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I tried very hard to go into reading Witch King without thinking too much about MZDS or The Untamed, and I did not at all succeed despite the fact that beyond the initial starting point of "notorious demon guy gets woken up after being dead for a while and has to spend some time in a new body solving the mystery of Why" they really don't have much in common. Martha Wells has redefined the word 'demon' to her own purposes and built a whole culture around it that is part of a broader complex political dynamic and magical system, which has always been one of her strengths as a fantasy writer, and is good and interesting. She is also exploring the aftermath and recovery of a major generational catastrophe and the way that the scars of that do and don't heal over the course of a couple of generations, and that's interesting. And her prose of course is always pleasant and readable. In and of itself, this book should have worked well.
I don't think it does work -- or at least, it didn't work for me -- and in trying to figure out why I did against all my best intentions keep going back to MDZS.
Like MDZS, this is a braided-timelines book: we are introduced to someone with a Notorious Reputation and certain existing relationships at a certain point in their life, and the current plotline in which that person unravels a mystery is intertwined with the story of that person's youth and the decisions they made that led to the acquisition of the Notorious Reputation and the state of their relationships.
At all points in the novel, these timelines are directly talking to each other. The first scene in the present introduces the protagonist and some important relationships and the ways that Wei Wuxian thinks about those people in relation to himself at the end of the story; the first scene in the past re-introduces those important relationships and the very different way that Wei Wuxian thought about those people at that time, which already recontextualizes some of the information that we just received about the present day. Right away, we have a compelling tension: how did we get from Point A to Point B? How will the things we learn, as readers, about the past, shed new light on the things that we have seen happen in the present, and make us understand the characters differently?
The first scene in Witch King introduces the protagonist and his most important relationships in the present -- the best friend who's been woken up with him, and two other people that they're very worried about -- but when we go back to the past, it's too early to meet any of those people. Instead, we're introduced to a different set of characters and a completely different context, none of which has been mentioned by Kai in the present-day context: structurally, that already leads me to expect that these characters, and this context, will not be important for long, and therefore I probably shouldn't emotionally attach to them. Nothing in that first scene in the past hooks into any of what we just saw in the present. It elucidates the protagonist's backstory and draws an interesting culture, but it doesn't set up tension, or build attachment to and interest in the rest of the cast.
The braided timelines in the book felt a bit to me like a zipper that doesn't really zip. It's not that either the present or past timeline is bad per se; it's just that they don't even begin to resonate with each other until towards the end of the book. They're not holding each other up structurally the way that they should. Moreover, though past-timeline Kai does eventually meet the characters who will be important to him in the present, all the meat of their relationships to him and to each other is set after the end of what we get in the past timeline, which makes it feel like emotional center of the book is just missing. There's no moment of cathartic understanding, as far as the character dynamics go; no point where seeing how characters interacted in the past made me look at their present-day relationships differently. The perpetrator of the mystery is someone we meet in the past, but since present day Kai had literally never thought about that person before they reappeared again at the end of the book, it didn't really hit as a betrayal the way I think it was supposed to.
The moments that did hit for me -- and there were several! -- mostly had to do with haunted places: scenes where we'd see Kai visit an abandoned location in the present and then contrast that against what happened there in the past, like the camera in Titanic panning up and down from a drowned ballroom to a crowded one. Some of those bits made me feel like I understood what Wells was trying to do with the book, and got me thematically interested in the way that a society reshapes itself around massive trauma. It's the tension of contrast again: it doesn't have to be about characters, in some ways character tension is the lowest-hanging fruit, it can be about locations, or cultures, or all kinds of things to be effective. But again that doesn't happen until midway; I think maybe what is supposed to be propelling the tension in the early part of the book is just Kai himself going from Naive to Grim, and that was not enough to hook me in because there's nothing unexpected about it, that's what protagonists do.
Either way, I am glad that I finally got around to reading it; although I think it's a structural swing and a miss, it got me to think about structure in ways I probably would not have done if I hadn't read it.
I don't think it does work -- or at least, it didn't work for me -- and in trying to figure out why I did against all my best intentions keep going back to MDZS.
Like MDZS, this is a braided-timelines book: we are introduced to someone with a Notorious Reputation and certain existing relationships at a certain point in their life, and the current plotline in which that person unravels a mystery is intertwined with the story of that person's youth and the decisions they made that led to the acquisition of the Notorious Reputation and the state of their relationships.
At all points in the novel, these timelines are directly talking to each other. The first scene in the present introduces the protagonist and some important relationships and the ways that Wei Wuxian thinks about those people in relation to himself at the end of the story; the first scene in the past re-introduces those important relationships and the very different way that Wei Wuxian thought about those people at that time, which already recontextualizes some of the information that we just received about the present day. Right away, we have a compelling tension: how did we get from Point A to Point B? How will the things we learn, as readers, about the past, shed new light on the things that we have seen happen in the present, and make us understand the characters differently?
The first scene in Witch King introduces the protagonist and his most important relationships in the present -- the best friend who's been woken up with him, and two other people that they're very worried about -- but when we go back to the past, it's too early to meet any of those people. Instead, we're introduced to a different set of characters and a completely different context, none of which has been mentioned by Kai in the present-day context: structurally, that already leads me to expect that these characters, and this context, will not be important for long, and therefore I probably shouldn't emotionally attach to them. Nothing in that first scene in the past hooks into any of what we just saw in the present. It elucidates the protagonist's backstory and draws an interesting culture, but it doesn't set up tension, or build attachment to and interest in the rest of the cast.
The braided timelines in the book felt a bit to me like a zipper that doesn't really zip. It's not that either the present or past timeline is bad per se; it's just that they don't even begin to resonate with each other until towards the end of the book. They're not holding each other up structurally the way that they should. Moreover, though past-timeline Kai does eventually meet the characters who will be important to him in the present, all the meat of their relationships to him and to each other is set after the end of what we get in the past timeline, which makes it feel like emotional center of the book is just missing. There's no moment of cathartic understanding, as far as the character dynamics go; no point where seeing how characters interacted in the past made me look at their present-day relationships differently. The perpetrator of the mystery is someone we meet in the past, but since present day Kai had literally never thought about that person before they reappeared again at the end of the book, it didn't really hit as a betrayal the way I think it was supposed to.
The moments that did hit for me -- and there were several! -- mostly had to do with haunted places: scenes where we'd see Kai visit an abandoned location in the present and then contrast that against what happened there in the past, like the camera in Titanic panning up and down from a drowned ballroom to a crowded one. Some of those bits made me feel like I understood what Wells was trying to do with the book, and got me thematically interested in the way that a society reshapes itself around massive trauma. It's the tension of contrast again: it doesn't have to be about characters, in some ways character tension is the lowest-hanging fruit, it can be about locations, or cultures, or all kinds of things to be effective. But again that doesn't happen until midway; I think maybe what is supposed to be propelling the tension in the early part of the book is just Kai himself going from Naive to Grim, and that was not enough to hook me in because there's nothing unexpected about it, that's what protagonists do.
Either way, I am glad that I finally got around to reading it; although I think it's a structural swing and a miss, it got me to think about structure in ways I probably would not have done if I hadn't read it.
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Yeah, she's talked a bit on her DW about writing the sequel currently I believe.
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