Review: Well of Sorrows, by Benjamin Tate

[ed_rex]

Well Of Sorrows

I hate coming down hard on books by relatively unknown writers; given my 'druthers, I'd much prefer to pass over them in silence. At the same time, if a writer goes to the trouble of sending me a review copy (even an electronic copy), it seems disrespectful to ignore it.

So I've struggled with this review, and not only because I have been "friends" with the author (or rather, with his pseudonym) on Livejournal for a while, but because it became clear in the reading that Benjamin Tate's heart is very much in the right place.

Well of Sorrows tries hard to play with, and even to reverse, many of epic fantasy's tired tropes. The protagonist is more peace-maker than warrior, and in plays of scenes of glorious battle we are given the blood and the shit and the brutality of hand-to-hand combat.

Unfortunately, good intentions alone don't make for good art. Well of Sorrows suffers from shallow characterization, structural confusion and world-building that is not remotely convincing. Click here for my full review (hardly any spoilers).

Comments

[ilthit]

That's a shame. I do like to see tropes subverted.

Subversion is good

[ed_rex]

Books that do it well, especially in fantasy, are few and far between.

Which suddenly brings to mind a series that I think did it very well indeed: Samuel R. Delany's Return to Neveryon series. A brilliant deconstruction of the heroic fantasy genre.

Re: Subversion is good

[ilthit]

Hmm. I'll remember that rec, though I've never been tempted to pick up a Delany before.

Re: Subversion is good

[ilthit]

...Oh dear, this isn't the series about evil brown people oppressing white slaves?

Re: Subversion is good

[ed_rex]

Good grief, no! Delany is one hell of a lot more interesting than that. (For whatever it is worth, he is also brown himself, and very thoughtful on the subject of race and, especially, of race-as-social-construct.)

There are a lot of inversions, one of which is that the "civilized" people are brown, or maybe black; one gets the sense the stories are set somewhere in Africa, a bit the way R.E. Howard's Conan stories are presumably somewhere in Europe (or so I believe; I've never read the latter).

So brown (or black) people are oppressors and some of the white characters are slaves, but Delany is after much bigger fish. The nature of slavery —, economic and political and even sexual — is among them, but so too are the origins and nature of written language, the nature of cities and economics, and not to mention relations between men and women, homosexuals and straights.