The story starts off with a one-eyed, three-legged dog expiring like an old wounded warrior, and then things get stranger and stranger. The Wooden Sea is a novel I picked up thanks to a recommendation in the 2003 Nebula Awards Showcase as an example of the direction the fantasy genre was heading. And fantasy here means fantastical, not medieval.
I think if I had to give just one label to this book, it would be surreal. The book starts off odd, then gets strange, and then gets truly weird. The lead character, a police chief in a small town, was extremely well rendered, and shows some real growth both prior to the timeline of the novel and within the novel as well.
The novel does suffer from something I think a lot of modern surreal novels suffer from, though... Things are somewhat explained by the end, and the explanation seems contrived and a bit too tidy. Somehow, the magic of the bizarre needs to be left as mysterious magic, and when it gets explained, its somewhat of a let-down. (I got this same feeling from Stephen Kings recent behemoth, The Dome, but Carrolls reasoning here is significantly better than Kings was.)
But if you like strange, give this one a shot!
4 of 5 stars.
In spite of feeling impatient with the vehicle, I was able to stay with this wonderful tale because Carroll created believable characters that I cared about! We are faced with watching as the main character faces life's important questions: What am I doing here? Who are we and what is life really about?
