Magician by Raymond E. Feist (New Revised Edition)

(Book Review)

I started reading this book mainly because it was lying on the book exchange table we've got going at work. (In Japan, English books can be a little hard to come by, so people will often get book exchanges going). Apparently this book is a bit of a classic in certain fantasy circles. And in fact two out of my 4 co-workers are big fans of this book (and the accompanying series). I had never heard of this book before I picked it up, but there's a lot of things I haven't heard of.

This book was originally published in 1982. The version I have in my hands is the "New Revised Edition" published in 1992 which "incorporates over 15,000 words of text omitted from the previous editions".

I guess I should have learned my lesson after reading "The Stand" to stay away from the author's revised edition. I'm sure Raymond Feist is in love with every word he put down on paper, but in my opinion this book could have done with being a lot shorter. Several whole plot lines could have been easily removed from this book without harming the story in anyway. I've worked my way through Russian epics in less time than it took me to read this book, and to be honest, now that's its finished, I'm not sure what I got out of it.

In the forward to the revised edition, Raymond Feist writes, "I hesitate to admit this publicly, but the truth is that part of the success of this book was my ignorance of what makes a commercially successful novel. My willingness to plunge blindly forward into a tale spanning two dissimilar worlds, covering twelve years in the lives of several major and dozens of minor characters, breaking numerous rules of plotting along the way, seemed to find kindred souls among readers the world over."

Which raises the question: after he's already admitted the book's major faults, is it still fair for me to go after him on these points?

Well, let's start at the beginning. This book is set in the standard fantasy genre setting. Some of Feist's fans (and publisher's reviews) have compared him to Tolkien. He's not in Tolkien's league, but, like most modern fantasy writers, he should probably consider paying royalties to Tolkien's estate, because most of the elements in Feist's fantasy world come straight out of Tolkien: the elves as tall mystical forest druids instead of small little mischievous creatures in a shoemakers shop, the dwarfs as a race of underground miners, the anachronism of having characters based on ancient Norse mythology smoke tobacco, and even going so far as to steal the idea of the Elves and the orcs (or "Dark Brotherhood" as Feist calls them) being related races.

As Feist admits, he has probably far too many characters and plotlines going on in this world of his. Just as your beginning to get a handle on who everyone is, and where all the different races live, and what the relationship between the Dark Brotherhood and the Elves are and all that stuff, the entire world is invaded by beings from another planet. Kind of almost like a sci-fi Alien invasion, I guess, except instead of technology and spaceships they use magical powers to travel back and forth between worlds.

At first the aliens are just an invading host, but then eventually one of the main characters gets captured, and goes back to the aliens' world, and then we have to learn all about the history, politics, and culture of that planet.

Now all this can be part of the charm of the book if you let yourself go along with it, but at the end of the day for me personally it was too many characters and plotlines to keep track of, and too little pay off. I guess I don't really expect any big life changing sociological or political messages from a book like this, but even in terms of plot, once everything was said and done, there was nothing extraordinarily special about this book which would cause me to recommend someone to wade through all 700 pages of it.

The descriptive passages are actually pretty good in this book, but the dialogue is terrible. It's somewhat a cross between the formal epic style of Tolkien and a more colloquial modern style, and it just comes off very stilted sounding. Everyone sounds like a character in a book instead of real people. (I'm told by one of my co-workers that even among Feist's fans his dialogue skills are often criticized.) The dialogue attribution is also overloaded with either adverbs or adverbial phrases, giving the book the old "Tom Swifty" effect.

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Magician by Raymond E. Feist (New Revised Edition): Book Review (Scripted)