Rudhraigh

Have you ever had a book that you read. And you read. And you read. And that when you read other books, you’re quietly and privately upset that that book isn’t that other book, the one you read. And you read. And you read. The book that you use as a quiet measurement of internal mental time, where you constantly think “Has enough time passed to read that book again?” These are the books that makes you live your life at the speed of memory. Set your watch to the clock of forgetting.

For me, The Name of the Wind is that book. The truth is that sometimes, when I’ve just read it, I wish I hadn’t. Because I know that I’ve got so much waiting around and trudging through other, piteously flawed books until I can read it again and not immediately remember every plot point, know every character or predict every single minor aspect of the story. And when that time has passed and I feel I can give it another go, I’m happy. By default. I go through my days always knowing that whatever else is going on, I’m reading The Name of the Wind. So I won’t be bored. And I hate being bored. I fucking HATE it. And reading this book is so far away from being bored as to make any time that I’m not seem bland and monochrome. This book basically takes the overall level of awesomeness in my life and concentrates it in single periods and as a result, makes other periods seem less awesome. I am totally okay with this.

Since it came out in 2007, I have bought about 7 copies and read them to shreds. I give it to friends I trust, people I know who live according to a similar set of personally exacted rules about the utter and complete awfulness of boredom. The fact that I have friends that love this book as much as I do enhances my relationship with them, it reassures me that we have similar mental ability and familiar imaginatory needs. In a way, books like this one are like letters in a kind of unique mental alphabet that I feel lets me communicate with others on a level that no other method compares to. The truth is, Patrick Rothfuss speaks fluent Rudhraigh. He may be the only one who does. Even I’m only conversational at best in it.

The book is the first in a trilogy, and follows the story of an almost mythically legendary arcanist, magician, wizard, lover, musician, warrior named Kvothe. It traces his birth as a member of a wandering minstrel’s troupe all the way to his tumultuous mid-teens as a gifted and capable member of the University, the world’s primary magical educational institution. And it’s Kvothe, and the way he is described that is the real gem of this book. For some reason, the idea of effortlessly executed talent has always fascinated me. Of the lives of people who have no real understanding of laziness, or of wasted time. Of not fully perusing, personally directing and exactly manifesting every opportunity to learn something new to the very best of their ability, who need to shape their minds into a tool with which they will shape the world around them. And it’s this kind of description of how Kvothe shapes his mind that really grabs me. The idea that a bright, enthusiastic and extremely gifted young boy, when given adequate encouragement and a constantly interesting, continuously changing world, can have limitless success, understanding concepts and grasping ideas that are far superior to what is appropriate for his age. I love this idea. It makes me want to have kids. Super-genius kids. Who may or may not be magicians. Here’s hoping for the former.

The second thing that is truly amazing about this book is that the disciplines that Kvothe applies his intellect to are sublimely well conceived and, unlike so many fantasy books, make you consider the way you relate to the makeup of your own mind in the real world. Kvothe is first and foremost, a musician. It is his passion. It is his language. The way in which Rothfuss makes Kvothe’s music part of his very being dovetails with the plot and his backstory in a way that emotively connects you in a seemless manner to the heart of his character. His music becomes this evocative thing, you can almost hear it. When Kvothe struggles to play beautiful music, you realise how much of themselves real musicians put into their music. It makes me feel lackluster, under developed that I can’t think of a single thing that I love that much*.

Secondly, Kvothe is an arcanist, a magician. And I can say, without any reservation, that the depiction of magic in this book is something totally new. Rothfuss manages to create a simple set of rules of magic that are commonsense and totally believable, as they seem to be based in the same mode as any other natural principle. He takes physical laws like the Conservation of Energy and allows humans to affect it with their minds and calls this magic. It becomes commonplace, ordinary, yet no less fascinating than any of the billions of natural laws that govern our universe. The base simplicity in which magic seems to work, combined with the seemingly endless amount of effort it requires to master it makes the process of Kvothe’s studies to be compelling. When he uses magic, you have this feeling of “AWWWWWWEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMEEEEE” that makes you want to sit down for three hours and give yourself a headache trying to achieve one of the basic mindstates required for magic that the book describes. The only similarly effective portrayal of the everyday directness of magic that I can think of wasn’t magic, but the mentalist powers of the Eggshapers in Peter F Hamilton’s “The Dreaming Void”. It’s something about making magic seem like a mountain that you have to scale, each step being built on the effort of all the others that came before, it makes you genuinely proud of Kvothe’s acheivements. And even the fact that I could say something like that gives you an idea of how much I relate to this character.

So, other than the Kvothe, what is it about this book that differentiates it from the hundreds of similar modern fantasy novels that purport to be the once in a lifetime genesis story of a young boy in a world of magic, monsters and malevolence? It’s really simple. There isn’t one wasted word in the entire book. Not one. The fantasy genre suffers somewhat from a glut of overly described, poorly developed characters and situations. I find myself incapable of reading the average fantasy tome without skimming at least a fair amount of the denser text as the author tries in vain to describe a backstory by simply referring to forcibly archaic names or long distant historical events, as if the fact that merely using the name “Dakwan Bloodletter” or “The Swamps of Gaelzar-Ra” would give you a solid connection with something you could understand or care about. I think that too often, attempts at Tolkienism have retarded a huge section of the creative forces within modern fantasy. Tolkien was capable of producing Middle-Earth as a factual statement by taking thousands of pages to do it, authors like Rothfuss can produce the same intensely well developed world, and he can do it in four pages, half of which are awesome dialogue.

So lets talk about the dialogue. The book is aware of the flow of language, but it’s also aware of the flow of silence. When the characters speak, you can imagine the expressions on the faces of the people who are being spoken to. You have an idea of who they are because the conversation isn’t some stilted thing with a plot related agenda, it feels real. This is one of the most important aspects of producing compelling characters, that they know when to speak and when to shut up and that you’re aware of the impact their presence is having on the conversation, even when they aren’t even talking. I love reading Kvothe’s repartee, his minstrel’s ability to speak with a every mode from a mannerly lilt that charms the women of the book to his ability to acidly destroy his hated enemies with exacted satire. It fascinates me to think of how Rothfuss researched the kinds of language he uses in the book. I bet he’s one hell of an interesting guy to talk to.

And then there’s the language the book uses itself. Entire passages are so beautiful as to require individual study on their own merits. The truth is that there aren’t a lot of fantasy books with this level of descriptive power that don’t end up overindulging in it. This book is not a show-off and I love it for that because it totally could have been. Too often when reading fantasy do you end up having to trawl through pages and pages of increasingly mundane description before the author seems to remember that it’s detracting from the immediacy of the story at hand. That doesn’t happen in this book, when there are flashbacks, they sit seemlessly in the present timeframe of the book and add to the overall narrative, adding possible interpretations to events that have happened at other times in the book. When Rothfuss is describing character behaviour, he has a turn of phrase that’s tailored to the character, as if the character were writing it themselves. It adds immensely to the experience, making you feel like he’s merely conducting the symphony of authors of the book, rather than writing it himself. I read passages of this book and I’m reminded of how, when used correctly, language can move mountains.

The only real problem I have with this book is simple. And childish. It is the first of three books. It has an ending that is not an ending and it came out FOUR YEARS ago. This means that for four years I’ve been hanging off a cliff and my fingers are bloody tired. In those four years I’ve probably read it 20 times, each time getting something new and nuanced that I hadn’t before, but I have to say, I was worried that Rothfuss was going to pull a George R. Martin on me and fall off the face of map of his talent. I was beginning to despair that the second book would ever come out. I thought dark thoughts, fell deep into the hole of agony that is anticipation without certainty of eventual actualization.

And then Rothfuss announced that it’s coming. FINALLY. “The Wise Man’s Fear” is out in March and you know, I can completely understand why it took this long. Because it’s going to be perfect. Flawless. Exacted. I am going to read The Name of the Wind at least one more time before it does, to enjoy the last period of time where it is the whole of the world of Kvothe. I hope that it doesn’t get jealous, like every first born child does at the arrival of a competitor. If I could, I would slap myself full force in the face every day for a week and place it on Youtube if I could get a copy sooner than that. I’m going to go to Mr Rothfuss’s signing in Park Slope, Brooklyn and I am going to shake him by the hand, because hero’s don’t get realer than when he writes them. And that, in it’s own way, makes him a hero in is own right. And that’s a fact.

*Other than this book. Plainly.