*****SPOILERS*****
Denna
Denna
is Kvothe’s love interest. He’s overly smitten in my opinion but never mind.
It’s certainly obsessive and bordering creepy.
Everyone seems to know her by
different names (Dinnah, Dyanae, Dianne etc) and no one seems to know much
about her. She never stays anywhere for long and disappears without saying
anything. (At one point Denna’s concerned Kvothe will do this to her. The
irony!)
Attachments are difficult for Denna
so it’s nice to see her fondness for Kvothe. She even mentions her secretive
patron-to-be ‘Master Ash’, whose real name she guards as strongly as her own.
When Denna’s in her delirium, she’s really sweet as she opens up to Kvothe.
The second time Kvothe and Denna see
each other is at the Eolian, a bar where the best musicians play. (Kvothe wins
his ‘pipes’ on his first try, making him one of the best.) Denna doesn’t say
his name (he thinks she forgot him) and she calls herself a different name (he
wonders if it’s a different person). But if either of the bracketed were true,
Denna wouldn’t have run up to Kvothe in the way she did.
Denna compares Kvothe to willow,
bending to the wind’s desires. That made me laugh because he wants to learn the
name of the wind to bend it to his
desires. Also, he wants to be a namer but adores Denna who doesn’t have ‘a’
name.
When a draccus comes near them,
Kvothe says they’re fine because draccus are herbivores, like a giant cow. (He
learnt this from the Chronicler’s book, incidentally.) When it breathes fire
again, Denna says, “Moo” and I couldn’t stop laughing.
Kvothe
hears of a destroyed wedding and connects the details with the Chandrian
warning signs. So he goes gallivanting off and meets an injured Denna, the
wedding’s musician and only survivor.
Denna tells Kvothe that Master Ash
took her aside and told her to come back later. When she does, there’s burning,
screaming and blue fires. The house, we’re told, was expensive, so the wood had
rotted, and the iron rusted, faster than natural. These are all warning signs
of the Chandrian.
Kvothe mentions Denna’s pale skin.
Not, the Chandrian song mentions ‘a woman pale as snow’. Denna also appears at
key moments and we know the Chandrian can teleport. So maybe Denna is a
Chandrian? Perhaps Master Ash is one too: Kvothe’s focal Chandrian Cinder, and
what’s left after something’s in cinders? Ash. So there are curiosities.
Problems
It’s
a big book. Thankfully there aren’t any big problems but it size does mean
there are plenty of opportunities for little mistakes. (Although I’ve read
books a quarter the size with ten times the mistakes so proportionally, this
book’s doing rather well.)
Kvothe says not many people have
accents anymore. *Sigh*. As it’s in first person, I’ll let this slip due to
character ignorance.
Kvothe ‘admitted’ one thing and the
very next time he speaks, he ‘admitted’ that, too. Some variety (especially
among neighbours) would be nice! Even something like ‘admitted again’ would
suffice.
‘Bastas, son of Remmen, Prince of
Twilight and the Telwyn Mael’. Which one is the prince? The sentence structure
is too ambiguous to provide an answer. The sentence structure also implies that
only one of them is the prince.
In middle of Kote’s perspective, there’s
one paragraph in Bast’s perspective. It’s not separated from Kote’s perspective
in any way.
When Fela calls for help, Kvothe
says this means no one else knows she’s in danger. Um… yeah. That’s the point
of calling for help: so people come over and help. But this was written as one
of Kvothe’s bright, unexpected revelations.
We
get some good, old-fashioned grammatical mistakes.
For example, ‘I gave a hesitant nod,
trick questions were fairly common.’ It’s an incomplete sentence, missing a
conjunction (or perhaps replacing the comma with a semi-colon).
‘Have you heard the expression white
muting?’ There should be quotation marks around ‘white muting’ because it’s a
phrase in referral to something outside the conversation.
First, Kvothe’s parents loved each
other so they saw no point marrying for ‘any government and God’. Now, the
latter should be a miniscule because ‘any… God’ is weird (unless every God’s
proper noun is ‘God’). Or if they did just mean one God, it should have been
‘God or any government’.
Abenthy
pours his beer into the floor then straight away refills it. Him emptying his
mug didn’t demonstrate his point. Sometimes people pour their drink on the
floor if they’ve had enough, but if he’d had enough then he wouldn’t have
refilled it straight away. It could be a quirk of his personality but in that
case we should have seen it more than once, just so that it’s peculiar yet
established.
Wearing
just his towel, Kvothe wanders into a clothes shop. A whore, he says, will only
give back his stolen clothes in exchange for his purse. But handing over his
purse would be handing over his dignity. He trails off and supposes a
gentleman’s dignity is in his purse. Um… yes? What else could that have meant?
When he recalls his father
said something similar, it made the tailor laugh. (I still don’t know what the
joke is but never mind.)
Conclusio
This
is among the most cleverly written novels I’ve read. All the characters were
fleshed out and the plot was consistently engaging. I’ve reread it (and the
sequel) many times and it doesn’t bore me.
One character that didn’t get a say
in the other sections was Schiem the Swineheard. He was brilliant. (Apart from
his prejudice towards the Edema Ruh. It’s a common prejudice but no less ugly
for it.) His accent was Irish-y, particularly with the ‘I’s, but was more a
jumble of various accents stitched together. Yet the accent was consistent:
people struggle to write real accents consistently so to create one and keep it
consistent is really impressive.
Kvothe says, and more often shows,
that he’s not beyond lying or exaggeration. We also know he makes contradicting
rumours to keep people confused and guessing. Seeing he’s now in hiding to
protect himself, is he likely to provide an honest account? (If it’s all fake,
he’s definitely an amazing story teller.)
Knowing the names of every star and
their stories, for example, but no one has a long enough life or big enough
memory to achieve this because
there are literally millions of stars. Did he really kill angels and speak to
gods? So we must take everything in this story with a bucket of salt.
It makes you curious to find out the
other truths he’ll reveal and lies he’ll make in the second book.
