* Every asterisk-marked item in the Sword of Shannara review has two scores, the first my score, the second an approximation of what my score would have been if I had never read the LotR novels, and therefore didn't realize how completely nearly every idea in Brooks' novel was ripped off from there.  The fact that Tolkien did almost all of it first doesn't really make the stuff less interesting in Brooks' amateurish hands, but I just can't reward his repetitive plagiarism.

April 5, 2004

First up is my review of Terry Brooks popular fantasy tale, The Elfstones of Shannara. My comments here will be somewhat spoilerish, so be warned. Personally, I couldn't have been spoiled for this one, since everything went exactly as I expected it to go, with only the "which gorgeous, inexplicably-attracted-to-his-dopey-ass girl will Wil end up with" thing not turning out quite as I'd expected it.

Elfstones is the second book in the series, published in 1982, and has been a huge seller ever since it was released.  Brooks has gone on to write another 10 or 15 books in the Shannara world, continuing the initial storyline on, looping back to write prequels, covering other races he didn't mention much in the first books, and so on. If you're a fan you say he's done a great job covering his marvelous fantasy world in such detail, and if you're not you say he's a hack who ripped off everything original from Tolkien, and has just been eating and regurgitating his own fantastic feces for 25 years of derivative fantasy novels.

I fall somewhere in between those extremes of opinion, though if I read more I'd probably lean more towards the "hack" side, since his world isn't very fresh or original, and his writing isn't good enough to overcome that. I've got no plans to read the 3rd novel in the series, though I'll probably skip ahead to one he wrote within the last 5 years just to see if he's progressed any further in his writing ability.

Brooks' first novel, The Sword of Shannara, was very, very amateurish. I had a hard time getting through it, both due to everything being "borrowed" from LotR, and due to the pacing being very slow. Brooks was a lawyer who dabbled in fiction, and the book reads... like it was written by a lawyer dabbling in fiction. It's basically fanfic of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, with 75% of the same plot elements and characters, and just the names and a few details changed, and the epic plot compressed from 1200 pages to 400, losing all of the epic-ness and gaining a bunch of video game-caliber action scenes and dungeon crawls. The writing is very poor and uninspired, the pacing is a wreck, and it reeks of "My first novel" in most every way.

Surprisingly, no doubt to Brooks more than anyone, the book was a huge hit and enabled him to keep on writing, and when he published the 2nd book in the series, 4 years later, he had definitely improved. The plot wasn't very original, though at least it wasn't completely "borrowed" from LotR, and though several of the main characters bear a rather strong resemblance to individuals named Gandalf, Frodo, Samwise, and Saruman, at least they're not doing the same thing as they were in the first Shannara book. Or in LotR. Though there is a Gollum-like tiny furry elf thing that shows up near the end of the book and will have you groaning as it shrieks and cries out things like "Wisp is good! Don't hurt Wisp! Nice Master! Nice elves!" See the elves in Shannara fill both the elf roles, and the hobbit roles, since some of them are very small and need protection, while at the same time others are big warriors, and sometimes the same elf is both, over the course of the book, depending on the requirements of the plot.

The plot was very linear, and split into two stories. Demons are coming to attack the Elf Kingdom since an ancient Elven tree that sealed the demons away into a black purgatory is dying. The elves must find a way to take a seed from the tree to some distant unknown location, dip it into some earth fire stuff, and then return it to their sacred garden, and only one special chosen elf can take it and dip it. (The Frodo/ringbearer parallels are obvious.)  Meanwhile the elf army has retreated to their fortress city to battle against the rampaging demons, and they must try to hold out long enough for the seed to be fertilized (or something) in the magical fire, and returned to the sacred garden where it will turn into the magical tree again and banish the demonic hordes for another couple of thousand years. Or at least until Brooks thinks of some way to spring them loose in 20 years to give his 3rd book a plot.

The story progresses step by step, cutting back and forth between the two desperate, nearly powerless elves struggling along with the magical tree seed towards their perilous destination while fleeing the deadly Nazgul. I mean Reaper. Meanwhile the other plot has a great battle where the elves try to hold off the vast hordes of besieging orcs at Helm's Deep. I mean demons in the elf city.

Will the elf and the chosen elf get the seed there in time?  Will they find some way to return to the elf city just before the demonic hordes overrun it?  What do you think? There's even a huge falcon to fly them to the rescue when all hope appeared lost.

Still, if you don't think about the inevitable happy ending (which isn't entirely happy, due to the love triangle twist I mentioned above) you might get somewhat caught up in the plot.

My main complaint about the plot, besides the LotR familiarity, was how convenient and silly it all was. Every time the two lone elves were screwed, they were saved by some incredibly convenient occurrence. A river god who hadn't been seen in a thousand years would sweep them up, or a gypsy they'd met earlier would reappear to pull them to safety just as a mob of thieves were about to kill them. Or a pair of witches they couldn't possibly defeat would suddenly kill each other fighting over them. Or the one person on earth who knew how to guide them to their destination would appear when they had no way to advance (this happened twice).

A few lucky breaks are necessary in a fantasy quest adventure like this one, but there must have been 6 or 8 incredible strokes of luck just in the one quest story line, and I was rolling my eyes by the 4th or 5th time they were stopped with no hope, knowing that the next chapter would bring yet another saving miracle.

The battle with the demons storyline isn't much different, as certain defeat turns into amazing victory time after time, with the same stupid lack of battlefield tactics every time.  There are impossibly large numbers of attacking demons, unless the story requires that a counterattack succeed, in which case there are suddenly only a few demons who can all be killed. The demons can climb up any wall or over any mountain, unless a cliff collapse is necessary to slow them down.  The demons care nothing for death and never need to rest and can see in the dark, unless the elf defenders are so tired that they must have a break, in which case the demons will pull back and rest only to return and attack again at dawn when the elves can see them to fight back. The demons are only able to be killed when a magical staff of the magical tree is nearby, unless they are about to win, in which case they suddenly die to every arrow and sword. The demon leader is amazingly powerful, but he never does a goddamned thing during the battle when virtually any involvement could have given his troops the easy victory, saving himself for a big ending showdown with the good guy Druid/Wizard-Gandalf; a showdown that delays his troops from the victory that is within their grasp just long enough for the good guys to return. 

The best way I can describe the plot and story is "amateurish." It's just deus ex machina over and over again, and while I suspect Brooks thought it was wonderful and thrilling, and a lot of his readers agree with him judging by the number of raving 5 star reviews over on Amazon.com, I couldn't keep my disbelief suspended for 400 pages of repeated impossibly close escapes, when I never really had any doubt that things would turn out fine in the end. The characters never seemed to make any choices; they were just buffeted about by fate, always doing the only thing they could do, and always having that turn out for the best.

I didn't care too much for the characters either. The Gandalf-like druid is supposedly all powerful, and he's got this incredibly smart and brave and fast horse, but his only magic is a blue flame he fires from his fingertips. There's never any description of how it works, how he conjures it, how much of it he can use without tiring himself, etc. I thought that was a missed opportunity, since I'm always curious about how the magic works in various fantasy worlds, and Brooks never delves into the Druid's at all. And the magic is very convenient, since he doesn't use it at times, does at others, is tireless when he needs to be, tires easily when the plot requires it, etc.

The brave halfling/elf/Frodo guy is smart and determined most of the time, but has totally illogical emotions and is extremely stupid about not accepting help from a gypsy girl when he's got no logical reason to turn it (or her) down. Nor does she have any reason to want to help, when he's done very little to impress anyone and insults her several times, before suddenly being apparently in love with her in the end, when it's convenient for the plot.

The bad guys are wasted also. They are interesting initially, and the dark demon lord is a cool adversary... who is then not seen for 400 pages, during which he's apparently sitting back and filing his talons, when he could have ensured his victory on any number of occasions by doing just about anything at all. The only bad guy you see forever is the "Reaper" who is seen chasing the 2 elves and killing everyone in its path with amazing speed and ease; unless it's very near the 2 elves it must kill, in which case it becomes very slow and confused and takes fifteen minutes to beat one elf warrior, or can't even deal quickly with a gypsy girl armed with a dagger.  It's also never described physically until about page 400, despite being in sight several times.  I was under the impression that it was a huge monster, until it was suddenly able to follow the heroes through narrow cracks in a mountain and revealed to be just a tall humanoid in form.

Brooks' writing is largely acceptable, vastly improved over the prose-impaired state it was in the first book, and the story is much tighter and better paced.  But he goes into 3 or 4 long, multi-page digressions of exposition, right in the middle of huge battle scenes.  And he's always explaining things that the reader realized 150 pages ago.  I skimmed along numerous times, flashing over the summary of stuff I'd known before it even happened.  I suppose some younger readers or people with poor reading comprehension needed those moments, but they just dragged on for me, and made the characters seem incredibly dumb, if they hadn't figured all of the stuff they were thinking of out already.

I could go on and on about the book's failings, but you get the idea.  It's a good novel for kids or young teens or uncritical readers.  The rest of us can get through it out of an idle curiosity about the plot, but I can't really recommend it. I'll give it a 2/5 star rating, since it was certainly far better than the Sword of Shannara, and thus deserves more than the 1/5 I gave that one.

March 29, 2004

Speaking of "what the hell," I also grabbed Terry Brooks' Elfstones of Shannara.  It's the second book in his ever-expanding fantasy series, and since I want to read a book or two in every popular fantasy series at some point, it's homework. I'd never read any of his work in my life, though I used to see kids carrying the various Shannara paperbacks around constantly in junior high, until I picked up the first book at the La Mesa library a couple of years ago. I wasn't blogging at the time, or didn't think it was worth a blog entry, but I did discuss it some in an email about writing and fantasy, which I quoted on the October 2002 Mailbag (scroll down to the 25th, near the bottom of the page). To quote myself quoting myself:

The Elfstones of Shannara (or whatever the series is called) by Terry Brooks is very popular, and up to at least 10 or 12 books now. I read the first one earlier this year, and found it just terrible. Not so horrible, but such a Tolkien-light, with elements of every other fantasy series mixed in. Young male clueless orphan boy somehow ends up in the middle of this huge adventure (and he's inevitably the one of some ancient prophecy), there's a Gandalf-like mysterious wizard, lots of evil ravening beasts, a stout friend, they set off on a quest pursued by strange black demons, get lost in some long long walk through an evil forest, etc. I'm not even sure I finished it, every element was so familiar and less well done than LotR that I was sort of disgusted. I don't think I even bothered to mention it on the site, it was so unremarkable.

Yet that book was very popular, lead to a trilogy, and has been expanded in a dozen or so other novels in the same world. The point being nothing original, and in fact almost everything very derivative, but still hugely popular (maybe it gets better after the first book).

I honestly don't remember much more than that at this point, and I hardly remembered it then, shortly after having read it. It's really an unremarkable book; almost like a LotR-cover or remix, to use musical terms.  Quite a few of the 1-star reader reviews on Amazon cover this in far greater detail than I could, having forgotten most of Swords by now.  To quote from one of the many 1-star, voted highly helpful reviews:

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

A little less than mildly entertaining, August 12, 2002

First of all, how in the world did Brooks get away with writing this so called classic?! It was almost exactly like Tolkien's masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. It ripped off everything from the valemen, being timid and weak, like the Hobbits, The tall mystical gaurdian Allanon, a character almost exactly like Gandalf. The skull bearers, unusually synonomous to the Nazgul. And Hendel the battle-hardened dwarf, exactly like Gimli. Also Balinor, not quite king of the border town Calahorn, oh yeah, he was also an experienced fighter and ranger/scout, kind of like Aragorn. There are so many other things, so let me list all of them for you. The mist monster, like the water guardian to the mines of Moria, the Elven archers curiously resemble Legolas, The Warlock Lord, kind of like Sauron, The Skull Kingdom being like Mordor, Shady Vale, almost exactly like The Shire, I'm sure I missed some, but you get the point. Don't waste your money on this LOTR clone, instead, go out and buy the real deal.

Besides the cheesy plot, the writing was very mediocre and run of the mill.  Brooks was a lawyer who turned to writing and only took it up full time when this mediocre novel inexplicably became a huge national best seller. However, we all have to start off somewhere. Some good writers might even have gotten their first online popularity doing something cheesy like say, fan fiction? *cough* Also, he was born in 1944 and got the first Shannara book published in 1977, so figure he was in his early 30's when he wrote it.  Okay, I'm getting sick of the parallels now.

Anyway part 2, the first book is very amateurish, both in the plotting and the writing, almost to the point where you're left to wonder how it got published.  Seriously, if Tolkien weren't long dead there might have been a lawsuit over the plot of the first Shannara book.

Brooks apparently learned quickly though, since the complaints about his ripping off Tolkien ended after the first novel.  I'm only 30 or 40 pages into the 2nd one, and it's far better than anything in the first novel.  The writing is still very amateurish, but it's not as boring or full of long slow lulls as the first book was, and the plot, at least, is totally unlike Tolkien.  It's not a great plot, and it all seems pretty familiar, but since he wrote the book in 1982 it's entirely possible that most of the rip offs that have osmosis'ed into my brain and are now fueling my "this isn't original" opinion of the book have been created in the last two decades, and are actually ripping off Brooks.  I don't especially like that the entire plot has been made very clear by page 30, since I really have no doubt what's going to happen, and how it's going to turn out, and I didn't even read the back cover info.

I suppose you could argue that he's just done a good job setting things up early, but for me it's sort of lame when I know everything in advance. The sacred tree is dying, it must be reborn in a "destroy the ring" style fashion (dipping a seed into a volcano), the "chosen one" has to do this, she's obviously the female tree keeper who was sent away, the king's under-appreciated 2nd son is going to be the hero who conveys her along since his snotty older brother just left town, and they're going to spend the whole book just inches ahead of the evil triumvirate of demons who want the tree to die before saving the land miraculously, falling in love in the process, and probably becoming king and queen after the older brother does something stupid and dies heroically.

I could be wrong on some of these points, but they all seem very clear, to the point of being telegraphed, and I'll be surprised if there are any big plot twists or any evidence of dynamic characters.  There certainly weren't in the first Shannara novel.

Despite the above, it might actually be a good book.  I'm not planning on reading any more of them, though I might skip to a more recent one after I read (or give up on) this 2nd one just to see if he's gotten better as a writer, but I'm reading them much more for research and comparative purposes than to get enjoyment from the process.

April 6, 2004

Another mail, this one from Caaroid. The double intention is him quoting me.

About the Brooks books... Now I have not really read them, but the parallels between Brooks and Tolkien are further reaching than you say.

"I didn't care too much for the characters either. The Gandalf-like druid is supposedly all powerful, and he's got this incredibly smart and brave and fast horse, but his only magic is a blue flame he fires from his fingertips. There's never any description of how it works, how he conjures it, how much of it he can use without tiring himself, etc. I thought that was a missed opportunity, since I'm always curious about how the magic works in various fantasy worlds, and Brooks never delves into the Druid's at all. And the magic is very convenient, since he doesn't use it at times, does at others, is tireless when he needs to be, tires easily when the plot requires it, etc."

Guess what. It's true to Tolkien as well. What's more, he does not describe characters either, only goes as far as "fair" or "ugly", and Aragorn even manages to change some in that regard. But you get NO indication about how the magic works, how the whole damned world works, what is the use of the silly rings, now come on! The STUPIDEST thing I ever read is Sauron forging his power into the One Ring that could be cut off his finger redering him powerless for thousands of years. He was pretty much all-powerful before, what's the use of implanting this weakness then? The same goes for the ringwraiths, at times they are able to keep entire cities afraid, the other times they are oumatched by Aragorn and an elven lord. Then again one forgives everything for Tolkien, since he was the First (see Malaya's theorem again), and he was a damned good linguist, producing unparalelled quality literature. This of course must make Brooks even sadder.

He's got a point, and I don't think the Tolkien novels are astonishingly good.  The writing of the is very spotty, for one thing, and that's what puts most people off of them. They read like they were written by a scholarly linguist who dabbles in fantasy... because they were. LotR works though, since the length and epic-ness of it combines with the very wordy, complicated, old-fashioned prose.  They compliment each other, while the LotR plot borrowings in the Brooks' novels are compressed down into one novel, rather than filling 3 as LotR does, and it seems hurried or cramped. Plus Brooks' writing voice is modern, and undistinguished.

The Gandalf's magic thing is an issue I've seen debated elsewhere, since after all, he never really uses any magic.  No fireballs, no lightning bolts from the sky, no teleportation, etc. This is true in the book and the movie, with the only real signs of his magic in the film coming when he battles and loses to Saruman early on, and then when he throws Saruman's control off of the King of Rohan in book 2. People who are new to LotR and expect Gandalf to be a typical D&D style sorcerer feel cheated to find out that he's more of an immortal spirit of good, rather than some guy who can shoot fire from his fingertips.

My complaint about the Druid's magic in Brooks' stories is that it's just boring. He casts blue flame, and more blue flame. And he's a druid, so you keep expecting him to do some nature-based magic, or enchant trees, or something. But no, he's just tall and powers blue flames like a flame thrower, whenever it's necessary or convenient to the plot, with never a mention of where he gets his powers, if he's serving any particular god, if anyone could do it if they knew the magic word or thought, etc.