book: The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett
Jun. 3rd, 2010 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serynI finally finished The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett. It is the sequel to The Warded Man, which I adored. I mean, I liked TWM enough to email the author and actually do it.
The Desert Spear, however, is the unfortunate product of an overworked author in the midst of all the publishing-required dreck of the previous book.
There are more than hundred pages where we watch the villain start out his young life as a complete asshole, grow up in a society which lauds the most assholish of tendencies, immerse himself wholly in assholishness, and finally become the gooeyest and stinkiest head-inserted asshole of the whole culture.
After front-loading the book with 200 pages of that, which honestly reads like a thinly disguised diatribe against Islam, we finally get back to the story.
The story wherein the Warded Man leaves the main character from the previous book, well, the one I actually liked anyway, and goes off to do other random shit.
There are several chapters where a vague nemesis gets focus. It's the demon prince. Actual fucking demon though, no metaphors at least. However, it's so nebulous that it grates in the book. The demon prince doesn't actually seem as noxious as the human villain.
Throughout the book we have various scenes with different groups of people whom we have met previously. In each of these scenes, women are viciously raped. There was one graphic scene of that in the previous book, but it was important to the plot and the character development. Mostly I forgave it because it emphasized two things, 1) saving your virginity is silly if you can safely and enjoyably lose it with a friend, even if the friend isn't going to be your lifemate. 2) If you're a woman and you're raped, you should take something to prevent conception. No questions about morality--- you're going to resent the child for its entire life and damn it for ruining yours, plus any genetic component for behavior would indicate you're breeding more people whose biology encourages them to continue that monstrous choice.
But the human villain's culture has a standing rule saying that any woman can be raped with impunity and it is the task of her father or husband to protect her. If her male protector is weak, then she deserves it. So we hear about several of these.
Then we go back to the Warded Man's home village where we watch incestuous rape and then victim set out to be killed by demons (actual, non-metaphoric, known to exist, guaranteed to show up, certain death by the most monstrous creatures known to humanity).
It's this constant constant theme. That women exist to be raped. Even the so-called heroes of the book seem to put up with it. There are no mechanisms in place to argue for the victims anywhere.
Compared to the humans, the demons (in the nebulous glimpses we've seen) actually have the right idea in killing all the humans. There isn't much to save between the religious intolerance and the violence and the institutionalized rapes and the lack of roles for women and the constant demands to make babies that no one wants so they can be thrown as a diversion into the war against the demons.
If I were a woman in this book's world, I would kill myself after spending some time explaining to all the other women that the only thing that's going to stop the ill treatment is for there to be no women to be abused and impregnated. It might mean the end of humanity, but there isn't anything worth saving there anyway.
Of course, if I were a woman in that world, I wouldn't actually be aware that there were other options. Sapir-Whorf. When there aren't words for it, the concept cannot exist. That's what oppresses women in Islamic countries now. Even though it's obvious to the rest of the world that they're abused, even though we could probably make room for them as refugees, they don't actually leave. Of course we can't bring them to America which continually passes laws restricting the rights of women to be full-fledged human beings in the false name of Jesus. I just cannot imagine the Jesus as described in the canonical texts being as much of an asshole as the overtly god-ridden men running the government...
So, anyway, The Desert Spear is mediocre-ly written compared to the first book, it needed to have bucketloads of boring shit excised, it needed to actually have a fucking plot (one with less unwanted fucking too), and it's guilty of the author not having an imagination sufficient to writing a world that doesn't just import all the current problems. Without the boring shit parts where we're shown the villain learning to be a bigger asshole, the book is just a repositioning cruise. Characters are shuffled around so they're in the right spots when something happens later. There wasn't any real reason for this book to exist, it could have been summed up by a chapter explaining the new evil invading and how X, Y, and Z were sent to "Paris" to bargain for troops. Instead we have a whole book of religious fanaticism and rape fantasy porn.
I won't be reading the third book or anything else by the author.
The Desert Spear, however, is the unfortunate product of an overworked author in the midst of all the publishing-required dreck of the previous book.
There are more than hundred pages where we watch the villain start out his young life as a complete asshole, grow up in a society which lauds the most assholish of tendencies, immerse himself wholly in assholishness, and finally become the gooeyest and stinkiest head-inserted asshole of the whole culture.
After front-loading the book with 200 pages of that, which honestly reads like a thinly disguised diatribe against Islam, we finally get back to the story.
The story wherein the Warded Man leaves the main character from the previous book, well, the one I actually liked anyway, and goes off to do other random shit.
There are several chapters where a vague nemesis gets focus. It's the demon prince. Actual fucking demon though, no metaphors at least. However, it's so nebulous that it grates in the book. The demon prince doesn't actually seem as noxious as the human villain.
Throughout the book we have various scenes with different groups of people whom we have met previously. In each of these scenes, women are viciously raped. There was one graphic scene of that in the previous book, but it was important to the plot and the character development. Mostly I forgave it because it emphasized two things, 1) saving your virginity is silly if you can safely and enjoyably lose it with a friend, even if the friend isn't going to be your lifemate. 2) If you're a woman and you're raped, you should take something to prevent conception. No questions about morality--- you're going to resent the child for its entire life and damn it for ruining yours, plus any genetic component for behavior would indicate you're breeding more people whose biology encourages them to continue that monstrous choice.
But the human villain's culture has a standing rule saying that any woman can be raped with impunity and it is the task of her father or husband to protect her. If her male protector is weak, then she deserves it. So we hear about several of these.
Then we go back to the Warded Man's home village where we watch incestuous rape and then victim set out to be killed by demons (actual, non-metaphoric, known to exist, guaranteed to show up, certain death by the most monstrous creatures known to humanity).
It's this constant constant theme. That women exist to be raped. Even the so-called heroes of the book seem to put up with it. There are no mechanisms in place to argue for the victims anywhere.
Compared to the humans, the demons (in the nebulous glimpses we've seen) actually have the right idea in killing all the humans. There isn't much to save between the religious intolerance and the violence and the institutionalized rapes and the lack of roles for women and the constant demands to make babies that no one wants so they can be thrown as a diversion into the war against the demons.
If I were a woman in this book's world, I would kill myself after spending some time explaining to all the other women that the only thing that's going to stop the ill treatment is for there to be no women to be abused and impregnated. It might mean the end of humanity, but there isn't anything worth saving there anyway.
Of course, if I were a woman in that world, I wouldn't actually be aware that there were other options. Sapir-Whorf. When there aren't words for it, the concept cannot exist. That's what oppresses women in Islamic countries now. Even though it's obvious to the rest of the world that they're abused, even though we could probably make room for them as refugees, they don't actually leave. Of course we can't bring them to America which continually passes laws restricting the rights of women to be full-fledged human beings in the false name of Jesus. I just cannot imagine the Jesus as described in the canonical texts being as much of an asshole as the overtly god-ridden men running the government...
So, anyway, The Desert Spear is mediocre-ly written compared to the first book, it needed to have bucketloads of boring shit excised, it needed to actually have a fucking plot (one with less unwanted fucking too), and it's guilty of the author not having an imagination sufficient to writing a world that doesn't just import all the current problems. Without the boring shit parts where we're shown the villain learning to be a bigger asshole, the book is just a repositioning cruise. Characters are shuffled around so they're in the right spots when something happens later. There wasn't any real reason for this book to exist, it could have been summed up by a chapter explaining the new evil invading and how X, Y, and Z were sent to "Paris" to bargain for troops. Instead we have a whole book of religious fanaticism and rape fantasy porn.
I won't be reading the third book or anything else by the author.
