Not all those who wander are lost. --J.R.R. Tolkien
Last week’s review of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind got some pushback from readers who didn’t like the novel, thought it long, slow and pointless. So this week I’m going to double down and write about the sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. I’m not doing this out of contrariness but in the interest of fuller discussion. Rothfuss offers us a perfect excuse for conversation about what makes for good fantasy, how reader expectations can be subverted and/or rewarded, and how restrictive are our definitions. (See? I remember from earlier diaries all the “you’re only writing about one kind of fantasy” comments.)
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
In The Wise Man’s Fear we get the sea in storm and plenty of moonless nights [in fact, where has the moon gone, anyway?], but as in The Name of the Wind, the title is a set-up for the next and final novel, The Doors of Stone, wherein the mystery will be resolved. Kvothe covers maybe two years of his adventures in WMF, both at the University and in the world at large. It would be a disservice to prospective readers to rehash plot (and it would give too much away), so I won’t, especially when there are other meatier issues on the table.
The mystery around the Chandrian deepens, and other mysteries as well. Ambrose, the closest thing to an outright villain in the novel, pursues his vendetta against Kvothe, whom he forces to leave the University for a term and go to Vint to work for the Maer Alveron, who needs someone talented and discreet to save his life, artfully woo his bride and deal with robbers in the provinces. He finds Kvothe remarkably suited to all sorts of tasks. Adventures follow, seemingly random but not really, not if you’re paying attention.
For one thing, the Maer is courting Meluan Lackless. We know exactly who she is, even if Kvothe doesn’t figure it out. Her hatred of the Edema Ruh makes perfect sense, given her identity and the fact that a Ruh bard greatly complicated her life. What does it mean to “lack less,” anyway, especially given that “lack” is also an archaic spelling of “lock”? Locked doors (of stone) and locked chests (stone and roah wood), both locked with and without keys, figure largely and are not yet resolved, as is the question of names and their importance. Lady Lackless’ entry into the story also brings to mind lyric rhymes, (remember, as Kvothe says, children’s songs are repositories of arcane knowledge hiding in plain sight.) From The Name of the Wind:
Seven things has Lady Lackless
Keeps them underneath her black dress
One a ring that's not for wearing
One a sharp word, not for swearing,
Right beside her husband's candle
There's a door without a handle
In a box, no lid or locks
Lackless keeps her husband's rocks
There's a secret she's been keeping
She's been dreaming and not sleeping
On a road, that's not for traveling
Lackless likes her riddle raveling.
Compare it to the Lackless riddle in The Wise Man’s Fear:
Seven things stand before
The entrance to the Lackless door.
One of them a ring unworn
One a word that is forsworn
One a time that must be right
One a candle without light
One a son who brings the blood
One a door that holds the flood
One a thing tight-held in keeping
Then comes that which comes in sleeping.
Do I know where this is going? No, but it’s going to be critical. The first poem is sung by a girl, the second by a boy. Two perspectives, two evaluations, one mystery.
Doors—could be the Lackless doors of stone, or the four-panel stone doors in the Arcaneum. Both are probably involved; they may be related, and related also to the Chandrian, or at least to Haliax, whose candle casts shadows.
The number seven chimes through the novels. Significant events cluster around seven. There are seven Chandrian, Savian returns to Aloine after seven years, Denna needs Kvothe’s seven words, the Lackless door requires seven things to open it. It wouldn’t surprise me if, after the trilogy is finished, we find seven significant groupings of sevens.
I mention these trivia to remind the unsympathetic reader that there’s a method in the narrative. In true story-telling fashion (not the straightforward point-to-point plot-driven narratives we see so often today) Rothfuss is weaving a tapestry by seeding details, details that taken in isolation look indulgent and/or pointless but will, with sufficient perspective, resolve into a grand image.
For all the apparent disunity and meandering—remember, Kvothe warned us that “true stories seldom take the straightest way”—beneath the apparently incoherent plot there is a tightening. The tension slowly, inexorably, rises, as do the stakes, despite asides and breathers that seem not to advance the story—whether they be Kvothe’s attempts to shake off Ambrose, his adventures in Vint, his sojourn in Faerie, his study with the Adem—apparent detours that aren’t. I suspect that, like Melville in Moby Dick who drags the reader through a comprehensive education in All Things Whaling, Rothfuss is giving us everything necessary in the foreground so that, when all hell breaks loose, we’ll be able to follow.
The Kingkiller Chronicles falls into the great tradition of picaresque fantasy adventure, a tradition that started with Homer and the Odyssey. You can trace its continuity through the great Arthurian myth tradition, through MacDonald (as Angmar and Quarkstomper reviewed Lilith and Phantasies and their rambling plots), through Tolkien and into the present. Imagine complaining that the Odyssey has an episodic plot structure, or that the Grail quest is boring because it wanders too much, or Tom Bombadil brings nothing to The Lord of the Rings. When I read complaints that Rothfuss hasn’t structured his plot, I think, You can’t know that. He hasn’t finished yet. We’re only two-thirds of the way through, and the story is damn complex. It’s neither fair nor appropriate to deliver judgment on a book that isn’t done.
Kvothe: Protagonist or Hero?
TVTropes has done fantasy readers a disservice by turning everyone into check-box experts. Instead of evaluating a novel on its merits, discussion turns on who is or is not a Mary Sue (a less-video intensive discussion is available on Wikipedia), an MPDG or any of an array of plot devices, not only with Rothfuss but with other novels as well. Such close focus on predetermined elements, or tropes, leads the reader to substitute symbol for character; semiotically, you confuse the sign of a thing with the thing itself. Therefore, Kvothe becomes, not a dynamic character, an actor capable of growth and change, but a symbol—an overcompensation, a wish-fulfillment that displaces the author’s anxieties.
It speaks more about readers than writers if readers can’t see a hero in a contemporary fantasy novel, readers who can accept Arthur as hero, or Siegfried, or Aragorn and Gil-Galad—all of them not only beloved characters but signifiers of an ideal, but who refuse to accept a post-modern incarnation of Hero. Kvothe must instead be a protagonist; he must be normal, he must struggle and fail, fall prey to self-doubt, succeed only with the help of friends—in short, he must be a stand-in for the reader, a displacement of reader wishes, lest he be interpreted as a displacement of authorial desire. We take the Hero and we name him Mary Sue, turn him into a symbol, and dismiss him.
Recall the Hero’s Journey: Separation, Initiation, Return. We come into the novel—remember, this is one novel spread over three volumes—after the Initiation and Separation, when the hero is at his lowest point, in the Belly of the Whale, and just before he rallies in the Return. That is, anyway, how I read him. I asked in my hero diary if a hero is even possible anymore, will we recognize him? (And yes, that question was a set-up. As Kvothe says, these things don’t plan themselves.)
If you insist on seeing Kvothe as a protagonist, we can go there. He does double duty and can serve as a fair protagonist. The qualities I’ve listed above: growth, self-doubt, attempt and failure and reattempt, the help of friends, all apply to his story. And you must remember that the story is autobiographic and, therefore, colored by both Kvothe’s perspective and his willingness to lie. It can be read this way—an unreliable narrator creating his own wish-fulfilled reality. Or you can read it as an epic.
The narrative fulcrum that applies within the story that Kvothe relates and within the novels themselves is the concept of the alar—the thing you know to be false but you believe with all your being. It’s the foundation of sympathy and the basis for all magic, which Rothfuss discusses deeply, fully, and damn near endlessly (that’s how you know it’s important). It applies for the reader, as well.
What is Kvothe doing, hiding out in the middle of nowhere? He has changed his name, and names are important. When Elodin hears that Kvothe has renamed himself he becomes deeply alarmed. To change one’s name is to change one’s essential being. Kvothe found a broken creature and named her Auri, so they can become friends (and she holds an essential role in this mystery as well as being the subject of the beautiful and strange novella The Slow Regard of Silent Things). Auri tells Elodin that if his name becomes too heavy, Kvothe can give him a new one. To know the name of a thing (like wind) is to understand it in all its being. Kvothe has become Kote (a word that translates as “disaster”); with the shortening of his name, he had become less than he was.
Is he truly a broken man waiting to die? This is the central mystery. In his own narrative Kvothe has said that his alar is powerful, and can be broken into several pieces in order to manage higher magics. It’s possible that those pieces correspond to the Kote/Kvothe personalities, that they’re alter-egos in the truest sense. If that’s so, Bast’s charge to Chronicler to “make him remember who he is” is a literal commission. It’s also possible that Kvothe is breaking through anyway—for a man who never spoke about himself, never sang, and never shared any knowledge of the arcane, he’s already doing a lot of that before Chronicler shows up. The attacks in the inn can be read as either Kvothe being unable to answer the challenges before him (as in, he is physically and mentally unable), or he can’t because it’ll blow his deep cover and reveal him for who he is. He lets the mercenaries beat him up because he can’t fight them as he would according to his Adem training without letting them know he’s the guy who trained with the Adem. Since he’s the only barbarian ever to receive Adem training, they will know him. So instead he takes a beating. Or it could be that he’s really, truly unable to defend himself.
This has been a good long diary, and we haven’t gotten to Denna, the Amir, the Chandrian, the interlude with Felurian, the meeting with the Cthaeh, the shaed and its significiance. Neither have we gotten to what’s locked in the chest, what’s hiding behind the doors of stone, who was killed in Imre and why. Nor have we looked at what’s closing in on Newarre, drawing around Kvothe as irrevocably as sunset draws down. We can pick up some of that if you want to, or we can go on to something else. Your choice. My points are three:
- There’s a lot more in these books than a casual read will reveal. To have mysteries within mysteries all wrapped up in beautiful prose is a gift doubled.
- Heroes can still walk among us. If you can’t stand a hero, take a gifted protagonist. Our character can do both.
- It’s ill-advised, to say the least, to dismiss a work that isn’t finished. You can’t adequately judge the scope of a thing until you see it in its entirety. Also, as a side note: a word of caution from an amateur: building a world this complete and original is a tremendous achievement. If you haven’t done it before, it looks easy. It isn’t. Adapting history requires research and a little sweat. World-building—not adapting something that’s already been created by someone else, not swiping gun powder and a magical system built by another writer but something made from the ground up—in short, making a secondary world that lives and grow, is a long, arduous discipline of the imagination. Honor it. You don’t see it often.
In the pantheon of great fantasy novels, three works stand out, and I think all three will endure long after we are all forgotten: There’s The Lord of the Rings (of course). Then there’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen. And third, The Kingkiller Chronicles. Each one wildly different, each one a master work. And Kingkiller isn’t even finished yet.
In a comment in the first diary of this series, Brecht shared Rothfuss’ response to the fact that readers on Goodreads have already started to write reviews of The Doors of Stone, the third novel of the trilogy. It’s a delicious and hilarious read, and you will enjoy it.
Finally, Rothfuss, who supports an array of Good Works in this world—our world—through the organization Worldbuilders, has created the game Tak, which was funded through Kickstarter and is in final development. It looks like a cross between chess and Go. Bredon teaches it to Kvothe while he’s in Vint, and he explains the point of it thus:
“Tak reflects the subtle turning of the world. It is a mirror we hold to life. No one wins a dance, boy. The point of dancing is the motion that a body makes. A well-played game of tak reveals the moving of a mind. There is a beauty to these things for those with eyes to see it….The point,” Bredon said grandly, “is to play a beautiful game.” He lifted his hands and shrugged, his face breaking into a beatific smile. “Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?” (p. 495)
This applies to the Kingkiller Chronicles, as well.
Previous Installments
Resources
Science Fiction and Fantasy Primary Online Resources