Reading:
- Master of the Cauldron by David Drake
- The Snapper by Roddy Doyle
- "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"
- "Dolly Hobbles"
First of all, the guiding premise of the story is that Garric must unite the Isles against the coming Evil, or else all of mankind will be destroyed. In fact, no greater motivation for unification is given, even though the Isles have not been united in 1,000 years. Now that's a nice round number, but just imagine if all of a sudden, some whackjob claiming to be the distant ancestor of Charlemagne decided he had to unite Europe under one flag (i.e., his).
In fact, the entire argument reminds me just a little too much of the "War on Terror" propaganda campaign which has dominated so much of the media for the last six and a half years. Now I specifically do not want this blog to get political
Obama in '08!
but I don't think I should ignore politics when it slaps me in the face. In the world of the Isles, all Wizardry is Evil! Unless, of course, the Good Guys are using it, and they do it the right way. (Is "waterboarding" a spell?) Humans are the Good Guys, but everything that is non-human is presented as monstrous and extremely well motivated to kill us. The huge climax of Cauldron features wave after wave of misshapen creatures boiling out of the ground to serve as sword fodder. Why do they want to kill? We never find out, although it might have something to do with Wizardry. And when the Wizard dies, the rest of the poor sons of bitches are hunted down anyway. No pity. No mercy. It becomes a game, and even the game is held up as a Good way to train the soldiers for battles to come.
To be fair, this is the first book in this series in which these overtones have really come through for me, and I don't know anything about Drake's politics besides what I read in the pages of his books. And all of the above is a critique of the themes of the story, not of the mechanics of the writing itself. Both are valid critiques, but if the point of this blog is to improve my skills as a writer, I should turn to the mechanics before I'm done.
First of all, the titular character, this Master of the Cauldron, doesn't even appear until the last fifty or so pages. When he does, we do not recognize him as such until towards the very end. You see, the misshapen creatures I mentioned before are pouring out of a cauldron, and the Wizard who enchanted it is their master, and you see... you see where he went with that?
But let's rewind a little first. As I suspected, it wasn't long before each of the four main characters were split up to pursue their own plotline. Ilna and her pirate boyfriend Chalcus get sucked into a parallel universe/dimension/other world/strange continent/place, just like always, along with a dude named Davus who seems to be pretty cool and likes rocks. They're purportedly searching for little orphan Merota, but she doesn't get much of a mention except at the beginning and ends of that plot thread. Their story consists of a Journey towards a Citadel, with adventures along the way that don't really contribute to the story, and barely add to the characterizations of any of the three.
Meanwhile, Ilna's brother Cashel gets whisked away by a lady-type Wizard who seems to be pretty decent. She gives him the grand tour of a Crystal City, and I spent the whole book, until the end, thinking that it was the same Citadel mentioned in Ilna's plot. After all, Ilna and Cashel disappeared off the same mountain at the same time, so why couldn't they be in the same universe? Both plotlines were talking about the rule of the Old King, and described a similar wasteland of neglect. One plot mentioned trolls made out of rock, the other plot told of the Made Men who were created by the King. It all fit together! I was looking forward to seeing Ilna and Cashel on opposite sides of a growing war. That would be juicy!
It also didn't happen. They were in two separate alternate universes/parallel dimensions/conveniently distant plot threads. Huh. Cashel winds up inspiring a bunch of kids to give their bodies to six dead heroes and go into battle, where some of them die, but that's okay, because it's a Good Thing. Oh, and the Wizard Lady is a Queen and also Cashel's mom, which we figured out from the moment she introduced herself, even though Cashel had to be told at the end of the book by people who weren't even there.
Now onto Sharina, who managed not to get sucked into any parallel alternate dimensional pocket universes until the beginning of Chapter 13! After a bizarre sequence in which she cuts off her hair to give to some sea nymphs for a faster transit time back home, she dicks around for a bit, gets zapped to the enemy headquarters, and unveils a plot for a bunch of bronze armored blond guys to take over the kingdom. They kill a bunch of them and save the day. But then she is needed back at Garric's plotline, so they hop the deus ex machina express back to the island where they started.
That's where Garric has been hanging out this whole time with his hot library girlfriend, Liane. (Well, she's a noblewoman of some description, but she has the function of a glorified secretary throughout the whole story, and I can just picture her being played by Jennifer Garner wearing horn-rimmed glasses. She would take them off halfway through the story to reveal her RAGING FEMININITY!) He's trying to play nice and take over the island without a fight using all sorts of passive aggressive political techniques. Meanwhile, the voice of his long dead ancestor Carus provides a sort of commentary in his head, which usually consists of variations on "Yep, I wouldn't have done that, because I was a bloodthirsty bastard when I was a king."
Eventually, Garric gets it into his head to, I don't know, do something about the people he suspected from the very beginning, but it's Too Late, and the freakazoid patrol comes bubbling out of the Cauldron which, we are informed, has a Master. (This guy is killed toward the end of the book by the Isles equivalent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I just reread that sentence, and it makes the book sound a lot cooler than it is.)
As my confession indicated, I must have enjoyed this book on some level, or else why keep reading? In part, it's because I've ridden through six books with these people, and I want to find out what happens. But also understand, I waited over a year between books five and six, and I feel no real need to pick up Fortress of Glass immediately. (That's book seven, and the volume that promises to be the antepenultimate entry in the series. Next to next to last, in case I made that word up.)
I think the explanation is that they became all the same. I kept waiting for character development that never came, because all four of them are already perfect... even Ilna, for all her self hate. So here's what I would do for each of them to re-energize the stories.
Garric:
As I mentioned before, he's got a voice of a long-dead king in his head. (That must be inconvenient when he's trying to get some hot library sex with Liane. You don't want to hear comments like, "You're a much better lover than I was, lad! You really care about the lady. I just drove my oxen for home like the oxcart was on fire!")
The problem is, Garric and Carus always agree. Let's have some disagreement, dude! And even better, leave it vague as to who the reader is supposed to think is right! Carus may try to take over Garric's body at some point or another, at least to accomplish one task. Maybe he succeeds? Does Garric try to banish him? Let's say he does, and loses the advice that he needs later on. Garric is proud of the job he's been doing, but what if he gets prideful? Does he do something to hurt Liane?
In essence, Garric is powerful when he has his ancestor's advice, his girlfriend's support, and an army at his back. Okay. Take those things away, one by one, and make him earn them back. We'll learn who Garric is when we see him with nothing.
Sharina:
She was great in the first book when she had a mentor who was teaching her the way of the Fierce Warrior. Her plots have been kind of bland since then, even with Tenoctris the Good Wizard at her side.
I'd like to see Tenoctris fail at something, or for her strength to give out. She has just been too perfect up until now, always lasting as long as necessary, magic always doing what she intends and no more. Has she no desire for anything more?
Much is made out of the way Tenoctris uses bamboo shoots as an athame (read: magic wand). What if she finds an athame that she thinks she can control, a Good athame, as it were. And at first, it seems to be working, but as time goes on and she grows more powerful, she starts to change, and has to give it up.
That addresses her, but not Sharina. She has acted as Tenoctris' friend and caretaker, but what about when she has to step in and do the intervention? And when she does, she fails. More than fails. Tenoctris blasts her, and suddenly Sharina isn't the beautiful blonde princess anymore. Maybe she's old, or ugly, or disfigured. Will Cashel still love her? And for goodness' sake, don't do the Fairy tale Fuck-up Fix at the end and turn everything back to normal. Give us consequences we have to live with!
Cashel:
Dawwww, he's a big dumb lug who always does the right thing. Isn't that wonderful? Cashel has absolutely, positively, the least character develop of anybody in these stories. Yet somehow, he's the most likable character, and I can tell that Drake likes to write him. He's the perpetual underdog in intelligence, but his simplicity, sincerity, and fucking huge muscles manage to win the day every time. But above all, you can always rely on him to do the right thing, no matter what.
There's two ways you can go with this. One, have him get scared and not do the right thing for once. Show us he's human. Unfortunately, six books on, that probably wouldn't work, since it goes against everything we know about his character. So take it a different way.
Instead, have him do the right thing, push forward no matter what the cost... and then he finds the cost is greater than he had thought. Maybe it has something to do with Sharina or Ilna, or even Garric. If Cashel had simply been misled, it wouldn't bother him. He would blame the person who misled him and not himself. No, Cashel will have to have been demonstrably wrong about something, and that leaves it up to him to fix it. And I would love to see him in a situation that his quarterstaff can't fix.
Ilna:
I saved her for last since she's the most interesting of the four. In the first book, she actually had plot development, starting as a chick crushing on Garric and turning into a force for Evil. Hot damn! Then the spell is broken and she sees a trail of death and destruction behind her, and decides to take the path of righteousness.
Yes, that's the same path that the others are on. But they are on that path because they are led to by their very natures. Ilna walks that path because she chooses to... in fact, chooses to act against her nature. So every single day, she feels the temptation to be and do evil, and resists because she has made that choice.
But arrrrrrgggghhhh, that potential gets wasted. She has never deviated from that path, even for a moment. It's like the recovering alcoholic who never takes another drink. That's awesome in real life, but in literature, if you've got a recovering alcoholic, he's got to take a drink at least once. Because then you get all the meaty territory of figuring out how to deal with backsliding and all the self doubt and self loathing it entails.
Another thing--emotion. Ilna seems to be emotionless, so much so that the scene at the end where she thinks Chalcus and Merota are dead rang completely untrue. (They had been turned to stone. So? The story started with her freeing someone who had been turned to stone. You can't tell me she wouldn't have figured out a way to turn them back if Davus hadn't fixed things.)
I would have liked seeing her worry for Merota building throughout the story. Let emotion get in the way, let her make mistakes. Let's see an explosion! Let's see her take it out on Chalcus, and let's see him not be perfectly understanding for once. I want some goddamn conflict!
In conclusion (because I should conclude, I really should), the characters only have external conflicts. The story could be improved if they had internal conflict, or conflict among themselves. Without that, they don't change, and without change, each book is interchangeable with the one before it. Of course, that might be just what Drake is going for.
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