Across the Face of the World: Amazon.ca: Russell Kirkpatrick: Books

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Descriptions du produit

Product Description

For 2000 years, Kanwar, the Immortal Destroyer, has been planning revenge on the Most High. Mahnum has escaped the Destroyer's prison, but on his way home to Loulea, he and his wife are captured. His two sons set off in pursuit with a small group of villagers to free their parents, and warn the world of the coming war.

About the Author

Russell lectures in Geography and manages a small map-making business. He lives in New Zealand with his wife and two children. This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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3.0�toiles sur 5 From Grandeur to Swampland, D�c 27 2007

Par	Mark Gerdes "Mark Gerdes" (Arkansas, USA) - Voir tous mes commentaires

This review is from: Across The Face Of The World (Paperback)

Halfway through this novel I was forming the opinion that this author was the true heir to Tolkien. By the end of the book I was struggling to pay attention.

The novel starts as a formulaic Tolkienesque fantasy with the unsure small male who ends up as the focus of a party of questing adventurers. It's been done a thousand times. The difference here being that this author has not done it poorly. Over the years authors have tried to freshen up the tired old model by adding pancake makeup in the form of complex systems of magic, cumbersome religions, place names with too many vowels and apostrophes, and fantastical creatures. Kirkpatrick has avoided all of these temptations and refreshed the model by stripping off the old layers of varnish taking it back to it's roots. You don't lose a thing. Reading the first half of the novel is like seeing an old '57 Chevy converted from a garish street-rod back to it's original showroom condition. Nice.

Formulaic fantasy also requires world-building and Kirkpatrick comes through on this account as well. The world he has created is simple, harsh, beautiful, and alive. He successfully avoided the fantasy trap of creating a world that is so alien that readers cannot become immersed in it. Kirkpatrick's world is a place that you can know.

A beautiful fantasy world won't be successful if it is not populated with interesting people. Some fantasy authors resort to the fantastic because humans are boring. Kirkpatrick's humans are not boring. The cultures encountered in the first half of the novel are both believable and interesting. Kirkpatrick's human Fodhram and Fenni are much more interesting than if he had thrown in Centaurs or Elves in their place. The action of the novel is interspersed with revelations of history and culture in a very interesting way.

The cast of individuals is interesting as well. From time to time the author shifts the point of view momentarily from his main character to the secondary characters at critical moments, giving the reader insight into motivations and making his party, and their opponents, much more than cardboard cutouts. The author does not overuse this technique and wields the scalpel expertly. My only complaint would be the shallowness of the female characters. Like Tolkien, Kirkpatrick seems to have difficulty developing a rich female character. I hope this will be corrected in the follow-on books.

The bad guys are almost exact duplicates of Tolkien's Sauron and his eastern allies...only more vicious. However, where Tolkien did not care to delve into the history and motivations of his nameless and faceless hordes, Kirkpatrick lets us look behind the curtain from time to time and see what is going on in his "Mordor".

The action is very good through the first half of the novel. These travelling quests can become tedious despite the beauty of the world being travelled through. The author does not let the journey falter and our adventuring party has plenty to do besides walking. Most of these travel complications seem natural, but a few seem forced. There are too many occurrences of people showing up at the exact spot in the uninhabited wilderness at the exact moment necessary to solve problems.

This first offering is really a fantasy masterpiece.....up until the climactic battle with the main protagonists. At this point the author seems to lose his way. It appears that Kirkpatrick found himself 1000 leagues and 200 pages short after the climax and was forced to make up something to fill the space. Or perhaps Kirkpatrick had one more culture he wanted to show off and took a vacation from his plot in order to present it. Having bested Tolkien at everything else, the author felt it necessary to top him in the category of unnecessary story-line deviations ala Tom Bombadil.

The whole Widuz section should have been left on the cutting room floor. The author not only breaks up his "Fellowship", he shatters it into useless fragments. Forced to follow multiple shards the novel becomes unwieldy, even for Kirkpatrick's prodigious talents. This part of the novel is like a beautiful river that reaches it's delta and spreads out into stinky swampland. By the time the novel stumbles to its unsatisfying conclusion, you are as exhausted as the characters are and just as thankful that the journey through the swamp is over.

I sometimes think that fantasy readers continue to read fantasy in a vain hope that they can recapture those days of wonder when they first read Tolkien. Authors have tinkered with the formula for years in a futile quest to provide that for readers. Kirkpatrick actually succeeded for 300 or so pages and that makes it well worth reading.

I pressed on to the unsatisfying end solely on the hope that the next offering in the series will return the majesty of the first half of this book.

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