Tom Lloyd

I thought I should actually write something about The Painted Man, it is my job after all. Well, fantasy books, not writing about them per se. And I should encourage people to read it. It’s by Peter V Brett, there’s an interview with him here as a matter of fact…

Now… Don’t get me wrong, this was a fine book, but I was wondering how long it was going to take to get to the point where the main characters were young kids still shell-shocked at the world they’re living in. I know I’m impatient and like to jump in to a plot – many readers have criticised me for just such behaviour – but by halfway in this book the only action had been folks getting ripped apart by demons and kids screaming in fear. Don’t get me wrong, fully on board with a hefty dose of demon-action and was all over it like a fat kid on cake, but I’m also a fantasy nerd who likes to see the nuts and bolts of how things work. When your premise is the Painted Man, I don’t want to see him make a crucial discovery, then jump on a few years and see the results of it. The premise is what did it for me in the first place but how it came about was glossed over rather, which was a shame.

A second thing that bugged me about this (admittedly fine novel that had me turning the pages as eagerly as The Name of the Wind but struck me as far more original) was the age of the characters. They’re all kids when it starts and only by jumping ahead several years do we get them to a point where they’re much use to anyone. Now this may just be as a result of me always wanting to write a novel a different way when I like the premise as much as this one, but it did strike me as something that I see a lot in US fantasy. I think UK authors have more freedom from the genre’s conventions than that lot over the pond, indeed that’s something that they’re trying to play up to carve out a niche because everyone knows Brits tend to do dark and nasty stuff better than Americans in general (because we’re more miserable and cynical one assumes). Isak was intended to be older than he ended up being in Stormcaller (for various, mundane reasons) and I suspect many others are intentionally moving away from the farm-boy hero, resulting in theirs being older and more grumbly, to use a technical, albeit made-up, term.

What I didn’t see is where the book’s going from here. There wasn’t much alluded to that hinted at a raising of the stakes, which was a bit of a concern. Just fighting demons isn’t so interesting now they’ve got the hang of it, but for all their talk of prophecy there wasn’t much in the way of a specific path that could be taken and I seriously doubt any writer’s just going to follow a set prophecy these days. This is of course something I’ve had to think about quite a lot in recent weeks and months – as well as doing the reverse and stopping myself thinking about it. There are numerous little scrawled notes reminding me that readers do want to see some of the carnage going on, however incidental it is to the overall plot! Three and a half books in to a quintet and finding any sort of grounding is unbelievably hard. For a stand-alone I’d know how to balance it, there’s a degree to which you can rely upon convention, but this far in I don’t really get to choose what happens most of the time. Small details sure, but so much is constrained by what has gone before (esp when you brutally kill you main character etc) that my first question to my editor when I deliver the beast is going to be, ‘what do I need to do to make this a proper book?’ I doubt I’ll be able to see it even by the end, I’m just celebrating the little victories like finally working out what role a character is playing in the overall plot, having given her page-space in three novels based upon faith that I’d work it out eventually.

Right, that’s me done for the day. Needless to say the first post I wrote was far more coherent and did have a point to it, but this one conforms to the title of the blog rather more so maybe it’s all not without an ineffable purpose after all…