Wastrel’s Reviews > Elfshadow > Status Update

Anyway, as I read the first few chapters I found myself thinking about what it did well... and what it did very badly, and why. So I thought it might be a good idea to get myself thinking critically about reading again, a little, and make some notes / share some thoughts as I went through.

The 'Prelude' is an unfortunate choice to start the novel, as it shows the author, the setting, and the genre, at their worst, stylistically. Chiefly, the problem is: it's about an elf. That's rarely a good sign.

The problem with elves is that few authors have a clear idea of how to handle them. On the one hand, their otherness is essential: an elf is defined in part by not being human, and their role in most fantasy is to act as a foil, or mirror, to the human protagonists. At the same time, though, there's nothing really about the concept of an elf that specifies what that otherness entails exactly, since they generally look, sound and act much like anyone else. That of course is also part of the concept: an elf is at once inherently other, and yet also inherently familiar and sympathetic in a way that a goblin or a modron simply isn't. But it means that the author - or the creator of a setting - has to do their own work to discover and explain the nature of their otherness in a way that's compelling and believable.

That's perfectly doable. Tolkien largely does this in the *Silmarillion*, where elves are the larger-than-life, glorious-but-dangerous heroes we recognise from myths and legends. Pratchett does this well in *Lords and Ladies*, where elves are updated, sinister faeries, Titania by way of the Joker.

The Forgotten Realms does not, in general do this. [D&D in general doesn't do it well, but FR worse than most]. It tends to slip into lazy stereotypes that lack much in the way of internal logic or persuasive depiction (the other is often too other for the author to inhabit!).

So, here, a graceful elf tracks somebody across a dewy forest glade and through a garden. One elf can move so smoothly through long grass that they don't even flatten it, and another can track them nonetheless by the disruption of the dewdroplets. There's no real explanation of how, for either of those things.

Instead, words like "ancient", "verdant" and "wench" get thrown around; there are exclamation marks; there are phrases like "the disruption was as glaring as a trumpet's blast" and "King Zaor lies dead".

...aaand, then the chapter ends with a Bond Villain Murder.

If you've ever read a D&D novel - and it's in quite a lot of fantasy novels really - the prelude (/prologue, etc) is a familiar little art form in its own right (i've even written a couple myself, for D&D purposes), but it rarely really works, and it's undermined by its own cliches, including that Bond Villain Murder (with quip) at the end. This isn't one of the better ones. The genre struggles with its excesive demands: to provide massive infodumps, while remaining mysterious and not actually saying anythign directly about the story itself (preludes are usually set in a different time or place and their relevance is only revealed later - they're cold opens, basically, often complete with CSI-style stingers to get you to come back after the adverts), and only being able to use characters that not only have you never met before but that in most cases you won't meet again (at least, not for a long time). When that protagonist character is also an elf, and the prelude has to explain racial differences between different types of elf along the way, it only gets harder.

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On the other hand, it's not a total failure. It does feature a nice misdirect - although the reveal (the protagonist is actually an evil assassin) is too quick and too unambiguous (seriously, you don't have to make him give an "evil smile" when you want us to realise he's a baddie). This is part of a much bigger problem that I'll talk about later. It does manage to be weird and confusing, which is a big part of what preludes are meant to do.

It's also at its most interesting when it gets into specifics. When it gives the nameless characters hints of characterisation, in concrete terms - not when we get abstract racial resentments between the elf factions, but when the gold elf seems to mentally roll their eyes at the gray elves all being (literally) tone deaf. And when, instead of the cliche and non-specific "glade, a small verdant meadow ringed by a tight circle of vast oaks" (thanks, I'm sure I needed to be told what a glade was - although to me if something's big enough to be a meadow it's too big to be a glade, fwiw) it gets into the details of the landscape gardening.

That (specificities, not landscape garden) is fortunately something that's a lot more focused on in the following chapter...

The second chapter (chapter 1) is a lot better, and really shows where the author, the setting, and the genre can do a lot better: dealing with individuals.

The "purpose" of fantasy in some sense - not in an ideological sense, but in the sense of what fantasy novels can do and when they're usually best - is to put people into novel situations. That can be a genuinely weird new situation, or a familiar situation seen in a different light. The genre is uniquely able to explore these situations in their essence, as it were, separated (so far as the reader is willing to extend charity) from much the baggage and confounding variables in real life.

In this case, we meet Arilyn, and Arilyn is to some extent (like so many fantasy protagonists) a vessel to discuss themes of race, class, gender and post-colonialism. Arilyn is mixed-race, and a recently-bereaved orphan; she lives in an elven-dominated city (I don't remember whether it's entirely elven or not) in what is now a human-dominated region. She's in a strange situation: neither fully human nor fully elven; privileged by reason of her mother's not only elven but noble birth, but de-privileged by her mother's alienation from her family (for reasons unclear, but at least for now we can assume racism); perhaps in some ways drawn to her human side, but also alienated from that by her father's absence from her life. To add to the liminality, she's drawn to a stereotypically male profession of swordsmanship, and even to a two-handed style that is presented as comparatively brutish, but this is complicated by the innate involvement of magic in her life, and by culture misalignment issues: violence is less male-coded in the more "enlightened" elven society, setting up a conflict of affiliations, as the the racist, classist elven culture is (at least somewhat) more tolerant of how she chooses to express her gender identity, but less tolerant of her racial and class identity. As we will later see, the adult Arilyn further expresses her dichotomies through her religion, feeling drawn to a goddess of love and beauty (her mother's affiliation, and a goddess somewhat identified with her mother in her mind, set up here by the similarity of the divine statue to her memory of her mother), while living a solitary life of violence.

All this is brought to a head by the introduction of Kymil, a high-class elf who not only offers to train and mentor her, but essentially gives her a free pass to (at least materially) bypass the prejudices that would otherwise block her path. If you're a fantasy fan, you've seen how this will turn out before: his protection will cause her to feel immense (and justified) gratitude to him as an individual, while his generally prejudiced attitude will both maintain a barrier between them and (combined with survivor's guilt) lead her to at least partially accept and internalise that prejudice. His support will be a source of power and protection for her, but will also leave her deeply vulnerable to him, both materially and psychologically.

He's also something a device at this point for exploring Arilyn's own attitudes to elven society as a whole: she treats him with a combination of awe and intense wariness. This is understandable, given not only her racial and class position, but also her personal circumstances as the recently-orphaned only child of a busy, important single mother with no apparent social support network. Arilyn, it's safe to say, has got some attachment issues!

All this is not exactly stated in this chapter - in which the grieving child Arilyn first meets her new patron - but is very effectively hinted at, not through this sort of explicit big-picture rambling but through a simple but effective and compelling portrait of Arilyn's emotions, and brief sketches of the external situation that produces them - an adumbration greatly aided, it must be said, by the well-known tropes of the genre as a whole. The author does not need to construct all this from scratch, but only has to locate her story in relation to those tropes, and launch immediately into how that context informs Arilyn as an individual.

This is far more effective than the nameless Bond cold open of the prelude - not just because Arilyn has a name, but because these tropes of privilege and alienation, of liminality, are far more directly psychologically rich that the rather bland and theoretical tropes of elven one-ness with nature. These more effective tropes aren't just thrown out as worldbuilding details - they're directly embodied by our protagonist.

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Incidently, this is one of countless examples of why those who condemn fantasy as inherently conservative, the literature of those with powers who don't want to give it up, are talking such utter rubbish. On the contrary, fantasy protagonists have always tended to be liminal figures - they're disproportionately mixed-race, frequently female (and/or gender-nonconforming to some extent) and for every prince there's a farm-boy (even the princes are often also farm-boys). Almost invariably depictions of power and sophistication are intertwined with themes of narcissism, prejudice or decadence. Racial conflict - often complex and ambiguous - is a constantly-returning theme. When you consider that this was the state of the genre in the 1980s and 1990s, and juxtapose these themes with mainstream popular literature of the same era, is it really fantasy that's the conservative genre?

[of course, I'm not saying that all these novels necessarily address these themes *very well*, with any great subtlety or insight, and of course on racial issues in particular it must be said that the authors themselves were disproportionately white and probably assuming a white audience. We shouldn't expect too much of a novel like this in that regard, both due to the time period (this was published in 1991) and the function of the book (this is a crowd-pleasing adventure story by an author with no great literary pretensions). But to fail to observe that these themes are present, and even central to the novel and the genre, is to fail to understand either the novel or the genre at all.]

In chapter 2 (the third chapter) we find some good examples of perhaps the biggest flaw of this type of book.

First, though, let's applaud the author for her structural courage. Having placed her second chapter in what I'm guessing is decades later and in a different place than her first (although it is intentionally unclear), we now arrive at a third chapter that is, again, decades later and in a different place than either the first OR the second chapters. Across the first three chapters, there is only one character who appears in two chapters (well, possibly more once we find out who those people in the prelude were, but for now we'll assume not), and none in three. And the character in common (the protagonist, Arilyn) is a child in one and an adult in another, so that hardly counts.

It's a bold, no-nonsense plotting decision (just imagine how many doorstopper tomes GRRM would have felt necessary to bridge the gaps between these three chapters!) that lets the author cast a more epic light on events than the wordcount of the (fairly slim) novel would normally generate, and lets her get to the meat of her story without too much faffing around.

[[and just momentarily I'll say that the thematic segue from the death in the prelude to the child mourning a death in chapter 1 - even though they're not the same death! - is a very nice touch]]

It's also, unfortunately, not entirely successful, as it leaves the reader a little displaced and unengaged, which I don't believe is the intent. I'd also suggest, respectfully, that Chapter 2 isn't really needed at all, and that even more of a running start could have been accomplished by leaping straight into Chapter 3, and mentioning the highlights of this chapter only in flashback, if at all. But hey, the story has to start somewhere.

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But now the big problem:

...the use of the word 'cackled'.

No, obviously, cackling by itself is not necessarily impermissable. Although it's pretty hard to pull off unironically. Instead, it's a symptom of a broader (no pun intended) disease.

The thing is, while I want to read about Arilyn's personal struggles, the vehicle for showing me that is the plot. And anything to do with the plot is dealt with with far less care, attention, and specificty than Arilyn's reaction to it. That displays an admirable understanding of where the weight of the novel is, and should be... but it also undermines the story, makes it hard to take seriously, and produces tonal whiplash (which, again, I don't think was intended).

So, this is going to be a novel in which evil retired assassins will "cackle" with laughter. Sorry, with a "delirium of wheezing mirth". Twice. In the same chapter they will also give out a "rheumy chuckle", a "lear", and a "sly grin", while at another point laughing so much that his writing table will "shake under the assault of his laughter".

So, yes, it's massive overwritten. So, so many adjectives, and such desparation to avoid repeating words. The result, aside from the sometime baroque languages (which, let's face it, will not be alien to genre fans), it just makes a lot of sentences really heavy. Leaden. When Arilyn isn't turned on by a man, we're told that "the lecherous expression on the man's loathsome face raised her bile. After his comment about her lineage she wouldn't have had anything to do with him even if he'd been as handsome and as virtuous as the elflord Erland Duirsar".

[which, incidentally, rings rather off, given that he's literally *just* been talking about that time he raped and tortured a woman for days before killed her. That's his intro to his pick-up line. And it's the *second* time he's implied his enjoyment of rape and murder in this conversation. Arilyn is completely right not to want to have sex with him, but having that reaction on the basis of a racial microaggression (he used the wrong racial term, calling her a 'gray' elf instead of a 'moon' elf) rather than the, you know, being a self-confessed (boastful!) sadistic rapist and psychopath, feels a bit unrealistic. At least if the author is taking Arilyn down that character path, it doesn't seem like it so far]

But no, it's not the porphyrochromicity of the cackling that's the problem, per se. It's the cartoonishness of it. The setting around Arilyn in this chapter, and her reactions to it, is in stark black and white; the Evil Guy doesn't actually have a moustache, but if he did, he'd be twirling it. Words like 'vile', 'repulsive', 'loathsome' get used a lot.

Nothing is actually wrong with the plot, the setting, or the characters. It's just that the author uses the loudst and least nuanced, the most cliché, ways to describe them, including in describing the actions of the man, which are hard to envisage as real, at points.

In other words, the bits the author isn't that interested in - the bits that are there to move the plot - feel a lot like a pantomime. And rather than letting us concentrate on the more realistic feelings inside Arilyn it just creates a tonal incongruity. How can I treat one side of the novel as real, when the other side is a pantomime? [that's not an impossible balancing act; but it is an extremely challenging one, that I don't think the author is equal to here].


A similar problem of whiplash occurs with the dialogue; it's a constant problem in fantasy novels, to be fair. On the one hand, we are expected to accept a certain stilted, archaic idiom, that tells us both "this is serious and important and epic" and also "these people aren't from around her, they're from Ye Olden Tymes!"... but on the other hand the author also tries to make them sound contemporary, colloquial, funny. It's a very challenging problem, which few authors succeed in.

[it has its roots in genuine linguistics, of course. It's relatively easy to write in the formal language of another time-period, as formal language changes more slowly, and is more familiar to readers. But it's very hard to write in colloquial language from another time-period, as colloquialisms change rapidly and, ephemeral, are lost in time. Even when scholars can recover popular turns of phrase, they can easily seems laughably weird, or simply incomprehensible, to modern readers. There's therefore a tendency to insert modern language in colloquial contexts in these setting. In some 1980s D&D novels this can in turn become laughable, as the 'modern language' used is itself a (by now) highly dated melange of anachronistic Americanisms. Cunningham's efforts here, I should say, are a long way from the worst this kind of writing can produce!]

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Another complaint: stop telling us stuff. in some ways, the author is doing a very professional job, skilfully stuffing little infodumps into every damn sentence in the chapter. It's how you're meant to do it. But she does it so much that it's too obvious that she's doing it. She's not just slipping something under a rug, she's stuffing piles of stuff under EVERY rug, until the floor looks like it has boils. And a lot of it isn't necessary. Take, for instance, her obsessive appositive namedropping. "Her mentor, Kymil Nimesin". Yes, we know, we've met him. A few pages ago. Do we really need both forename and surname here? Or any name at all. Is Arilyn really thinking "my mentor, Kymil Nimesin" every time he comes to mind?
"The handsome elflord, Erlan Duirsar". "No one comes over that wall unless Sememmon, Master of Darkhold, wants them to." That's not how these people would be talking or speaking. And because these namedrops are irrelevant to the story, and the descriptions are in any case clear from context, there's no pressing need for the literary conceit.

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Last one for now: the world has changed a bit since 1991. For instance, the author is happy to explain that Arilyn is hot, because, being an elf, she still "possess[es] the fresh beauty of a woman still south of her twentieth winter" [i.e. she looks like a child, so she's sexy]. This is, of course, a realistic aspect of most cultures and time-periods and it's not inherently wrong to find a way to introduce it: in a culture where people die young and half the population is under 20, it's not suprising that a teenage child may be considered a "beautiful woman", even by respectable people. But that's... kind of a blasé way of raising a subject that didn't need to be raised (she could just have said she looked young for her age, without getting into details), let alone being raised in such a... creepy... way.

Oh, and Arilyn reminisces about that time she wore blackface, and how hard it was to clean herself not only of the facepaint but of the spiritual contamination that comes with looking like a black person.

OK, so that's not entirely the author's fault. The atrocity that is the entire concept of the drow - "dark elves" who are physically dark-skinned (despite living in darkness, where melanin is not necessary! cave-dwelling creatures are famous for being the exact opposite of dark-skinned!) and therefore evil - is baked into the setting of the Forgotten Realms, and the author of this novel could not have changed that. And, to be fair, within the context of the setting, Arilyn's behaviour and reaction is understandable, and perhaps the mention of it is meant to tie into the whole "Arilyn is contaminated by the racism of elven society" thing, which is definitely a thing. But boy, that's uncomfortable. I'm not someone who tells authors they ought to have avoided any topic. But let's say this: that's a *very* bold move for the author to make (far bolder now, of course, but somewhat bold even at the time), for *very* little payoff. [what I mean is: she's not doing it in order to explore the issue in any depth, it's just a throwaway].

[obligatory "Dragonlance is a better setting" plug: Dragonlance also has evil dark elves... but they're just normal elves with unpopular political and ethical opinions, the "dark" is just rhetoric by their enemies. Not actual, you know, genetically-evil black people. In a setting that otherwise basically doesn't have black people in it. (don't 'akshually' me, I know there's a black-human continent on Toril, I'm sure one of them is in a book somewhere, sure, but that's not the point).]

[and yes, in fairness, we should note that many stories about the drow, including the most famous and popular book series in the setting, explores in detail how innocent drow can have to face unpleasant racism, with people assuming they're evil just because they're black. That is a thing. On the other hand, the exploration of racism is a bit... different... when it's actually true that 99.999% of all the black people on this continent are child-murdering demon-worshipping sadists attempting to conquer and enslave the world. When you're having to acknowledge that the racists have a point and if anything are actually being surprisingly polite toward the in-world equivalent of a guy turning up in their pub wearing gestapo uniform, that kind of sends mixed messages!]

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On a lighter note, regarding the limitations of this shared world the author is working in: "platinum coins" are just stupid.