My take on Pat Rothfuss’ “The Wise Man’s Fear”

Less than three weeks ago Rothfuss fans all over the country rejoiced as The Wise Man’s Fear, sequel to his extraordinary The Name of the Wind, finally hit bookstore shelves.  I snagged my own copy at lunch that day since my local B&N doesn’t open until after my own workday begins (But at no point did I consider taking a “sick” or vacation day.  What a silly suggestion! *ahem*).  I finished reading it two weeks ago today.

I rather imagine that most people’s first question tends to be, “So, is WMF as good as NotW?” (Yes, I imagine the question with abbreviations.  Problem?)

I’ll be bold enough to say outright that Yes, it is indeed just as good as NotW.

So what in the world stopped me from writing up this post the instant I put Wise Man’s Fear down?  First and foremost I’ve only read through this new book once as opposed to NotW which I’d read multiple times before even starting this blog.  Therefore I know that my memory as I talk about it is going to be less reliable than was the case for NotW.  The other major reason is that I know that this review of WMF is not going to be anywhere near as gushing as the one I did for The Name of the Wind, despite my earlier claim that it’s every bit as good.  Everything I liked and gushed about in that post still applies for The Wise Man’s Fear and I stand by every word (well, except the typos!).  That being the case I don’t intend to repeat all of that here.

So what is The Wise Man’s Fear?

This is the second volume in Rothfuss’s planned trilogy, The Kingkiller Chronicle.  In keeping with the conceit of the frame story, WMF kicks off the second morning of Old Kvothe’s present as he continues to relate to Bast and the Chronicler the true story of his youth and how he became the most notorious man of his day.  This book covers two different “epochs” of Kvothe’s life: his experiences as a University student with a newly higher rank and then, once those stresses actually seem to become overwhelming, the period of time he spends in the service of the Maer — a high ranking noble in a fairly distant country.

I’m not at all interested in spoiling any of the story here so let me just touch on a few things.

I am still in awe of how Rothfuss approaches the English language like an architect.  He uses his words as foundation, structure, and decoration and all with equal care.  Considering all of the time Rothfuss spent obsessively revising, at this point every word has its place and purpose.  If while you’re reading you ever find yourself asking, “that thing he just talked about, is that supposed to be connected to . . . ?”  Yes, it’s absolutely connected and not at all an accident.  (In fact, I recently read a spoiler thread for WMF over at tor.com and if they’re right, there’s an incredible amount of stuff that I flat missed on my own first read through!)

While WMF introduces plenty of new characters into young Kvothe’s life, especially in the second “epoch” as I called it above, all of the characters I grew to love in NotW are still important to Kvothe’s tale.  Elodin and the other masters at the University still do their thing.  Auri gets some lovely scenes and in one of them seems to hint that there’s more to her than we know.  Kvothe’s “unlicensed” (shall we say) moneylender, Devi, is still her charming self and I love the story arc for her in this novel.  And Denna.  Denna is . . . Denna.  And through the course of this book becomes even more so.  Were I to suffer a brief fit of honesty, I’d have to admit that in NotW I probably fell in love with Denna to some extent.  That hasn’t changed now after WMF even with (a little) more knowledge of where she’s come from and a bit quite a lot (thanks to the spoiler thread) of suspicion about what’s not been said.

When I first read NotW everything about Rothfuss’s world was completely new and part of the fun of reading it was absorbing everything all of the detail.  With this second novel there is much that is already familiar and so in a sense it may not feel as compelling.  It is still the same world and so is just as solid and lush as I saw in NotW and also in a sense that very familiarity keeps me more fully in the story since I’m not as often wondering “what the heck is that?”  Fortunately, and for both senses, the latter two thirds of the book take place in a completely different part of the world.  We get to see not just the University but also the Maer’s court and surrounding country and we also get to learn much more about the Fae.  And no, that’s not a spoiler because Kvothe states several times in NotW that he “spent a night with Felurian and left with both his sanity and his life.”  That happens in this book.  Pay attention to the dialog when you get there too, it was nice to notice just what Rothfuss did there.

This is a fantasy and magic is still a central element of the story.  Sympathy and Sygaldry are still the most common examples and WMF showcases even more of the ins and outs of both.  We also finally begin to see what it really means to be a Namer.  I can’t wait to see Kvothe come into his full power in the final volume.  I can’t help but feel that it’s going to be EPIC.

And now a bit of a mental shift. . .

This is also part of the reason for the delay in writing this.  I really don’t enjoy being openly critical of much of anything (well, there are some things but it also has to be in a certain context).  I’d much rather be a cheerleader for things that I actually like and let others deal with pointing out shortcomings when necessary (and when not necessary, this is the internet after all!).  That said there are basically two things that keep me from shouting that WMF is “OMG, y’all! BEST. BOOK. EVAR!!1!one!”

The first is truly trivial and I won’t be surprised at all if maybe only one other person in all the world is bugged by it.  Late in the book, after Kvothe’s infamous night with Felurian in fact, he’s spending time with one of the many cultures Rothfuss has dreamed up for this story.  In this culture sex between two people is almost always casual and unless I misread even the family bonds within that culture are weaker than in the others.  In the story Kvothe seems to be overly confused/hung-up on this point and it’s my opinion that Rothfuss spent too much effort conveying Kvothe’s recalcitrance.  While it may have been an important thing for Kvothe-the-character to learn at that point in his young life, my take was more that Kvothe instead seemed a stand-in for us readers instead and that Rothfuss was trying more to pound it into our (supposedly dense) heads rather than into Kvothe’s.  Well, it’s a fantasy world, and to be honest, that particular cultural feature seems to crop up rather frequently as fantasy worlds go.  We get it.  Of course, I could be reading too much into it.  Like I said, trivial nit-pick.

This other point I’m finding rather difficult to express properly.  The Wise Man’s Fear is a “middle book.”  It’s not the bright, shiny new beginning to the story and it’s not the whizz-bang finale either.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this one and I still think Rothfuss’s command of language, character, and setting are downright masterful.  But.  While tons of truly interesting things happen over the course of WMF that kept me turning pages and losing sleep, I’d honestly say that to my mind, there wasn’t near as much advancement to the main plot as I would have expected.  And I happen to understand the “main plot” to be Kvothe’s personal quest to learn enough about the Chandrian and Amyr for him to finally avenge the murder of his family.

Understand, Rothfuss did not by any means ignore this part of his story.  Pieces were moved upon the board.  New information was found.  New connections were made, New questions were asked.  I didn’t get the feeling that Kvothe moved far enough along in the relevant areas to begin to be a threat to the Chandrian in his own right.  I don’t doubt that the final book will take care of all this in the most awesome manner possible but considering the pacing in WMF, (not to put too fine a point on it) the fecal matter is really going to have to collide with the impeller starting in, like, chapter two of the final book.

A little bit later after initially posting this I got to thinking again about this point.  I think it’s important to note that Rothfuss is NOT using the bog-standard “Three-Act” (or “Try/Fail Cycle) structure in either of these books and from what I recall of him saying in interviews/blog posts/whatever that he did so intentionally.  Real people’s lives don’t work that way, even the ones who become incredibly famous, influential, or powerful.  As readers, though, we’ve pretty much been trained to expect that type of plot structure and I do think that’s a part of my reaction here.  It doesn’t help that NotW did have a really neat and rip-roaring “climax” with the events in and around Trebon.  The closing chapters of WMF don’t depend on frenetic action in the same way and the “climax” if one can call it that is much more of an emotional nature, I’d say.  This coupled with the apparent stagnation of the Chandrian/Amyr mystery makes WMF appear weaker than I think it actually is.

Fortunately I honestly suspect that when all is said and done and all three novels are out, this will also be a trivial nit-pick.  Once all three are done I fully expect to consider The Kingkiller Chronicle to be a single, 3000 page story rather than a trilogy of 1000 page books.

And on that note, I want the third book RIGHT NOW!

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