Cav's Place

This is a big book, but if I managed to still sort of stay within what I consider the limits of a “quick review” for A Dance with Dragons, I thought I’ll manage it for Blessings of a Curse as well, with the plan after reading the first few chapters being to have three paragraphs to briefly summarize the good, the bad and the ugly. However, after that first part things changed and I realized there’s a lot more to say and no way to squeeze even a pretty simple list into a review no longer than that one. So here we are.

What I must begin with is that this book presents a huge fantasy world, Kellaran having close to three and a half times the circumference of Earth, multiple very different continents and areas, and being home to about a dozen sentient, or intelligent, races without counting the Hidden ones, some of those races also being separated not only in multiple nations but even in “races” in the sense people currently understand the term in the “real world” when referring to each other. The diversity is stunning and the level of detail even more so, the author being very focused on precise measurements, on top of shapes, colors and the other more common details. In addition, there is information about the history of the world even on a geological scale, the multiple types of magic and, as a result, of magic users, and the various systems according to which life is organized and functions.
Obviously, this last part also includes politics, economics, laws, social norms, customs, traditions and religious concepts, but while all of these also help paint an even more accurate picture of Kellaran, they no longer refer only to it. Whether it’s a matter of detailing how things currently are, how they were at some point in the past or how they should change in the future, it’s perfectly clear that the author makes use of Blessings of a Curse in order to present his views of how our world should be, what the current major problems are and the solutions he proposes for them. And I must say that, while what for me are by far the top issues don’t receive sufficient attention here and when they do I may disagree, or at least not quite agree, with the approach and conclusions, what is included deserves serious consideration and, though some ideas and details are troubling, it would be a significant improvement if much of it would be applied with only relatively minor changes.

Sadly, the story is not only clearly just an excuse to present these ideas, but also poor in itself. Despite the world’s outstanding potential, what you get are a series of clichés and extraordinary events that are too outrageous even for epic fantasy yet have pretty much no weight or impact. Now I keep saying I much prefer quality over originality, but there is all too little quality here, the developments often simply don’t work together and the whole is not only mere wrapping for all the details about Kellaran and the author’s ideas about our world, but evidence of too little thought spared for it. While some story was obviously necessary, since I wouldn’t have started reading something that didn’t have one, once I did I found that it actually harmed, at times making it difficult to offer the details and concepts presented the attention they deserved when the story and even the choice of words kept offering evidence of such a terribly immature approach, and that may be putting it mildly.
Actually, I’ll go past immature now that I’m moving on to the characters, whose behavior is often childish or simply senseless. They don’t react in any way which would be even remotely realistic, they keep laughing, smiling, grinning, giggling, chuckling, chortling and so on almost whenever they speak regardless of the topic or situation, they seem to just sort of occasionally remember to act affected by the extraordinary and tragic events happening around them but immediately snap back to something else… And let’s not even get to how sex factors into this because there will be a separate section just for this later. Much of the time, in most cases, it’s like they’re some strange children who hold a wealth of knowledge about the world and have spent much time giving serious thought to advanced concepts, but who are otherwise defined by their overactive libidos and their inability to actually comprehend human emotions despite believing that they experience some.
To add insult to injury, it’s obvious that the author isn’t a writer, in the sense of a person who has the talent and abilities required for writing as an artistic endeavor. All those details and concepts are presented in information dump after information dump, characters either answering questions which are obviously only an excuse to fit the dump in or doing without even that excuse and launching themselves in long speeches directly. Even when it comes to actual action and events, there’s a whole lot of telling and very little showing, many scenes being mainly presented as plans made before or reports offered after the fact, while others feel like news read by a highly professional and efficient reporter with no involvement in the matter. There are a lot of numbers and hard facts and these, such as for example simply stating that a character is tens of millions of years old or that billions took part in a battle and hundreds of millions were slaughtered in a fraction of a second by a single spell, are used in what I guess is an attempt to get a rational reaction from the reader, instead of events being presented in a way that’d result in some emotional involvement and response. Now these inner workings may seem familiar to me, since my mind also tends to switch between playing with numbers and more or less abstract concepts while having great difficulty putting any of it into words in any passable way, but here there’s no attempt to hide them, the author instead letting these “guts” get spilled all over.

But that’s not the ugly part. The ugly and troubling part starts with the sex, and I’m not talking about how sexual and promiscuous the characters are, and definitely not about the arguments against monogamy and in favor of polyamorous relationships and being more open towards sexuality, which I generally agree with and to a certain extent often make myself as well. What I am talking about first and foremost is how much the size difference between the main character and his partners is emphasized and how they behave perhaps even more like children, and how he treats them as such in various ways. Now I may be wrong, and I hope I am, but with how much this book seems to say about its author, I really wouldn’t want him around any little girls… And women in general may wish to be wary as well, the way the concept of rape is approached being likely to trouble even submissive masochists who wouldn’t be bothered by the emphasis on rough sex and BDSM. Must admit that one character has a commendable speech in favor of making these latter concepts a part of one’s sex life though.
Still, while the first part of the book seems to be used to a fair extent as a way for the author to explore certain quite troubling sexual fantasies, after a while he seems to have mostly gotten that out of his system. Sadly, this only means replacing one type of ugly with another, even if one likely much easier to stomach. Now I’m not necessarily talking about how the main character, who’s quite obviously the author’s alter ego, is so apparently perfect and proves to have such immense powers and such an amazing mind and the best solution to pretty much every problem that comes up. What I am talking about is how said character sees himself and how others see him, how he ends up obeyed and pretty much worshipped by everyone despite claiming and even always being told by others that he’s far too modest and supposedly having no interest in ruling and stressing that he does not do so. And I am also talking about the methods used by those supposedly on the side of good, which to me, once they get past a certain point, seem worse than those used by the other side.

Overall, Blessings of a Curse can be seen as a guide or a manual for a huge and stunningly diverse fantasy world described in incredible detail and in which quite a number of writers could probably spend their entire lives placing stories, coupled with a nonfiction book presenting the author’s views about the “real world” and the changes he proposes, which generally deserve serious consideration and in plenty of cases represent good solutions to real problems. The story and characters, on the other hand, are a mere wrapping around those details and concepts, and so poorly written and developed and revealing such immaturity and lack of thought that they may make it difficult to pay proper attention to the matters that deserve it. Worse, at least the first part explores sexual fantasies that appear to be for, shall we say, the author’s personal use and which are disturbing to read regardless of the reasons why they were included, while later it exposes a quite terrifying and worsening God complex and some troubling ideas about what would be acceptable or even desirable on the part of those who are supposedly on the side of good.

Rating: 3/5