It's
interesting how Ulysses arguably took the novel to its formal and experimental
end in 1921, and now nearly 100 years later we've mostly returned to the
Victorian era of narrative linearity. (Nothing wrong with that.) The '20s was
one helluva radical decade from the future jazz, talkies in cinema, stream of
consciousness, Freud, Einstein, serialism in music, Eliot and Pound! --
Unreal. Now, in 2019, retrograde rap, gaming, superhero movies and
remakes, gangster novels in a Low Fantasy milieu run the show. Maybe many
people prefer something that is timelessly good rather than worrying about
experimentalism and modernity or their absence. Of course that opens a can of
worms as to what “good” would mean. Isn't the 'great' novel a manifestation of serious
society of serious people striving to shine a light on humanity's absurdities
and possibilities? We're not a serious society anymore in the industrial
'West'; just an ant hill living on the bounty of an overturned lorry. Stacks of
bound paper between two cardboard covers maybe selling like Billie Burgers;
does that mean the fantasy novel is dead? Maybe it’s its high counterpart that
needs saving. While we frequently hear about motivation (e.g., Kurt Vonnegut
said a character should at least be motivated to drink a glass of water),
reading this novel, one should wonder on how a lot of High Fantasy these days badly
need an active protagonist not plot-driven, i.e., one whom things just not happen
to. As usual we never get inside Vaelin's head, his psychology, and his
thoughts. He's just blank.
Better
than the awful “Blood Song”. Maybe Ryan one day will give us something.
