(no subject)

[camwyn]

A third female character showed up in passing in The Chosen yesterday- a slave, one of the ritually mutilated ones. There are a lot of those in this society. And frankly, other than the main character and a half-brother, there's nobody else in this book so far who hasn't made me think 'my God, you're a terrible person' except for the handful who've made me go 'my God, you're going to die soon, aren't you'.

The setting's fascinating and I kind of want to see how all of this unfolds, but it feels like the same kind of fascinating as when I used to take public health classes to learn about the most horrifying diseases possible. On the other hand, the book does not carry the feeling I got from Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which was "You're reading this because you THINK it's going to be fascinating and unusual and dark but really what it is is an excuse for me to be CLEVER at you and put SEX all over the place and be CLEVER some more and then I'm going to end the book in a wholly unsatisfying way that shows how CLEVER I am".

(I still kind of resent Michael Swanwick for that and will never again read any book that has 'darkly erotic' anywhere in its reviews unless that phrase is couched in terms on the order of 'about as darkly erotic as a pound of Oscar Mayer bologna'. Especially not if it's praised as witty or clever, because that kind of praise, in my experience, means the author is writing something designed to make himself or herself feel superior rather than something that I'd enjoy reading.)

Anyway, I'm probably going to see about finishing the Pinto book, but it's seven hundred pages long and each time I come up for air at the end of a chapter or two, it's disconcerting to have to plug back into the real world. I don't know that reading large stretches at a time would be healthy for me.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Well that's a shame. Guess you can't always have everything.

[camwyn]

The thing with the book so far is that the culture and the world itself is kinda fascinating. It's really not like the kind of thing you'd find anywhere else in the fantasy section of the bookstore. From an anthropological point of view I want to see more of it and find out more about it, but from a personal point of view it's kinda difficult to put the book down and get my head out of a space where absolutely everyone of any kind of note is plotting against absolutely everyone else and even the protagonist sees nothing very unusual about 'oh shit, my low-blooded half-brother accidentally saw someone else of my blood-rank without the other guy's mask on and now I have to decide between betraying my father's tightly held secret to the guy my brother saw versus allowing that guy to have my brother's eyes gouged out'. (Being the protagonist, he doesn't like that this can happen, but nobody actually questions the fact that that kind of thing is the Law-that-must-be-obeyed, at least not in the 175 pages I've read so far.)

I kind of hope we see something more promising about the protagonist soon. While he's a decent guy who tries to protect his people from the worst of his society's nature, so far he hasn't done that much that I can actually root for. He's mostly been Captain Viewpoint to give the reader an introduction to this world rather than having had any action or doing much of anything by his own choice. I've read books that took place in terrible grim worlds before- The Night Land springs to mind- but the protagonists there did more than just act as a tour guide for their world.

(On the other hand I have to allow Mr. Pinto some slack. This was apparently his first novel, so that may be part of it. Maybe the pacing gets better later.)