Fun with Language

I’ve been busy reading, and as school has started for me after a long hiatus, my reading will probably be fewer and farther between. However, I wanted to let you all know about one of the best science fiction writers in America today, Steven Brust.

Brust got big with the Vlad Taltos series, concerning a human assassin in a world primarily made up of elves (in one of those brilliant moves an author can make when creating a world, of course the elves call themselves “humans,” and humans are “Easterners”). I have read that series, and it’s fantastic, but I’m writing today about his second series, set in the same world, although hundreds of years before Vlad’s story takes place.

Technically, it is two separate series, but realistically it is one five-book series, starting with The Phoenix Guard, and followed by Five Hundred Years After, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode. They all are centered, more or less, the activities of four friends, who start out as young soldiers trying to make a name for themselves, and, over the course of the books, doing so.

As far as the plot goes, it’s fairly standard fantasy fare. There’s magic, and gods, and fighting; plots and intrigues, twists and turns. In that regard, it does not do anything particularly interesting, although, as I’ve mentioned, Brust has created a pretty cool little world, complete with all those details that make a fantasy world seem believable. One thing I am not incredibly happy with is a lack of a map (and I doubt anyone would have an easy time putting one together from his descriptions – in this regard, I say if you’re going to make up a world, the least you can do is provide a picture. No one, and I mean NO ONE, is a talented enough writer to do without this essential item. Hell, even stories that take place on Earth often need maps, what makes your made up world any different? Huh?), but I can live – it’s not incredibly important.

If it sounds like the plot isn’t that interesting, then I apologize. The story keeps you drawn in, and the relationships between the characters, while not super developed, is still compelling enough to want to know what happens to everyone in the end. Regardless, the most important thing to know about these books is the narrative voice: I can almost guarantee you have never read anything like this, and that alone should be enough for you to pick up the first novel.

What makes it so unique? Brust has created a historian who is writing a “popular history” of the events that you are reading about, and so you are reading it through his voice. This means that you are getting a narrator that is not omniscient, but still knows a great deal. Moreover, he’s kind of a pompous ass, which makes his tangents amusing. There’s also the neat (I need to get a thesaurus, I think), writer’s trick that Brust uses, in that he lets the narrator, Paarfi, write as if his audience are elves from Vlad’s time-period, and thus would be conscious of certain events and people so that he can refer to them without any need to explain. Brust does this in such a way that you pretty much know what Paarfi is talking about, but even if you don’t, it doesn’t matter.

But even this is not the greatest feature. It is the dialogue that is so great. The reason is that the characters talk in an overly polite manner (which apparently is in a similar style to Voltaire, although I’m sad to say I’ve never actually read anything by that guy). In other words, something that should only take two sentences all of sudden takes up half a page. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about (and I’m making this up, because I’m a little too lazy to find a perfect passage in five books – suffice it to say that such back-and-forths are pretty common throughout):
“I have a thought.”
“Ah, I recognize you so well in that!”
“Thank you.”
“But.”
“Yes?”
“What is this thought?”
“Oh, you wish to know?”
“I am most anxious to learn.”
“Then I will tell you.”
“You perceive I am waiting.”
“Then here it is.”
And then the character would actually get to the point of the dialogue that might help move the plot along.

I grant that this could be very annoying to some people, but I have to say that not only did I find it to be incredibly amusing, but almost ridiculously so. If you ever watch The Simpsons, (and if you’re reading this, and yet don’t watch The Simpsons, I’m not exactly sure what led you to this blog), then you should have seen the episode where Sideshow Bob chases after Bart in a Cape Fear parody. In that episode, at one point Bob steps on a rake, and it hits him in the face. He then steps in another direction, and another rake hits him in the face. Well, this goes on for some time, and then you pan out, and you see that he’s in a field of rakes. On the DVD commentary for this episode, the writers discuss how it took them forever to figure out how many rakes it would take for the joke to be funny, and they discovered that one is funny, two is very funny, three, is hilarious, four is overkill, and five or more is genius. The idea is that repetition can be boring after a while, until it becomes so ludicrous that it starts to not be just funny, but incredibly funny.

For me, the dialogue in these books is like that. It is a formula that gets repeated a hundred times, and yet that repetition is what makes the entire series a stand-out.

If that doesn’t entice you, but you still want to read great sci-fi/fantasy, read the Vlad Taltos series – the first book is Jhereg, although you might want to figure out if you want to read the stories in chronological order according to publishing dates or Vlad’s life (I’m not sure which one Jhereg falls under; I believe it was published first). These are amazing stories, and very well written in “normal” English. If you like them, go and read the Khaavren Romances, as the five novels I mentioned above are called. If you’re feeling adventurous, read the Khaavren books first. Either way, I promise you will not be disappointed.