into crimes against literary characters: after her uncle Mycroft invents a machine that allows people to literally enter a book, it turns out that said machine can also be used to remove characters from the book into the real world. Now the master criminal Acheron Hades is threatening to destroy several of England’s most beloved classics, and Thursday Next has to stop him.

My Thoughts
I had heard good things about this series before we chose to read it, but I didn’t know (and had chosen not to find out) any details, because I wanted to go in without having been spoiled. Having had few expectations, then, it would be a bit silly to say it wasn’t as anticipated — except it wasn’t, a bit.

The world of Thursday Next is an alternate Earth of some kind. Much is similar to our own world, but much more is different. Now, in my past experience with series of books set in an alternate history of Earth, the differences tend to hinge on identifiable differences between that world and ours which have then rippled forward and caused historical divergence. For example, in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books, the big difference is the existence of dragons and their kin, and this has affected world history in ways which are still being explored. In Jo Walton’s Small Change books, the UK agreed to terms with Nazi Germany and withdrew from WWII before it really got underway, leaving many of the upper classes still able to indulge their fascist sympathies. The setting in Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy may be rather too changed to really be called an alternate history, but Strange Horizons has an incredibly in depth analysis of it available for the interested.

So what am I getting at here? Well, in all of the three examples above, the author has thought carefully about the changes they were making and how the ramifications altered the world. While reading, the worlds make internal sense. This was not the case for the setting presented in The Eyre Affair. There are plenty of changes in this alternate Earth, but they don’t seem to hang together well at all. This is a world where time travel is possible and incredibly advanced bioengineering is embarked upon by amateurs at home — and yet their computers still operate with valves and tubes? I’m sorry, what? The technology is out of whack.

There are also lots of clever asides and nudges at history embedded in the text, a number of which I’m sure I didn’t pick up on, being American and well versed in U.S. history rather than British or European. Some were important: the Charge of the Light Brigade has been shifted up a hundred years or so (the war in the Crimea is still going on as the book opens), for instance, and is an important touchstone for the heroine, Thursday Next, as she is a survivor. Others seemed, perhaps, to be setting up for future plot in the ongoing series, but this was less clear.

Part of the problem is that Fforde seems to have fallen victim to the impulse to say too much about the world, far before it was necessary. There’s a reason authors reveal things slowly and only when they need to: first, excess information can bog down the narrative and confuse the reader; second, once you’ve said something, it’s out there and you’re stuck with it — even if you have a better idea of how to handle it in a later book, when you’re actually going to focus in on it. Sure, you can retcon, but that just makes the fans angry.

A secondary result of the information packing (beyond the added confusion and internal contradictions) was that the actual real plot of the book — the danger posed to literature and to the world by Mycroft Next’s Prose Portal — felt like it didn’t ramp up until well past the midpoint of the novel. Once it did get properly underway, the narrative tightened up almost immediately and became far more readable and coherent. Enjoyable, in fact: it was a good idea and an interesting one, and I think it should have been given more pages than it was allotted. The title of the book, after all, is The Eyre Affair, not How Thursday Next Came to Be in Swindon That One Time.

In Short
This book was hampered by the fact that it wanted to be more clever than it actually was. Fforde didn’t seem to decide until halfway through if he was writing a punny Xanth romp or a novel with a plot that was going somewhere; once he settled on the latter, it got better and wrapped up not unsatisfyingly. For anyone who enjoys trying to pick out every sly reference and allusion in a work, this book would be a gold mine. For those who aren’t as enamored of such things, it’s not bad, if you can wade through the confusion of the first half (which is considerable.) Will I seek out the rest of the series? I can’t say I’m chomping at the bit, but I won’t rule it out.

J’s Take on The Eyre Affair

I’m not quite sure I knew what I was getting into when we decided to read The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I’m not quite sure I knew what I was getting into when I started to read it. Or when I was in the middle of reading it. Or now that I’ve finished.

What the heck is this thing?!

Our library has labelled it Mystery. Which most likely means Fforde is typically a mystery writer. Because I can’t say there’s much of a mystery involved in this book, though there is a crime. I guess. Yet I can’t call it an alternate history either. Or science fiction. I would call it fantasy if I had to, but a fantasy reader would typically be disappointed by it. Then again, I can only assume a mystery reader would be completely confused!!

Then again again, I was completely confused!!

Just when you think you’ve got the world and the story figured out, it’d take a 90 or 180 degree turn. And not necessarily in a horizontal direction either. And to label it bizarre might make you think it was bizarre in a cool and interesting fashion. It’s not.

It’s just not.

So the premise? Okay, it’s 1985 for starters. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem for me, but it was just one more thing I had to keep reminding myself of. And it’s the UK. Erm, I think. Well, I guess not, really, since Wales is its own country. But, anyway, something resembling the UK. And it’s an alternate history, in that people are really obsessed with literature. By which is meant classic British literature for the most part, I think. Shakespeare is really big. And there are a couple of really cool points around this part of the premise. Shakespeare animatronic coin-op machines. The original manuscript of Jane Eyre being on display and a page turned every couple of days, so regulars can read it… verrry slowly. I liked that idea. It may even be true. And then there was a Rocky Horror Picture Show version of.. was it Richard III? Very big on audience participation.

Frankenfurter — The real author of Shakespeare's plays...

Shakespeare — ... is, of course, Tim Curry!

The main character is a SpecOps operative, LiteraTec, basically a book cop. And since the Dickens Chuzzlewit manuscript is stolen, well, it’s what she does, right? Or something.

So then to add to this premise, there’s a ChronoCorps, which does time travelly-fixy-uppy stuff. The main character’s Dad is one of those guys. And she ends up dabbling in it herself, of course. He tends to retroactively fit things into the time stream. So that bananas were genetically created and then planted back in the past. And things like that.

Do I need to even mention the blimps and the dodos? Probably not. Steampunk and alternative history readers won’t be at all phased by those. And, really, minor point. And nothing to do with anything.

11 days of The Doctor: Day 9 — Great Source of Potassium

Okay, so have you got your mind wrapped around all that yet? Because there’s also vampires and werewolves for no good reason.

And the bad guy is like immortal or a wizard or something I don’t even.

AND THEN! The main char’s uncle is a crackpot mad scientist, but the lovable sort, you know, and he invents something to let you go into books and change the story. And if you change the story on the original manuscript OHNOES!

If this all sounds awesome to you, more power to you, go ahead and read it. If you’re just confused, then, believe me, reading it won’t make you less confused.

Aside from all of that, the story was not, I believe, very well-written. I was halfway through the book and I felt like we were still at the setting-up-the-story phase. Sometimes there’s be odd bits of text that.. well, I thought the main char was also narrating part of it, but how could she know what was going on? She sort of guessed things she wasn’t there for. And then when it came to the big climax, I was confused. Granted my mind was also wandering because I was bored.

And then I can also quibble that in one chapter there were two misuses of the word ‘onto’. And then later on there was the reverse problem with ‘near by’.

As for the characters themselves, I felt the main character was pretty detached from her emotions. Colleagues are killed and she doesn’t seem to really feel anything. She has conversations with a man she claims to love, but they’re all very analytical conversations. She’s even pretty detached and third person narraty when she’s giving a report to her superiors about something that went down. I mean, narraty in a pseudo-literary sort of way, not a detailed-police-report kind of way.

For the whole Jane Eyre thing, I have not read Jane Eyre. Yet when they discuss the ending of it and Eyre running off to India, I did kind of guess that was a false ending. This was pretty much confirmed for me by the way that the characters in the book (Jane Eyre) are forced to do and say things that you really don’t think they would have given the narrative of this book. Kind of like reading a parallel novel where, now that we know a lot more about the secondary character of the first book who is now the main character of the second book, you can’t quite believe that character would do and say the things s/he did, but the author’s kind of stuck with the scene the way it was written the first time.

Apparently there are more books about this main character, whose name is Thursday Next, which totally reminds me..

The names in here are stupid! And none more stupid than Jack Schitt.

So there are more books in this series, but I can only imagine what they’re about. Will Next be going into another book? Who knows? Will she be messing with the past? Travelling to the future? Fighting more vampires? Eating brains because she’s been turned into a zombie? Going to Mars on a recumbent bicycle? There is just no telling. None at all.

Before I close, I probably shouldn’t neglect the Crimean War. Which is still going on. But I know nothing about the real Crimean War. Except there was one. So. Yea.

In summation, not the worst thing I’ve ever read, but possibly the most uneven hodgepodge thing I’ve ever read. And I will not be reading another thing about Thursday Next. And probably not another Jasper Fforde either.

The Key to the Kingdom 1-4 (Kyoko Shitou)

The Plot
After the King of Landor and his eldest son are killed in battle, the people of Landor (at least the upper class people) are soon embroiled in a contest to see who will succeed to the throne. Five candidates of royal blood begin a quest for the mysterious artifact known only as the “Key to the Kingdom”. Whoever can acquire it within the allotted time frame will win the kingdom.

My Thoughts
After the death of his father and his brother, Prince Astarion, the next heir to the throne, refuses to take over or to allow a regency to be established in his name (he’s 12 or 13 as the story opens.) Rather than settle immediately upon another claimant and possibly spark a civil war, the King’s council wisely decides to organize a sort of contest: all eligible parties (aka those with some sort of blood claim to the throne, however distant) may undertake a quest for the artifact known as the “Key to the Kingdom”. Anyone who finds it within two years will win the kingdom. If no one finds it within the time frame, then the throne will revert to Prince Astarion whether he likes it or not.

Asta finds himself among the candidates, however reluctantly, and he sets off with his brother’s friend Baddorius to see if he can figure out just what this mysterious item actually is. The reader follows their progress, with intermittant updates on Letty (the only female candidate, and Asta’s friend/crush) and later Asloan Fairheart, candidate number 5.

With all of these characters and quite a few mysteries set up, I admit to feeling some concern: this is, after all, only a six volume series, and while 1000-ish pages is quite a decent length for a plain old prose trilogy, it’s actually not a whole lot of manga real estate in which to tell a complex story.

But we get right into the thick of things: the first couple of volumes serve very well to introduce the main characters and the present situation. And once the reader has a handle on the basic setting, the author wastes no time in delving into the history of the kingdoms and revealing quite a bit more about what’s actually going on.

It becomes clear very early on that the day of the summer solstice is going to be key, and the various players spend a span of several months getting into place for what will happen on that date. Volume four comes to a close as that day is dawning, leaving the reader to anticipate what’s going to happen next.

Thus far, the series has impressed me with its pacing. Not only has mangaka Kyoko Shitou resisted the temptation to overly complicate her plot, she’s also doling out important information a little bit at a time, rather than trying to keep it all until the end. I really feel like there’s enough time left for the major points to be resolved, and resolved well.

The characterization has also been good — in fact, I like Asta a lot more than I thought I was going to at the start, and I’ve been extremely pleased by the lack of stupidity shown by quite a lot of the characters. For the most part they seem like alert people who aren’t likely to fall prey to annoying plots like not passing on a vital bit of information for no good reason, or drawing entirely the wrong conclusion about something and acting a fool as a result.

Hopefully the final two volumes will continue these positive trends and bring us to a satisfactory conclusion of the story.

In Short
Mangaka Kyoko Shitou has created an imaginitive pseudo-medieval setting for her fantasy manga The Key to the Kingdom. The first two-thirds of the series is spent setting up the principle players and maneuvering them into place for the climax to come in the final two volumes. It does its job: enough is revealed to the reader to make one interested in the fates of the characters and the ultimate answers to the mysteries not yet solved.

Warriors of Alavna (N.M. Browne)

The Plot
Dan and Ursula are two British teenagers on a school field trip. A strange fog envelops them and the two find themselves transported to a strange new world where there are still Romans and Celtic tribesmen. Once there, they’re thrown into a deadly conflict for which neither is prepared, but with which they must deal if they’re ever to have a chance of finding a way home.

My Thoughts
Somehow, even though I’m the one in charge of creating the “Upcoming” page on Tripletake, I had not actually read the blurb I pasted in for this book. The result being that my impressions of the book, formed from only its title, were completely wrong. It was nothing like what I expected (which was, of course, relatively high fantasy centering around a land called Alavna).

We begin instead in Hastings (as in Battle of) where Ursula and Dan, unwilling partners on a school field trip, have found themselves in the middle of a clinging yellow mist. Dan is a smart, athletic, popular kid while Ursula is apparently an outcast who has low self-esteem due to her height (tall) and build (heavy). These facts turn out to be rather less important than one might expect in a young adult novel. The point of view shifts between Ursula and Dan throughout the whole book, but it’s most noticeable here at the beginning, where we’re most in their heads. Dan’s point of view is presented in short, nearly clauseless sentences, while Ursula’s sentence structure is more complex. It was an interesting contrast but for me, it made reading Dan’s sections difficult. It felt like the equivalent of being in heavy traffic — you’d move for a couple seconds and then jerk to a stop again. Repeat.

Ursula and Dan emerge from the mist into somewhere different — a land which might be Britain of the distant past or might not. In any case, the situation there is much the same as the situation in Britain during the middle of the Roman occupation. The Celtic tribes are finding their way of life threatened, their lands taken, their authority usurped; in desperation, they’ve been trying to use magic to lift the Veil and summon help from elsewhere. What they got was Ursula and Dan, who don’t feel especially useful.

Of course, the reader knows this will turn out not to be the case: they will obviously hold the key to solving the tribes’ problems, at least in the short term. It wouldn’t be much of a story, otherwise. Dan’s ‘talent’ is revealed fairly early on in the story: he’s what the tribes call a ‘bear sark’, aka a berserker in the grandest tradition of the word. He can turn into an unstoppable killing machine in a disturbingly easy way (disturbing to himself perhaps more than the reader) and go Hitokiri Battousai on all the bad-guys.

Ursula’s purpose is developed more slowly, and it’s she more than Dan who ends up as the central figure of the book. The Celts who summon her and Dan mistake her initially for a boy and this ruse is continued for a very large part of the book. Though it strains credulity for portions of the beginning, it’s a necessary ploy to keep her involved with the male warriors who making the decisions for the tribes. While there’s some lip service paid to the idea that the Celts were a relatively equal society whose womenfolk are known to fight alongside the men, we never see this in practice and the men all seem content enough with the patriarchy, new or not.

The plotting is well-paced; there are no sections of the book where there are too many incidents and others where there are too few. The final battle in particular was impressive, conveying as it did the hectic confusion of what an actual battle of the sort might have been like.

Overall, I’m left wondering why I don’t find myself more enthusiastic about the book or more interested in reading the rest of the trilogy. The lack of good female characters may be one reason; there are only two in the book of any note: one a bitchy screwup and one, Ursula, who spends her time disguised as a boy. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really start to feel a connection to the characters until the very end, right when it was clear that everything was about to change again — the next book may be a continuation, but it probably won’t be a continuation of this particular set of circumstances. I don’t know. All I can say is that it didn’t excite me, but I don’t entirely rule out finishing the series.

In Short
In the end, I have mixed feelings about this book. Browne is a good writer, and yet there are other good writers whose stuff I just don’t enjoy. The story itself was pretty solid, but at the end of it I felt like I still had a pretty shallow feel for the two main characters, Ursula and Dan. I was told that they had changed and grown, but since the book started and stopped without any real look at them in the ‘real world’ I have no particular evidence of them either before or after these incidents. There was a distinct lack of female characters, and our one lead female spends almost the entire book pretending to be a boy; the only other prominent female is jealous, impulsive and behaves like a fool. For that alone I should dislike it, but knowing it’s part of a trilogy leaves me with the hope that like many series, it’s much better when taken as a whole.