PhoenixFalls - , reviewed on 12/15/2010 + 185 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 2

There is a lot to like about this book. First off, it's basically an ode to the engineering mindset -- I'm pretty sure it's clockpunk (at least as sure as one can be basing their decision on a few sentences in Wikipedia) and even the non-engineer characters share a similar rationalist view of the world. Instead of being vaguely Celtic or French like most high fantasy it's vaguely Italian (judging only by the names and the Guilds though; the geography bears no resemblance to Italy). And, perhaps most unusual of all, it's very much concerned with economics -- there are political and personal machinations, but there is also a keen eye for cost and profit and unequal trade.

Unfortunately, there is also a lot to dislike about this book, for me at least. The biggest issue I had with it was that I'm just not into clockpunk for the same reason I'm not into much steampunk and I'm not into hard SF -- I get really, really bored with long descriptions of technical specifications, no matter what the technology is. This book could have been half the length if those passages were cut out, and none of the story would have been lost. And it wasn't just the ingenious titular devices being described; I was also treated to very long passages about armor, and bows, and the various techniques for hunting boar. I have no clue if Parker was accurate in these descriptions, mostly because I started skipping them altogether.

Second to that in making me grind my teeth was the very rational mindset shared by all the characters. I got that that practice of immediately assessing a situation, breaking it down into its component parts, and then coming up with a solution to work that situation to his advantage is the hallmark of Vaatzes' (the engineer) character; it was a nice change from most fantasy heroes, and emphasized the message that engineers are a breed apart. But then all of the other men who got a turn as viewpoint character thought in exactly the same way, and it just rang false for me. One person, yes, I can see behaving that way; but most people, as far as I can tell, don't have the objectivity to think like that when they're in the middle of a war zone, stuck through with arrows, and that wrecked my suspension of disbelief.

Most of my other issues with the book stem from kind of the same place. A character would do something, or feel a certain way, and I'd buy it; but then three other characters would also behave exactly the same and I'd get frustrated and annoyed. For example, much of the book is about the lengths that people go to for love, and that's a rich (though well-trod) field to play in; but why, for heaven's sake, do all the men in this world have to be in love with only two women? Everybody keeps going to war with everybody else, and the armies are all male, so there should be a pretty severe gender imbalance, and Parker deals with that by having a whole class of women become traders; but it seems like so many women went off to be traders that there are no eligible beauties for the men to swoon over, and they're forced to share! (Not really to share -- this book shies away from actual sex or bad language, though it has no shortage of violence.)

And when we really get down to it, Vaatzes is a monster, and the novel is entirely his story. I found this partly problematic because I have no sympathy for monsters, or at least monsters with as little cause as he had; but I also found this problematic from a structural standpoint, because his machinations drive the entire plot, but because that plot was supposed to largely be a mystery to the reader that meant that all those passages from his perspective had to awkwardly talk around what he was plotting. That's a technique that just bothers me as a reader; mystery novels are so rarely narrated by the great detective to prevent this exact issue, where the character whose head we're in knows something and is deliberately hiding it from the reader. (An exception to this case is when we have an unreliable narrator, which is a technique that can be brilliant, but was not in use here.)

So overall I don't know how the tally sheet works on this novel. It reads very quickly, mostly because as I noted above I skimmed great huge chunks, but also because Parker's style is fairly pulpy; but even that style had its issues, because Parker would throw in very culturally specific references that didn't seem to fit the world (an offhand remark by one character that "the dog ate my homework"?!? really?!?). I can't say I enjoyed it, but I can see why other people would, and I'm totally conflicted about whether or not to read the next novel.

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