<< I think the issue here that troubles me (and whoever else it was commented
about it--sorry, I deleted this message) is the very close way GGK sticks to
his originals. >>
I am going to have to stand up and agree with Lesley here. I've never
thought that much of GGK, and this is one of the reasons why --his
perfunctory attempts at worldbuilding. Speaking as a writer of fantasy with
a degree in history, his work is a copout in this regard. (The later books
anyway.) THE LIONS OF AL-RASSAN was quite the most egregious in this respect.
It would be cool to create a fantasy world based on Moorish Spain. But to
set it on a peninsula of land shaped *exactly like* the Iberian peninsula,
and to change the religions of the land from transcendent monotheism to a
facile paganism, just to make it seem more "fantasy-like" (the Jews,
Christians and Moslems are made to worship the moons, the sun, and the stars,
respectively) while keeping everything else about the culture and the
politics the same as in real-life medieval Spain -- well, it bugs me. It's
just lazy! He didn't do the work necessary to make it a real historical
novel or historical fantasy, which it would have worked fine as since there
were not that many fantastic elements in it anyway. Nor did he do the work
to create an intruiging new fantasy world inspired by an exotic period of
Earth history. Instead he came up with some kind of lazy-ass, slipshod
hybrid. I think it is a disservice both to history, and to fantasy.
The book was well-written enough. He's learned to put a rein on the
Hallmark-card level Lord of the Rings prose he used to spew everywhere. The
charcters are well drawn and the action scenes are good. Too bad the overall
framework of the book is so shoddy. It was really a cheat on that level. I
think he should pick a subgenre and stick to it -- historical fantasy or
imaginary-world fantasy, instead of trying to get away without doing either.
that's my .02.
Kirsten
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:07:38 PDT