As many* of you may have read in a previous post, Patrick Rothfuss is an author that I love in a way that is bordering on needing exploration with a mental professional with whom I have an extremely solid line of credit. He is, to put it simply, incredibly talented, or rather complicatedly, a genuine force for the purity of the written word in a world addicted to mediocre and forced simplicity, or fairly surreally, a fish the colour of my mother’s love.
His first book, The Name of the Wind, is one of those books that can stand alone within the canon of fantasy as to be called literature. Reading it was, for me, an addiction, but one with no real drawbacks. I’ve read it at least ten times since I read it the first time and every time I did I found myself completely immersed in it on so many different levels that for me to try to articulate it, you’d have to speak a language I made up specifically for the task. Knowing me it would probably sound like a robot having sex with an elephant.
So, the wait for the second book was, to say the least, arduous. It dominated the entirety of my anticipatory literary capacity for quite some time. The Wise Man’s Fear, even the name seemed to embody the intrinsically complex, philosophically intense nature of Rothfussism. What should a Wise Man fear? It made me think of that old saying, “Fear the wrath of the just man for he will destroy you utterly for good”.
So, when I finally bought a copy of the book, when I held it in my hands and I read the first page I suddenly found it was 4 hours later and I hadn’t moved once. If there is such a thing as mental food, my mind has apparently been starving for quite some time now cause it ate the shit out of The Wise Man’s Fear.
The story picks up literally where it left off. And if you remember, it left off in a little place I like to call narrative perfection. I am literally not going to in any way comment on the content of the book, I don’t want to say if I liked or didn’t like bits of it in the same way that Christians don’t say whether they liked or didn’t like parts of the Bible. I look at The Wise Man’s Fear as being beyond criticism, it has sections that investigate concepts that make my heart sing. Admittedly this kind of defeats the purpose of a review, but what can I say,
In extremely broad strokes, the reason I love this book is simple, the flow of the language is so on point that at times Rothfuss describes things with two words that it would take a lesser writer, such as myself, pages of superfluous dialogue to acheive. He manages to articulate concepts and characters and tension and when the flow is going hard you feel set sail in an eternally legendary sea of narrative force where there is nothing but beauty and adventure as far as the eye can see. I feel that the rise and fall of the story has eddies and pools that I could happily sit in and just soak for days before even asking myself what’s happening next. The character development is slow and so nicely executed that when things happen to the core cast, people on the subway will jump because of your sudden uncontrollable whimpers of anguish. The many interwoven plotlines are mutually complimentary and the disparate parts of the legend of Kvothe make you feel like you want to tell your friends about this awesome wizard musician you met in a bar.
The only point of concern I have is that there’s only one book left in the series and I’m not sure how Rothfuss is going to resolve the storyline without destroying the smoothly gradual buildup he’s acheived so far. But you know, in any other writer I’d be worried, but with Rothfuss, I’m not. He’s gonna make the final chapter make me want to burn out my eyes so I can never read another book ever again. FACT
So, suffice it to say, after reading the book I learned a simple but crucial lesson, the only thing a Wise Man should ever Fear is not being Wise enough to read the right books, like The Wise Man’s Fear.
If you disagree, or you think sitting in a line for three hours so that I can get my book signed and have one of the greatest moments of star struckedness of my entire young life, there’s only one thing I can say to you:
*Still just my Mum.
