Krishna
Torturer’s apprentice Severian. They go into the graveyard by night. He encounters some grade diggers being confronted by guards and watches from a hidden place. He saves the leader Vodalus and gets a coin in return. This changes his life. He also nearly drowns but seems to have been pushed out by the water itself, enough to rise near the surface and be saved. He buries the coin. He rescues a huge dog called Triskele.
He goes with a message to the aged librarian and visits the library, a new part of the building he has not seen.
He goes to a brothel for the ‘growing up’ experience. He meets and befriends Thecla, a beautiful woman who was arrested and participates in her torture against his will. He gives her a knife to end it all, and takes the punishment for it. Instead of killing him, they banish him to a remote village.
He meets a gentle giant who makes money with a partner in shows. He goes to buy a cloak but is challenged to a duel by a knight who gives him a golden seed as a symbol.
They go to pluck a flower “for the combat” and go to a weird place where disjointed and weird things occur. Glenn seems to go off on a very surreal tangent that confuses rather than impresses and the height of expectations raised by the unusual story-line comes crashing down.
Then they meet two others who want to cheat people through a play and further weirdness happens. When they pass through massive walls with guards that are not even human, the story abruptly ends and the second “book” The Claw of (what?) begins. Begins in – by now familiar – a disjointed sequence with sudden new characters which makes you wonder if you missed a piece in between but you are still reading the same physical book!
The story wanders all over the place. For instance, when you get interested in Triskele, the dog is completely abandoned. So with other characters. It makes the whole story seem disjointed.
He gets a letter where Thecla says she is alive and he rides hard into a trap laid by the sister of the fellow he killed (a girl called Agia) and escapes due to the power of the Claw. He is taken by Vodalus and there are disgusting scenes where he eats human flesh and drinks some weird intoxicant. He is chased by shadow creatures that are vicious and seek heat.
The author several times says ‘If you don’t want to continue this journey with me, dear reader, and want to stop here, I understand’. I wish I had listened to that sage advice from the author himself and stopped the first time he wrote it. It would have saved a lot of valuable time.
The whole thing is dropped suddenly and a substory starts. This is what irritates you. Suddenly out of nowhere the author decides to wander, and invents beasts and men with weird names but suddenly introduces them into the story with absolutely no introduction. It is like watching a film where another film suddenly is thrust into, with no clue on where you left the original film and why you should care about this new film appearing, knowing that after some time, another new film will start at random. Ridiculous.
And all that blather about the play! The book reaches heights of ridiculousness and confusion that is unmatched even by the previous blather so far. It is really hard to keep reading as the whole thing seems pointless quite often. If you persevere, then you will find that there is no improvement right until the end.
1/ 10
- - Krishna (Oct 2018)