DWJ: The Merlin Conspiracy

[truepenny]

I can honestly say it was better than Year of the Griffin.

And there was a lot of this book I liked a lot. I actually quite like Nick Mallory as a narrator, and I enjoyed the inventiveness of the plot, especially the way she used that ten-year time discrepancy to produce her villain.

But the book had two problems, and unfortunately they were both major. One was the other narrator, Roddy, and the second was the ending.

Roddy was problematic for me for a couple of reasons. One was because I never did, first to last, get any clear sense of her character. Especially for a Jones heroine, she seemed weirdly characterless--much more a convenient vehicle for plot than a real person. This is very much in contrast to Deep Secret, which has its flaws, but none of them is Rupert or Maree, both of whom I love as narrators. We get a lot of other characters telling us things about Roddy, but I, at least, got no sense of Roddy herself.

Which leads into the problem that belongs, in a Venn diagram sort of way, to both my major categorical problems. Part of the ending is the revelation of the glamour Grundo's had on Roddy for years, and this, like most of the other terrible things that happen at the end, has no fucking pay-off.

Which makes me all the madder because of the direct comparison with one of Jones's own best books, Charmed Life. What Gwendolen does to Cat is not very different from what Grundo does to Roddy, and there are consequences all over Charmed Life, both in terms of plot and in terms of the damage done to Cat's psyche. But in TMC, there's nothing. Roddy has a kind of minor crisis and then just forgets about it. And no one seems to think Grundo's done anything particularly wrong, or that he needs to be dealt with, or anything of the sort.

But that's symptomatic of the problems the book has. There aren't consequences. The Izzys (who are wonderfully horrible brats, like Vivian Lee in A Tale of Time City) have been casting a glamour of their own, and they don't suffer the consequences of their wrongdoing any more than Grundo does. Judith and Heppy have been treating the invisible people terribly, but don't even seem to have been forced to admit that, much less deal with it. And why the fuck is Dora not locked up for the good of herself and society? She's clearly completely untrustworthy, and with no excuse for letting herself be used like that (I really loathe Dora), and yet no one even apparently bothers to explain to her either what she was helping to do or why it was wrong. Romanov, who's set up to be this ominous and incredibly important character (and then turns out to be Grundo's father for crying out loud), just fades out at the end (along with that sudden new idea that Nick wants to be like Romanov when he grows up), as do the whole political ramifications of what the conspirators very nearly managed.

And when consequences do happen, they happen stupidly. The villains of this book are some of the stupidest villains DWJ has ever written--that business about only being able to call Gwyn ap Nud three times, for instance. Anyone too stupid to get the right end of the stick on that is too stupid to manage a conspiracy of the size and complexity that these idiots do.

Jones is not a writer who does much with angst. And actually I mostly really appreciate that about her--while loving the books where she gets it right (The Homeward Bounders and Power of Three both have a lot of varying angst in them, for instance). But what happens in TMC is that she sets up situations that have serious consequences, serious emotional trauma for the characters, and then just shies away. Roddy and Grundo is the worst example, but she also completely funks the effects of the ritual on Nick. Roddy says some vague, ominous things about how much Nick suffered and how long it's going to take for his mind to heal, but Nick himself doesn't seem to show any ill effects, and the book ends so quickly in any event that there's no time for the reader really to assimilate what happened. The book forces an emotional situation (as Peter says to Harriet in Have His Carcase)--and then refuses to deal with it.

I wanted to like this book. I really really did. And parts of it I like very much. But overall it just isn't satisfying. It doesn't feel finished.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Yeah.

Except I thought *Year of the Griffin* was way better than this.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Year of the Griffin was badly written. It had some of the clumsiest and most heavy-handed character exposition I believe DWJ has ever perpetrated. And that happens to hit more of my pet peeves than the problems with The Merlin Conspiracy.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I wasn't satisfied with it, either. Though I couldn't figure out why.

[kattahj.livejournal.com]

Word. I like Nick, but Roddy was bland, and the plot had too many parts that weren't properly worked through – as you showed.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I got the feeling she loved all her characters very much, even Dora and the Izzies, and it can be very hard to be angry with the ones you love and make sure they suffer the consequences of their actions. Unless she was making a very subtle point about co-dependency and enabling?