Monday, March 7, 2011

Point of Impact, The Way of Shadows

Point of Impact is an action book which starts very slowly (100 pages in, the major plot is just getting started), and each climactic moment also has a very slow buildup, with a sudden resolution.  Stephen Hunter might take 30 pages to set up a confrontation, only to have it resolve in four paragraphs.  I found it a very effective pace; the build-up to each set piece is so deliberate that you can see how all of the players are laid out, and so Hunter can have his hero beat incredible odds while maintaining a completely realistic feel.

Brent Weeks, on the other hand, tries for a different sort of realism in The Way of Shadows.  His assassins seem unconstrained by the laws of physics, pretty much like the craziest ninja fantasies you can find on TV.  Weeks, though, is part of a trend to move fantasy away from heroic archetypes, like those in Tolkein, and more toward realistic psychological types.  Unfortunately, I don't think he really succeeds; his characters end up feeling more like riffs on characters from other fantasy books than like actual people.  Here we find the madam with a heart of gold, there we find the assassin with a secret in his past, yonder is the sadistic bad guy.

It's kind of strange, actually -- there's no question that the characters in Point of Impact are much simpler than those in Way of Shadows.  But they Hunter's characters feel much more alive than Weeks's.

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