Normally, I wouldn’t review a fantasy novel, largely because I often feel a tiny bit shameful about reading them. I think it’s because I spent such a large portion of my pre-teenage years gleefully reading and re-reading, well, books that had dragons in them (and other things! I also read other things about, like, Okies or Vietnam or depressed poets). As this was the same time that I listened to New Kids on the Block and pegged my jeans and had giant, pink, plastic-framed glasses, I am suspect about all of my judgment from that time. Also, the library tends to shelve romance, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks altogether in the side of the main room they might as well label “books for people we assume don’t enjoy real literature.” So, I’ve tried to hide my recommendations under the labels of cyberpunk (Gibson) or indefinably good (Bull), but the sordid truth remains that sometimes I really do enjoy a long, epic saga and sometimes those come with magic or ogres or, yes, a dragon or two.
The Dragonbone Chair, and its attendant sequels, is really not as dragon-y as the title would suggest: it’s (as the genre demands) the very long story about an unlikely hero (a kitchen scullion named Simon) and a bunch of his unlikely companions (a princess, a troll and his wolf, a bunch of dukes and knights, and some mysterious immortal folks) trying to save their moderately unlikely world from total annihilation. Despite his twee tendencies toward the names in his alternate universe (do you really have to you’re your winter months ‘Novander” and “Decander’?) and an unappealing tendency to including the lyrics to ballads his characters are singing to pass the time, Williams actually avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can come from following the strict boundaries of the genre (and, believe you me, in that misspent youth I read plenty of books that wallowed in those pitfalls). He compelling conveys that characters can have doubts and misgivings without being paralyzed from action and he doesn’t shy away from the absolute misery of participating in an epic quest – lots of eating crappy food and sleeping in the forest and getting lost in the dark and not knowing if your loved ones are safe. And he tries to keep the dei ex machina to a bare minimum, which is quite a feat if you’re going to include immortals and dragons and the like.
Phew. I feel so much better for having gotten this secret reading habit off my chest. Maybe I’ll go dig out some peasant blouses and listen to Paula Abdul.