Reflections on Terry Goodkind
Violence
So ... yeah. Damn, there's violence galore. Even ignoring the few hundred pages of sex-torture that Richard survives in Wizard's First Rule, Goodkind apparent reserved a special store of gruesomeness for Stone of Tears: more torture, cannibalism (albeit by good guys, the Mud People), characters being flayed alive, gang rape (p. 414), threats of gang rape, genocide .... Goodkind runs the gauntlet of awful things that human beings can do to one another.
None of it evokes much real horror, apart perhaps from one character who is flayed alive. Either Goodkind doesn't have the writing chops to pull horror off, or he just doesn't feel much empathy for suffering (which seems to be a qualifying factor for any devotee of Ayn Rand). So all the torture in the book is pretty bloodless -- plentiful, to be sure, but nothing as horrifying as Ramsay Bolton or as shocking as the Red Wedding.
Speaking of Genocide ....
Oh yes! Genocide. Apparently, the Mud People are friendly to Richard and Kahlan, so we're supposed to like them. Yet one Mud Person confesses to Kahlan that, years ago, they had slaughtered the Jocopo people in retaliation for some war crimes committed against the Mud People. Of course, this counts as genocide, not as a normal act of war, since the Mud People killed the Jocopo's women and children, too. But you know how Kahlan responds? "Your people did the only thing they could" (448). Thanks, Kahlan!
So, yeah ... a lack of empathy and/or compassion is certainly a thing in Goodkind. Plus maybe a certain lack of decency.
Quality of Writing
Frankly, not all that great. I'm not necessarily talking about his sentence-level prose, which is as bare bones and workmanlike as anything you might expect from a writer of massive commercial fiction. I'm talking about various narrative tics. For example, Goodkind frequently has characters sentimentally dissolving into tears whenever they relate a sad story (pages 354, 543, 702, 736, 775), plus some melodramatic variations: "His eyes were wet when he turned to Kahlan" (169), or "Shota hit Richard's chest again. He put his arms around her and pulled her against him, comforting her as she cried" (171). Shota, by the way, is this allegedly bad-ass enchantress who, of course, oozes sex and collapses helplessly into Big Strong Hero's arms.
Other tics annoyed me as well. In several scenes, Goodkind had a tendency to have his characters speak for much too long after the reader had already gotten the basic point of the conversation. And some other moments, like Richard's conversation with Sister Verna about religion, were just a relatively clumsy "gotcha" anti-religion spiels.
Finally, there's the subplot of Richard's "madness." In order to save Richard's life, Kahlan forces him to travel with the Sisters of the Light, despite knowing how much he'll loathe wearing the collar. Richard agrees .... but, rather than understanding Kahlan's very understandable reasons, he spends the next 600 pages bemoaning how Kahlan had "abandoned" him. Goodkind explains this through a madness that Richard had inherited after being tortured by Denna in the previous book. This madness, though, no longer seems to operate by the end of Stone of Tears, when Richard suddenly seems to understand Kahlan's motivations after he himself must force away a friendly Gar for its own protection.
World-Building
.... is bad. Very bad. Like, deliberately bad. In fact, Goodkind continually brags about how little he cares about world-building. He doesn't write fantasy, as he keeps saying, but he writes literary stories about characters making decisions. He's obsessed about his book covers, sneering at anything that seems to suggest commercial fantasy. His first novel in the series, Wizard's First Rule, contains a map, but apparently only because the publisher insisted. Through the rest of the series, the map becomes exponentially more useless as Goodkind continually references places, cities, and even continents that bear no graspable relation to the first novel's map. His character names are also jarringly mundane: Richard, Rachel, Kelley, Samantha, Warren, Samuel, etc. A lot of this, I guess, explicitly attempts to distance Goodkind from the fantasy genre, although of course his storyworld is still a largely pre-industrial world with swords and dragons and magic, so .... okay, I guess?
Also, Goodkind loves his magical items, artifacts, weapons, and more. Magical doodads appear everywhere in Stone of Tears, and they often have crazy conditions attached that mostly just add further complications to the plot. Perhaps we should start calling Goodkind the King of the MacGuffin? But crazy conditions also attach to other magical situations, too. For instance, when Richard must agree to travel with the three Sisters of the Light, he must do so while following their insane rules (see p. 134 and 137). Why would any organization make acquiring new recruits so difficult?
Anyway, speaking of shoddy world-building, let's turn to how Goodkind .....
... rips off Robert Jordan
About 20% of the way through Stone of Tears, I had this strange feeling. "Man," I thought, "this sure sounds like Robert Jordan!" You have the all-female Sisters of the Light (Aes Sedai) tasked with putting collars around the necks of male wizards (the Red Ajah using Seanchan a'dams), but who are also struggling with a secret internal cult called the Sisters of the Dark (Black Ajah). The "Banelings" are agents of the Keeper (basically, Dark Friends), and the Blood of the Fold are just religious fanatics akin to Jordan's Children of the Light. The magical item, the Stone of Tears, is a seal on the Keeper's prison, making it a much lamer version of Jordan's seven cuendillar seals on the Dark One's prison at Shayul Ghul.
Of course, I need to be careful here. As much as Goodkind borrows from Jordan, Jordan -- and several other major epic fantasists, like Stephen R. Donaldson and Glen Cook -- borrow their world-building from Tolkien. So the "originality" critique can be a double-edged sword, and I don't want to claim that such borrowings are simply wrong.
Still, most fantasists at least acknowledge their debts to other writers like Tolkien. If someone brings up Goodkind's debts to Jordan in an interview, though, he'll respond with the following non-answer: ""If you notice a similarity [between me and Robert Jordan], then you probably aren't old enough to read my books" (USA Today interview).
Which brings me to .....
What the hell does Goodkind think he's doing?
I actually spent a lot of time puzzling this out. As an anti-fantasy writer of fantasy who rips off Robert Jordan's world-building but loves Ayn Rand, who claims that he's writing about "characters" and not about fantasy per se, the logic of Goodkind's position intrigued me.
First, it's worthwhile to note that Goodkind doesn't just admire Ayn Rand -- he seems to be an actual disciple. It's hard to say definitely since I only read Stone of Tears (and plot summaries for several others), but he seems to follow the Randian line without any deviation. That is, he doesn't change, add to, or modify Rand's philosophy in any way -- he's mostly just regurgitating it for his own fiction.
But the fact that he is trying to promote a Randian view of the universe, I think, is why Goodkind considers his work so different from Jordan's. As much as I love The Wheel of Time, I don't imagine many articles on Jordan's literary vision will ever appear. Writers like Tolkien or Donaldson have one; so does Goodkind, but Jordan is mostly just, "Let's just tell an awesomely epic story about a guy destined to save the world." And it totally works for Jordan, but it's that element of "pure plot-ness" that Goodkind seems to save his biggest sneers for.
That said, Goodkind seems to think he's entirely unique in the field, at least in terms of having a core "theme." That doesn't bode well for his reading acumen -- Tolkien, Donaldson, Cook, Erikson, Martin, etc .... Then again, he may not have even bothered to read those other fantasists, or to understand them if he has. As he says,
What I have done with my work has irrevocably changed the face of fantasy. In so doing I've raised the standards. I have not only injected thought into a tired empty genre, but, more importantly, I've transcended it showing what more it can be-and is so doing spread my readership to completely new groups who don’t like and wont ready typical fantasy. Agents and editors are screaming for more books like mine. They can’t find any."
So what do I ultimately think of Goodkind? Well, I have to admit .... I kinda liked the last 1/3 of Stone of Tears. The plot moved along, and it was (mostly) pretty interesting. But Goodkind also seems like a train wreck who happens to believe that he's the greatest train of all time, and I doubt I'll be trying any more of his 1,000-page novels anytime soon.
Great piece, Dennis! Hopefully Goodkind didn't have too large an impact on me when I was reading it at 10-16 years of age, lol...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Joel! And hopefully not .... although, if you ever end up saving the world from the Keeper of the underworld, I think we can call it a wash. ;)
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