Lamentation

I just finished a book called Lamentation, by Ben Scholes. It's a high fantasy and a very good book.

Basically something really bad happens and people have to deal with it, there's war, yadda yadda yadda.

What I want to talk about is the way the story is told. Usually in books I've read you have one chapter, one person's Point of View. Ben does it different! In one chapter there are several headings, and those headings are peoples names. In one chapter there may be several different sides of the story being told from several viewpoints (the person named).

Now, usually I hate that. George RR Martin is a prime example (I am preparing myself for the angry mob that sentence will instigate). George will spend a chapter with a character, then end the chapter with the main character getting stabbed through the chest and then you have to wait nine or ten chapters to find out if he's dead or if Protagonist Power came through and he's just scratched.

I mostly read stories told from just one point of view (Jim Butcher's Dresden series, Simon R. Green, etc.) but recently I've been reading new authors and my choices are limited to what's available. The next Dresden book won't be out for another year, so I gotta read something else.

Ben does it well, but there are still times when I find a character I don't care about and skip to a character I do care about. Petronis is that character in Ben's book, I'm sorry to say. It's a very interesting character, but he just happens to be away from all the other, cooler characters and away from the action. When he starts hanging out with them I start paying attention to what he does.

Being a writer myself, I can appreciate this kind of writing style. Doing a straight up first-person perspective limits you to that one person. Sometimes that forces you to write really well because if you want to show how witty or strong your main character is, you actually have to show it rather than have some other character go "Wow he's really witty and strong." It's a difficult thing because your main character, to seem like a real person, is going to have doubts and insecurities and you're going to be sitting in the middle of that while he's being strong and witty and your audience is going to have to see past that.

It's also hard to praise your main character from a first person perspective. People don't walk up to someone and go "You're surprisingly strong." So the compliments a main character gets--usually well deserved because he's the main character--are few and far between. While if you have multiple viewpoints you can have the badguys go "Keep an eye on the main character, he's smarter and stronger than he let's on." You see?

Anyway. As my reading continues I find I enjoy more and more things and Ben Scholes Lamentation is one of those things. I recommend it if you enjoy a good high fantasy.

-McK