So, in the middle of Phantom, I decide to give up on the Sword of Truth series.
1.5 books left out of 11, and I just can’t finish.
Terry Goodkind has always had a point to make in the series, but it seems to me like the preaching has gotten progressively worse over the course of the series. Maybe I’m just being blinded by nostalgia, but I doubt it. I looked through a few parts of Wizard’s First Rule a few weeks back, and I didn’t see any preaching.
None. At all. You couldn’t go two pages in Chainfire or Phantom without at least a sentence or two of preaching.
I can barely remember much of anything in Pillars of Creation, but I doubt there was that much. No Richard around to be preaching. Faith of the Fallen was not subtle at all in it’s message working, but still, I don’t remember many ‘I am now going to expound upon the virtues of Randism’ bits. He had things to say, and he wasn’t at all subtle about it, but he said what he said in the story instead of having Richard (or someone else) get up on a rock and start preaching at people. And Faith of the Fallen is probably my favorite book in the series.
Naked Empire is when it got bad. The preaching hit like a ton of bricks. He raised points, but Richard preached and preached. And while he did raise points, it was a little hard to cheer for the brutality being wreaked upon the folk of Bandakar.
There are also internal consistency problems with some of the stuff.
The first one that really irritates me is the way the blame for the Imperial Order overrunning the New World is placed on Ann’s shoulders. It’s not so much that she’s getting blamed for it, but that the books espouse free will and individual responsibility yet we are blaming Ann for an action someone else did under their own free will. Richard brought down the barrier. Ann did not force him to. He did so on his own. Yes, Ann forcibly taking Richard to the Old World was wrong, but she in no way made him bring down that barrier. He did it.
When this blame shift gets mentioned first, I don’t really mind. It’s Kahlan who says it, and she’s got plenty of reason to be flippin’ mad and irrational about the whole mess. And I never liked Kahlan anyway. The second time this gets mentioned is by Nicci, who has no extenuating circumstances, and we are watching the scene through Richard and he doesn’t say anything to correct Nicci nor does he even think that she is wrong.
Next, we have the problem of prophecy.
The story pits free will against prophecy time and time again. This can be pretty easy to see. If these books are all about free will and individual responsibility (among other things), if someone in the far past was going and writing down how events would play out in the future, this eliminates free will and creates and easy way to pass the buck. I didn’t want to do it, but fate and the devil made me do it.
The problems here are how the novels approach prophecy and how in small, seemingly inconsequential ways, the above view of detailing future events is actually upheld by the story.
Prophecy isn’t described as a single path. This Is What Happens. It’s described as a tree. As you climb you hit various branching points and choices are made. If things happen one way one branch is invalidated (as you can’t go back in time and make a different choice), but everything down the branch chosen is still possible. Instead of describing what will happen it instead describes the results of a person’s actions. Thus, perhaps, giving them useful advice in making their choice.
As you could imagine, that method of approaching prophecy would mean a huge body of work. And there certainly is that. There are innumerable books of prophecy in this series. More than a single person could even hope to dent in their lifetime. And on top of all that, it’s not like prophecy is dead either, there are plenty of folk that can foresee the future that are alive and well in the books, which means that there’s still much to be added. The tree is still alive and growing new branches. Which mean that not all options and ends are covered.
All this means that the way prophecy is put together in the stories means that prophecy and free will do not have to fight. They can get along just fine.
Except for some stuff. Little, tiny stuff that is easily overlooked.
Like when people from the past refer to the current characters by name.
That one statue in Chainfire that refers to Richard by name presents difficulties for free will. That the chosen one would be of Rahl blood and that a parents have no choice in what to name a child. Richard’s parents had now control over his name. It was already chosen. A little odd, eh?
The final big issue I have is that of Ends Justifying Means. I mentioned this in my comment of cheering the brutality.
The books spend a lot of time going over the horror of the Imperial Order. The Imperial Order is horrible and awful. Look and their brutality and awfulness when they sack a city.
But it’s just fine for Richard to order the same to defeat them.
When the Imperial Order burns, murders, steals, tortures, and ravages the cities and country sides of the New World it’s bad bad bad. How could they do such awful things?
When the D’haran Empire does the same to the Old World, it’s just fine. It is, in fact, good because they are defeating evil.
While I do agree that you can’t let evil go unchecked, when you spend page upon page on how awful the Order is because it does all these things, and then praise the same actions when the good guys do it it seems a bit hypocritical. If this was treated more as a necessary evil (as it sort is when Richard unveils his plan in Phantom, as opposed to pretty much every other occasion) I’d be just fine with it.
They do make a difference between the two groups in that the good guys don’t engage in some of the more nasty stuff, the rape and testicle frying for instance, that the Order does.
And where did that testicle frying thing come from? I don’t recall ever hearing about anything along those lines before, and I’m sure I would have remembered if they had. It felt like a, “Hey, we need to make the Order looks really, really nasty. Oh, I know. Let’s have the soldiers fry and eat the testicles of captured enemy soldiers.”
And then a few oddities.
Does it seem odd to anyone else that the Keeper (a.k.a the Devil) is a very real presence in the books, but the Creator (a.k.a God) might as well not exist? There’s no reason why the Creator would have to exist if the Keeper did, but it seems odd to me.
Well, not entirely. A force of evil and death doesn’t hurt his point about individualism. But a force of good and life would cause problems.
But when the Keeper is a freakin’ character in the story, it just seems weird.
And all those millions and millions of order troops? Does anyone else find it odd that they could pony up that many monstrous folk? People are pretty nasty and selfish, but people have compunctions. Eliminating someone’s compunctions completely is not easy, yet the Order has millions of these folk.
The actual Order itself is my last point. The teachings of the Order are an amalgamation of everything Terry Goodkind hates.
What makes this weird is that these teachings tend not to get along in the real world. You can find parts of what the Order believes in many, many, many groups all over and on many sides of many spectrums. But any one group following more than half?
Ha! Good luck.
And to top it all off he seems to insinuate that all these beliefs flow from each other. If you believe part, you will believe the whole.
Which doesn’t work in the real world.
And it doesn’t even work in the world of the novels either. See Verna and Ann.
Yeah, so I’m done ranting now.
