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44 internautes sur 49 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
1.0étoiles sur 5
Phantom Menacing, Juil 26 2006
I picked up Wizard's First Rule when it was first published and found it to be an enjoyable fantasy novel. I have stuck with the series far longer than I should have, but by now I have too much time invested in it to stop. The story as it was has now devolved into little more than a political manifesto, a propaganda piece extolling a vile philosophy. If Faith of the Fallen had been the worst offender for characters endlessly prattling on about their love of life and liberty that would have been fine, if boring. But it has altered course in a significant way. Where once the only absurdities in these books were (to name a few) a wise-cracking dragon, a heroic talking wolf, and a chuckling chicken that is evil manifest, Mr. Goodkind has sunk to new depths. His main characters - Richard and Kahlan - are held up as paragons of virtue, and great champions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But one sees as the story progresses that they repeatedly betray such virtues and participate enthusiastically in the very atrocities that they so boldly (and endlessly) claim to be fighting against.
What Mr. Goodkind has done in his latest installment of the Sword of Truth series is a new low. Facing insurmountable odds, our hero Richard decides that the only path to victory lies in visiting the same atrocities upon the enemy citizenry, as have been committed upon Richard's own people. Whereas some might say the plotline (such as it is) in Phantom is particularly relevant to current world events, the fact is that what the heroes in this story are engaging in on behalf of all that is good, is exactly what would be universally condemned here in real life.
The prose in Phantom is long-winded enough to destroy the New Orleans levees all over again. Goodkind has one character spend twenty pages in a row describing what she saw in the camp of the Imperial Order, and another character follows immediately with a ten page explanation of how they got that way. If the characters in these books spoke like normal people do then it would be the size of a pamphlet one could read while waiting for a bus. The action that one could previously depend on is almost non-existent in Phantom, as the characters do very little other than talk each other (and the reader) to death. The twenty page description of life with the Order could have been done much easier, for example: "Jebra spoke of the horrors she had seen in the camp during the months she had labored there. The squalor, the endless rapes of screaming women, the torture and brutality. Richard's mind reeled at what he was hearing." I make no claim to be a great writer, but I don't need twenty pages to explain that the "bad guys" are evil. Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident. Mr. Goodkind has fallen into the bad habit of treating his audience like dimwitted children who must have an idea repeatedly pounded into their heads for them to grasp it. I found myself on several occasions wishing I had simply skipped an entire chapter, if only because the entire time I was reading it I kept muttering to myself "yes, I know life is good. Yes, I know the Order is evil. Get on with it." Mr. Goodkind's prose acts as a bulldozer, piling tons of rubble on top of you, distracting you from realizing that almost nothing is happening to move the plot along.
Soon this series will come to an end, and that is for the best since anything worthwhile in the story came to an end for me long ago. All I look forward to in the final installment is to see whether Richard finally realizes that he has become something no better than the evil he claims to fight against, and falls on his magic sword. Or if he will be found at the end of the story with his shiny Sword of Truth held high while standing upon a mountain of the corpses of his innocent victims.
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1 internautes sur 1 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
2.0étoiles sur 5
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, ..., Mars 1 2008
To start things off, I think Terry Goodkind is a talented writer (as evidenced by his earlier works). But this book is SO wordy. I am on page 174 and it feels like 80%+ is nothing but talking and no action. Man, is this boring!!! I have started to gloss over the discussions of the brutalities of the Order because it's the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and ... (I think you get the drift). Earlier, he had Richard talk about the "emblamatic" nature of a spell that Nikki was in. While it takes quite a bit of creativity to write with such conviction, Terry Goodkind just went too far with it.
I will finish this book, though it is now becoming a chore rather than a pleasure. I always finish the novel I started (with one boring exception with a book by Ed Greenwood; I cannot remember the title). It is very possible that this may be the last Terry Goodkind book I will ever read, unless things significantly improve. But with the threat of a third book with Kahlan under the Chainfire spell, can I really do it?
Before I picked this one, I had just finished (re-)reading the first 11 books of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. That storyline did not always move too quickly, but there were many engaging (sub-)plots.
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1 internautes sur 1 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
1.0étoiles sur 5
The horse is dead, but Goodkind is still flogging, Janv. 31 2008
Terry Goodkind is not a terrible author, but his story lost its way books ago. The first three novels were wonderful and I have reread them each several times. Then he ran out of steam and floundered for a couple of books until he decided to teach us all about life and love. Now he is simply preaching his philosophy through his characters: Richard is the mouthpiece and the rest of the characters (regardless of their supposed age and wisdom) are the rabble who must be educated. It feels insulting to read through these meaningless discourses.
As for the actual plot, it is mostly a rehash of elements from the previous books; some I enjoyed and some I did not. There is very little new material here to expand his world and inspire the imagination. I get the distinct impression that Goodkind simply wants to finish this off so that he can move on to his next project. At this point his intriguing characters are boring, his magic is unmagical, and his creative setting is empty and bland.
I will only be reading the final book, Confessor, to bring a little closure to my 10 year relationship with this series. I believe it would have been better if Terry Goodkind had simply written the Chainfire trilogy as a single book.
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