Reviews and Comments

A compelling premise but a ponderous execution. I found the narrative hard to follow in a page-by-page way. There are five stories, only tangentially related, and many of the stories are themselves told out of order with weird flashbacks, and a lot of ambiguity about who is where when doing what. Maybe if you've read a lot of actual English history these things make more sense. Also the first story was about a tiresome man obsessed with his steam-powered truck who is very, very sad that he is friend-zoned by his secret love of 10 years. The second story starts with the main character dying a gruesome death and doesn't seem to contribute much to the story arc except to tell us about the semaphore system. OK? The third story is about a stupid fishing village and a brooding fisher-girl and some pirates and somehow makes the pirates boring. It's an accomplishment. The third story is about a priest who is commissioned to paint scenes of torture performed by the inquisition and then goes crazy. The fourth story is about the daughter of the friend-zoning lady from the first story getting involved with the local lord. It's all told at such a weird stylistic remove that again sometimes it's unclear what's even happening. The fifth story is actually pretty good, though also suffers from the problem of what the heck is literally happening here and in what order? And the coda kind of wraps it all up in a neat bow.

This book apparently was considered really important and ground breaking and stuff, and maybe conceptually it is but the execution is poor. I suppose it's meant to show the history of ideas through the view point of several pathetic individual lives. I see some reviews comparing it to Thomas Hardy, whose writing I also dislike, because it's all about very boring and/or bad people doing stupid things or having horrible things happen to them mostly for no good reason. Pavane is less intensely oppressive than Hardy but it pulls off the same tone.

The characters are carried along by events rather than making choices, and everyone dies a pathetic death. Luckily, one doesn't care about them that much because the story is so sketchy.

Some people might like this, but it's not what I look for in science fiction.

This book gets good about 300 or 400 pages in. Before that it's a whole lot of purple prose and extremely sex positive courtesaning. The prose never stops being purple, you just get used to it. About halfway through the heroine starts having really great adventures that aren't just about who she is having sex with to gain information.

The world building is fantastic. For all the slowness of the first half, everything that's mentioned or happens in the beginning later has a payoff in various dramatic denouements.

And this book has all the things I love in a good fantasy story. There are mysterious prophecies that come true in unexpected and dramatic ways. People have to make terrible sacrifices. There is danger and adventure and when the book is at its best, events that follow the inexorable logic of ancient Greek myths or Arthurian tales.

There is a lot of weird sex, none of which I found sexy even though I actually like reading about that kind of thing, normally. But on the other hand, I didn't find any of it upsetting, unlike say the unrelentingly and pointlessly gross grimdark rapyness of a lot of other fantasy series that try to handle sexual themes (hi Malazan books). I suspect the author may have deployed excessive purple prose around sexuality specifically to make it less titillating. Well it worked. I haven't ready less sexy accounts of explicit sex since reading de Sade.

But, and I have to give credit here, the weird sex always moves the plot forward. The plot might plod but it always moves forward and eventually there is dramatic payoff.