Skip to main content

First King of Shannara: The Platypus Reads Part CCXXXII

Today's post will cover chapters XXIX and XXX of Terry Brooks' First King of Shannara.  As always, don't read on if you haven't read the book yet and want to keep it a surprise.

*Spoilers*



Chapter XXIX cuts away from the action in the west to follow Kinson and Mareth's attempt to rally what's left of the dwarves.  The pass through the ruins of Culhaven, fight a skull bearer left to keep watch and link back up with Risca and the dwarven remnant.  Brooks attempts to continue Mareth's character development in this chapter by having the skull bearer pretend to be her long lost father.  The action plays like a hasty remix of Rimmer Dal and Par Ohmsford in The Talismans of Shannara and thus falls flat.  The dramatic smooch between Kinson and Mareth when its all over is too cliche to be really satisfying (For me reading about it at least.  If it worked for them, who am I to disagree?  That's what I get for peeping in on other people's business).  Aside from character development, the scene is also meant to simultaneously increase tension by keeping us wondering what's happening with the elves while at the same time giving us just a little hope that with the dwarves found the tables can be turned.  Welcome to the world of pulp.  This is how we roll.

Chapter XXX cuts back to the battle for the Rhenn.  Terry Brooks seems to have read a little Sun Tsu between this and the last chapter so the battle scenes have a freshness that's been lacking so far.  Jerle's continued struggle to believe that the Sword of Shannara can help him is kept at the forefront of our attention in tandem with his military genius.  The hope is that we will admire Jerle as a legendary leader while understanding his ultimate failure to use to the sword.  It's a bold move, and I think it's probably more than Brook's story is able to handle.  My guess at this point is that he'll partially pull it off.  The question of whether he'll finesse the rest with pulpy panache is still up for grabs.  There have been enough flat spaces in First King of Shannara to make me doubt, but enough inspired moments to give me hope.  The end is coming soon, so I won't have to wait long to find out.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more