The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford
Hello, Stranger.
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character)
Bechdel Test: Fail.
Technobabble: None.
Review: This book is just well and truly awful. The haughty condescension from the author about how grounded the historical aspects are clashed with some painfully bad attempts at changing the past. Mix in some truly baffling choices as to when to adhere to actual historical events and when to veer away, and you've got yourself a stew. Characters have no traits that aren't explicitly stated, and, in the name of "subterfuge" these characteristics can change on a dime. Pacing is abysmal - switching at random from plodding discussions to sloppy action. Fantasy elements are handled with the grace of a baseball bat to the stomach.
I have allowed Justinian his time—and Theodora as well—by a mechanism which should be apparent from Chapter Three, and not too different from some of the reports of Procopius's Secret History.
- The Historical Notes at the end of the book.
"Madonna Lucrezia used to say that the incubus who brought Arthur down, was Theodora of Byzantium, after she turned vampire to save herself from death. But surely not... surely they would not succeed in ruining a king, and then fail to take his country."
- Chapter Three
The mechanism is that they're vampires. So, that.
Look, I love Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, enough so that I should probably write a review of it here. It's a brilliant mix of history and wacky fantasy, but cleverly executed in such a way that one can disentangle what is what. More than anything else, it's a biography of Lincoln that is intended to appeal to those who might not run to the biographies shelf at the library (with all due respect to my brother, who did just that when he was younger).
Then there's things like A Song of Ice and Fire - you know, Game of Thrones - that have their foundations in historical conflicts: for George R. R. Martin, it's the War of the Roses.
And then there's this book. What an unpleasant mess. The tone and content diverge wildly - the premise is almost shockingly dumb, while the tone is completely serious. Text is broken into two categories: clumsy exposition or stilted dialogue.
Exposition:
Cecily Neville, dowager Duchess of York, had been called the Rose of Raby in her youth, and she was still quite fair and smooth of face; seeing her, it was not easy to imagine that eleven children, the executions of a husband and son, and a long chain of battles and captivities had come between then and now. In her pose at the dinner table, however, relaxed yet elegant, one could clearly perceive the mother of a king.Dialogue:
"George," Richard said, "Peredur... has a question... for you. About the paper... with Henry and Margaret."
"Oh... that. If you want to know why a man signs his own death warrant, I don't know. Stupidity, I suppose, but it seemed like a wonderful idea at the time."
"The document was destroyed," Hywel said. "Margaret was trying to send it to England."
"Destroyed?" George said, looking up. "Edward doesn't have it? The court won't see it?"
"She was sending it by magic," Hywel went on. "We stopped it. But we need to know whom she was sending it to, who would have taken it to the court."
"You stopped... oh, gods, Dick. I didn't... I mean, I'm sorry."
Note the obvious: there are three characters here, and they all speak with the same voice. Usually short sentences, a whole lot of ellipses.
It's unforgivably bad on a purely structural and textual level. I haven't mentioned the division of this book into four separate segments, each of which starts with slow exposition. No reason to mention the constant coincidences that drive the plot, the terribly explained and defined magic, or the weird pseudo-profound lines sprinkled throughout. Okay, just one!
A guilty man could never have brought himself to master the tainted weapon so well.
Why? Why not? What? The bad guys used poison a whole bunch of times!
The climax is everything you've read in a fantasy book before. What? They're gonna be lil' sneaky sneaks and use explosives? On a timer? Is there gonna be an issue with the timer? You bet your batoot there will! Oh, we're not going to respond with out and out force to something because blah blah blah ideological victory? Sure. Why not? Oh, a last minute betrayal? Will he say, "something something, but at what cost?"
"Was it worth it..."
Well, consider my expectations mightily subverted.
To quote the Supremes:You can't hurry [dragons]/[Stranger], you'll just have to wait
And don't forget to read a book!
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