Garth Nix's Abhorsen Trilogy
May. 30th, 2003 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennySabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen
I enjoyed these books. I like the world and the magic system; I especially like the character of Mogget. I like the way he does gender roles, so that Lirael and Sabriel are the decision makers, while Sam and Touchstone follow them, but have important contributions of their own to make. And the plot certainly keeps one's attention.
Sabriel and Touchstone are a little too much capital-H heroes, and too little characterized; I like Lirael and Sam much better, although Nix doesn't really stick with Lirael's reluctance to speak as firmly as I wished he would. I was disappointed by the predictabililty of the romances; they were a little too easy to spot. And he has that horrible compulsion--Tad Williams has it, too--to make happy endings where they aren't really warranted. I think fantasy writers are far too prone to that kind of thing. When I kill people in my books, they stay dead.
The magic system was perhaps excessively schematized and tidy; it's one of those trilogies where, if there are nine precincts of Death, you know that one or the other of your heroes will have to visit all nine, and if there are seven bells on an Abhorsen's bandolier, you know all seven are going to be rung. And I wanted him to do more with the jarring juxtaposition of Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom, because that was the part--aside from the basic concept of an Abhorsen--that really grabbed my attention.
In the category of Most Irrelevant Nitpick, what on earth was he doing with Shakespeare? Touchstone is of course the name of the fool in As You Like It, and Abhorson is the name of the executioner in Measure for Measure; neither of those plays seems to have anything at all to do with these books, and while you can make a case for the relevance of Touchstone-in-Shakespeare to Touchstone-in-Nix--Mogget and Touchstone very thoughtfully explain it, in case anyone was confused--Abhorson in MfM is a ghastly character, and nothing at all like the Abhorsens of the books, either in personality or in function. I grant that abhorsen is a really cool word, and I like it, but if that was going to be his principle of names and titles, he needed to go ahead and go all out. You can't stop with one word that's slightly off-kilter; there has to be a whole raft of them, so that tiresome people like me don't give ourselves headaches trying to work out the corespondences. Gene Wolfe does that sort of thing splendidly.
But they were fun, well-written enough, and the Great Library of the Clayr is the coolest thing ever (also v. Wolfian, come to think of it). I would have been perfectly happy with a novel that never left the Clayr's Glacier, and there are ways it might have been a better novel, because following a less predictable quest/bildungsroman plot.
Fun books. Worth a reread, most likely.
I enjoyed these books. I like the world and the magic system; I especially like the character of Mogget. I like the way he does gender roles, so that Lirael and Sabriel are the decision makers, while Sam and Touchstone follow them, but have important contributions of their own to make. And the plot certainly keeps one's attention.
Sabriel and Touchstone are a little too much capital-H heroes, and too little characterized; I like Lirael and Sam much better, although Nix doesn't really stick with Lirael's reluctance to speak as firmly as I wished he would. I was disappointed by the predictabililty of the romances; they were a little too easy to spot. And he has that horrible compulsion--Tad Williams has it, too--to make happy endings where they aren't really warranted. I think fantasy writers are far too prone to that kind of thing. When I kill people in my books, they stay dead.
The magic system was perhaps excessively schematized and tidy; it's one of those trilogies where, if there are nine precincts of Death, you know that one or the other of your heroes will have to visit all nine, and if there are seven bells on an Abhorsen's bandolier, you know all seven are going to be rung. And I wanted him to do more with the jarring juxtaposition of Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom, because that was the part--aside from the basic concept of an Abhorsen--that really grabbed my attention.
In the category of Most Irrelevant Nitpick, what on earth was he doing with Shakespeare? Touchstone is of course the name of the fool in As You Like It, and Abhorson is the name of the executioner in Measure for Measure; neither of those plays seems to have anything at all to do with these books, and while you can make a case for the relevance of Touchstone-in-Shakespeare to Touchstone-in-Nix--Mogget and Touchstone very thoughtfully explain it, in case anyone was confused--Abhorson in MfM is a ghastly character, and nothing at all like the Abhorsens of the books, either in personality or in function. I grant that abhorsen is a really cool word, and I like it, but if that was going to be his principle of names and titles, he needed to go ahead and go all out. You can't stop with one word that's slightly off-kilter; there has to be a whole raft of them, so that tiresome people like me don't give ourselves headaches trying to work out the corespondences. Gene Wolfe does that sort of thing splendidly.
But they were fun, well-written enough, and the Great Library of the Clayr is the coolest thing ever (also v. Wolfian, come to think of it). I would have been perfectly happy with a novel that never left the Clayr's Glacier, and there are ways it might have been a better novel, because following a less predictable quest/bildungsroman plot.
Fun books. Worth a reread, most likely.
