Yet, right at around page 300, having gotten all of his setup out of the way, Goodkind unexpectedly kicks things into gear and, quite unlike Jordan, actually has his characters do interesting things.
#Terry goodkind sword of truth review series#
All of which means that the first 250 or so pages are an endurance test of Jordanian proportions, and for a while I was about to shake my head in dismay that yet another gigantic bestselling VLFN series was turning out to be another follow-the-dots groaner.
(In particular, the more Goodkind has Zedd explain what a Seeker is, the more confusing it becomes.) Then, scenes in which our heroes set out on their quest to find the last box of Orden (Rahl so far only has two) are unnecessarily protracted. There is much that is virtually incomprehensible and muddled and fails to become clear until much, much later in the novel. Goodkind takes forever setting all this up for us and explaining in exhaustive detail everything I have sketchily summarized above. These early scenes are the most problematic. So there we go: the Hero's Journey, repackaged afresh. Zedd now presents Richard with the Sword of Truth and informs him he is the Seeker, a figure who, in times of insurmountable strife, emerges as a man of heroic stature who must use the magic of the sword and his own experience and independent judgment to find a solution and save the day. We learn that Richard's father was the one in possession of the Book of Counted Shadows, and that as a child Richard was made to commit the book to memory before his father burned it so its secrets wouldn't fall into the wrong hands. Richard takes Kahlan to meet Zedd, a crusty old eccentric who, of course, turns out to have been a powerful mage who left his order in disgust over their inappropriate handling of the boxes of Orden. (Another box would kill him if he opened it, and the third would even more drastically annihilate all life everywhere.) Rahl, like all dark lords, is seeking various magical thingys: the three boxes of Orden, which contain "a magic spawned from the earth, from life itself." He also wants the Book of Counted Shadows, because only one of the boxes will enable him actually to control the magic and use it to his ends and the Book tells which is which. It turns out, naturally, that evil is afoot to the east in the form of the charismatic D'Haran leader Darken Rahl. Richard helps her dispatch these mysterious assailants, and then she shocks him with the news that she has entered the Westlands from the Midlands, by crossing the supposedly impenetrable Boundary. Out one day scouring the woods for clues to his father's murder, he meets a young woman named Kahlan who is being stalked by four armed men. Synopsis: Richard Cypher is a young man living in the Westlands, a magic-free area that exists peacefully apart from its easterly neighbors, the Midlands and D'Hara, by virtue of a mountain range shielded with a magical Boundary. While he won't win any awards for originality (to put it gently), Goodkind has created a quest fantasy that eschews the most obvious Tolkienian clichés, offers up its fair share of unexpected twists and turns, and, most importantly, features absorbing characters who, though archetypes, engage the reader both intellectually and emotionally. Yes, this doorstopper of a novel is markedly flawed in several areas, and many of these flaws are due to both its extreme length as well as the routine mistakes one would reasonably expect a first-time novelist to make. Happily, I am able to say: much, much better than Jordan. (Clearly James Frenkel is the most generous editor in the business in allowing his writers to indulge themselves this way.) The important issue at hand for us is: Do the merits of the story justify the length and the investment of time required by the reader? Pissed-off readers of this website already know how I would answer that question in Jordan's case. The question of whether or not this sort of thing is just writerly machismo gone horribly overboard is perhaps best settled by a critical rumble in the alley. With this 820-page monster debut, Goodkind becomes the heavyweight champion of the VLFN sweepstakes, even out-Jordaning Robert Jordan in the effort to astonish potential readers with the utter enormity of his creation. Yessiree, there's no denying that you can't miss Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels on your local bookstore shelves, if only for the fact that they're so goddamn huge that one copy of a Goodkind novel takes up the same rackspace as three or four novels by most anyone else.
Book cover art by Keith Parkinson (left) Doug Beekman (right).
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