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kaigouLong, long time overdue, as I read the final book in Francis’ Path series back in, hrm, last March, and Dayton’s concluding (I presume) book in the Compass series in October or thereabouts, and then finished Francis’ first title in her Crosspointe series, in, uhm, the week it came out. (Whenever it was, it was before last month, and that means ancient history in my brain; I need a gray-matter housecleaning day.)
Alright, to get this started, the titles are Path of Blood and The Cipher (Diana Pharaoh Francis) and The Eternal Rose (Gail Dayton). First, though, two technical notes for when you read either.
I saw Dayton’s final installment was out on Fictionwise, it was late at night, and I was so thrilled I d/led rather than wait (and invariably forget) the next time I was in a brickfront store. I’m used to reading online now, and it doesn’t bother me, but someone at Juno really needs to be kicked in the ass about their pathetic QA skills. Entire pages have lost the hard carriage returns, which means paragraphs are run together into one massive chunk. Teasing out dialogue with no line separations is not easy... any more than the parts where every soft carriage return got turned into a hard carriage return, for a page or two. I’m guessing something got mangled when they converted to PDF, but still, it’s pretty sad (not to mention frustrating, especially when it happens just as the story’s pace picks up, yet your reading speed drops to nothing as you try and figure out who-the-hell is talking or if it’s the same person).
For Path of Blood, I recommend that when you get to chapter 43 (the final chapter, I believe), just slap a mental “EPILOGUE” over the numbering. Given that the author hadn’t failed me, nor thrown me out of the story with awkward pacing or wording or related technical issues, and then went in a massive leap from the main storyline to a jump forward with little warning... as a reader (once I finished flipping back a chapter to reread to make sure I’d not missed some kind of clue, and then I checked the page numbers, and then the chapter numbers, but nope, nothing was missing), I could only chalk it up to the same editorial shove that had to have produced a similar circumstance in The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers), in which the story’s pacing and location take a startling leap forward: it’s got to be some editor saying, “look, you get twenty more pages to wrap this up, and that’s it, got that!?” But there’s no real disconnect in Francis’ story itself, as long as the reader can get some kind of a placement clue that the story’s pacing/location has just changed so significantly... so when you purchase a copy, open it to the last chapter, and cross out the number and replace it with EPILOGUE. You’ll thank me when you get to that point, really.
If you want to refresh, I’ve already done commentaries of the previous books in each series:
- Dayton: Barbed Rose, Compass Rose
- Francis: Path of Blood, Path of Honor
Tangent: the editorial shove wouldn’t surprise me, seeing how much I’ve heard from published authors about pressure to write shorter books (mostly so more can sit on the shelf, rather than because readerly attention span is decreasing). Yes, I spent my time packing books onto the shelves in my own bookstore, and fussing like any bookperson over the eternal question of what to do with those pesky way-way-undersized books and those overlarge artbook-sized books -- how do you get people to look somewhere else when they think they’re already in the appropriate section? -- but all that aside, I’m not convinced that the Big Boxes of B&N and Borders aren’t maligning the entire book industry far, far out of whack.
Frex, a paperback book that’s x inches by y inches and is no more than x inches thick -- I seem to recall it’s 1.5”? one of the LJ-based Tor publishers explained it, awhile back, but I can’t recall the specifics -- anyway, if your book is x inches thick, it means (and this is important to someone, mainly, the buyers for B&N/BB and pretty much NO ONE ELSE) that when you do a face-out, that X number of books in the stack is equal to the rest of the books when spine-out. And, too, that the shelf widths at the bookstores are all set (in terms of they’re all installed/designed from the same manufacturer, regardless of being in Alaska or Alabama), so if you know the shelf is 22” long, that means you can get in 11 books at 2” width... or you could have 22 titles packed into the shelf if none are more than an inch thick.
It’s knowing that publishers sit around and come up with ways to please the two largest (and entirely unavoidable) buyers -- who are demonical and tyrranical entities in themselves -- that makes it easier for me to give a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt when I come across should-be-epilogue or abrupt-jump-forward steps. This is especially true if I can tell (as a reader, and a writer) that the story wouldn’t have been weakened by a segue chapter or two. (I’m not saying such would strengthen it, just that it couldn’t be worse than leaving me so confused.) After all, if you edit down your story, it should be seamless to me as a reader -- and most published authors (regardless of their other skills) are pretty good in at least keeping the storyline coherent, time-wise. It’s when I’m reading and start a new scene or chapter and have to stop a paragraph in to ask, “did I not place the bookmark in the actual place I’d stopped, last time? Because I’m pretty positive I’m missing something...” That’s when editing isn’t seamless.
Okay, now that I have my caveats out of the way along with today’s allowance of fussing about corporate goons, I’ll get on with the show.
The reason I’ve had a mental connection between Dayton’s work and Francis’ work, since reading the concluding of each, is because both deals with a classic story-pattern: the everyday, regular person called to greatness. At the beginning of the Rose series, Kallista is a sergeant in the army, able to use her magic-speciality and a decent person but not necessarily that spectacular... she’s got the army edges, is more matter-of-fact that dreamy, but her well-honed mindset and overall jaded veneer make for an interesting character. Reisil, in the Path series, is at the other end of the spectrum: newly completed in her Healer training, she’s just recently returned to her hometown with intentions of settling down with her boyfriend and providing for her community as a way to thank them for paying for her education. She’s headstrong, a little naive, not entirely confident in herself but willing to try; her story starts at the point in the wheel where many stories end (of the young hopeful who finally gets to the goal of recognition/education/achievement of some kind).
Then hop forward to Francis’ next book, where we meet Lucy, a customs inspector with a sharp tongue and a strict working ethic... mostly strict, that is. Neither Kallista -- the army woman -- nor Lucy -- the government official -- are the usual starting-point for most epic fantasy I’ve read (actually, they’re more what I find in the SF I read), but still, the overall arc of all three is that of Everyday Jane landing in the middle of it all.
One problem with critiquing both Dayton’s and Francis’ final installments is that I don’t want to spoil anyone so horrendously if you’ve not read the books but want to. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to be a bit elliptical about what exactly happens in the books. All I’ll tell you is that both stories (all three, really) are tightly plotted, with strong emotional content, developed characters -- and, as a major plus for my preferences -- the character development has been continuing from the first book, as a coherent thread for each character.
I know Dayton’s written previous works, but as I have no interest reading stock Harlequingeneric genre (and those covers aren’t exactly inspiring me to think it’s anything else), and given Dayton’s treatment of both the fantasy and romantic elements are a pretty wild combination of each (and rather cracktastic in some ways, but I mean that as a good thing), it does seem as though Dayton’s learning some kind of new (revised? re-introduced?) process in her writing, when I look over the three books. Francis’ series is her first published work(s), so in that sense reading the series made for an especially enlightening study -- yes, yes, even when reading my analysis-hat remains on, it’s surgically attached -- as a concrete example of an author’s growth from “good story, clear voice” to “solid story, authoritative voice,” which isn’t always the same thing.
It’s not just that both authors gradually expanded from what begins as a storyline dominanted by one point of view, and then begin to grant screen/page time to the internalities of the side and secondary characters -- while not losing sight of the main storyline -- but it’s also a growing strength of voice in the sense of being willing to be unlikeable. I’m not sure how else to put it, though that is rather awkward. It’s hardly as though anyone sits down to tell a story with the intention of making their story, their characters, or themselves, out to be unlikeable. And it might seem both obvious and a bit cliched to say that an author can, and should (perhaps even must, if we’re to avoid the curse of Mary Sue), show you that an otherwise likeable character or plot device or situation does in fact have some unattractive sides -- but it’s also a question of just how unattractive these are, in the author’s viewpoint, that indicates authorial security.
Hopefully I can explain this with some coherency: what I mean by the above is that an author’s confidence does come through, and it’s a big part of the air of authoritativeness (along with more tangible issues like “having a consistent and clear set of world-rules,” and “not mucking up the characterizations for the sake of plotline”, and “researching enough to be solid but not so much the text turns into the encyclopedia brittanica,” etc). Let’s say it’s a character raised and educated as nobility, who can play a gentleman’s role at the ball and the next day push up his sleeves and help his men move the cannon into position at the barracks: an all-round man’s man who can still charm the ladies. Let’s say we get to see this character when the issue of marriage comes around.
Attendant: The ladies think you’re quite a catch as potential husband.
Hero: I am.
Which, if you read that “I am,” as a flat statement of fact... you might be the kind of person to interpret it as a pretty arrogant thing to say. Perhaps, though, all the characterization up to this point has said that the character would probably be -- at the very least -- confident in himself, established in his surroundings, and clear-headed enough to assess the reality of things. Regardless, in most cultures, to be so bluntly certain of one’s value is see as arrogant, even conceited (if not create the abrupt connection in a reader’s head between your character and that really annoying, if handsome and admired, highschool football quarterback).
Here’s where an unconfident author will muck it up: imply it’s a question somehow, or follow it with something akin to a chuckle -- on the author’s part. It’s a very subtle move, and it’s almost impossible for me to give specific examples, because they’re always tied up in tone and situation. Even when I can find a decent example, it falls flat without the audience also having read enough of the author’s tone in the book to that point, to see the slightest shift of what is really an amelioration about this character’s suddenly revealed (if perfectly reasonable) ‘unattractiveness’. Once again I find myself coming around to Whedon again, as an example of letting a character be unattractive, unapologetically, like when he writes Buffy -- previously a perky, generally likeable and liked optimistic character -- saying things like, “Did I ever thank you for saving my life?” To Xander’s response of, “no,” she just shrugs and says, “oh,” and walks off. There’s no scene of her privately, and tearfully, monologuing about her inner thoughts, nor is there a scene of Xander rationalizing the question somehow. Nope, just a shot of him looking startled, and hurt to the core, as she walks away.
I don’t think it’s just a willingness to make even secondary characters “well-rounded” -- although that is a stage in authorly skills-development -- nor is it just being willing to write an unlikeable or unsympathetic character -- very much a beginner’s lesson, if we’re categorizing -- but in letting an otherwise likeable character become un, however temporarily, and making no effort to excuse it. The author can be the parent who rushes along behind a surly teenage son, apologizing to the reader, “oh, but he’s such a dear at home,” or, “he’s just in a stage, you know.” That’s not just insulting to the readers, as though our teeny little feelings could be hurt by having a previously symapathetic character reveal some inherently human traits such as selfishness or envy, but it’s also trivializing to the characters themselves.
Whether an author realizes it or not, showing me a character’s flaws is only the first half of the “well-rounded” battle; how the author continues from there is the other half, and even when a reader can’t really put their finger on it, they know when excuses are made, and when the surly teenager is left to stand or fall on his own. A good author, like a good parent, doesn’t feel the compulsion to excuse a surly character, having faith not only in the child’s/character’s overall goodness, but also in your ability to look past this moment to see that goodness, as well.
Both main characters, in their respective third books, are hemmed in until forward movement means action(s) that could be unsympathetic -- or just plain are. (And here I go with being purposefully vague) Reisil figures out that to save her world -- because both these stories are essentially tied up in a save-the-world kind of conflict -- she must not only gain the trust of a set of people, but then she’ll have to betray that trust to get from them what she wants, knowing they’d never let her have it otherwise (and it’s pretty clear, early on, that “just asking” won’t do).
It’s tantamount to walking into the house of a friend of a friend, swearing up and down that you’re there to learn all they can teach you about their nifty computer system, and then -- while the host sleeps -- stripping the study of every bit of equipment, and hauling it off to a distant place where you rebuild it all so that now there’s not even an option of returning the items. Or borrowing a relative's car without permission, knowing you'll be running it to the point the pistons blow and the back axle breaks off, at which point you'll abandon it. It’s a pretty low-down kind of maneuver -- doubly so when you got access via pretending to be a friend -- if you stop and think about it.
I have seen the ameliorating move per an inexperienced/unconfident author: the “I’ll put it all back” plan. That kind of move is done when the author believes you couldn’t possibly keep liking this character -- even if the goal or process is well within characterization and motivation believability limits -- so there’s a compulsion to let the readers know the character feels guilty. One way to do this is with a firm, if murkily planned, goal that “afterwards, when I’ve used this One Ring to steal the gold so I can save my little sister from the fingernail-eating flu, I’ll put it back and then I’ll give all the left-over money to charity!”
Naturally, nine times of out ten, the author makes sure to screw up this restitution plan (a plan inserted per author’s intrusion in the first place), so now we’re getting jerked to a different side of the table, the one where not only do we feel bad for the character who committed this dishonorable action, we’re also told to feel indignant on his behalf, now that the authorities are giving him a hard time for having stolen that fancy ring. Oh, but can’t they see, really, he’s just at that stage, y’know.
Or something.
Granted, Reisil does show guilt... for about two lines, and then she packs it away as the cost of success at her larger goal, and that’s it. From the beginning, the character assesses situations as best she can, takes on a course of action, and provides no apologies for following her gut. When she screws up, she admits it -- but she doesn’t apologize for thinking on her own. It’s like the difference between someone who apologizes for accidentally burning the pie, versus someone who apologizes for burning the pie by apologizing for being able to cook in the first place. D’ya see what I mean in terms of characterization? -- and thus, why it makes sense that in turn, Francis (as the voice behind the voice) is able to do the same about Reisil as a character. It was there in the first book, a little more in the second, but the third really shows the muscular development.
I hate to say it, because I really enjoyed the first two Rose books, but it seems like Dayton went in the opposite direction. For Kallista -- gone from low-rank army soldier to high-rank in the government thanks to her burgeoning magical powers -- the plot conflict hinged to a great degree on Kallista making several very important choices (which in turn alienate opposing characters and propel the story forward). But where in the first book, and to some degree the second, that Kallista would’ve been unapologetic in her assessment ability, based on her experience in the army and her solid grasp on her skills, this Kallista gets... well, not just excused, but her choices are also categorized (in that intangible author-voice kind of way) as mistakes. If it’s not one of her allied-characters treating her actions like a mistake, it’s Kallista herself, and the author joins in on the fun.
Granted, not saying I want to read stories where the main protag (or any protag) sails on through the story without making a mistake at all. Nor do I mean that I prefer stories where everyone around the main character always loves and adores and admires her, and never sees any wrong in any action she does. If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d save myself ten bucks and sit around reminiscing about high school cheerleaders, instead. Or something.
It’s simply that I don’t want to read about a character that I’ve read, and been told, and seen, to be strong enough to make mistakes, pick herself up, carry on -- and most importantly, in the carrying-on part, attempt to fix those mistakes -- then get nearly an entire book of being, well, excused. I know folks in real life can be wrong-headed: the guy who always dates the girls who cheat on him, the employee who gets fired from every job, blah blah blah, and I sure don’t care for it when that person’s trailed by someone who says, “oh, it’s because of his relationship with his mother,” or, “oh, he had a tough childhood.” Well, so freakin’ what, get over it already. It can take some people years to break their bad patterns, but I’m reading fiction and I sure as hell don’t want to feel like I’ve been reading the same story for years before we get some kind of resolution.
Yeah, so it’s a good sign of an author’s confidence to let a character screw up -- if the author lets it stand -- but let’s not go overboard with it. Let’s certainly not push it to the point of hysterics, which Kallista indulges in maybe nine or ten times through the story. I’m still baffled over that, to be honest, because it felt like a total regression to some point before the entire series began. (Or maybe even that the thing had been ghost-written, or that Dayton’s new editor -- after the Luna line got closed down and Juno picked up her series -- was either too strongly pro-romance style, or not strong enough to arm-twist Dayton into toning the romance-style down.)
I’m raising that issue because one thing Francis mentioned to me (erm, should I note at this point that I consider Francis among my go-for-pancakes friends?) was unhappiness over a review at Amazon that complained about Lucy (in The Cipher) being so unsympathetic, and that Marten, the story’s unintentional antagonist, being generally unlikeable. I guess I wasn’t really that surprised, any more than I was by the well-meaning if clueless offer by someone on a romance blog to read and review the story and their ensuing dissatisfaction with it. (The Cipher may contain a romance, but it's squarely in the SFF world.)
When I compare Francis’ mindset (as a storyteller) -- that is, what she leaves in versus takes out, what gets emphasized -- to what I read in fantasy-romance and paranormal-romance, I just can’t see a romance reader really going whole-hog for Francis’ style (or anyone much like her).
How to put it, how to put it... well, I guess the old Harlequin romance plot remains the best illustration. Here’s Romantic Interest Number One, who comes across as a stone-faced, cold-shouldering, arrogant, intimidating, jerk... but for whatever reason (author-induced madness, I say), the heroine thinks he’s just all that and a freaking cherry. Again and again, thejerk romantic interest acts like a prick, a self-centered child, steamrollers everyone and anything, and at the end, if we’re lucky, we get him breaking down and admitting he had some kinda issue with his mother and that made him, uh, scared and something, but really, he loved her from the very first minute! Right, because we always act like absolute assholes to the person we’re madly in love with, because that’s so guaranteed to get someone to love us back.
(Which is one more example of why I think most romance authors, and many readers, are from another planet, because that just doesn’t resemble earth-logic.)
Anyway, the issue isn’t that well-trod, over-trod, romance pattern, but that in romance, both main love interests -- no matter how genuinely unlikeable their actual actions are, on the page -- must, must be seen as likeable and sympathetic. If we can’t get the hero to be that way, we get the author and the heroine combining forces to retcon the scene into a more positive reading. Same goes for the heroine, too... and what I think is really happening is that when you read a lot of romance, you stop seeing this as a malfunction of the authoritative voice and more as a de facto treatment/reaction whenever a story-centered character must go against not the character’s grain but against the author’s internal list of What Readers Think Is Okay.
Remember what I said about details? I think this is part of that, too, perhaps. What details would I tell myself, compared to my sister, compared to friends who don’t know much about me? Which one would I apologize to, if I did something dishonorable -- and which ones might I never even tell? A character who’d see bystanders as irrelevant or just uninvolved, or a character who doesn’t like to involve others, or a character who only admits failure to a rare few -- are not characters who’ll go around apologizing for others, let alone for themselves. Again it’s the question of “to whom the character is speaking is as important, if not outright delineating the content of, what the character is saying.” This goes for apologizing when one is a prick, too.
Which means that when Kallista goes totally against the type of what I’d come to expect through two previous books, and instead of showing her cool and sharp army training we get to see her flying off the handle and shrieking like a banshee and basically going apeshit, I’m left with several impressions, all a variation on bewildered. Uhm, is this the same mature and capable character I liked in the other books, or did I pick up the wrong book by accident? Check the cover, no, it’s the right book and author... hunh. Well, maybe she’s possessed or something, so someone smack her, she’ll come back to her senses, and the story can carry on without any more of this momentary madness stuff. Oh. Five pages past and I’m getting rationalizations, but no smackdown. Two more pages, no smackdown, what? And then, before you know it, more hysteria! More shrieking! More wackiness of the “maybe someone kidnapped Dayton and wrote the book for her and turned it in while she was hogtied to the back porch’s chaise lounge” variety.
I mentioned who gets apologized to, because the question here is that we all have friends who fall into a list of "who can call me on shit," and people in our lives who don't fall on that list. (Duo and Sanzo like to say, "so-and-so's not people," meaning that when the statement applies, "people get on my nerves," that those designated as "not-people" are exempt.) Reading a main character at the pinnacle of a group effort (that is, a good-sized story cast even if there's a main focus), I would expect at least one or two of them to fall into the not-people category, and probably be on the list of Can Call Me On This permissions, too. However, the psychological key of our personal, rarely-spelled-out Call Me On This list is that when a person on that list speaks up, we listen seriously.
And, if the situation warrants it, it's probably those folks to whom we'll apologize first -- if we realize our wrongdoing before they have a chance to nail us for it -- unless we're apologizing after the fact, in which case such apologies are often tinged with a bit of humiliation and self-disappointment. Letting someone call you on things you've screwed up is giving someone enough trust and respect that even when you disagree, they (and their word) means enough to you that you won't dismiss them out of hand.
Don't give me two books where characters have worked to include each other in this kind of respecting, equal, permissions-list... and then have one of the characters continuously ignore, and disregard, all call-outs in the third book. I'm gonna get pissed with someone, and chances are it'll be the author. (Easiest target, after all.)
Actually, now that I think about it, the third book in the Rose series does kinda read like bad fanfiction, in the way that some fanfic can when the author is caught in a combination of loves (neither of which, honestly, belong on the printed page, and I don’t mean the naked kind): being so enamoured of the characters that readers not only get every little flaw but also get every flaw treated as though it’s just as adorable/wonderful as all good parts, AND seeming to think that to have emotional punch, the story must contain characters who shriek like banshees. In film-speak, they call that chewing the scenery, and honestly, we can sit and watch Sir Anthony Hopkins play a truly chilling madman who’s yet also bizarrely, gentlemanly, inhumanely sane... or we can wade through another ear-splitting, frothing, rant from someone in a straitjacket. (The best example of turning that on its head remains Exorcist III, an otherwise useless movie but for the meta-moment when the obligatory madman interrupts himself halfway through the canned rant to ask, “oh, was I raving?”)
This is how every fandom gets its share of fiction designed to jerk around reader emotions, but where an editor-led, published-work might figure just one case of abuse would suffice, the fanfic author is like some teenager with a bottle of antibiotics. “Take one,” the kid reads slowly, and carefully, “...or two, per day, as needed.” Hunh, well, if one is good, two is better, right? Except in fanfic, if two is good, then ten is way, way, WAY better. So instead of minor “I’m not very happy with my life,” we get “I cut myself daily!” or “I’m on heroin, and crack!” and instead of “we argue too much”, it’s “he beats me!” I’m sure you know what I mean... overkill, such overkill.
And this section is just a fancy, trying-to-avoid-the-actual-details way of saying, if you are going to make your character unlikeable through a dishonorable action, then please don’t freaking repeat this on me ten times. Even if you have successfully brought the story, and me, to a point where the character’s unlikeable action/choice is both unavoidable and believeable, this doesn’t mean I’ll forgive it a second time. Choose wisely, author. Pick your battles, because the bigger the dishonorable or unlikeable or unsympathetic action, the harder it’ll be for me to entirely forget -- which is why I say that doing it unapologetically is the surest sign of an author’s confidence, that s/he will let that plot action flow, with faith in his/her skills to bring me round again (along with the character).
The other point I buried in this overlong post, hrm, I think I did, was that in reading the person’s critique of Francis’ most recent book, I was struck by what could be (maybe? thoughts?) a difference in reader approach between non-romance and romance. Or maybe some readers do it automatically, and it’s just that I see the guiding/training hand of authorial-style in the romance books -- that is, some readers want to like a character, and prefer that Bad Things get explained so they can rationalize continuing to like the character is hawt, or interesting, or good, or whatever. Meanwhile, authors excuse Bad Things and give a reason (or trivialize the ‘abberation’ in some way) rather than risk character-dislike being the reason for a reader tossing their book to the wall -- and readers got used to getting spoonfed after the hit-damage of seeing a character’s less-than-stellar side. I suppose it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
Anyway, the reviewer’s problem was that she found Lucy unlikeable, and Marten equally so. The reviewer also (I seem to recall) considers at least one of them unsympathetic, or maybe both, and in chewing over those words, I realized that this was exactly what I had enjoyed about the book. Lucy is, honestly, not very likeable: she’s got a sharp tongue, she’s smart as a frickin’ whip, she’s collected and controlled (but not necessarily ultra-controlled, just mature enough to not need to leak high-emotion all over the place or to emote like a leaking barge) -- and when Lucy thinks someone is an idiot, she has no compunction telling them so. She doesn’t have time to waste on idiots, especially with the worst part of the storm season -- and its magically-enhanced terrifying and gruesome sea creatures swarming the seas around the island-city -- so she’s not going to stand around and make idle chatter when there’s work to do.
Yet at the same time, she’s highly sympathetic: or maybe to see her as such requires that you be a reader with a strong work ethic, who understands the value of one’s reputation in the workplace, who knows what it’s like to work your way up to a position of some responsibility (however precarious), to have to deal with stupid people (and there’s the vicarious, because I would dearly love to be as sharp-tongued with clients as Lucy gets to be, at points)... and under that, she has a huge flaw she hides from showing on her work-persona, even from others in her private life.
It’s akin to watching/reading a character who’s a dedicated and respected person in X field, but who goes home at night and shoots up, hating themselves for getting hooked but unable to stop -- and more importantly, unable to even admit they’ve got a problem as the first step of getting help, because doing so would destroy everything (and perhaps some everyones, as well) they’ve worked to create. The character is trapped inside the veneer of his/her success, and torn between the questions of whether the wrongful aspect has grown to a destroying level, or whether the wrongful aspect can yet be contained and thus isn’t equal to the risk of destroying the rest of the person’s existence. Make sense?
That, I can sympathize with, even if I don’t jive much with someone being addicted (as a rough analogy, but I guess you know what I mean); the crux here is that as a reader, I can see the character is unlikeable, and I know I probably would clash within seconds if we met ‘in person’ -- but the author also allows me into a huge gaping hole in the character’s psyche, in which there exists this flaw that the character works so hard to hide from others, possibly even to also protect others from the consequences of the flaw, should it come to that. And above that, it’s a flaw the character knows exists, and hates, and wishes gone: I can definitely sympathize with that oh-so-human situation.
In sum, Lucy may not be likeable (though to be honest, I liked her a great deal as a refreshing change to the too-diplomatic, erm, even too-feminine?, too... something saddled on a lot of female characters), but she is inherently sympathetic. Marten, on the other hand, is a charming rascal, and from the very first, he’s quite likeable, in all those ways audiences are taught to enjoy -- in books and film as well as real life. A bit of the bad boy, y’see, a rapscallion even if he comes with good references (of being a friend of Lucy’s closest friend), and when Lucy tells him off, he just grins at her.
This is, admittedly, the flip side of the romance-cliche I mentioned above (where theprick romantic interest smacks the heroine down) -- this is the version where it’s the woman who says she’s not interested, and the guy just keeps pushing, undissauded.
[Sidenote: wait a minute... Does anyone know of any romance-plotted books (not necessarily romance genre, mind you) where the guy delivers the smackdown and the woman oh-so-confidently continues to tease him and cajole him, eventually seducing him until he comes around? With, specifically, a romantic end in the story for the couple -- because I just realized after a few moments’ thought that I can’t think of any story -- where the end result/goal was romantic, that is, though I can think of plenty where the woman’s intent is friendship-based -- that I can’t think of a single story in which a distrustful or disinterested guy gets told, “oh, you’re so cute when you’re all snappish and prickly.” Uhm. Anyone?]
Getting back to Lucy and Marten: that premise of the couple’s dynamic, introduced from pretty much the start of the book, might have been a clue (if a misleading one) to any romance-genre readers who’d made it through the first chapter. Perhaps if that’s all I’d read, and if I didn’t know better but were for whatever reason under the impression that the story contains strong elements of romance despite being shelved in the SFF section, then I might’ve thought the rest of the story would go something like this... Something happens to Lucy that forces her to seek help concerning her One Big Secret, and wanting to limit the public damage, and having no one else to turn to (or perhaps because he suspects her flaw and is willing to use his knowledge to get closer to her), Lucy turns to Mister Won’t Be Dissauded, who not only eventually helps her break free (or in a more modern version, offers support and cookies while she does it herself), but also coaxes her out of herfrigidity shell and she realizes she’s been in love with him, blah blah blah, throw in a few details about past abusive boyfriend or lover and you’ve got yourself about six of the romance stories I read last year.
It probably should go without saying that Francis follows that pattern for all of about, oh, one chapter. Now, true, she does carry through on some the parts -- enough that I can see where a romance-genre person would continue to read happily, secure in the knowledge that the author will take this left, this right, go four buildings down and pull around the back just like everyone else does. I can also see how that reader would be more than a little upset to wake up two chapters later and discover that not only is she not in Kansas, but the author’s kidnapped her to Brazil and they’re about to get on a boat for the Ivory Coast... by way of Hong Kong.
It’s when Marten’s dishonorable act comes not at the end of two and a half books’ worth of getting you to like him, but somewhere closer to only two and a half chapters after you’ve met him for the first time. I won’t spill what it is he does, but I will say that it’s definitely not a pleasant, nor kind, nor particularly compassionate, act, and it’s one -- regardless of whether Marten recognizes or will even accept the dire consequences of his acts -- for which Francis doesn’t even attempt to excuse Marten. I wouldn’t say the author’s leaving the guy out to hang, but it’s a pretty close call. Yeah, so Marten’s truly likeable, but his doublecross makes him totally unsympatheticin my book in my opinion.
[Not my book, after all. What a turn of phrase, now that I think about it..!]
Yet Marten's overall likeableness kept me reading, and interested, even as I was thinking: you! you’re a jerk! ... and unlike the romance-reader, I had no problem with the fact that the narration and tone never once attempted to contradict my reaction. In fact, I’d even say the narration expected that reaction to a degree of planning for it, and then hinging a lot of the rest of the story on it. Both in terms of how other characters interpreted it (and none make the attempt to rationalize it for Marten, nor on his behalf to the reader), and in how Marten himself begins to re-evaluate his actions and -- here’s where Dayton needed lessons -- attempting to do something about it. He may not stay likeable throughout the story, thanks to his unsympathetic act, but just as he’s losing the last dregs of his likeability, he’s simultaneously gaining in sympathy, by dint of his bullheaded determination to do something about his screw-up.
And, I should add, that he doesn’t succeed the first time. That, my dears, is authoritativeness when it comes to character portrayal: allowing backsliding! (I don’t count repeating the same mistake without any attempt at correction to be a type of backsliding, though.) It says something (to me, at least), when a reader gets to a crossroads for the character... and the character turns around and walks back into that dark pit (whatever type of pit it may be). When the reader groans out loud -- and startles the sleeping dog nearby -- you know you’re caught up in the character’s conflict. And just like we may have friends who frustrate us for being bone-headed morons about this or that, frustrating us even as we continue to love them, so we can feel the same about characters.
The long-suffering groan, the comical slap to the forehead, all signs of “man, you are so frustrating me right now,” but if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that this reaction more often means the reader’s caught up enough -- cares enough -- to keep reading despite the character screwups. A reader who doesn’t care is more likely to huff and close the book, not react with a sort of amused, aggravated, book-clenching grip, along with a silent-voiced hope that someone in the next chapter will smack the character silly. (Or non-silly, as the case may be.)
The last bit of comparison between these three is that of what the main character eventually achieves (above and beyond the resolution of the main conflict). For the Path and Rose series, this overall result stretches through all three books; for The Cipher, it’s open-and-close inside one book, but there is a reward for all three main characters. Don’t know what else I might call it, but a reward, although in most of the epic fantasy I’ve read, the reward wasn’t planned-for, hasn’t really been part of the conflict, maybe wasn’t even an issue or option when the book(s) began. Right off the top of my head, first example is Mulan (original poetry or Disney version, this is one passage in which they’re similar): when Mulan saves China from the Huns, the emporer asks her to be one of his generals. (In the Disney version, she goes home to be a Good Girl; in the original, she spends another however many years kicking ass.)
But that is the ‘reward’ in a nutshell: Mulan didn’t go in her father’s name, didn’t fight with the army, didn’t come rushing into the city after the spies, just so she could end up being an imperial general. It was no more within her range of goals -- from the “probable” even to the “highly unlikely but would be really cool” -- than it was for Luke Skywalker to give Obi Wan Kenobi a ride home just so he could eventually get presented with some Olympic-medal ripoff from a chick with cinnamon buns on her head while some walking carpet cheers next to him. Just not really in the plans, y’know?
Now here’s where the type of reward has to fit in more than just “makes the readers happy with a great happy ending!” kind of fit. Luke Skywalker -- intentional or not -- did rescue the princess, and was instrumental in taking out the Death Star. Giving him a medal and public acclaim fits, and works for me, because it rewards him within the parameters of what makes sense to give a young man, otherwise still naive and headstrong, some kind of recognition. Unless he’d pulled a Mulan and single-handedly averted the majority of the Huns and then demonstrated quick thinking and strong tactical skills upon tracking down and taking out the spies who escaped the first barrage -- then there’s no reason to reward him with a military position... and there’s every reason to expect that Mulan, in contrast, would rise to the challenge of a greater military responsibility, regardless of her young age.
A reward as a temporary culmination-point seems a common move in multi-book works. It’s a positive version of the bait-and-switch: the main conflict isn’t resolved, but in the meantime,have a cookie have an Olympic-medal-like big honkin’ coin you can hang around your neck.
Reisil does get a reward of some sort at the stopping point between books, and it fits where she is and what she’s achieved so far and reflects what she could achieve, given the chance. That is, she doesn’t marry a prince and sail off to be an international diplomat; she is an orphan in a semi-classist society, after all. She doesn’t get invited to come teach at, let alone head, the country’s finest healer-university; she’s barely out of her teens and maybe a year done with her own education. If I went with possible rewards based on aptitude she shows in the book, she’s not even complimented with significant recognition by horsemen, trackers, or military minds. And despite the fact that she shows a magical aptitude, and divine connection, that’s unrivaled in her world, she’s not even particularly feted, let alone wined and dined and majorly rewarded, for that, either.
Actually, the best I can recall, the bulk of her reward consists of a path that Reisil herself doesn’t find that attractive (and I don’t mean in the “oh, little old me, oh, but I couldn’t!” kind of for-show disinclination, but a genuine, “thanks, but I’d really rather keep on with my original goals, thanks,” kind of preference). Maybe the one reward she does get is a sort of half-recognition from a childhood nemesis, and the admiration of a set of friends she’s grown to respect, as well as the attraction of a man who started out as a prick, stays a bit of an arrogant guy, but is decent despite not caring about his rough edges. (He’d probably get along great with Lucy, or try to kill her within twenty seconds of meeting, if she didn’t skewer him first.)
Over in Lucy’s story, yes, it’s a stand-alone story although it’ll share the world with several other promised books (and if you like the Dickensian-influenced, shades-of-Victorian-gothic, intense and complex world and characters of The Cipher, and you liked the sea-faring and ship-working technical and environmental details in various nautical-based epics of the past century, you will absolutely devour The Black Ship) -- but back to Lucy... anyway. She gets a reward, of a sorts, at the end (while at the same time getting the one thing she does want ripped right out of her hands), but it’s still a reward that’s within the scope of her position in her society, her knowledge, her past actions, all that. Given the ups and downs she goes through, and the consequences of her One Big Secret, any kind of majorly public recognition would’ve been tough for me to believe.
I mention those as distinct contrast to what made me have the hardest time at the start of The Eternal Rose, though it wasn’t an issue I’d predicted at all. That is, Kallista -- like Reisil -- carries a type of magic that’s unparalleled and unforeseen in her world. Like Reisil, she’s asked (if not outright expected) to use this ability to protect her country from outside threats; and unlike the more peace-bound pseudo-Red-Cross-worker healer-type Reisil, Kallista is career army and shown to be pretty good at her job. Therefore, at the end of the second book, after Kallista and her cohorts have saved the country from invasion (again), and the political top guy wants to retire, or something, whatever (been a while), but the position’s vacant. Parliament can choose its new figurehead, and they pick... you guessed it... Kallista.
Which pretty much took a lot of the joy out of the storyline for me, and might be (I’m starting to think) why the vast majority of stories end when that final, if unexpected, honor is bestowed. After all, what we liked -- and I’m including generic readers in here with me, or maybe it’s my turn at the royal we, damn it -- is that long struggle from the hero’s days of being unknown and disrespected and generally struggling bottom-of-the-pole up through the setbacks and achievements and final overall conflict to win the day. So he’s then asked to stick around and be the country’s president, say what? Yeah, we all saw how well that worked for Generals Jackson and Eisenhower. Just because someone did her job as an Army officer, and did it well, and was even instrumental -- if not overwhelmingly so -- in diverting invasion does not mean queenship is in the cards. Generalship, see, I would’ve thought that would be interesting, to pit her against a new commanding officer just after a big promotion.
But instead, Dayton plays the “oh so special” card that Francis didn’t play, though I didn’t think much about it in Francis’ book until I’d read Dayton’s and finally put my finger on what I didn’t like (and thus discovered what did work, in the previously-read work). It’s not just that once the character is at the top of the heap, having been rewarded up to a level that any previous conflicts are now avoidable by dint of this one mid-series reward -- how do you angst about not having enough to eat on the battlefield when your entire kitchen staff follows you from manor house to manor house? -- but it’s also that it just plain doesn’t fit the character’s previously displayed talents, skills, or potential. Plenty said that Kallista would make a kick-ass general. Not much was saying -- nothing was saying -- she’d make a great queen. Big difference in job skills, not to mention uniform and personality-style required.
Oh, but the reason is because she’s got speshul magic. That entirely negates her lack of experience, let alone total lack of any real diplomatic skills, and makes it perfectly reasonable to put her in charge.
And so, a Mary Sue is born.
Sprung full-grown from the head of a previously interesting character, at that. Pity. Things were going so well up until then.
Or maybe it’s just me. I mean, the “rare and unparalleled magical skill” is all over the place in traditional fantasy, if not downright a mandatory ingredient for the fantasy epic recipe. I mean, I’m thinking it’s maybe like saying you can make bread without flour. I guess you could, but chances are that most folks wouldn’t call it bread. The problem is that when you start rewarding a character based on a skill she did nothing to gain, then I start getting irked. If you follow that up with abrupt and repeated bouts of hysteria for reasons not entirely explicable and rationalized out the wazoo, that’s when I get really annoyed. (Even though I slogged through and read the rest, mostly because as a PDF-only book, I could hardly return it.)
The real key is that when the character did nothing to earn the skill, it becomes very hard to find the character sympathetic. You can certainly find him/her likeable -- as I said above, that’s a distinct trait from sympatheticness -- but how do you relate to someone who is pretty much the end-all and be-all of this one skill? I mean, talk about a definite security when it comes to market demand. Write your own damn check and the client will sign anything, that kind of thing, and now I’m supposed to believe the character has some kind of struggle? What? This is an especially crucial point if the author doesn’t lean to the school of thought that all effort should have a cost, like those stories in which a character may have the ability to, say, freeze time -- but does so at the cost of a year of her life, for each event, or spends a night in complete agony after a day of making the king’s roses bloom out of season, or whatever: but still, a definite cost.
Side note: while I’m on the topic, “can’t do magic for a day or two afterwards” doesn’t count as a cost, people: I wouldn’t race on Saturday and then race again on Sunday because I was still worn out on Sunday, but not-racing on Sunday wasn’t exactly a cost I paid, not in the sense of something I lose because of what I did on Saturday.
Cost becomes even more important the less the skill is self-cultivated. The freer the lunch appears to be, the higher a price you must pay somewhere. I guess there could be readers out there who like the “get it for free” fantasy where the final reward is all out of proportion and the cost wasn’t too high -- I wonder just how many of them lurk in the romance-genre, given how much I see that trait in romance-genre storylines. But most folks I know, myself included, know that we’ve had to work hard for our skills, to educate ourselves (formally or on-the-job), to practice, to hone our talents. A person may start with an ear for pitch and timing, but no one’s ever woken up and suddenly ‘had’ Mozart’s skills as a pianist. No one will ever bop you on the head and thereby grant you the knowledge required to pass a dissertation defense on astrophysics and do it cold -- like, without even having gone to a single class. That, in my opinion, is the equivalent of “suddenly getting” a divine magic.
How an author treats a character with divine magic, how the author rewards that character, and how carefully the author maneuvers around the risks, tells me a lot about how savvy the author is to just what it means to include divinely-granted, oh-so-speshul magic in the story. In some ways, really, the author’s just turned the character into an unstoppable force, and what’s the interest in that, where’s the conflict, unless you can provide an immovable object as opposition?
Yes, some may say that a parliament is certainly an immovable object. Okay, I’ll give you that one, but I also say it’s a damn well unexciting immovable object. Who the hell likes dealing with committees, let alone sees them -- collectively -- as an intriguing organism with enough charisma and character to stand against the divinely-granted unstoppable object. At most, they can do what the parliament does in Dayton’s book (and what many of them do in real life): they just plain block the majority of her requests.
Which is a bit too literal on the notion of an immovable object; when it comes to the conflicted world of a plotline, I want the immoveable object to not refuse to move but to also stop the unstoppable object. That’s an awkward way to say it. How about, I want the obstacle to be as active as the protagonist, an obstacle that shifts and realigns itself to changes in the situation, just as much as the protagonist must. A moving target is harder to hit, after all, to completely mix and whack my metaphors beyond all coherency. I just can’t see any validity in the argument of “well, I made her queen since God X or Goddess Y said she’s speshul, after all, but that’s okay, parliament’s going to prevent her from doing any good, because, y’know, they’re an obstacle!”
And that requires I accept -- however unconsciously -- several assumptions on the author’s part about her own characters. One, parliament is full of people smart enough (uh, whatever) to hire/elect/appoint this divine-marked Speshul Power Person. But! Two, at the same time, parliament isn’t going to actually, y’know, listen to the declarations of this Speshul Power Person, because, y’know, parliament now has to play the Bad Guy (or one of them) and be the obstacle. Which means that in turn I must accept, as a reader, that the author’s parliamentary system is full of buffoons, powermongers, illogical thinkers, fuller brush salesmen, and other pathetic sorts: because unless the author is going to characterize at least a good portion of this many-headed obstacle, am I just to believe that a large chunk of people are automatically against the announcements and goals of Our Hero/ine simply because the author says they have to be?
I guess that relies on whether I honestly believe that every single politician in Congress, with almost no exception, is a political twit. Hrm. *thinks hard*
Well, more seriously: no, I don’t. I do think every single congresscritter believes s/he is doing the best s/he can, even if this is the self-convincing rationalization of a duplicitous soul, or just the delusion of someone insulated from true public opinion. Whatever. But I don’t think they all, or even a majority, truly have negative intentions towards this country, nor does any politician; it’s a lot more work and a lot less reward than Hollywood would have you believe, you’ll never please everyone, and you’ll always fall short by some standard, and you get into it because you sincerely believe (in most countries, at least) that you can do some good.
Given we do have a real-world counterpart to such political entities in SF/F worlds, I fail to see how authors could reasonably argue that when Our Hero/ine -- especially those Divine-Speshul ones -- posit some Brilliantly Cheap and Simple Solution that the parliament/congress wouldn’t leap on it. Or, failing to leap, at least thrash it out and come around, if it is so brilliant. If there are enough people to say it’s not brilliant, wouldn’t there have been enough people to block the Speshul One from becoming Head Guy in the first place?
Because the only other conclusion I can see, when the Speshul One is knocked up to eleven and the only significant remaining obstacle (external to the Hero/ine characterization, that is) is that of a body of politicos -- is that the Brilliantly Cheap and Simple Solution isn’t, in fact, so brilliant, or cheap, or even a real solution. In other words: the hero/ine may be speshul, but s/he is still an idiot -- and certainly not qualified to rule a frickin’ country.
This is a damn long post considering I managed to avoid most (hrm, I hope, well, okay, a few exceptions) of the major spoilers. There was some more I was contemplating in that last point, but it can wait for another day, or maybe it’s already been said in there and I just need to reread to see that. Yes, yes, I do like to revise, and I can be succinct... uhm, sometimes... if cash is involved... but that would mean rereading and revising in the posting-program, and then I’d bloody well never get anything put up. So, you see draft! Consider it as such, and entirely unpolished and sprung full-grown from the head of ME DAMN IT, so jump in and argue or posit or whatever as you wish.
And don’t forget what I said about The Black Ship. Go get a copy of The Cipher, now, though to keep you company while you wait. Y’know, just a thought, not that I’m biased or anything.*
*Actually I try hard not to be. Then again, since I can’t read and not analyze -- I am a Virgo, damn it -- I figure that undermines any tendency towards preferential treatment. No one escapes the critique, no one! ...including me. Oi.
ETA -- because I KNEW there was a major point I'd thought of and forgotten to include! -- there's also one thing I learned about trilogies from reading these two series: the need for circular completion.
If you don't end up where you started, somehow, then it's not really a trilogy so much as a series of books about the same character and the same world. That's entirely possible and works just as well, but then don't tell me it's a series -- because a 'series' to me and possibly most readers is really just a kind of serialized Really Big Story. That is, a series is something where you could publish all the parts together in one anthology, read them from start to finish, and they work.
It's possible to do have the circular completion on a simple, literal, level, which is the tack Francis takes at the end of the third book. It's the same thing Tolkien did for Lord of the Rings, and if you think about how LotR moved from start to finish, you'd probably see that if the story (which was, at heart, the story of hobbits and not elves, dwarves, or even humans) had ended once Aragorn were crowned -- and we'd not been able to follow the hobbits back to where they began -- the story would feel, however subtly, unfinished. It needs a completeness: a story requires closure.
Nonfiction is more straightforward about it: the thesis or hypothesis stated in the first chapter is usually revisited. Either the author is adjusting the hypothesis based on the evidence reviewed in the book, or the author reaffirms and possibly clarifies the original thesis.
Fiction isn't much different. We get a sense of a cohesive whole when the ending in some way reflects the beginning, brings it around to a conclusive goal that solidly fits where the character began. I don't know why this is; I'm not convinced as humans that we always feel the compulsion to "go back to our roots" so I'm not sure why it's such a solid and continuing element in our fiction. But it is, and there it is, and it does color how I feel when I close the final chapter on a story, whether a short one-shot or a multi-book novel.
And that, in final point, was part of what had me -- even at the parts I did like -- feeling a bit as though I was reading a side-trip in Dayton's series, and not the book marked as the finale. The story begins with Kallista and her cohorts deciding to travel to a neighboring country to visit the relatives of one of her partners, and while there, they battle demons and slavetraders and various political and socio-cultural bigotry. All good, except... the end doesn't really harken back to Kallista's beginnings as an army soldier standing on the barricade overlooking the enemy, let alone the goals and hopes and fears she had, then.
I'm not sure how to put it. It's hard to describe (even for me!) -- I'm certainly not saying every character must do a mental retrospective like some kinda bad TV sitcom "tag" just before the credits roll, after the last commercial break. But it does need to come full circle somehow, or maybe it's just that we always know our journey has finally ended when our left-behind home is back in sight.
It's not just that Kallista's third story -- the supposed pinnacle of the trilogy, and usually the culmination of the smaller battles that ramped readers up to this final one -- takes place in a distant country. It's also that, despite the emphasis on "these are the demons that got away", the impression isn't "now we fight the biggest and baddest of them all!" so much as "now we go around the countries doing clean-up duty." Y'know, Tolkien did that, too, but he gave the work about a paragraph and a half, amounting to nothing more than a mention of Merry and Pippin getting rid of the riff-raff and returning peace to their corner of the world.
Compared to Reisil -- whose battle is most definitely the final, and highest, and highest price-bearing, of all three books -- Kallista's third story feels like it should've been a postscript. Or maybe a ramp-up. Or published as a continuation but not as a conclusion of the series -- that, maybe should've been the second book. With a few minor edits, it could've been, now that I think about it.
But finishing a trilogy without a sense of coming back around again -- and I think a big part of that is "finally reaching a clear and positive resolution on whatever conflict began driving this story" -- even if that resolution is the character's own peace of mind about it, perhaps? -- finishing without that reflection (literal and metaphorical) just leaves me kinda... undone. Dissatisfied, on some level.
Must contemplate that more, since I can't quite put my finger on what is required. That is, what works, what doesn't work, what ways have authors incorporated the notion of circular completion, and can it be purely metaphorical instead of literal or even environmental? Etc.
IOW:will may revisit later.
Thoughts?
Alright, to get this started, the titles are Path of Blood and The Cipher (Diana Pharaoh Francis) and The Eternal Rose (Gail Dayton). First, though, two technical notes for when you read either.
I saw Dayton’s final installment was out on Fictionwise, it was late at night, and I was so thrilled I d/led rather than wait (and invariably forget) the next time I was in a brickfront store. I’m used to reading online now, and it doesn’t bother me, but someone at Juno really needs to be kicked in the ass about their pathetic QA skills. Entire pages have lost the hard carriage returns, which means paragraphs are run together into one massive chunk. Teasing out dialogue with no line separations is not easy... any more than the parts where every soft carriage return got turned into a hard carriage return, for a page or two. I’m guessing something got mangled when they converted to PDF, but still, it’s pretty sad (not to mention frustrating, especially when it happens just as the story’s pace picks up, yet your reading speed drops to nothing as you try and figure out who-the-hell is talking or if it’s the same person).
For Path of Blood, I recommend that when you get to chapter 43 (the final chapter, I believe), just slap a mental “EPILOGUE” over the numbering. Given that the author hadn’t failed me, nor thrown me out of the story with awkward pacing or wording or related technical issues, and then went in a massive leap from the main storyline to a jump forward with little warning... as a reader (once I finished flipping back a chapter to reread to make sure I’d not missed some kind of clue, and then I checked the page numbers, and then the chapter numbers, but nope, nothing was missing), I could only chalk it up to the same editorial shove that had to have produced a similar circumstance in The Anubis Gates (Tim Powers), in which the story’s pacing and location take a startling leap forward: it’s got to be some editor saying, “look, you get twenty more pages to wrap this up, and that’s it, got that!?” But there’s no real disconnect in Francis’ story itself, as long as the reader can get some kind of a placement clue that the story’s pacing/location has just changed so significantly... so when you purchase a copy, open it to the last chapter, and cross out the number and replace it with EPILOGUE. You’ll thank me when you get to that point, really.
If you want to refresh, I’ve already done commentaries of the previous books in each series:
- Dayton: Barbed Rose, Compass Rose
- Francis: Path of Blood, Path of Honor
Tangent: the editorial shove wouldn’t surprise me, seeing how much I’ve heard from published authors about pressure to write shorter books (mostly so more can sit on the shelf, rather than because readerly attention span is decreasing). Yes, I spent my time packing books onto the shelves in my own bookstore, and fussing like any bookperson over the eternal question of what to do with those pesky way-way-undersized books and those overlarge artbook-sized books -- how do you get people to look somewhere else when they think they’re already in the appropriate section? -- but all that aside, I’m not convinced that the Big Boxes of B&N and Borders aren’t maligning the entire book industry far, far out of whack.
Frex, a paperback book that’s x inches by y inches and is no more than x inches thick -- I seem to recall it’s 1.5”? one of the LJ-based Tor publishers explained it, awhile back, but I can’t recall the specifics -- anyway, if your book is x inches thick, it means (and this is important to someone, mainly, the buyers for B&N/BB and pretty much NO ONE ELSE) that when you do a face-out, that X number of books in the stack is equal to the rest of the books when spine-out. And, too, that the shelf widths at the bookstores are all set (in terms of they’re all installed/designed from the same manufacturer, regardless of being in Alaska or Alabama), so if you know the shelf is 22” long, that means you can get in 11 books at 2” width... or you could have 22 titles packed into the shelf if none are more than an inch thick.
It’s knowing that publishers sit around and come up with ways to please the two largest (and entirely unavoidable) buyers -- who are demonical and tyrranical entities in themselves -- that makes it easier for me to give a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt when I come across should-be-epilogue or abrupt-jump-forward steps. This is especially true if I can tell (as a reader, and a writer) that the story wouldn’t have been weakened by a segue chapter or two. (I’m not saying such would strengthen it, just that it couldn’t be worse than leaving me so confused.) After all, if you edit down your story, it should be seamless to me as a reader -- and most published authors (regardless of their other skills) are pretty good in at least keeping the storyline coherent, time-wise. It’s when I’m reading and start a new scene or chapter and have to stop a paragraph in to ask, “did I not place the bookmark in the actual place I’d stopped, last time? Because I’m pretty positive I’m missing something...” That’s when editing isn’t seamless.
Okay, now that I have my caveats out of the way along with today’s allowance of fussing about corporate goons, I’ll get on with the show.
The reason I’ve had a mental connection between Dayton’s work and Francis’ work, since reading the concluding of each, is because both deals with a classic story-pattern: the everyday, regular person called to greatness. At the beginning of the Rose series, Kallista is a sergeant in the army, able to use her magic-speciality and a decent person but not necessarily that spectacular... she’s got the army edges, is more matter-of-fact that dreamy, but her well-honed mindset and overall jaded veneer make for an interesting character. Reisil, in the Path series, is at the other end of the spectrum: newly completed in her Healer training, she’s just recently returned to her hometown with intentions of settling down with her boyfriend and providing for her community as a way to thank them for paying for her education. She’s headstrong, a little naive, not entirely confident in herself but willing to try; her story starts at the point in the wheel where many stories end (of the young hopeful who finally gets to the goal of recognition/education/achievement of some kind).
Then hop forward to Francis’ next book, where we meet Lucy, a customs inspector with a sharp tongue and a strict working ethic... mostly strict, that is. Neither Kallista -- the army woman -- nor Lucy -- the government official -- are the usual starting-point for most epic fantasy I’ve read (actually, they’re more what I find in the SF I read), but still, the overall arc of all three is that of Everyday Jane landing in the middle of it all.
One problem with critiquing both Dayton’s and Francis’ final installments is that I don’t want to spoil anyone so horrendously if you’ve not read the books but want to. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to be a bit elliptical about what exactly happens in the books. All I’ll tell you is that both stories (all three, really) are tightly plotted, with strong emotional content, developed characters -- and, as a major plus for my preferences -- the character development has been continuing from the first book, as a coherent thread for each character.
I know Dayton’s written previous works, but as I have no interest reading stock Harlequin
It’s not just that both authors gradually expanded from what begins as a storyline dominanted by one point of view, and then begin to grant screen/page time to the internalities of the side and secondary characters -- while not losing sight of the main storyline -- but it’s also a growing strength of voice in the sense of being willing to be unlikeable. I’m not sure how else to put it, though that is rather awkward. It’s hardly as though anyone sits down to tell a story with the intention of making their story, their characters, or themselves, out to be unlikeable. And it might seem both obvious and a bit cliched to say that an author can, and should (perhaps even must, if we’re to avoid the curse of Mary Sue), show you that an otherwise likeable character or plot device or situation does in fact have some unattractive sides -- but it’s also a question of just how unattractive these are, in the author’s viewpoint, that indicates authorial security.
Hopefully I can explain this with some coherency: what I mean by the above is that an author’s confidence does come through, and it’s a big part of the air of authoritativeness (along with more tangible issues like “having a consistent and clear set of world-rules,” and “not mucking up the characterizations for the sake of plotline”, and “researching enough to be solid but not so much the text turns into the encyclopedia brittanica,” etc). Let’s say it’s a character raised and educated as nobility, who can play a gentleman’s role at the ball and the next day push up his sleeves and help his men move the cannon into position at the barracks: an all-round man’s man who can still charm the ladies. Let’s say we get to see this character when the issue of marriage comes around.
Attendant: The ladies think you’re quite a catch as potential husband.
Hero: I am.
Which, if you read that “I am,” as a flat statement of fact... you might be the kind of person to interpret it as a pretty arrogant thing to say. Perhaps, though, all the characterization up to this point has said that the character would probably be -- at the very least -- confident in himself, established in his surroundings, and clear-headed enough to assess the reality of things. Regardless, in most cultures, to be so bluntly certain of one’s value is see as arrogant, even conceited (if not create the abrupt connection in a reader’s head between your character and that really annoying, if handsome and admired, highschool football quarterback).
Here’s where an unconfident author will muck it up: imply it’s a question somehow, or follow it with something akin to a chuckle -- on the author’s part. It’s a very subtle move, and it’s almost impossible for me to give specific examples, because they’re always tied up in tone and situation. Even when I can find a decent example, it falls flat without the audience also having read enough of the author’s tone in the book to that point, to see the slightest shift of what is really an amelioration about this character’s suddenly revealed (if perfectly reasonable) ‘unattractiveness’. Once again I find myself coming around to Whedon again, as an example of letting a character be unattractive, unapologetically, like when he writes Buffy -- previously a perky, generally likeable and liked optimistic character -- saying things like, “Did I ever thank you for saving my life?” To Xander’s response of, “no,” she just shrugs and says, “oh,” and walks off. There’s no scene of her privately, and tearfully, monologuing about her inner thoughts, nor is there a scene of Xander rationalizing the question somehow. Nope, just a shot of him looking startled, and hurt to the core, as she walks away.
I don’t think it’s just a willingness to make even secondary characters “well-rounded” -- although that is a stage in authorly skills-development -- nor is it just being willing to write an unlikeable or unsympathetic character -- very much a beginner’s lesson, if we’re categorizing -- but in letting an otherwise likeable character become un, however temporarily, and making no effort to excuse it. The author can be the parent who rushes along behind a surly teenage son, apologizing to the reader, “oh, but he’s such a dear at home,” or, “he’s just in a stage, you know.” That’s not just insulting to the readers, as though our teeny little feelings could be hurt by having a previously symapathetic character reveal some inherently human traits such as selfishness or envy, but it’s also trivializing to the characters themselves.
Whether an author realizes it or not, showing me a character’s flaws is only the first half of the “well-rounded” battle; how the author continues from there is the other half, and even when a reader can’t really put their finger on it, they know when excuses are made, and when the surly teenager is left to stand or fall on his own. A good author, like a good parent, doesn’t feel the compulsion to excuse a surly character, having faith not only in the child’s/character’s overall goodness, but also in your ability to look past this moment to see that goodness, as well.
Both main characters, in their respective third books, are hemmed in until forward movement means action(s) that could be unsympathetic -- or just plain are. (And here I go with being purposefully vague) Reisil figures out that to save her world -- because both these stories are essentially tied up in a save-the-world kind of conflict -- she must not only gain the trust of a set of people, but then she’ll have to betray that trust to get from them what she wants, knowing they’d never let her have it otherwise (and it’s pretty clear, early on, that “just asking” won’t do).
It’s tantamount to walking into the house of a friend of a friend, swearing up and down that you’re there to learn all they can teach you about their nifty computer system, and then -- while the host sleeps -- stripping the study of every bit of equipment, and hauling it off to a distant place where you rebuild it all so that now there’s not even an option of returning the items. Or borrowing a relative's car without permission, knowing you'll be running it to the point the pistons blow and the back axle breaks off, at which point you'll abandon it. It’s a pretty low-down kind of maneuver -- doubly so when you got access via pretending to be a friend -- if you stop and think about it.
I have seen the ameliorating move per an inexperienced/unconfident author: the “I’ll put it all back” plan. That kind of move is done when the author believes you couldn’t possibly keep liking this character -- even if the goal or process is well within characterization and motivation believability limits -- so there’s a compulsion to let the readers know the character feels guilty. One way to do this is with a firm, if murkily planned, goal that “afterwards, when I’ve used this One Ring to steal the gold so I can save my little sister from the fingernail-eating flu, I’ll put it back and then I’ll give all the left-over money to charity!”
Naturally, nine times of out ten, the author makes sure to screw up this restitution plan (a plan inserted per author’s intrusion in the first place), so now we’re getting jerked to a different side of the table, the one where not only do we feel bad for the character who committed this dishonorable action, we’re also told to feel indignant on his behalf, now that the authorities are giving him a hard time for having stolen that fancy ring. Oh, but can’t they see, really, he’s just at that stage, y’know.
Or something.
Granted, Reisil does show guilt... for about two lines, and then she packs it away as the cost of success at her larger goal, and that’s it. From the beginning, the character assesses situations as best she can, takes on a course of action, and provides no apologies for following her gut. When she screws up, she admits it -- but she doesn’t apologize for thinking on her own. It’s like the difference between someone who apologizes for accidentally burning the pie, versus someone who apologizes for burning the pie by apologizing for being able to cook in the first place. D’ya see what I mean in terms of characterization? -- and thus, why it makes sense that in turn, Francis (as the voice behind the voice) is able to do the same about Reisil as a character. It was there in the first book, a little more in the second, but the third really shows the muscular development.
I hate to say it, because I really enjoyed the first two Rose books, but it seems like Dayton went in the opposite direction. For Kallista -- gone from low-rank army soldier to high-rank in the government thanks to her burgeoning magical powers -- the plot conflict hinged to a great degree on Kallista making several very important choices (which in turn alienate opposing characters and propel the story forward). But where in the first book, and to some degree the second, that Kallista would’ve been unapologetic in her assessment ability, based on her experience in the army and her solid grasp on her skills, this Kallista gets... well, not just excused, but her choices are also categorized (in that intangible author-voice kind of way) as mistakes. If it’s not one of her allied-characters treating her actions like a mistake, it’s Kallista herself, and the author joins in on the fun.
Granted, not saying I want to read stories where the main protag (or any protag) sails on through the story without making a mistake at all. Nor do I mean that I prefer stories where everyone around the main character always loves and adores and admires her, and never sees any wrong in any action she does. If I wanted that kind of thing, I’d save myself ten bucks and sit around reminiscing about high school cheerleaders, instead. Or something.
It’s simply that I don’t want to read about a character that I’ve read, and been told, and seen, to be strong enough to make mistakes, pick herself up, carry on -- and most importantly, in the carrying-on part, attempt to fix those mistakes -- then get nearly an entire book of being, well, excused. I know folks in real life can be wrong-headed: the guy who always dates the girls who cheat on him, the employee who gets fired from every job, blah blah blah, and I sure don’t care for it when that person’s trailed by someone who says, “oh, it’s because of his relationship with his mother,” or, “oh, he had a tough childhood.” Well, so freakin’ what, get over it already. It can take some people years to break their bad patterns, but I’m reading fiction and I sure as hell don’t want to feel like I’ve been reading the same story for years before we get some kind of resolution.
Yeah, so it’s a good sign of an author’s confidence to let a character screw up -- if the author lets it stand -- but let’s not go overboard with it. Let’s certainly not push it to the point of hysterics, which Kallista indulges in maybe nine or ten times through the story. I’m still baffled over that, to be honest, because it felt like a total regression to some point before the entire series began. (Or maybe even that the thing had been ghost-written, or that Dayton’s new editor -- after the Luna line got closed down and Juno picked up her series -- was either too strongly pro-romance style, or not strong enough to arm-twist Dayton into toning the romance-style down.)
I’m raising that issue because one thing Francis mentioned to me (erm, should I note at this point that I consider Francis among my go-for-pancakes friends?) was unhappiness over a review at Amazon that complained about Lucy (in The Cipher) being so unsympathetic, and that Marten, the story’s unintentional antagonist, being generally unlikeable. I guess I wasn’t really that surprised, any more than I was by the well-meaning if clueless offer by someone on a romance blog to read and review the story and their ensuing dissatisfaction with it. (The Cipher may contain a romance, but it's squarely in the SFF world.)
When I compare Francis’ mindset (as a storyteller) -- that is, what she leaves in versus takes out, what gets emphasized -- to what I read in fantasy-romance and paranormal-romance, I just can’t see a romance reader really going whole-hog for Francis’ style (or anyone much like her).
How to put it, how to put it... well, I guess the old Harlequin romance plot remains the best illustration. Here’s Romantic Interest Number One, who comes across as a stone-faced, cold-shouldering, arrogant, intimidating, jerk... but for whatever reason (author-induced madness, I say), the heroine thinks he’s just all that and a freaking cherry. Again and again, the
(Which is one more example of why I think most romance authors, and many readers, are from another planet, because that just doesn’t resemble earth-logic.)
Anyway, the issue isn’t that well-trod, over-trod, romance pattern, but that in romance, both main love interests -- no matter how genuinely unlikeable their actual actions are, on the page -- must, must be seen as likeable and sympathetic. If we can’t get the hero to be that way, we get the author and the heroine combining forces to retcon the scene into a more positive reading. Same goes for the heroine, too... and what I think is really happening is that when you read a lot of romance, you stop seeing this as a malfunction of the authoritative voice and more as a de facto treatment/reaction whenever a story-centered character must go against not the character’s grain but against the author’s internal list of What Readers Think Is Okay.
Remember what I said about details? I think this is part of that, too, perhaps. What details would I tell myself, compared to my sister, compared to friends who don’t know much about me? Which one would I apologize to, if I did something dishonorable -- and which ones might I never even tell? A character who’d see bystanders as irrelevant or just uninvolved, or a character who doesn’t like to involve others, or a character who only admits failure to a rare few -- are not characters who’ll go around apologizing for others, let alone for themselves. Again it’s the question of “to whom the character is speaking is as important, if not outright delineating the content of, what the character is saying.” This goes for apologizing when one is a prick, too.
Which means that when Kallista goes totally against the type of what I’d come to expect through two previous books, and instead of showing her cool and sharp army training we get to see her flying off the handle and shrieking like a banshee and basically going apeshit, I’m left with several impressions, all a variation on bewildered. Uhm, is this the same mature and capable character I liked in the other books, or did I pick up the wrong book by accident? Check the cover, no, it’s the right book and author... hunh. Well, maybe she’s possessed or something, so someone smack her, she’ll come back to her senses, and the story can carry on without any more of this momentary madness stuff. Oh. Five pages past and I’m getting rationalizations, but no smackdown. Two more pages, no smackdown, what? And then, before you know it, more hysteria! More shrieking! More wackiness of the “maybe someone kidnapped Dayton and wrote the book for her and turned it in while she was hogtied to the back porch’s chaise lounge” variety.
I mentioned who gets apologized to, because the question here is that we all have friends who fall into a list of "who can call me on shit," and people in our lives who don't fall on that list. (Duo and Sanzo like to say, "so-and-so's not people," meaning that when the statement applies, "people get on my nerves," that those designated as "not-people" are exempt.) Reading a main character at the pinnacle of a group effort (that is, a good-sized story cast even if there's a main focus), I would expect at least one or two of them to fall into the not-people category, and probably be on the list of Can Call Me On This permissions, too. However, the psychological key of our personal, rarely-spelled-out Call Me On This list is that when a person on that list speaks up, we listen seriously.
And, if the situation warrants it, it's probably those folks to whom we'll apologize first -- if we realize our wrongdoing before they have a chance to nail us for it -- unless we're apologizing after the fact, in which case such apologies are often tinged with a bit of humiliation and self-disappointment. Letting someone call you on things you've screwed up is giving someone enough trust and respect that even when you disagree, they (and their word) means enough to you that you won't dismiss them out of hand.
Don't give me two books where characters have worked to include each other in this kind of respecting, equal, permissions-list... and then have one of the characters continuously ignore, and disregard, all call-outs in the third book. I'm gonna get pissed with someone, and chances are it'll be the author. (Easiest target, after all.)
Actually, now that I think about it, the third book in the Rose series does kinda read like bad fanfiction, in the way that some fanfic can when the author is caught in a combination of loves (neither of which, honestly, belong on the printed page, and I don’t mean the naked kind): being so enamoured of the characters that readers not only get every little flaw but also get every flaw treated as though it’s just as adorable/wonderful as all good parts, AND seeming to think that to have emotional punch, the story must contain characters who shriek like banshees. In film-speak, they call that chewing the scenery, and honestly, we can sit and watch Sir Anthony Hopkins play a truly chilling madman who’s yet also bizarrely, gentlemanly, inhumanely sane... or we can wade through another ear-splitting, frothing, rant from someone in a straitjacket. (The best example of turning that on its head remains Exorcist III, an otherwise useless movie but for the meta-moment when the obligatory madman interrupts himself halfway through the canned rant to ask, “oh, was I raving?”)
This is how every fandom gets its share of fiction designed to jerk around reader emotions, but where an editor-led, published-work might figure just one case of abuse would suffice, the fanfic author is like some teenager with a bottle of antibiotics. “Take one,” the kid reads slowly, and carefully, “...or two, per day, as needed.” Hunh, well, if one is good, two is better, right? Except in fanfic, if two is good, then ten is way, way, WAY better. So instead of minor “I’m not very happy with my life,” we get “I cut myself daily!” or “I’m on heroin, and crack!” and instead of “we argue too much”, it’s “he beats me!” I’m sure you know what I mean... overkill, such overkill.
And this section is just a fancy, trying-to-avoid-the-actual-details way of saying, if you are going to make your character unlikeable through a dishonorable action, then please don’t freaking repeat this on me ten times. Even if you have successfully brought the story, and me, to a point where the character’s unlikeable action/choice is both unavoidable and believeable, this doesn’t mean I’ll forgive it a second time. Choose wisely, author. Pick your battles, because the bigger the dishonorable or unlikeable or unsympathetic action, the harder it’ll be for me to entirely forget -- which is why I say that doing it unapologetically is the surest sign of an author’s confidence, that s/he will let that plot action flow, with faith in his/her skills to bring me round again (along with the character).
The other point I buried in this overlong post, hrm, I think I did, was that in reading the person’s critique of Francis’ most recent book, I was struck by what could be (maybe? thoughts?) a difference in reader approach between non-romance and romance. Or maybe some readers do it automatically, and it’s just that I see the guiding/training hand of authorial-style in the romance books -- that is, some readers want to like a character, and prefer that Bad Things get explained so they can rationalize continuing to like the character is hawt, or interesting, or good, or whatever. Meanwhile, authors excuse Bad Things and give a reason (or trivialize the ‘abberation’ in some way) rather than risk character-dislike being the reason for a reader tossing their book to the wall -- and readers got used to getting spoonfed after the hit-damage of seeing a character’s less-than-stellar side. I suppose it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
Anyway, the reviewer’s problem was that she found Lucy unlikeable, and Marten equally so. The reviewer also (I seem to recall) considers at least one of them unsympathetic, or maybe both, and in chewing over those words, I realized that this was exactly what I had enjoyed about the book. Lucy is, honestly, not very likeable: she’s got a sharp tongue, she’s smart as a frickin’ whip, she’s collected and controlled (but not necessarily ultra-controlled, just mature enough to not need to leak high-emotion all over the place or to emote like a leaking barge) -- and when Lucy thinks someone is an idiot, she has no compunction telling them so. She doesn’t have time to waste on idiots, especially with the worst part of the storm season -- and its magically-enhanced terrifying and gruesome sea creatures swarming the seas around the island-city -- so she’s not going to stand around and make idle chatter when there’s work to do.
Yet at the same time, she’s highly sympathetic: or maybe to see her as such requires that you be a reader with a strong work ethic, who understands the value of one’s reputation in the workplace, who knows what it’s like to work your way up to a position of some responsibility (however precarious), to have to deal with stupid people (and there’s the vicarious, because I would dearly love to be as sharp-tongued with clients as Lucy gets to be, at points)... and under that, she has a huge flaw she hides from showing on her work-persona, even from others in her private life.
It’s akin to watching/reading a character who’s a dedicated and respected person in X field, but who goes home at night and shoots up, hating themselves for getting hooked but unable to stop -- and more importantly, unable to even admit they’ve got a problem as the first step of getting help, because doing so would destroy everything (and perhaps some everyones, as well) they’ve worked to create. The character is trapped inside the veneer of his/her success, and torn between the questions of whether the wrongful aspect has grown to a destroying level, or whether the wrongful aspect can yet be contained and thus isn’t equal to the risk of destroying the rest of the person’s existence. Make sense?
That, I can sympathize with, even if I don’t jive much with someone being addicted (as a rough analogy, but I guess you know what I mean); the crux here is that as a reader, I can see the character is unlikeable, and I know I probably would clash within seconds if we met ‘in person’ -- but the author also allows me into a huge gaping hole in the character’s psyche, in which there exists this flaw that the character works so hard to hide from others, possibly even to also protect others from the consequences of the flaw, should it come to that. And above that, it’s a flaw the character knows exists, and hates, and wishes gone: I can definitely sympathize with that oh-so-human situation.
In sum, Lucy may not be likeable (though to be honest, I liked her a great deal as a refreshing change to the too-diplomatic, erm, even too-feminine?, too... something saddled on a lot of female characters), but she is inherently sympathetic. Marten, on the other hand, is a charming rascal, and from the very first, he’s quite likeable, in all those ways audiences are taught to enjoy -- in books and film as well as real life. A bit of the bad boy, y’see, a rapscallion even if he comes with good references (of being a friend of Lucy’s closest friend), and when Lucy tells him off, he just grins at her.
This is, admittedly, the flip side of the romance-cliche I mentioned above (where the
[Sidenote: wait a minute... Does anyone know of any romance-plotted books (not necessarily romance genre, mind you) where the guy delivers the smackdown and the woman oh-so-confidently continues to tease him and cajole him, eventually seducing him until he comes around? With, specifically, a romantic end in the story for the couple -- because I just realized after a few moments’ thought that I can’t think of any story -- where the end result/goal was romantic, that is, though I can think of plenty where the woman’s intent is friendship-based -- that I can’t think of a single story in which a distrustful or disinterested guy gets told, “oh, you’re so cute when you’re all snappish and prickly.” Uhm. Anyone?]
Getting back to Lucy and Marten: that premise of the couple’s dynamic, introduced from pretty much the start of the book, might have been a clue (if a misleading one) to any romance-genre readers who’d made it through the first chapter. Perhaps if that’s all I’d read, and if I didn’t know better but were for whatever reason under the impression that the story contains strong elements of romance despite being shelved in the SFF section, then I might’ve thought the rest of the story would go something like this... Something happens to Lucy that forces her to seek help concerning her One Big Secret, and wanting to limit the public damage, and having no one else to turn to (or perhaps because he suspects her flaw and is willing to use his knowledge to get closer to her), Lucy turns to Mister Won’t Be Dissauded, who not only eventually helps her break free (or in a more modern version, offers support and cookies while she does it herself), but also coaxes her out of her
It probably should go without saying that Francis follows that pattern for all of about, oh, one chapter. Now, true, she does carry through on some the parts -- enough that I can see where a romance-genre person would continue to read happily, secure in the knowledge that the author will take this left, this right, go four buildings down and pull around the back just like everyone else does. I can also see how that reader would be more than a little upset to wake up two chapters later and discover that not only is she not in Kansas, but the author’s kidnapped her to Brazil and they’re about to get on a boat for the Ivory Coast... by way of Hong Kong.
It’s when Marten’s dishonorable act comes not at the end of two and a half books’ worth of getting you to like him, but somewhere closer to only two and a half chapters after you’ve met him for the first time. I won’t spill what it is he does, but I will say that it’s definitely not a pleasant, nor kind, nor particularly compassionate, act, and it’s one -- regardless of whether Marten recognizes or will even accept the dire consequences of his acts -- for which Francis doesn’t even attempt to excuse Marten. I wouldn’t say the author’s leaving the guy out to hang, but it’s a pretty close call. Yeah, so Marten’s truly likeable, but his doublecross makes him totally unsympathetic
[Not my book, after all. What a turn of phrase, now that I think about it..!]
Yet Marten's overall likeableness kept me reading, and interested, even as I was thinking: you! you’re a jerk! ... and unlike the romance-reader, I had no problem with the fact that the narration and tone never once attempted to contradict my reaction. In fact, I’d even say the narration expected that reaction to a degree of planning for it, and then hinging a lot of the rest of the story on it. Both in terms of how other characters interpreted it (and none make the attempt to rationalize it for Marten, nor on his behalf to the reader), and in how Marten himself begins to re-evaluate his actions and -- here’s where Dayton needed lessons -- attempting to do something about it. He may not stay likeable throughout the story, thanks to his unsympathetic act, but just as he’s losing the last dregs of his likeability, he’s simultaneously gaining in sympathy, by dint of his bullheaded determination to do something about his screw-up.
And, I should add, that he doesn’t succeed the first time. That, my dears, is authoritativeness when it comes to character portrayal: allowing backsliding! (I don’t count repeating the same mistake without any attempt at correction to be a type of backsliding, though.) It says something (to me, at least), when a reader gets to a crossroads for the character... and the character turns around and walks back into that dark pit (whatever type of pit it may be). When the reader groans out loud -- and startles the sleeping dog nearby -- you know you’re caught up in the character’s conflict. And just like we may have friends who frustrate us for being bone-headed morons about this or that, frustrating us even as we continue to love them, so we can feel the same about characters.
The long-suffering groan, the comical slap to the forehead, all signs of “man, you are so frustrating me right now,” but if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that this reaction more often means the reader’s caught up enough -- cares enough -- to keep reading despite the character screwups. A reader who doesn’t care is more likely to huff and close the book, not react with a sort of amused, aggravated, book-clenching grip, along with a silent-voiced hope that someone in the next chapter will smack the character silly. (Or non-silly, as the case may be.)
The last bit of comparison between these three is that of what the main character eventually achieves (above and beyond the resolution of the main conflict). For the Path and Rose series, this overall result stretches through all three books; for The Cipher, it’s open-and-close inside one book, but there is a reward for all three main characters. Don’t know what else I might call it, but a reward, although in most of the epic fantasy I’ve read, the reward wasn’t planned-for, hasn’t really been part of the conflict, maybe wasn’t even an issue or option when the book(s) began. Right off the top of my head, first example is Mulan (original poetry or Disney version, this is one passage in which they’re similar): when Mulan saves China from the Huns, the emporer asks her to be one of his generals. (In the Disney version, she goes home to be a Good Girl; in the original, she spends another however many years kicking ass.)
But that is the ‘reward’ in a nutshell: Mulan didn’t go in her father’s name, didn’t fight with the army, didn’t come rushing into the city after the spies, just so she could end up being an imperial general. It was no more within her range of goals -- from the “probable” even to the “highly unlikely but would be really cool” -- than it was for Luke Skywalker to give Obi Wan Kenobi a ride home just so he could eventually get presented with some Olympic-medal ripoff from a chick with cinnamon buns on her head while some walking carpet cheers next to him. Just not really in the plans, y’know?
Now here’s where the type of reward has to fit in more than just “makes the readers happy with a great happy ending!” kind of fit. Luke Skywalker -- intentional or not -- did rescue the princess, and was instrumental in taking out the Death Star. Giving him a medal and public acclaim fits, and works for me, because it rewards him within the parameters of what makes sense to give a young man, otherwise still naive and headstrong, some kind of recognition. Unless he’d pulled a Mulan and single-handedly averted the majority of the Huns and then demonstrated quick thinking and strong tactical skills upon tracking down and taking out the spies who escaped the first barrage -- then there’s no reason to reward him with a military position... and there’s every reason to expect that Mulan, in contrast, would rise to the challenge of a greater military responsibility, regardless of her young age.
A reward as a temporary culmination-point seems a common move in multi-book works. It’s a positive version of the bait-and-switch: the main conflict isn’t resolved, but in the meantime,
Reisil does get a reward of some sort at the stopping point between books, and it fits where she is and what she’s achieved so far and reflects what she could achieve, given the chance. That is, she doesn’t marry a prince and sail off to be an international diplomat; she is an orphan in a semi-classist society, after all. She doesn’t get invited to come teach at, let alone head, the country’s finest healer-university; she’s barely out of her teens and maybe a year done with her own education. If I went with possible rewards based on aptitude she shows in the book, she’s not even complimented with significant recognition by horsemen, trackers, or military minds. And despite the fact that she shows a magical aptitude, and divine connection, that’s unrivaled in her world, she’s not even particularly feted, let alone wined and dined and majorly rewarded, for that, either.
Actually, the best I can recall, the bulk of her reward consists of a path that Reisil herself doesn’t find that attractive (and I don’t mean in the “oh, little old me, oh, but I couldn’t!” kind of for-show disinclination, but a genuine, “thanks, but I’d really rather keep on with my original goals, thanks,” kind of preference). Maybe the one reward she does get is a sort of half-recognition from a childhood nemesis, and the admiration of a set of friends she’s grown to respect, as well as the attraction of a man who started out as a prick, stays a bit of an arrogant guy, but is decent despite not caring about his rough edges. (He’d probably get along great with Lucy, or try to kill her within twenty seconds of meeting, if she didn’t skewer him first.)
Over in Lucy’s story, yes, it’s a stand-alone story although it’ll share the world with several other promised books (and if you like the Dickensian-influenced, shades-of-Victorian-gothic, intense and complex world and characters of The Cipher, and you liked the sea-faring and ship-working technical and environmental details in various nautical-based epics of the past century, you will absolutely devour The Black Ship) -- but back to Lucy... anyway. She gets a reward, of a sorts, at the end (while at the same time getting the one thing she does want ripped right out of her hands), but it’s still a reward that’s within the scope of her position in her society, her knowledge, her past actions, all that. Given the ups and downs she goes through, and the consequences of her One Big Secret, any kind of majorly public recognition would’ve been tough for me to believe.
I mention those as distinct contrast to what made me have the hardest time at the start of The Eternal Rose, though it wasn’t an issue I’d predicted at all. That is, Kallista -- like Reisil -- carries a type of magic that’s unparalleled and unforeseen in her world. Like Reisil, she’s asked (if not outright expected) to use this ability to protect her country from outside threats; and unlike the more peace-bound pseudo-Red-Cross-worker healer-type Reisil, Kallista is career army and shown to be pretty good at her job. Therefore, at the end of the second book, after Kallista and her cohorts have saved the country from invasion (again), and the political top guy wants to retire, or something, whatever (been a while), but the position’s vacant. Parliament can choose its new figurehead, and they pick... you guessed it... Kallista.
Which pretty much took a lot of the joy out of the storyline for me, and might be (I’m starting to think) why the vast majority of stories end when that final, if unexpected, honor is bestowed. After all, what we liked -- and I’m including generic readers in here with me, or maybe it’s my turn at the royal we, damn it -- is that long struggle from the hero’s days of being unknown and disrespected and generally struggling bottom-of-the-pole up through the setbacks and achievements and final overall conflict to win the day. So he’s then asked to stick around and be the country’s president, say what? Yeah, we all saw how well that worked for Generals Jackson and Eisenhower. Just because someone did her job as an Army officer, and did it well, and was even instrumental -- if not overwhelmingly so -- in diverting invasion does not mean queenship is in the cards. Generalship, see, I would’ve thought that would be interesting, to pit her against a new commanding officer just after a big promotion.
But instead, Dayton plays the “oh so special” card that Francis didn’t play, though I didn’t think much about it in Francis’ book until I’d read Dayton’s and finally put my finger on what I didn’t like (and thus discovered what did work, in the previously-read work). It’s not just that once the character is at the top of the heap, having been rewarded up to a level that any previous conflicts are now avoidable by dint of this one mid-series reward -- how do you angst about not having enough to eat on the battlefield when your entire kitchen staff follows you from manor house to manor house? -- but it’s also that it just plain doesn’t fit the character’s previously displayed talents, skills, or potential. Plenty said that Kallista would make a kick-ass general. Not much was saying -- nothing was saying -- she’d make a great queen. Big difference in job skills, not to mention uniform and personality-style required.
Oh, but the reason is because she’s got speshul magic. That entirely negates her lack of experience, let alone total lack of any real diplomatic skills, and makes it perfectly reasonable to put her in charge.
And so, a Mary Sue is born.
Sprung full-grown from the head of a previously interesting character, at that. Pity. Things were going so well up until then.
Or maybe it’s just me. I mean, the “rare and unparalleled magical skill” is all over the place in traditional fantasy, if not downright a mandatory ingredient for the fantasy epic recipe. I mean, I’m thinking it’s maybe like saying you can make bread without flour. I guess you could, but chances are that most folks wouldn’t call it bread. The problem is that when you start rewarding a character based on a skill she did nothing to gain, then I start getting irked. If you follow that up with abrupt and repeated bouts of hysteria for reasons not entirely explicable and rationalized out the wazoo, that’s when I get really annoyed. (Even though I slogged through and read the rest, mostly because as a PDF-only book, I could hardly return it.)
The real key is that when the character did nothing to earn the skill, it becomes very hard to find the character sympathetic. You can certainly find him/her likeable -- as I said above, that’s a distinct trait from sympatheticness -- but how do you relate to someone who is pretty much the end-all and be-all of this one skill? I mean, talk about a definite security when it comes to market demand. Write your own damn check and the client will sign anything, that kind of thing, and now I’m supposed to believe the character has some kind of struggle? What? This is an especially crucial point if the author doesn’t lean to the school of thought that all effort should have a cost, like those stories in which a character may have the ability to, say, freeze time -- but does so at the cost of a year of her life, for each event, or spends a night in complete agony after a day of making the king’s roses bloom out of season, or whatever: but still, a definite cost.
Side note: while I’m on the topic, “can’t do magic for a day or two afterwards” doesn’t count as a cost, people: I wouldn’t race on Saturday and then race again on Sunday because I was still worn out on Sunday, but not-racing on Sunday wasn’t exactly a cost I paid, not in the sense of something I lose because of what I did on Saturday.
Cost becomes even more important the less the skill is self-cultivated. The freer the lunch appears to be, the higher a price you must pay somewhere. I guess there could be readers out there who like the “get it for free” fantasy where the final reward is all out of proportion and the cost wasn’t too high -- I wonder just how many of them lurk in the romance-genre, given how much I see that trait in romance-genre storylines. But most folks I know, myself included, know that we’ve had to work hard for our skills, to educate ourselves (formally or on-the-job), to practice, to hone our talents. A person may start with an ear for pitch and timing, but no one’s ever woken up and suddenly ‘had’ Mozart’s skills as a pianist. No one will ever bop you on the head and thereby grant you the knowledge required to pass a dissertation defense on astrophysics and do it cold -- like, without even having gone to a single class. That, in my opinion, is the equivalent of “suddenly getting” a divine magic.
How an author treats a character with divine magic, how the author rewards that character, and how carefully the author maneuvers around the risks, tells me a lot about how savvy the author is to just what it means to include divinely-granted, oh-so-speshul magic in the story. In some ways, really, the author’s just turned the character into an unstoppable force, and what’s the interest in that, where’s the conflict, unless you can provide an immovable object as opposition?
Yes, some may say that a parliament is certainly an immovable object. Okay, I’ll give you that one, but I also say it’s a damn well unexciting immovable object. Who the hell likes dealing with committees, let alone sees them -- collectively -- as an intriguing organism with enough charisma and character to stand against the divinely-granted unstoppable object. At most, they can do what the parliament does in Dayton’s book (and what many of them do in real life): they just plain block the majority of her requests.
Which is a bit too literal on the notion of an immovable object; when it comes to the conflicted world of a plotline, I want the immoveable object to not refuse to move but to also stop the unstoppable object. That’s an awkward way to say it. How about, I want the obstacle to be as active as the protagonist, an obstacle that shifts and realigns itself to changes in the situation, just as much as the protagonist must. A moving target is harder to hit, after all, to completely mix and whack my metaphors beyond all coherency. I just can’t see any validity in the argument of “well, I made her queen since God X or Goddess Y said she’s speshul, after all, but that’s okay, parliament’s going to prevent her from doing any good, because, y’know, they’re an obstacle!”
And that requires I accept -- however unconsciously -- several assumptions on the author’s part about her own characters. One, parliament is full of people smart enough (uh, whatever) to hire/elect/appoint this divine-marked Speshul Power Person. But! Two, at the same time, parliament isn’t going to actually, y’know, listen to the declarations of this Speshul Power Person, because, y’know, parliament now has to play the Bad Guy (or one of them) and be the obstacle. Which means that in turn I must accept, as a reader, that the author’s parliamentary system is full of buffoons, powermongers, illogical thinkers, fuller brush salesmen, and other pathetic sorts: because unless the author is going to characterize at least a good portion of this many-headed obstacle, am I just to believe that a large chunk of people are automatically against the announcements and goals of Our Hero/ine simply because the author says they have to be?
I guess that relies on whether I honestly believe that every single politician in Congress, with almost no exception, is a political twit. Hrm. *thinks hard*
Well, more seriously: no, I don’t. I do think every single congresscritter believes s/he is doing the best s/he can, even if this is the self-convincing rationalization of a duplicitous soul, or just the delusion of someone insulated from true public opinion. Whatever. But I don’t think they all, or even a majority, truly have negative intentions towards this country, nor does any politician; it’s a lot more work and a lot less reward than Hollywood would have you believe, you’ll never please everyone, and you’ll always fall short by some standard, and you get into it because you sincerely believe (in most countries, at least) that you can do some good.
Given we do have a real-world counterpart to such political entities in SF/F worlds, I fail to see how authors could reasonably argue that when Our Hero/ine -- especially those Divine-Speshul ones -- posit some Brilliantly Cheap and Simple Solution that the parliament/congress wouldn’t leap on it. Or, failing to leap, at least thrash it out and come around, if it is so brilliant. If there are enough people to say it’s not brilliant, wouldn’t there have been enough people to block the Speshul One from becoming Head Guy in the first place?
Because the only other conclusion I can see, when the Speshul One is knocked up to eleven and the only significant remaining obstacle (external to the Hero/ine characterization, that is) is that of a body of politicos -- is that the Brilliantly Cheap and Simple Solution isn’t, in fact, so brilliant, or cheap, or even a real solution. In other words: the hero/ine may be speshul, but s/he is still an idiot -- and certainly not qualified to rule a frickin’ country.
This is a damn long post considering I managed to avoid most (hrm, I hope, well, okay, a few exceptions) of the major spoilers. There was some more I was contemplating in that last point, but it can wait for another day, or maybe it’s already been said in there and I just need to reread to see that. Yes, yes, I do like to revise, and I can be succinct... uhm, sometimes... if cash is involved... but that would mean rereading and revising in the posting-program, and then I’d bloody well never get anything put up. So, you see draft! Consider it as such, and entirely unpolished and sprung full-grown from the head of ME DAMN IT, so jump in and argue or posit or whatever as you wish.
And don’t forget what I said about The Black Ship. Go get a copy of The Cipher, now, though to keep you company while you wait. Y’know, just a thought, not that I’m biased or anything.*
*Actually I try hard not to be. Then again, since I can’t read and not analyze -- I am a Virgo, damn it -- I figure that undermines any tendency towards preferential treatment. No one escapes the critique, no one! ...including me. Oi.
ETA -- because I KNEW there was a major point I'd thought of and forgotten to include! -- there's also one thing I learned about trilogies from reading these two series: the need for circular completion.
If you don't end up where you started, somehow, then it's not really a trilogy so much as a series of books about the same character and the same world. That's entirely possible and works just as well, but then don't tell me it's a series -- because a 'series' to me and possibly most readers is really just a kind of serialized Really Big Story. That is, a series is something where you could publish all the parts together in one anthology, read them from start to finish, and they work.
It's possible to do have the circular completion on a simple, literal, level, which is the tack Francis takes at the end of the third book. It's the same thing Tolkien did for Lord of the Rings, and if you think about how LotR moved from start to finish, you'd probably see that if the story (which was, at heart, the story of hobbits and not elves, dwarves, or even humans) had ended once Aragorn were crowned -- and we'd not been able to follow the hobbits back to where they began -- the story would feel, however subtly, unfinished. It needs a completeness: a story requires closure.
Nonfiction is more straightforward about it: the thesis or hypothesis stated in the first chapter is usually revisited. Either the author is adjusting the hypothesis based on the evidence reviewed in the book, or the author reaffirms and possibly clarifies the original thesis.
Fiction isn't much different. We get a sense of a cohesive whole when the ending in some way reflects the beginning, brings it around to a conclusive goal that solidly fits where the character began. I don't know why this is; I'm not convinced as humans that we always feel the compulsion to "go back to our roots" so I'm not sure why it's such a solid and continuing element in our fiction. But it is, and there it is, and it does color how I feel when I close the final chapter on a story, whether a short one-shot or a multi-book novel.
And that, in final point, was part of what had me -- even at the parts I did like -- feeling a bit as though I was reading a side-trip in Dayton's series, and not the book marked as the finale. The story begins with Kallista and her cohorts deciding to travel to a neighboring country to visit the relatives of one of her partners, and while there, they battle demons and slavetraders and various political and socio-cultural bigotry. All good, except... the end doesn't really harken back to Kallista's beginnings as an army soldier standing on the barricade overlooking the enemy, let alone the goals and hopes and fears she had, then.
I'm not sure how to put it. It's hard to describe (even for me!) -- I'm certainly not saying every character must do a mental retrospective like some kinda bad TV sitcom "tag" just before the credits roll, after the last commercial break. But it does need to come full circle somehow, or maybe it's just that we always know our journey has finally ended when our left-behind home is back in sight.
It's not just that Kallista's third story -- the supposed pinnacle of the trilogy, and usually the culmination of the smaller battles that ramped readers up to this final one -- takes place in a distant country. It's also that, despite the emphasis on "these are the demons that got away", the impression isn't "now we fight the biggest and baddest of them all!" so much as "now we go around the countries doing clean-up duty." Y'know, Tolkien did that, too, but he gave the work about a paragraph and a half, amounting to nothing more than a mention of Merry and Pippin getting rid of the riff-raff and returning peace to their corner of the world.
Compared to Reisil -- whose battle is most definitely the final, and highest, and highest price-bearing, of all three books -- Kallista's third story feels like it should've been a postscript. Or maybe a ramp-up. Or published as a continuation but not as a conclusion of the series -- that, maybe should've been the second book. With a few minor edits, it could've been, now that I think about it.
But finishing a trilogy without a sense of coming back around again -- and I think a big part of that is "finally reaching a clear and positive resolution on whatever conflict began driving this story" -- even if that resolution is the character's own peace of mind about it, perhaps? -- finishing without that reflection (literal and metaphorical) just leaves me kinda... undone. Dissatisfied, on some level.
Must contemplate that more, since I can't quite put my finger on what is required. That is, what works, what doesn't work, what ways have authors incorporated the notion of circular completion, and can it be purely metaphorical instead of literal or even environmental? Etc.
IOW:
Thoughts?