REVIEW: The Wise Man’s Fear

Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man’s Fear (Kingkiller Chronicles, Day 2)
DAW
ISBN-10: 0756404738
ISBN-13: 978-0756404734
Fantasy
March 1, 2011

Beware, this review does discuss spoiler-ish things. Oh yes.

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as “quothe.” Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I’ve had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it’s spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree.

“The Flame” is obvious if you’ve ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it’s unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire.

“The Thunder” I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age.

I’ve never thought of “The Broken Tree” as very significant. Although in retrospect, I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic.

My first mentor called me E’lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them.

But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant “to know.”

I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned.

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep.

You may have heard of me.

Book one was 2009, and now we finally have Book 2.

FYI – one of these things is like the other.

If you enjoyed The Name of the Wind, you might like this installment, too. Unless you were expecting wildly fluctuating shifts in pace. As in a quicker one. No, this is still very much a pleasantly flowing and meandering river through Kvothe’s life. I actually loved that about book 1. I liked that we got to visit all the pockets and closets and inlets of Kvothe’s sob-ariffic and wondrously strange life. It was heartbreaking and joyous and not a little awe-inspiring at times. I didn’t mind at all that the pace, like with book 2 still, was of the slower variety.

No, this is not the kind of fantasy read whereby swords stab and wizards throw blazing balls of fire and dragons stomp and eat towns. ‘Scuse  me muchly, I started jotting down my thoughts on this book before I got to the place where I decided to DNF it’s mother -f- anyway. There’s almost a wizardly moment with ball-of-fire proportions. The rest of the paragraph is still true, though. Carry on. There’s no Insane Action threatening around every corner, or even, really, every other other other corner. You really have to enjoy the writing and Kvothe as a character to ever get into these long, door stopper tomes.

Personally I rather like Kvothe. OK, lies, that was full of lies. Or just one lie. Whatever. I all-out love me some Kvothe. The book had already made me CRAI like a baby early into it, as Kvothe relates a memory to do with his mother. I loved that the book made me weep. I also liked the pace. There’s nary a dull moment, for me at several hundred pages in, despite the fact that this is not action-driven wordage and plotage and characterization-age.

But then the characterization went a little…bad. I think I’ve tried to deny that Kvothe is a Marty Stu, or maybe that it would improve in this book. I thought maybe he couldn’t really be one because sometimes the boy just makes bad decisions, and he didn’t really seem to get away with everything. I can even get along with one, but, sometimes, predictable things happen and then ‘ole Marty Stu just gets annoying.

And then, THEN, dear lurvlets, the nice river pace became a creek, then a stream and then a trickle and it ended up in a quicksand-esque sludge pile in THE WOODS. There were chapters upon chapters of Kvothe heading this expedition to the Eld forest area place to rid the Vintas of dagnabbit bandits who were terrorizing the countryside and stealing all the tax money. Woes to the people! And people, this reader just could not bring herself to give even a handful of shitsies about what this merry band of mercs and their one Special Awesome Main Character were doing in the woods. My toofs, I gnashed them, I tell you! There were pages and pages of two of the mercs mooning over each other but not realizing each was mooning the other. I mean over the other. There was a Sooper Special Merc who was Most Deadly and couldn’t speak the others’ language hardly a’tall, and Kvothe makes it his life’s mission to engage this man until they both were on the same page about every single thing. He and Kvothe offend each other, he and Kvothe make each other all awkward, he and Kvothe dance together  – as the merc himself says more than once, it’s complicated. It’s also repetitive. And boring.

To make matters worse, what came next was chapter upon chapter of Kvothe frolicking in Fairy World with The Hottest Fairy Evah, and ohmygawds he could die from her nethers. I wanted to kill these chapters. My eyes were in danger of receiving a vicious poking via spoon after the woods chapters of yore alone. Then, after Fairy World, in which Kvothe constantly struggles to get it together and stop thinking with his dong, and he gets to leave fairy and a very fond Hot Fairy behind….there’s more chapter upon chapter in ZEE WOODS. At this point, I grabbed that spoon, just in case.

Look, I can forgive some tropes and Marty-Stus and MAry-Sues – I mean, we read, we even like some tropes, right? Someone out there might even write another story one day about a guy who can pretty much do no wrong whatsoever, bag all the hot babes and I’ll love it to pieces.

But, c’mon – really? First we have martial arts that are not called martial arts, yet they ARE martial arts. Can’t we, you know, maybe get a new fighting style unique to the series? And then the fairy stuff. The fairy nethers. I’m going to quote what I said in the comments section of a post where I talked about this book a couple of weeks ago:

I don’t begrudge that fairy showing up to be explained – I begrudge it being SO boring. And when I say it made no sense to me, I mean that…it was so thin and wispy a passage in the book. Kvothe’s life is very stark and harshly relayed and we’re left with no doubts as to what’s been happeing – which I’ve loved – then suddenly there’s this fairy part that’s all cloudy and quite wishy washy compared to everything else. I’m not a fan of fairy tales that are relayed in these ethereal ways, as if Kvothe is drugged. It’s like he was, I suppose, but it makes for a means of storytelling that seems intentionally hard to grasp at times, and it’s been done so much already, and frankly I think I expected better of Rothfuss. I don’t think that Felurian is particularly original.

I dunno, I was so disappointed at this point in the book that my enthusiasm levels plummeted faster than Kvothe’s ever dwindling coin.

And – and! Before that, in the Vintas (where he travels to work for a patron, the Maer of Vint) Kvothe resumes his bewildering obsession with Denna, who of course shows up there, too! I didn’t much care for her in book one. She never had much personality, though it became obvious she is some kind of prostitute that everyone wants. I still cannot fathom why Kvothe moons over her. She has absolutely no personality other than the woman who wants to remain very independent of men unless it is by her choosing she be with them. Which, hey, that’s great, but again – that’s ALL she’s been in the series up to the point I read. She and Kvothe have the most ridiculous argument and both stomp off in an embarrassingly juvenile snit. Which suited me just fine, I can’t understand what she’s doing in the series in the first place. Am I really supposed to keep reading this very. long. series till the end to find out? Truthfully, it’s another aspect to add to the I Don’t Care list.

So far, Kvothe’s life isn’t exactly that thrilling. It’s interesting, but not really thrilling. But I’m wondering if that’s the point? The blurb for the series, that looooong one above? Is the point that none of what Kvothe’s actually done is as exciting as what actually happened?

I just skimmed the rest of the book, and I’ve got the basics down. I dunno, I’m really disappointed in this installment and certainly won’t be in any rush to read book three now, but at this point in time I still feel like it’d be a shame not to finish the series itself. And see if this is all ever going to get anywhere. If Kvothe will save himself from Marty-Stu-dom or wallow in it.

Since I couldn’t finish the book except to skim the rest, you might be interested in this review (full disclosure – they didn’t like the book much either, and I agree with the review for the most part). I started off feeling euphoric over book one, but now I wonder what the point is and am a little disappointed, especially given the points made in the linked review about how women are represented in the series. I think it took me till reading that review to understand why Denna’s bothered me so much, or one reason at least.

I’m not even going to officially rate the book, except to say it would usually be a straight forward DNF since I only skimmed that last 300-ish pages, but if I rated what I read up to before quitting, it would probably be two scoops. A. This book repeats way too much of what we already read in book one, mainly about the university days (Kvothe’s struggles with money, his nemesis. etc., although I still enjoyed the interactions with those he calls friend); B. It repeats way too many other things, like Kvothe’s obsession with getting Sooper Special Merc Guy to like him; C. The lack of originality in some of the basic ideas and carrying out of them this time surprised me.

But – that’s just me.