Chapter One: A Place for Demons (Part I)
In which Galatea has many questions and threatens to throw spiders.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, the Waystone Inn was really, really, really quiet.
It was Felling Night.
Repetition(epetition): 1
This count is pretty self-explanatory. Rothfuss repeats himself a lot, and - if I'm generous - only about a third of the time is it for stylistically sound reasons. Most often it's just amateurish writing, and it's not just words or phrases: whole scenes get recycled almost wholesale, making an already lengthy novel feel long through sheer déja-vu.
In this case, it's bad form to start a chapter with a variation on "it was night" right after a short prologue whose first sentence is a variation on "it was night". Not only is it repetitious; it makes the timeline pretty confusing. Is it the same night? Does "night again" vs "felling night" mean something? The hell is "felling night" anyway?
I Have An Interrogative: 1
The Kingkiller Chronicle gets a lot of praise for its worldbuilding, and I don't think any of it is deserved. If I had a count for every variation of a worldbuilding element - be it language, geography, magic or technology - being introduced and inadequately explained, or explained in a way that makes no sense and has no internal consistency, I'd have more counts than I could keep track of. So I'm pulling out one or two particularly common or egregious ones, and the rest are getting lumped under the I Have An Interrogative count. Basically, it's for every time I find myself asking who/where/when/why/how something is in Rothfuss' universe, and never getting an answer that makes sense.
In this case...the hell is "felling night"?
These books have a loose sense of time at best, but it's compounded by Rothfuss inventing his own calendrical system and then forgetting to tell the readers how it actually works. Over the course of the books we are introduced to the names of several days, but it's near-impossible to figure out whether they're days of the week, days of the month, or days of the year. It's like the worldbuilding equivalent of the NaNoPadMo count: inserting invented elements out of a feeling that epic fantasy ought to have them rather than a need for them in the story's universe.
Incidentally, I promise I will not spend 350 words on every 4 words of the actual book.
The first part of this chapter is actually fairly workmanlike. Local townspeople are in the bar telling stories, and because this is Epic Fantasy, we're pretty primed to expect that the subjects of their folk tales will turn out to be of crucial importance to the main narrative. The myths are real, people. We get introduced to Taborlin the Great, a famous-and-probably-fictional wizard, and the Chandrian, an infamous-and-probably-not-fictional evil force.
I've lived in a small town in England, and Rothfuss does a fair job of capturing the characters and their voices. Aside from a repeated instance of "times/things being what they were/are", it's fair writing, and, while I doubt any of these characters will be of even passing importance to the overall story, they work just fine as pieces of talking scenery.
Repetition(epetition): 2
The tale-telling is interrupted so the folks can eat and drink, and if I'm being unkind (which I am) it feels like padding.
NaNoPadMo: 2
When the story resumes, it quickly becomes clear that this is the sort of fantasy universe where the names of things matter. It isn't particularly original a concept, but used well it can be a subtle commentary on things like identity, ownership and appropriation. Let's see how Rothfuss does.
“So Taborlin fell, but he did not despair. For he knew the name of the wind, and so the wind obeyed him.
Title Drop: 1
This'll come up a lot.
"He spoke to the wind and it cradled and caressed him. It bore him to the ground as gently as a puff of thistledown and set him on his feet softly as a mother’s kiss."
Simile Soup: 6
Those similes would make much more sense if they were switched.
There's a bit about a magic amulet that I'm sure won't have any bearing on any of the events of the "real" world of the book, and we find out that Taborlin got his amulet from a tinker.
Tinker, tailor: 1
Tinkers show up all the damn time in The Kingkiller Chronicle. They're Rothfuss' magic Purveyors of Things Needed by the Plot, which makes them a bit...problematic. See, technically a "tinker" isn't the itinerant merchant Rothfuss wants him to be: he's an itinerant tinsmith, travelling from place to place to perform repairs on household utensils and occasionally plumbing. Using the word "tinker" to refer to an itinerant metal-worker is just a description of trade; using it to describe a travelling merchant and odd-job-man, like Rothfuss does, is actually a pejorative. "Tinker" was used to describe Irish and Scottish Travellers in much the same way that "gypsy" is used to describe the Romani.
Now, I don't know whether Rothfuss knew this, though since it took me ten seconds of Googling to find out I'm going to guess that he did. That being the case, I'm really not sure what he's doing here. The tinkers of the Kingkiller universe are generally neutral or benevolent figures; no one that I've noticed uses the term pejoratively. I get the sense that it's one of two things: either it's part of a weird appropriative thing Rothfuss keeps doing where he borrows words and concepts from the real world and tries to shoehorn them awkwardly into his fantasy world, or - more likely - he knew the associations with the word "tinker" and, because his tinkers are good, respected figures, decided to use the word anyway. Just like far too many writers still do with "gypsy", sadly.
Anyway, the count is for any time a tinker shows up to patch a hole in the narrative.
I Have An Interrogative: 2
And that's for telling us these folk have been coming to the inn "every Felling night for months" without making it any clearer what a "felling night" is. What are we felling? How often do we fell it? Why can't it just be "Tuesday"?
There's a brief argument about the lore surrounding tinkers that, while it feels like padding, actually nods quite effectively to how idioms get twisted in repetition ("blood is thicker than water" and all that), so I'm not giving it a NaNoPadMo count. And finally - finally - our man Flame-head speaks, and we're told that his name is Kote.
Kote? Seriously?
We're about to find out that Kvothe has more names than a bad Hollywood portrayal of dissociative identity disorder, and that Kote is one he chose for himself to protect his assumed identity as a nobody of an innkeeper. His witness-protection name is literally his own name as spoken without a speech impediment.
I don't have a count for this because ultimately it only affects two characters, but for a guy whose series is all about the importance of names and naming things, Rothfuss sure has a funny idea of what makes for an effective alias.
Anyway, there's some more sure-to-be-important mythologising about Taborlin the Great, the magic amulet, and the eeeeeevil Chandrian. There's also a brief but not-that-subtle mention of the in-universe religious mythology by way of "Tehlu's choice of the path", and let's just say that the Kingkiller universe religion is going to be the source of a lot of I Have An Interrogative counts later on.
Just as the whole thing starts getting dangerously close to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" - because of course the Chandrian are fictional and demons don't exist, don't'cha know - another small-town fellow breaks the pattern by stumbling into the inn covered in blood and carrying a suspicious-looking bundle.
Since this is the first thing that gets the locals rattled enough to swear, it's time to pay Rothfuss a rare compliment. Swearing in Kingkiller-verse is actually an example of that weird appropriative thing I mentioned earlier, but it's an unusual case of its being very effective. First we hear familiar, if old-fashioned, curses like "Mother of God" and "God's body", but when we first hear "Blackened body of God" it's not only a neat segue into curses that don't exist in standard English, but a subtle tip of the hat to parts of the mythology that we won't learn about for hundreds of pages. This is worldbuilding done right: it all makes sense in context because we all know this kind of curse when we see one, but when we find out why this particular curse exists, it retroactively adds meaning to every time we hear it used.
It's also rather over-used in these few pages.
Repetition(epetition): 3
All three of the above curses are spoken by the same vaguely-defined side character, and it actually works against the distinctiveness of his voice. Swearing, particularly when it's reactionary, tends to slide into particular cadences, which is why I instinctively swear in phrases that put the emphasis on "fuck": motherfucker, Jesus fucking Christ, fucknuggets and so on. "God's body" just doesn't fit with "Mother of God" and "Blackened body of God"; it feels like it should be said by a different person.
Carter, the fellow with the blood and the bundle, explains that he got waylaid by something on the road, and that said something killed his horse. There follows a paragraph of padding while people eulogise the horse.
NaNoPadMo: 3
This will not the the first time I get the feeling that Rothfuss really, really wants a pony of his very own.
Carter undoes the bundle, and we get the genuinely creepy reveal of an enormous black spider. Kote, of course, knows what it is, but passes off his knowledge as a tall tale from a passing trader. The townspeople pad for a paragraph by insulting the trader.
NaNoPadMo: 4
It's not the worst padding in terms of word count, but you can tell it's padding because it brings the narrative crashing to a halt by introducing information that has no relevance to the GIANT FUCKING SPIDER SITTING ON THE TABLE. I'm just saying: if I were confronted by a spider the size of a mastiff and someone derailed the discussion of said spider by complaining about the price of salt, I would probably punch him. Or throw the spider at him.
The spider is actually a thing called a "scrael", and it is a portent of Bad Things to Come. The characters describe it in a litany of similes:
“Its feet are sharp like knives.”
[...]
“More like razors,” Kote said.
[...]
“It’s smooth and hard, like pottery."
[...]
“More like stone.”
[...]
“Like a mushroom.”That last one is about the scrael's innards (not its outards), so it's not quite as out-of-place as it looks. Still, while each of these similes is technically appropriate for the thing it's describing, not one of these similes sounds natural as a piece of dialogue. Particularly bad is Kote's "It's smooth and hard, like pottery" as he runs his hands over the thing: he's literally telling us a thing it would be much easier and more effective to show. In fact, this whole passage would have been more effective if, instead of having characters say "like, like, like", we got the same words in prose description as Kote examines the scrael, leaving us - for now - in the dark about what he thinks of it while providing creepy and atmospheric description in an equally creepy and atmospheric silence.
Simile Soup: 11
That's one count for every simile that should have been description, not dialogue.
Cob - the one who was telling the story about Taborlin and the Chandrian - says that the scrael is a demon. The others protest, because...well:
Certainly there were demons in the world. But they were like Tehlu’s angels.They were like heroes and kings. They belonged in stories. They belonged out there. Taborlin the Great called up fire and lightning to destroy demons. Tehlu broke them in his hands and sent them howling into the nameless void. Your childhood friend didn’t stomp one to death on the road to Baedn-Bryt. It was ridiculous.So a big theme of these books - arguably the biggest - is the difference between myth and reality, and how one affects the other. The reason there is a framing narrative rather than a straight account of Kvothe's exploits is to contrast the Kvothe of myth with the Kvothe of reality, thereby providing a sort of meta-commentary on the nature of myth, legend, and Epic Fantasy as a genre. There'll be space to talk about how successful Rothfuss is once we get into the narrative proper, but this is the first instance of a motif that gets hammered in over and over and over: that (despite literally being in a work of fiction) these people are not in a story.
Is This The Real Life: 1
Any time a character says (or implies) "This is not a story", it gets one of these.
They decide to use iron to test whether the scrael is, in fact, a demon, inviting some argument about what kind of iron to use:
“Just use a drab,” Jake said. “That’s good iron.”
“I don’t want good iron,” the innkeeper said. “A drab has too much carbon in it. It’s almost steel.”
“He’s right,” the smith’s prentice said. “Except it’s not carbon. You use coke to make steel. Coke and lime.”
I Can Science: 2
Remember how I laughed about Rothfuss' "chosen field of chemical engineering"? Yeah, this is why. Technically Rothfuss is almost sort-of right about iron vs steel. Unfortunately, it's a lot more complicated than he makes out in this brief exchange, with the result that Rothfuss kind of shows his ass when it comes to metallurgy. Let's break it down:
“I don’t want good iron,” the innkeeper said. “A drab has too much carbon in it. It’s almost steel.”This is what I mean by technically right: yes, pure iron is elemental and has zero carbon in it. Pure iron is also almost never used for anything because it's much too soft. It only takes a tiny amount of carbon to add an incredible amount of strength to iron - so little that some types of steel only have 0.002% carbon by weight, which is less than the 0.008% of certain types of iron that are technically considered "pure". The point is that it's not the amount of carbon that counts: it's how the carbon has been introduced or reduced, what other elements exist in the same alloy, and a whole host of other things I'm much too little of a scientist to understand.
Unlike Rothfuss, I am just enough of a scientist to recognise that "too much carbon" ≠ "almost steel".
But wait! We have a modifier!
“He’s right,” the smith’s prentice said. “Except it’s not carbon. You use coke to make steel. Coke and lime.”And this is Rothfuss showing his ass. Again, he's sort of technically right: coke, limestone and quicklime are used in the blast furnace process for making steel, which would - I think - be the appropriate process for the vague time period in which this book is set. Maybe.
I Have An Interrogative: 3
Although, come to that: does Newarre (the town they're in) have a blast furnace? I thought it was a tiny, rural town whose major industry is farming. And while I'd accept that the smith's prentice (why is he not just an "apprentice"?) needs to know the basics of how various metals and alloys work, it doesn't ring true that he'd have detailed knowledge of how they're all made. It's not part of his job, and I don't buy that a small-town boy in what looks to be pre-industrial Europealike had the education to know that before entering his trade.
I Have An Interrogative: 4
For raising far too many questions about the time and place we're in in an attempt to wow us with scientific knowhow - because I'm pretty sure that's what this is. Leaving aside the very questionable science (because the coke and lime are the same whether you're reducing iron ore or making steel, making the prentice's comment redundant), there is literally no point to this exchange. It's just showing off - worse, it's showing off using the rare Double-Authorial-Mouthpiece technique. Both Kote/Kvothe and the smith's prentice are supposed to be right here, Kote because he's the protagonist, and the prentice because, as Kote says a sentence later, "it's [his] business, after all". And because we as the readers don't need to know dick about the carbon content or blast process of steel to understand that this coin will work but that coin won't (if we even need to know that), what we get is Rothfuss once again taking a break from the narrative to tell us - twice - how smart he is.
NaNoPadMo: 5
Because I can. Good God, we're barely half a chapter in and this book is exhausting.
Thankfully, Rothfuss picks up the pace for the last couple of paragraphs of this section: they find the right type of coin and press it to the spider's side, and the ensuing loud crack and sharp smell - effectively described, by the way - tell them that the thing is, in fact, a scrael.
At this point, we're almost exactly halfway through the chapter, so this feels like a good place to take a break. Let's count 'em up!
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