Subject: Tad Williams: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (some spoilers)

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sat, 27 Feb 1993 04:47:20 GMT

"To Green Angel Tower" completes the trilogy started in "The Dragonbone 
Chair" and "The Stone of Farewell".  It was an enjoyable read, but one I 
found ultimately disappointing.  

The world-building was unexceptionable, but not not good enough to do
more than constitute a stage for the story:  The stage owes far more
to JRR Tolkien than to Tad Williams.  The characters?  The only characters
we come to know in any depth are the obligatory serving boy whose quest
is also his coming of age, and the princess, for whom the quest is also
a coming of age -- and those very roles prevent those characters from
being particularly rich or interesting. 

The main failing of the trilogy, however, is in the plot:  Virtually
everything that happens is irrelevant.  Let two examples stand for
the rest.  One subplot has the Elves, and a supporting group of Human
soldiers, ride to attack an enemy stronghold.  After several weeks of
fighting, and terrible losses, they acknowledge failure, and leave
the stronghold to ride to Green Angel Tower.  Another subplot has the
exiled prince finally ride to war to reclaim a Dukedom.  After several
weeks of fighting, he wins a victory which turns out to have no bearing
on the rest of the story, and then he and his forces ride to Green
Angel Tower.

Yes, the final book of the trilogy is appropriately titled.  By its
end, all the significant characters who are still alive have converged
upon Green Angel Tower, in a culmination which would have occurred in
almost the same way if two thousand of the previous twenty-five hundred
pages had never been written.  The author, through one of the characters,
makes the claim that had it not been for all the scurrying around, the
final outcome would have been different, but there is no particular 
reason to believe this:  The final outcome hinged on unforeshadowed
coincidences, which is to say that it hinged on the writer's whim, and
little else.

The trilogy's other failings are cut from the same cloth:  skillful
writing in the service of sloppy architecture -- resulting in a story
that was fun to read, but unsatisfying in retrospect.  Take the Tower
itself.  What at the beginning of the story seems like a fairly 
ordinary castle, by the end resembles a misenchanted Gormenghast.
It's a castle of endless tunnels, shifting architecture, subterranean
secrets and horrors, half-deserted except for the veritable armies
of characters who seem to be skulking through its hidden passages...
and for what?  All the effort that Williams pours into this complex
seems to go to waste.  Unlike Gormenghast, this castle is too much
a potpouri of plot devices to become a dominant character in its own
right.  And few of the characters skulking through the castle seem
to have any existence beyond their assigned roles of being at the
right place when their brief opportunity comes to further the plot.

There's no shame in not being Tolkien.  Today's fantasies owe so
much to him that the production of well-crafted Tolkien knockoffs is
a legitimate artform.  But if an author is going to produce so
familiar a product, six or seven hundred pages ought to suffice.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope