First of all, don't read it. Seriously. You have been warned. I have had several small problems with previous books in the series, and I've always enjoyed reading about the Harpers and outcasts much more than the Dragonriders themselves, but in comparison to "Dragongirl" the worst parts of all the previous books combined look pretty awesome. I now regret what I said in my previous post about liking the influence Todd McCaffrey is having on the series. I said that because judging from Dragonharper and the like he seemed to be taking the focus away from Dragonriders like Lessa and their tedious and distasteful love lives. That seems to have only been the case for the books which were collaborations between him and his mother. This book, which he wrote on his own takes all of the negative aspects of previous books and blows them out of endurable proportion.
Ok, now that the warning rant is over with I will begin the actual review.
As I said in my previous post I re-read Dragon Harper because I knew Kindan featured in this book and I remembered liking him and the storyline of Dragon Harper. Even though I had refreshed my memory about Kindan's character and some of the others in this novel I found myself completely disoriented at the start of Dragon Girl - a first for any Pern Novel I've ever read. They always stand alone, but this one felt like it was some kind of offshot that you had to re-read five past novels to even begin to understand. I've never tried so hard to understand what was happening and who was who in a novel. So I struggled through the long list of confusingly similar names and the terribly repetitive writing for a while and then the real problems began.
First of all, the storyline is something we've read before in several Pern novels. Plague: check. Too few dragonriders to fight fall: check. Timing it: check. There is nothing new here, no new problem and nothing else in the way of characterization or world-building to make this lack of novelty bearable. In fact there doesn't seem to be a plot at all.
Every time there's a hint that the characters are discovering something that will help them with their problems they just ... walk very happily past this moment of inspiration or neatly wrap-up their conversation for no apparent reason.
Also, even though the story is told from a third person limited perspective the characterizations are horrible. I couldn't care less about any of their problems, and I barely understood what they were talking about half the time anyway because they kept referencing things that happened ages ago or repeating the same dialogue in different scenes...over and over and over.
Anne McCaffrey's novels already established the disturbing nature of relationships in weyrs - the lack of not only loyalty, but more importantly, the lack of choice were always disturbing, but at least she was good enough at writing to make you overlook this in the face of an engaging plot. And as I said, she wrote about Holders and Harpers and outcasts and Runners and all kinds of people that it was easy to settle into a non-dragonrider point of view and enjoy the world. In this book, however, the relationships are not only disturbing, they're downright disgusting and the characters continually dwell on them night and day, even in the face of looming disaster, without ever thinking about the implications at all. And why are they engaging in these ill-considered and disturbing relationships? The reader has no idea, because with the lens we've been given they all seem to have the emotional range or a teaspoon, to quote Hermione Granger, and as much as they say they all love each other I'm not at all convinced. In fact, this brings me to the realization that after trudging through about 300 pages I haven't seen an inkling of tension between characters. We keep hearing that people are bad-tempered or uneasy around each other or whatever, but there's no evidence of that whatsoever and everyone just gets on happily, with random characters that don't even know each other just hugging randomly to comfort each other from a sadness that the reader never gets to feel...
And so on.
I think this might be the longest Pern book and it's quite hollow.
Finally, I would like to say that this is further evidence that people's sons should stop attempting to revive their fantasy series. At least Christopher Tolkien didn't attempt to write his own tales and stuck to deciphering and delivering his father's notes and unfinished works to the fans. Todd McCaffrey, however, has destroyed Pern in one fell swoop with this book. Previously, I understood Anne McCaffrey's insistence to prevent fanfiction based on her books, because her books - with their varying perspectives - essentially were fanfiction. The nature of her world and the series she created centered around her ability to go back in and tell stories that overlapped her previous tales or illuminated a new part of Pern. Now, I'm starting to think that she should have just opened the world up for fanfiction instead of allowing Todd to mangle it like this. Yes, fanfiction can be distasteful, but at least it doesn't have the stamp of authority that she's given Todd and with so many millions of fans there's always bound to be gems that turn up occasionally.
I've heard that the next Pern novel is going to be a collaboration, but I the revulsion I feel for this one will not allow me to give the new novel a chance. In fact, it's so off-putting that I don't think I'll be re-reading any of the previous Pern novels anytime soon either.
No comments:
Post a Comment