The Dragonbone Chair (by Tad Williams) // Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Book 1 Review
The Dragonbone Chair is distressingly boring tale about a scullion boy with a bad case of attention deficit disorder wandering about a castle and doing ... nothing. The major forces in his life are the typically businesslike and fearsome Mistress of Chambermaids, the typically eccentric and brilliant Doctor Morgenes, and such compelling points of interest as bird's nests, suits of armour, bullfrogs, and inchworms. One might mistake the inchworm for a synopsis of this book, in fact, a brilliant and clever little metaphor. The thing takes a magnamious amount of effort to do absolutely nothing. One sees flashes of things and people who may possibly be interesting skittering around in the corner of their vision, but it's all so insubstantial it's more frustrating than intriguing. The book is a complete waste of time and effort.

This is what four of five people will tell you about this book, because none of them made it past the first 160 pages.

Fortunately for Williams, the one who did make it past will likely go on to hail him as one of the masters of the genre.



Let's start from the beginning. We open the book at the end of an era. King Prestor John, a sort of King Arthur sort of figure who made legends, slew dragons, fought wars, knighted heroes, and generally was a pretty impressive guy, is dying. He's not being poisoned and he hasn't fallen tragically ill ... no, John is just very, very, very old. The kingdom he forged from nothing is poised to try and compensate for the loss of him as he hands his hard-won throne over to the older of his two sons, Prince Elias. But the younger son, Josua, cautions Elias to put aside the council of the sinister priest Pryrates who follows the elder brother as closely as a hound. As Prestor John dies, Elias concludes that Josua only acts out of the long history of bitterness between the brothers, and continues heeding the Red Priest's words as he rises to the throne of all Osten Ard ...

Now this story, you must agree, sounds far more readable than the one described above. The Dragonbone Chair has the weak beginning to end all weak beginnings. Rather than see Elias's rise to power, his slow corruption by the evil wizard, the disappearance of the solemn Prince Josua, the land slowly spiraling into chaos, we see Simon. Simon collects mushrooms. Simon learns to read. Simon watches crickets. Simon climbs a tower. Simon catches bullfrogs! Interspersed with Simon gets in trouble for being such a mooncalf and Simon is praised by Rachel or Morgenes and walks on clouds for the rest of the day. If I wasn't stuck at home for four days without any sort of entertainment, I don't think I could have gotten through these first 200 pages from hell.

It's a seemingly familiar route that suddenly becomes fascinating. Simon finds a hole in the ground. Simon investigates. Simon discovers a conspiracy about to destroy all of Osten Ard.

From that moment, the novel quickly transforms from a mundane account of daily chores to something absolutely brilliant.

Williams' writing, which until now has been unintentionally amusing in how overdramatic it makes the boring life of Simon Mooncalf is so beautifully suited to the Simon Pilgrim and Simon Snowlock sections. He has a knack for thinking of a metaphor no one else has thought of yet -- too easy writers find it now to rely on cliche for their turns of phrase, the old practiced sentances are so second nature to us readers, we don't take any notice of "hair white as show" or "eyes black as pitch" or "the moon was a pearl in the velvet sky." Williams has a new metaphor for everything, the reader is constantly stopping to think "That really does sound like something."

The book is also a master course on world-building. Never have I seen such an intricately designed setting, where you can feel the weight of history and legend and even nursury rhyme. Too many worlds come to life when a reader opens the pages. Osten Ard truly feels as if it's lived long before Williams put his hands on his keyboard to write it. The predjudices between the different cultures, the unique way they interact, it's all absolutely flawless. Mentionable is the way Williams has parraleled it's developpment to our own world, but in the most clever of ways. While we can clearly see the old Norse in the Rimmersmen, to the point where they share gods and language structure, Williams seems to operate on the notion that some world-gods birthed both of these cultures. They show the traits of the same parents, the same roots, the same DNA, but their personal selves have branched into different but mirror directions. This is not a simple case of surplanting a culture and changing a few names, it's something ... quite different. And one can't deny the benefit of operating this way. In the Aedonite religion's close mirrors to Christianity, for instance, those who know history can truly see the level of sway it holds over the people, the important of the Hyrnsteri not converting, the reluctant but sincere faith of the Rimmersmen. When the characters make the mark of the Tree, we understand it. When they swear "Elysia, Mother of God," we understand it. It's all very ingenious.

And there are so many little details about the construction and writing of the novel that consistantly blew me away. The character of Binabik, for example, is a troll for whom the commonly spoken tongue of the world is a second language. I have never seen english as a second language written so well in fantasy. Binabik's grammar is incorrect, but it's consistantly and logically incorrect -- it seems a bizarre thing to be impressed by, but it was positively amazing. The same can be said in some places of the Sithi prince Jiriki, though this is less mind-blowing that Binabik's language.

In addition, some of the characters are positively wonderful. I speak mostly of the younger son who only wants to be left alone, Prince Josua. "Younger" is still "thirty-something at least" in this case, and Josua bears his experience well. You feel his regret over the bitterness that has severed him from his brother Elias over the years, you feel his reluctance to play the rebel, his sincerity at just wanting the kingdom his father built to be a good place. I was personally constantly reminded of the adages about those who don't want to rule being the greatest rulers of all. And the best part is Josua isn't a saint, either. He's standoffish, too-serious, somewhat sullen. And the most intriguing thing about him is that while this novel gives a point of view to everyone who can tie their shoes, we never see anything from strictly Josua's eyes, or if we do, it's very briefly. We see so much of him from so many people, he stands at the very center of the plot, and yet he's just out of our grasp. Truly the most fascinating character in the story.

Also mentionable are the above mentioned Binabik, an endearing fellow just seething with unique culture and personality, and the also mentioned Jiriki, who likewise projects an air of grace and elegance, and, once again, that culture. Williams is a master of writing all these different worlds and how they interact with one another. The Sithi may be one of the best faerie races ever written, so unhuman in their entire presentation, but we're compelled by them and badly want to reach out and touch their beautiful world.

I feel the need to bring to the reader's attention one particular section -- the forge, if you will, where the story plunges in weak and unreliable, and comes out solid and powerful. This is the sequence in which Simon flees beneath the Hayholt, twining through secret passages, seeing all sort of things, reality and fantasy blurring a thin line ... this is one of my favourite sections from any novel I've ever read. Williams has captured so perfectly the sensation of being completely alone in absolute darkness when one has a thousand thoughts on their mind and nowhere to put any of them. Everything flowed perfectly, the passage of time and space can be felt, even we're not sure what's real and what Simon is concocting. It was the most remarkable part of the entire book, by my call, and of any book I've read to date.

However, even past those torturous first 160 pages, the novel is not all wonder and glory. There are several things to be remarked on. The first being that, like all great male fantasy novelists, it seems, Mister Williams couldn't romance his way out of a paper bag if the fountain of youth was waiting on the other side. Why do none of these men have any concept of the progression of a well told love story? They all seem to revert to young adult fiction when it comes to these matters. If you can't make the sauce right, just keep it off the food, boys. Princess Miriamele is set up as Simon's love interest from the first moment we see her, and it's infuriating. Their relationship seems entirely based on being in the right place at the right time with some hormones thrown in to the mix. The absurd amount of time Simon spends wallowing in love for her and the fact that he even identifies his feelings as love are completely foolish. Maybe if he's simply being a teenager, but we're given the impression that Williams actually is hoping we'll be swept along by the "romance." I'd be shocked if anyone over the age of eighteen were. Even more perplexing than Simon and Miriamele's relationship is Maegwin and Eolair's, which seems so arbitrary it's painful. It almost read as if Williams was afraid he was introducing the adorably awkward, too-tall Princess Maegwin too late, and so to make her relevant to the story, he tied her to the one Hernstyri character we already know, in the home that endearing him to her would, in turn, endear her to us. It didn't work, for the record, I distinctly remember raising my eyebrows in bemusement at the whole business. The one romantic connection Williams did portray very well was the relationship between Josua and the wagoneer-girl turned courtesan Vorzehva, who is useless and demanding and Josua keeps in his bed largely out of guilt and for the sex. They have a sort of subtle connection that I greatly enjoyed reading. Willams, like his compatriots, seems more skilled at writing pre-existing relationships than writing new ones.

There were also several plotlines I'm still not sure what the purpose was. This strongly applies to Princess Maegwin's tragic story, which I found very interesting, but the more she appeared, the most I wondered how she was at all connected to Simon or Josua's stories. She didn't appear enough to justify calling it an entirely different storyline, but appeared too much and too deliberately to just be another character showing flashes of how Elias's reach was affecting the world at large. I suppose I'll reserve judgement on her until I read the later books, but so far, I'm a little perplexed.

It's also, it should be mentioned, neither as a positive or negative, a fairly slow read. I've read four-hundred paged books where more happened. This nearly seven hundred paged monster is really not a particularly spacious story. In Hayholt, to Naglimund, to Urmsheim ... the end. Williams' style itself is laborous in its detail and he takes a very long time to actually get to anything. While I personally quite enjoyed this -- I like the journey more than the destination -- I can see room to criticize with those who prefer their fiction concise. Concise is a not word in Mister Williams' dictionary, I don't believe, as the first two hundred pages of very little can attest.

But whatever can be said about the novel, Williams is, simply put, a master of the genre. He goes far above and beyond what fantasy readers require from a writer, as so few are willing to do, elevating the endeavour over "simple genre fiction" to something even fantasy's critics must agree has some merit beside the "superiour" general fiction of the day. The Dragonbone Chair is not for those looking for light fantasy fare, nor for those who value content far more than style, but to those who like the artistry of well-strung words and have the time to sit around and marvel over Binabik's speech patterns, it's definitely a feast to be enjoyed.

STARS: 4.5/5
GRADE: A
FINAL SAY: It's good. It's really good. It's a shame one has to sit through the worst beginning to any book ever that last forever to get to that good. I strongly advise anyone reading this book to keep at it until Aldheorte, at the least. But I always say that I prefer an exceptionally weak start with a strong finish to the other way around, and this book's powerful climax and moody aftermath will leave you breathless. Far above genre standards.