Graeme Smith (1)

I actually heard about this book reading the author's pitch on Query Shark; it sounded intriguing and I discovered it had been published, to my delight. As far as I'm concerned, this was a decent read that unfortunately didn't quite reach the potential that summary promised.

Let's do the good first. I liked the premise of the book, and it had several fun concepts in it - the protagonist, the teenaged dragon, the sergeants, how the halflings work, the entire Idiot business, and smaller touches throughout. When the humour worked for me, it worked. I liked the concept of the threat too.

What I felt undermined that work was twofold: lack of clarity, and a rather dated air. I'm going to delve into that a bit because I don't want to just throw criticism around.

Basically, there are several intersecting factors that contribute to the writing being unclear, and unfortunately that meant I found myself regularly being confused about what was going on. Not just the overall plot, but what was actually happening on the page. There's the overall plot, which is complicated in a vaguely noirish sort of way and gets slowly revealed over time. There's the protagonist, who is an unreliable narrator despite being first-person, and holds back crucial information. He's also supposed to be slow on the uptake, and not understand women (of which more later). There's also the setting, which is a comedic fantasy world in a very self-aware way, so people make jokes about not having invented the French yet, and use lots of references that don't exist in their world. There also seem to be some explicit laws of drama that exist in the setting, although I couldn't quite work out what they were (which is itself a bit of a problem) as well as a set of Rules that the narrator understands to apply to the events of the story, but which are themselves only discussed right at the end.

And finally, sometimes the actually writing just isn't very clear. There were sections that I reread two or three times while I tried to work out whether something was a description of what was happening, a description of something that happened in the past, a comedic aside, or something else entirely. There are flashback sections (I think?!?) and time cuts, which add to the confusion. The comedic asides often tend towards being back-and-forth misunderstanding routines that get quite long, and the writing wasn't tight enough to maintain clarity for the reader while the characters are confused.

(I think there were also some issues with line breaks, which meant dialogue and description sometimes ran together in ways that seems odd - that added to the confusion, but I can't fairly ascribe that to Smith)

I don't want to say that the writer was trying to do too much - it's pretty complex as I said, but I don't think he was overstretching himself - but I feel like this whole book could have really done with another editing pass and at least one more round of (new) beta readers to try and nail down the clarity issue. I personally enjoy comic fantasy and was interested in the plot, but I know some people would have given up because they told me so when I talked to them about this book.

I also felt that the ending fell rather flat, because essentially it felt like a deus ex machina. I'd tentatively guessed at the Big Secret (which I won't reveal) but that didn't matter. However, the solution to the problem involved a lot of trickery around those aforementioned Rules, and unfortunately I didn't feel like they'd been sufficiently well-established during the story to really support being the crux and key of the predicament. So it sort of felt like, having created a powerful threat, the author was suddenly introducing limits to that threat and immediately using those limits to defeat it. I might have missed something during reading, though.

So, that second issue. The style of the book, or specifically its comedy, felt rather dated, and that comes down a fairly fundamental part of the book, which is gender. The protagonist's inability to understand women is a constant refrain, but it's a fairly blunt feature. Essentially, he's completely oblivious to even explicit female interest, even in his thoughts. Alongside this is a steady trickle of the sort of thing aging comics used to do onstage: men are clueless dullards, women are cryptic and emotional, both are incapable of taking the slightest step to overcome their misunderstandings. It didn't bother me, it just didn't do anything for me either. I was intrigued by the book's tagline that "To Segorian Anderson, women are an open book. The problem is, he never learned to read" but I suppose I was expecting something a bit more complicated than this.

I didn't dislike this book. I enjoyed it on the whole, and I thought the premise and multiple aspects of the book were interesting and had a lot of potential. I felt quite invested in the love triangle, for example. Unfortunately I thought the writing detracted somewhat from both the plot (by confusing me) and the humour (by getting in my way). I also felt that the reliance on a specific style of gender humour missed opportunities - I feel like Segorian's naivety and his dynamic with Sandy and Sonea could have been exploited with more variety, even without shifting from the basic premise of "doesn't understand women". Given the intriguing touches that Smith throws in elsewhere, I think he could have managed it.

I'm rating this 3 stars, which for me means I'm glad I read it, but have enough reservations that I don't immediately want to buy his other books or recommend it to my friends. I'm interested to see what Smith can come up with in future though.… (plus d'informations)

Jack Shadow is a very interesting and surprisingly complex novel. I'm not sure even how to describe it, but to say it was about a man named Jack whose job it was to nudge history according to the plans of someone. But when Jack cheats, the future gets, well, complicated.

The writing is a delight to read, if you like quirkiness. The plot is, well, not sure what to think. Like Graeme Smith's other book A Comedy of Terrors, it started off light. Then it got very complex in spots but I only noticed the complexity after it got complex so I did get a bit lost.

I will have to re-read this sometime and honestly, it is good enough to take the time to re-read it.… (plus d'informations)

Sagorian is an Idiot. Not just any idiot but the Royal Idiot. Most days his job is simple and only gets exiled for life but that's not a problem since he has a key to the back door. But when a nonexistent dragon shows up in the kingdom it takes an Idiot to go be it's not dragonslayer, and that's when the job really gets tricky.

In this story the twist and turn happen not only in the plot line but in the characters conversations as well. This is not your traditional fantasy story as fantasy may not yet have been invented.… (plus d'informations)