Chapter 2: A Beautiful Day
In which Galatea reminisces about English autumns and finds surprisingly few reasons to yell at Rothfuss.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Kvothe's best friend was a demon, the small-town folk buried the evil spider, and Kvothe insisted he was just an innkeeper. There was some clunky conlang, but Rothfuss generally got the job done.
It was one of those perfect autumn days so common in stories and so rare in the real world.
Is This The Real Life: 3
If you ask me, Rothfuss has this flipped. I don't have a particularly strong sense of stories harping on perfect autumn days - I feel like I've seen more fictional perfect summers and clear cold winters - but, growing up in the south of England, I definitely remember plenty of genuinely gorgeous autumns. Summers tended to be on the weak side and winters were cold, grey and slushy, but for a few weeks in September and October you could count on glorious warm afternoons and long sunsets.
Anyway, Rothfuss does describe what looks like a lovely day:
The weather was warm and dry, ideal for ripening a field of wheat or corn. On both sides of the road the trees were changing color. Tall poplars had gone a buttery yellow while the shrubby sumac encroaching on the road was tinged a violent red. Only the old oaks seemed reluctant to give up the summer, and their leaves remained an even mingling of gold and green.Back up a second. Sumac?
I Have An Interrogative: 9
Just where the hell are we? Sumac grows in subtropical and temperate regions - in other words, regions that shouldn't be showing this kind of fall colour. Last chapter the people in the Waystone were worried about the snow coming early, which heavily implies that snow comes at some point most years: again, not something that happens where sumac typically grows. Oak and poplar have a pretty wide spread, depending on species, but the sumac places this scene in a pretty specific type of climate - ironically, the one type where you'd be least likely to see oak and poplar buddying up at the side of the road.
I Can Science I Know Stuff: 3
I'm changing up the I Can Science count for a more inclusive one: from now on, I Know Stuff will tally up any time Rothfuss tries to sound smart by throwing in unusual facts or terminology and ends up showing his ass. In this case, getting fancy with the shrubbery is causing a pretty significant geography fail.
Everything said, you couldn’t hope for a nicer day to have a half dozen ex-soldiers with hunting bows relieve you of everything you owned.Every so often, Rothfuss slips out of the usual voice of the book - a sort of dry melancholy for the framing narrative and...well, we'll get there for the narrative proper - into something that borrows from some of the wittier British authors of genre fiction. The line above could have been Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett quite easily. Honestly, I like it and wish he did it more often: a drier, wittier voice would do a lot to mitigate some of what most infuriates me when we get into the first-person narration of the narrative proper. Sadly, this voice only shows up sporadically, and consequently sticks out pretty badly when it does.
"She’s not much of a horse, sir,” Chronicler said. “One small step above a dray, and when it rains she—"Okay, firstly: "Chronicler" is a stupid name for a character. It never sounds natural no matter how many times Rothfuss writes it. We find out later that his name is Devan, so that's what I'm calling him from now on.
Secondly...
I Know Stuff: 4
That's for trying to impress us with archaic horse terms. A "dray" is a draft horse, bred for size, stamina, strength and an even temperament. If you're show jumping or riding a steeplechase then sure, a draft horse is pretty much the bottom of the horse totem pole: they don't jump well and aren't fast, and their size can make them difficult to ride. But if you're stealing a horse to sell to the army - which is exactly what Devan's highwaymen say they are doing - then a draft horse is exactly what you want. During World War I, draft horses were bought in droves to pull cannons and carry supplies because they were strong and didn't spook easily.
Devan - an educated man who expected to be robbed and should know better - basically just told his robbers that he's riding a perfect military horse.
The robbery itself is pretty much a laundry list of the things the robbers - who are clearly military deserters...
I Have An Interrogative: 10
If they're deserters, how are they planning to sell the horse back to the military without getting court-martialed?
Anyway, the robbery is a laundry list of the things the deserters take, but it retains some of that dry wit that feels a little Pratchett-esque, so it's an entertaining laundry list. They take Devan's best stuff, including a new blue shirt that I'm sure we'll see again, Devan haggles a little, they leave him just enough to get by and everyone parts ways with surprising civility.
Once the robbers leave, Devan re-stocks his purse from caches of coins he's hidden in places like his underwear and a loaf of stale bread. It's clever and unexpected, and it gives us a nice little window into Devan's character without over-explaining things. It does bother me that Rothfuss describes his trousers as "pants", not because I'm English but because it feels anachronistic: "pants" wasn't used to mean "trousers" until 1840, and despite how inconsistent the time period seems to be for The Name of the Wind, it feels like it generally takes place earlier than that.
Mother Tongue: 4
Devan is startled by a crow as he attends a call of nature, and it functions just fine as both a Portent of Doom and a note that Devan is too much of a realist to be ruffled by Portents of Doom. With that, this short, surprisingly entertaining chapter is over.
We have sumac here in western Washington state, and it does turn a lovely red in the fall (or yellow depending on the variety).
ReplyDeleteIn which case...I Know Stuff:1
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