Mirage and Rhapsody

Mirage by Pauline Gedge = fantastic! I was starting to see the conclusion before it happened... but there were still surprises. I loved the book, especially the very end. The best book out of the recent lot I borrowed from The Public Library of Cincinnnati and Hamilton County so far.

And, on to Rhapsody: Child of Blood by Elizabeth Haydon. I mentioned in an earlier post that I didn't really remember anything that happened in the book - I read it some years ago when I lived in Athens, Ohio. Turns out, this may have been a defensive mechanism for my brain.

The book opens with an entity in a film editing room, editing the "films of time." He takes a boy in one cell of film and transfers him into another reel. Boy wakes up, meets girl, girl is sad, boy and girl do the nasty, boy gets transported back to his film reel by entity.

I was a little wierded out by the whole Watchmaker into Filmmaker premise, but willing to let it go. However, I'm most of the way through the book, and other than some other wierd things going on with time, Haydon hasn't revisited the Filmmaker.

Back to the story, the main body of the novel starts out with a girl named Rhapsody (yes, the titular character) composing music (how original! I shall write a book and name the main character Sword. She shall be a... warrior!) and rebuffing the advances of a henchman who wants to take Rhapsody to his master. Because Rhapsody used to be a prostitute. And, by the way, everyone, from the innkeeper to the bad guy LOVE Rhapsody. And she interests all men sexually.

Some time during her flight from Michael, the Wind of Death (...) she runs into two half-breeds who look semi-monstrous and asks to be adopted. Through this, you learn Rhapsody is a Namer/Singer: someone who sees into the truth of things, and when she speaks the truth of things, she can change things.

The two individuals she runs into were recently under the thumb of a demonic entity, but Rhapsody's skillz in Naming changed all that. And here, things get wierd. The threesome travel along the root of a tree, moving in time and being fundamentally changed. This was actually somewhat interesting - a world-tree that holds together the world and regulates time. But during the entire time, much is made of how small Rhapsody is, and how hard she has to work to keep up with her companions, and how difficult it is for her to be away from the sun and how terrible her nightmares are. They emerge on the other side of their world, more than 1000 years after they left their homeland.

And then you find out that Rhapsody has become MORE beautiful and that she has no idea she's beautiful. Let me clarify: she is so unobservant and idiotic, that no matter how many people tell her she's beautiful, or how many accidents are caused by people staring at her amazingness, she thinks she must be terrible to behold. Really? This lack of self-awareness and consideration really started to drive me insane. That, and the fact that EVERYONE ALWAYS LURVES HER. And to top off her interestingness, she adopts children as her grandchildren will-he-nill-he and declares that she loves them all (after meeting them once) and gasp! She's a half-breed! Because that is so much more amazing than just being one race... and... breaking new ground in the fantasy genre... she's much more than either race by itself. I'm not even going into the powers she has that she doesn't really have to work for - they just work perfectly well every time she needs them! Even though she's never done some of this shit before!

Really. I would like to say... MARY SUE! As wikipedia says "Perhaps the single underlying feature of all characters described as "Mary Sues" is that they are too ostentatious for the audience's taste... The author may seem to push how exceptional and wonderful the "Mary Sue" character is on his or her audience, sometimes leading the audience to dislike or even resent the character fairly quickly... While the label "Mary Sue" itself originates from a parody of this type of character, most characters labeled "Mary Sues" by readers are not intended by authors as such." To which I have to say... Rhapsody.

Rhapsody lacks any flaw: even her history as a prostitute is colored by the fact that she was so kind and sweet and thoughtful and... pushed into it by circumstance. And she advocates to her companions about why prostitution is bad for women, absolving her of the stain prostitution could confer. There is even a storyline about how she prostitutes herself to save a child. Because if you save children, its not a flaw. Even the tripe about how she doesn't recognize her beauty is supposed to be flattering - instead, Rhapsody comes off as an idiot.

I'm a big fan of knowing your strengths and trying to work around your weaknesses. Rhapsody not only doesn't have weaknesses, she doesn't know her strengths. She just tries stuff that she thinks up with no real effort and IT ALWAYS WORKS. Not only do I not identify with this character in any meaningful way that would invest me in this novel, I actively DO NOT LIKE HER, which, I'm fairly certain, was not the author's intent.

There are things going on with this book that deserve more scruitiny, but I can't move past my dislike of Rhapsody right now. The difference between this novel and Lord Foul's Bane, in my eyes, is the rest of the novel- Donaldson creates and interesting and compelling world and I very much liked the other characters. I hated Thomas Covenant's guts, but I really wanted everyone else in The Land to be alright. In Rhapsody, I don't really care what happens to them. I think part of this antipathy is Haydon's worldbuilding - the world seems to have been constructed around the story, rather than as the backbone of the story. Need to get people to live a long time to fit your fantastic 1500 year old journey over a root? Well, if everyone crosses part of the world, just make it so they never die! Which begs the question, how do you travel and trade if you cross over part of the world and then live forever? Pretty soon, you're going to have way too many people. And why doesn't everyone just go travel over that part of the world? I have no clue, because the author pretty much drops that info in our lap and then walks away.

I'm going to try to finish this book, mostly because I don't like to leave books unfinished, but I think I'll move on in the meantime. More interesting reading awaits.

Including this:

Which is the first book in the concluding trilogy to the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time by the late Robert Jordan. The series is being concluded by Brandon Sanderson. Given that this series, specifically The Eye of the World, was the first real fantasy book I ever read, I'm very interested to read this The Gathering Storm.