Drop by the Fantasy forum during nanowrimo and you’ll find an absolute obsession with clichés and how to avoid them. Thread after thread of “can I do this? Is it okay to have a farm boy becoming king if he’s not very good at it? Yadayadayada.” I have looked on with bemusement. After all, decent writing can turn cliché to archetype. Tell the damn story, I thought. Almost worse than the obsession with clichés is the obsession with (apparently) subverting clichés. Mortal elf underlings! Stupid dragons! Not having elves and dwarves at all – but instead having newly invented races which aren’t elves and dwarves! Except that they kinda are, but they have different names! Tell the damn story I thought. Write well, and it won’t matter. I’m a sucker for a mystical ancient sword and a wizard with a big beard. You can only remove so much of the rich supply of tried and tested fantasy materials before it ceases to be high fantasy at all. Tell the story.
And then I read “Lord of the Clans.”
And now I take it all back. Cram this many clichés into a paragraph and you should be impaled on an ancient elven sword and left in the woods to be raised by a wizard who will send you on an epic quest to discover your true destiny as a checkout assistant, or refuse collector, or frankly anything other than an author. Although anyone who writes a novel with a title which differs in only one word from the title of the best-loved fantasy saga of all time is probably not too hot on originality.
Now, now, Neddy. That is rather mean. What is so bad about this book? Well, I’ll tell you. The first problem boils down to the most basic flaws in writing technique which should be removed by anyone who’s been on a creative writing course or read Stephen King’s On Writing (and if you haven’t read this, and want to write, you should read it so that you never become Christie Golden) or even read a lot of books. Lazy similes jump from the page like a cloud of exploding green marmots. First rule of the simile: don’t ever use one you’ve seen before. If you’re tempted to say something idiotic like, oh I don’t know, “he picked up a goblet of red wine, red as the blood which was soon to be shed on the arena floor” [Golden, 2003] then drop the laptop (oh, I’m sorry, was that expensive?) and put your hands in the air. Not only is this simile more overused than random bad flute solos in the middle of Mamas and Papas songs, but red wine doesn’t look a fucking thing like blood anyway.
Golden is a rent-an-author. She writes for various sci-fi and fantasy tie-ins (including Star Trek apparently) and so her creations are not her own. She writes about characters people know. This is the story of THRALL, SON OF DUROTAN, HEIR TO LEADERSHIP OF THE FROSTWOLF CLAN, ULTIMATE EPIC WARCHIEF OF EPIC EVERYTHING GRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!oneoneelevenone!!111! In other words, a Big Damn Hero. You may recognise the traits of the Big Damn Hero species from other fantasy books. There are also a handful in this one: Grom Hellscream is also a Big Damn Hero, and therefore the two of them agree on everything because they have no other personality, much to the chagrin of all the other, stupid and cowardly individuals who surround them. You know exactly what Thrall is going to do, for two reasons. Firstly, he is a completely unrealistic character with no flaws of any kind who can always be relied upon to act like a Big Damn Hero, and secondly the entire storyline revolves around setting up scenes in which Thrall can be a Big Damn Hero. Golden couldn’t do much about the cliché ridden background story (you mean, “a baby has noble parents who get killed for standing up for what they believe in, leading to the baby being raised by utter bastards who mistreat him until the day he escapes and fulfils his destiny” has been done before? Say it ain’t so!) which was given to her by Blizzard. Fair enough. But one contrived situation after another pops up:
Thrall: No! I will not kill this helpless human child you have placed before me! I believe in mercy, apparently!
Stupid, cowardly orcs: Then we will kill you, for no apparent reason!
Thrall: So be it! I know no fear of being killed for no apparent reason! I am also happy to go with the fact that you think you can kill me after I have just beaten up all four of the best warriors in this camp at once, even though they jumped me, with full weapons and armour, and I was only armed with this piece of mouldy lettuce!
Stupid cowardly orcs: Yes, and then you refused to kill them. Which makes us angry, because apparently we want all our best soldiers killed off.
Grom Hellscream: What is going on here? Can’t you see that this guy is a Big Damn Hero, like me? I set up this situation so that we could see this is true. You idiots! Release the human child!
(I paraphrase). Thrall can’t even eat meat without there being some wounded animal who desperately wants to die being provided to him and happily offering up its succulent body as a yummy flame-grilled sacrifice. He kicks ass at the right time, is humble at the right time, and then we learn it was all set up by the boss to demonstrate how epic Thrall is. Over and over and bloody over. You can’t have any sympathy for Thrall because you know he’s going to be fine even if the plot has to tie itself in knots to make this happen. In his career (forced upon him by the Evil Bastard Blackmoore) as an arena fighter, he loses one fight. Fair enough – no athlete wins all the time. Ahem. He loses the fight because he’s just won seven other battles, back to back, is tired, and has to fight an ogre twice his size who is far more heavily armed than him. And then we are told, very firmly, that he would have won if it had only been his sixth fight of the day.
Blackmoore is of course the evil bastard who has to do evil things all the time, even if they make no sense, because he’s the Evil Guy. Other writers might like to have a more complex character who is brutal to slaves but kind to his children, or has a mistress but really cares about her happiness. Lesser authors might deem this necessary. Not Golden. There are four personalities here: Big Damn Hero, Evil Bastard, Stupid Cowardly People Who Exist To Make The Big Damn Hero Look Heroic, and of course one Sacrificial Virgin in the form of Tareha, who has to go around being beautiful and tragic and good. I only got 70% through the book but I’m pretty damn sure something very bad is going to happen to her, possibly with a massive cry of NOOOOOOOOOOOOO from Thrall. Perhaps I’m wrong: maybe there’s a twist. I’m willing to bet that Golden doesn’t have it in her though.
I blame Metzen more than Golden.
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