The First Binding (R.R. Virdi)
Look, I'm 50 pages into this, and I am really struggling.
This appears to be the worst sort of overwritten, self-indulgent fantasy trash. It has antecedents. Robert Jordan is the grandfather of pointless and tiresome fantasy bloat, although I think R.R. Virdi is much more in the Patrick Rothfuss vein of rather more ornate (pretentious) bloat, or Christopher Ruocchio's space opera. R.R. Virdi starts very similar to the "The Name of the Wind" in style and setting here. Except it appears that Rothfuss is a significantly better author than R.R. Virdi, and can actually get a move on and tell the goddamn story.
50 pages in, and basically all that's happened is that the protagonist has told a short story and a woman has sung a few songs and we've had a small exposition dump about the country they are in. Not just 50 pages spent on approximately nothing whatsoever, but 50 pages of dense, small type such that it might easily be more like ~70 pages of many other books. Characters don't just do things, and things aren't just things. They are and do things in a welter of overdescription, metaphor, simile and epithets that serve no great purpose except to delay the reader finding out anything useful about the plot or characters.
"Our meal threw up wisps of steam and pulled at me with the smell of meat and spices. Slivers of shredded carrot floated through it along with nubs of potatos. I took a spoonful, blowing a steady breath over it. The first taste filled me with warmth. Marrow and cream made themselves known in the strew's broth."
Firstly, neither I nor anyone else gives a shit about this stew. The characters have turned up in a basic tavern and ordered a basic meal and telling us about this stew is utterly pointless. Imbuing an everyday stew with this much detail and overwrought sentence design does not make this story magical, it is just annoying and wasteful. Now imagine that almost everything is written about like this in the story. The text then moves on:
"Eloine and I ate with a quiet speed only known to travellers and performers. Silent. Focused on our food."
Oh right. Is that how travellers and performers eat?
That's not rhetorical: seriously, is that how travellers and performers eat? Because it's nothing I've ever heard, and it doesn't make any obvious sense, either. This is what happens when you fill your book with that sort of excessive writing unless you are a great author (and you almost certainly are not): dreadful tripe that doesn't work at all starts clogging up the text and any reader who hasn't switched their critical faculties off is going to have to painfully stumble over all of it. Here's a better suggestion: don't do it.
Likewise we can consider all sorts of little sayings dropped in which I assume are supposed to be sound playful and or wise, but mostly come off as stupid and at worst even chauvanistic: "Going too far in prodding a woman is never conducive to one's health"
Okay, I see. So then, is going too far in prodding men harmless to one's health?
I came across more this bad, I'm just not willing to slog back through to find them.
* * *
Our protagonist thus far is - I'm pretty sure - the main character from the blurb at the book and implicitly, I'd guess he's at least a few centuries old, if not millennia. He certainly appears to have done stuff in an age everyone else thinks is legend. The singer appears to be some random woman around at the time who is incredibly good looking, smart, witty, coquettish, with just the right touch of vulnerable. She is of course drawn to the protagonist's air mystical and mysterious air, and he's intoxicated with her charms. It's bad enough she's a wank fantasy, but frankly, a centuries-old... whatever he is... has surely encountered hundreds such women. It's hard to believe she's got some factor X he hasn't seen and done (in all senses of the word) many, many times before. I think he'd actually be bored stiff, or at least experience a bit of ennui.
I'm not the author and haven't finished this, and there could be a great explanation for why the protagonist is some complex, romantic hero still susceptible to the flushes of romance despite living 20 times as long as a normal person; why this woman is so incredibly alluring that's not just chance encounter, but at the current moment it feels wrong. It feels like the product of an author who is either rather naive, or writing for a naive audience, or an audience not really thinking about what they're reading.
* * *
Clearly fantasy is going through a major shift. The big thing from the shelves seems to be that fantasy literature has decided to embrace diversity, and that's fine. The problem is the same as what happens when any new trend arrives. In the usual mad dash, publishers have started flinging money to sign up anyone and everyone they can, which unfortunately means a load of second- and third-rate authors clogging up the shelves. Also, that just because the authors are diverse, it doesn't really mean we are genuinely seeing new perspectives. Cixin Liu is actually Chinese, and I like to think giving us some idea of Chinese culture. However, a second generation Chinese American is much more likely to just be... kind of an American, and the diversity - in thought, culture, ideology, perspective etc. - might be less than we could suppose. One way or another, it will be the work of years to whittle down the masses of new authors into a handful that... well, I would say are good, except that what that means in practice is "sell lots of books".
