Stone of Farewell: Book Review

I just finished the Stone of Farewell, which is the middle book syndrome of the four book trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, by Tad Williams. This book picks up right where The Dragonbone Chair left off, and like the previous entry, it methodically moves forward, following the various characters as they trek to their new destination. We have Simon in the north, with the trouble that Binabik is facing. We have Josua and his ragtag people now fleeing in the wake of the events of the last book. We have Miriamele, who is, in turn, chased by Isgrimnur, traveling south on a fruitless mission. And we have Maegwin, who is a headstrong woman now leading a defeated people after the first book. There are other characters, as well, who are more sidelined, but these are the core of the novel.

All in all, I think this book was quite rough. It was a serious step down from book one. This does not mean there aren't good aspects to the book, but from a storytelling perspective, the way the story comes together, I don't think it does all that well. More specifically, this means many of the positives often come in the way of specific scenes, rather than understanding the story as a cohesive whole.

No Spoilers

Plot

I

As I mentioned in the introduction, this book suffers from middle book syndrome. I played around with the thought that The Illearth War was suffering from the same affliction when I was reviewing it, but it never really felt right, even if there were some problems with how the book was integrated into the overall story. At the time, I was simply thinking about how necessary the middle book was in the grand scheme of things. And middle book syndrome is a bit more specific than that. The Illearth War had a plot. There was a climax. This was all true even if I still question how specific plotlines could be integrated into the overall series. Middle book syndrome, in contrast, describes a book with no plot. Characters just slap their dicks around for a few hundred pages or more as they wait for the real shit to happen.

Guess what happens in this book? A lot of events happen. I could list some, barring mentioning spoilers, but in terms of plot progression toward the series-end goals, there is essentially no progression whatsoever.

What makes a story work, plotwise, is the feeling that the events of the story are moving the characters from one beat to the next. Even if the end goal is specified at the beginning, local goals usually have to be specified along the way to show that progress has been made. If the end goal is H, starting from A, then readers will get a sense of plot progression when the writer specifies how the characters get from A to B and then B to C, etc. Crucially, the local steps and associated goals—how the character gets from C to D—are actually tied to the ultimate goal. By getting from C to D, you are that much closer to H.

This is generally not what happens in this book. The ultimate goal is introduced early on: they need to get to the Stone of Farewell. The problem is pretty obvious, though. Many of the local steps and associated goals they take and have are not really related to getting to the Stone of Farewell in any obvious way, save for the fact that they are just roadblocks. Instead of having the feeling that the characters are getting closer to their end goal, it feels like their journey is just endlessly being drawn out artificially. Even when a sequence is interesting, I often found myself annoyed, because I just wanted them to get on with it already.

Worse, some characters just sit around and do nothing the entire book. King Elias just sits in his castle and is creepy the whole time. He does nothing. One of the secondary antagonists just stands there . . . "menacingly!", for no reason whatsoever, for a good chunk of the book. People often say that middle book syndrome is where the characters just wait for the final book to come, and this is the perfect example of that. More, the final book is over 500,000 words, so it could have been the final two entries on its own. We'll see if my opinion on this changes, when I read it.

II

Since I've started writing my own stories, I have adopted a philosophy that I generally call dotted-line writing. Basically, at all levels, I try to write like a dotted line, as opposed to a straight line. This is a visualization of how many words I put in the scene relative to the amount of information that I communicate. In the case of a picture, I can draw a circle with a straight line. In that instance, there is a straightforward relationship between the markings on the page and the information communicated, barring surrounding context. In other words, the person sees a circle. In contrast, we can draw a circle with a dotted line. In that instance, there are less markings on the page, but the same amount of information is being communicated. The person still sees a circle.

The same logic can be applied to writing. You can create a picture with words, for example. You can also use more or less words to communicate the same information, whatever that information is. As such, some descriptions are more analogous to a straight line, and others to a dotted line.

Consider the following two lines: "The man raised his fist, cocked it back, thrust it forward, and cracked him in the chin." " The man cracked him in the chin." These two lines communicate the same information, yet they do not use the same amount of words. The former is "straight-lined," while the latter is "dotted-lined." This example is rather contrived, but it exaggerates to show how unnecessary certain words or clauses often are. You don't need to specify that the fist was raised or cocked back or any of that, because the information is implied by the fact that he punched him. How else do you punch someone? Unless, the punch is exceptional. But then that would be the only time you should feel compelled to provide some specification. And this implied information is directly analogous to how dotted-lined pictures imply information without directly stating it, too. You don't need to fill in the gaps in order to understand that the picture is a circle.

So far, I have been talking about prose, but this also applies to the scene level. You don't need a scene for every interaction, for all the minutiae, for all the mundane details. I remember reading Eldest, which is the second book in the Inheritance Cycle, by Christopher Paolini, and there was a scene where Eragon was learning how to shave. Granted, this was a long time ago, so maybe it was not as long or as irrelevant as I remember, but I swear some fantasy authors feel the need to dwell on everything.

Especially when it comes to the questing.

I am not saying that Williams needs to cut out his quests. What I am saying is that he needs to take my philosophy of the dotted line and apply it to his writing of quests. Instead of writing endless accounts of people just walking and walking going from place to place, he needs to create distinct scenes that have some sort of landmark, thematic point, and/or goal in it that the whole thing is centered on to give a sense that the characters are going somewhere. This will allow the writer to skip forward in time, or at least summarize it, while still communicating all the same information.

But even this might be too nice. I honestly think I would have cut this book entirely, if I had written it. I don't see why it exists, plotwise. While I did say that the Stone of Farewell was the ultimate goal in this book, it is ironically a meaningless plot beat in the face of the ultimate goals the characters have for the series as a whole. Worse, what little information they do get could easily be worked into the third book, I have no doubt.

III

A final thing I want to comment on is the fact that so much of the plot is not character driven. I've always been baffled by people like Stephen King, who make hardline distinctions between character stories and plot stories. I think he is wrong, but now I think I understand better than ever, where that notion comes from. In this story, the plot comes from convenience when it could come from character, in some of the most obvious of places. For example, when they were trying to save Binabik. They could have had Simon be pivotal in some substantial way, but it was instead a happenstantial development, which was annoying.

I am not saying that every single plot beat has to be driven by character. That is obviously nonsense and unreasonable. But when you have an option, I think the choice is clear.

Theme

Some of the plot lines just seem to be contrivances. We know from book one that Miriamele went south to try and recruit her mother's house to her uncle's cause, though they were already on his side. Brother Cadrach is sent with her. Isgrimnur is sent after them, to bring her back. What exactly was the point of this? At this point, I still don't know. I don't understand the thematic point. I don't think it's supposed to be a point about futility, necessarily; that's not what I am grasping from the overall messaging. I don't think there even is a thematic point. I think it is just sloppy, off-handed writing designed to get certain characters to certain locations, even if it doesn't make that much sense.

In this way, I think the plotting is undermining the themes.

Characters

I didn't really get the sense that Simon developed all that much in the second half of this book. He just puttered about and was roadblocked for the most part, which was annoying, especially in contrast to the previous book. The first half, however, where he was dealing with the trauma of what he's been through, as well as dealing with mortality, was interesting.

Brother Cadrach is one of the more interesting characters in the book, being upgraded into something much greyer and more complex than what we saw in the previous book. I also like how Williams isn't swinging too easily in one way or the other. Cadrach is complicated, and he escapes an easy judgement.

Miriamele is another interesting character. We don't see her at her best in this one. Finally free from the constraints that she feels that she is caught within, she is only a captive to yet more people. As a result, she acts recklessly, and has a rather fiery relationship with Brother Cadrach. The end product is tragic, and I'll have to read on to see what happens.

Maegwin is underdeveloped. She is upgraded to a main character of a sorts, but she is still peripheral in relation to the rest of the characters. And given the fact that her behavior leads to only accidental plot developments, she doesn't really get seen as competent.

Binabik is developed more, but it is just in the abstract, not in a way that is interesting to the plot. I know a lot of people like his character, and I certainly don't hate him. He's fine.

Josua suffers from the same problem as Simon, where he is struggling to get to his final destination, only to suffer countless roadblocks that I just interpreted as annoying, more than anything. We get to see some cool things with him, but nothing all that interesting. Nothing relating to my speculations in the previous review.

Positives

The positives, as I mentioned, are mainly just specific scenes. Either that, or they are worldbuilding. But there are trade-offs, as well. The manner in which the worldbuilding was executed made the plot slow down, for what plot there was, of course. Regardless, both the Sithi and the trolls are expanded upon, as well as other creatures in this world that are not as prominent.

As for the scenes, we have the scenes with Skodi, almost anything involving Pryrates (especially at the Sancellan Aedonitis), Josua's fight with Utvart, the final speech by Amerasu, many of Isgrimnur's antics (even if the whole was unsatisfying), and perhaps some more that I am not remembering right away.

Ending

The ending was nothing short of disappointing. It was . . . perhaps . . . awful? While The Dragonbone Chair actually had a climax that it built up to, this one had nothing. It was just a string of events. There was no real climax at the end. I actually stopped reading the book for two days or so at 92%, because I had no drive to keep reading.

I guess there was a chase scene for Binabik and Sludig at the end there, but by that point, it felt like William had gotten tired of writing and just wanted to wrap it up. The chase scene felt rushed. There was no tension, and it had no build up, either. We were thrown into it, in media res, which doesn't really work for the climax of a novel. All of this would have made sense if a similar chase sequence had happened with Josua, and he wanted to avoid repetition, but . . .

The only thing that makes up for the lack of a climax for the main group is what happens with Simon while he is with the Sithi. But this reads like another side plot. There was no build up. It was not a climax that was hinted at from the beginning. And it did not last that long. Simon and Josua each had their own climaxes in the first book. This time, Simon had a small one and Josua had none.

Conclusion

Overall, I was left pretty disappointed and burnt out by this book . . . throughout this book. I'm still going to read the third one, as my criticism really just amounts to the fact that this book . . . did not need to exist. All the same, that says something about this book in particular. I think I will give this a 2.5/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/YAefVVTyCyw