Chapter 4: Halfway to Newarre
In which Galatea complains about contrivance and accuses Rothfuss of insufficient origami.
Previously, in The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss accidentally wrote an attempted murder in an effort to pad his word count. Nothing else of note happened.
This is a blessedly short chapter, and one that also - blessedly - retains some of the more distinctive voice of the last
Chronicler walked. Yesterday he had limped, but today there was no part of his feet that didn’t hurt, so limping did no good.Devan's POV is by far the most entertaining of all Rothfuss' characters. True, we spend most of the book inside Kvothe's head, but we also get a little Bast here and there for comparison. Again, I have a theory about why this is, but for now I'll just say how much I enjoy that even the third-person narration of Devan's POV tells us a little about who he is. He's pragmatic, he has a decent sense of humour, and there's a sense that he's filtering events through a storyteller's lens as they happen, which feels like a well-developed coping mechanism for dealing with shitty events.
There's a book called A Serpent Uncoiled by Simon Spurrier: it's a potboiler of a murder mystery that doesn't always hang together perfectly (in the way that potboiler murder mysteries often don't), but that has a wonderfully distinct sense of voice. You can tell so much about the main POV character by how his scenes are narrated - a veneer of witty self-deprecation over a morass of mania - but when the narration briefly shifts to other POV characters, the voice changes to match them too, giving so much life to characters who sometimes only have a scene before they get gruesomely murdered. It's one of the things I dislike about the Song of Ice and Fire series: the breadth of characters is amazing, but the voice stays the same no matter whose head we're in.
Yes, this is me spinning my wheels because the first few pages of this chapter are rather good and so there's not much to spork. The point is this: voice is hard in prose fiction, but it's well worth it. I've spent a chapter and a page with Devan against three chapters and a prologue with Kvothe, and I'd much rather be reading a whole book about Devan.
Anyway, Devan's tired and grumpy because no one will sell him a horse, and after realising that he's much further from Newarre than he thought he was and it's getting dark, he heads for what he thinks is the light of a farm or homestead.
It turns out (via a comma splice and two dangling modifiers) to be a bonfire in the ruins of an old house. The bonfire smells funky and it's being tended by a fellow in a heavy cloak carrying a metal rod of some sort. I've got good odds that it's Kvothe with his iron bar, burning a piece of the demon spider.
Alert The Editor: 11
Honest to God, I don't mind Rothfuss being coy about Kvothe's identity here. This is Devan's POV chapter (mostly), and Devan's voice is strong enough that it's easy to slip into his head and view Kvothe as a stranger in this scene.
Kvothe tells Devan he's arrived at pretty much the worst time, and Rothfuss does a good job of showing his anxiety over balancing Devan's need to know what's going on with the likelihood that Devan will think he's fucknuts insane. Rothfuss does a less good job of maintaining Kvothe's anonymity, choosing to reveal his red hair as Kvothe's hood falls back.
I Have An Interrogative: 12
Devan is travelling to Newarre specifically to follow up on a rumour that Kvothe is there. He knows what Kvothe looks like and he expects to find him when he arrives. I just don't buy that Devan would meet a mysterious red-haired badass on the road and not go, "Holy shit, are you -"
Or words to that effect, anyway.
Kvothe tells Devan the scrael are coming; Devan insists scrael aren't real.
Is This The Real Life: 5
Again, I don't mind it here: we're literally in Devan's head and we know he's a pragmatist. Besides: the scrael promptly prove him wrong by arriving to wreak some demonic havoc. Which they do:
They came into the light, moving low across the ground: black shapes, many-legged and large as cart wheels. One, quicker than the rest, rushed into the firelight without hesitating, moving with the disturbing, sinuous speed of a scuttling insect.The first sentence of that description is fine. The second is horrible: the over-long sentence slows the action down to a crawl, and as a rule you shouldn't include emotional descriptors when you're describing something that's supposed to elicit that emotion: it's hand-holding. Try:
One, quicker than the rest, scuttled into the firelight with sinuous speed.The alliteration at the end is still a bit clunky, but the tighter sentence doesn't slow down the action, and it shows you how to feel rather than telling you. Honestly? This is both padding and something the editor should have caught.
Alert The Editor: 12
NaNoPadMo: 11
The scrael goes straight for Devan:
Before Chronicler could raise his piece of firewood, the thing skirted sideways around the bonfire and sprang at him, quick as a cricket.
Simile Soup: 21
Is "cricket" really what you want to go for here, Rothfuss? Crickets are cute and chirpy - and, perhaps most importantly, completely fucking harmless. When you're describing something that's supposed to be deadly and horrifying, maybe don't do so in terms of the one insect Disney has programmed us to think of as "adorable".
Anyway, the scrael rushes Devan, who makes like Frodo on Weathertop and falls over backwards, cracking his head on a rock and knocking himself right the fuck out. It works because we know Devan isn't a fighter, but it is a cheap device to stop Devan seeing Kvothe killing the rest of the scrael single-handedly.
I wonder if this wasn't Rothfuss writing himself into a corner: obviously Kvothe has to take care of the rest of the scrael or they'll tear through the town, and if Devan's out on the road when the scrael are on the attack he has to be saved from them somehow. But if Devan sees Kvothe single-handedly defeat a swarm of scrael, it undermines what's supposed to be a slow build-up of Kvothe's mythos by basically screaming THE LEGENDS ARE TRUE in Devan's face. So Devan conveniently meets up with Kvothe before he becomes scrael-meat, but gets knocked out in the first few seconds of the fight so that he can stay unsure about what actually went down until he has enough of Kvothe's story to believe it. It makes sense, but it's incredibly contrived.
There's another solution, of course: just bloody skip this bit. As much as I enjoy spending time with Devan as a break from Kvothe's dour POV, there's no reason outside of word count to stretch his journey out over the extra night (and it's not even done being stretched). Far better would be to have Kvothe deal with the scrael off-camera, and for Devan to notice his scrael-induced injuries later, after hearing stories from the locals about the single scrael and discounting them because 1) scrael aren't real, and 2) even if they were, there's never just one in the stories. As Devan hears more of Kvothe's story, becoming more credulous the more of it Kvothe tells, and the world of demons keeps intruding on the "real" world Devan thinks he knows, Devan is eventually able to realise that the wounds on Kvothe's back and shoulders can only mean one thing: that he went out and dealt with the remaining scrael on his own. It would be a powerful turning point in Devan's relationship with Kvothe, not to mention a powerful moment in the gradual deepening of the link between the Kvothe of myth and the Kvothe of reality.
Instead, we get convenient unconsciousness.
To my astonishment, when Devan comes to we get a sliver of realism about waking up after a sharp crack to the head:
Chronicler opened his eyes to a confusing mass of dark shapes and firelight. His skull throbbed. There were several lines of bright, clear pain crossing the backs of his arms and a dull ache that pulled at his left side every time he drew in a breath.The impressive bit is not so much that Devan's head throbs, but that over the course of the scene it stays painful, and Devan suffers dizziness, nausea and difficulty speaking. Now, we're not actually going to get a realistic depiction of the long-term effects of a concussion, and good thing too: with the amount of padding that's already happening, I dread to think how much longer we'd be spinning our wheels if Rothfuss decided to go full-on realism with Devan's head injury. But it is nice to see a decent compromise between plot-necessitated speed-healing and the reality of getting bonked on the noggin. Devan will recover much too quickly, but until he does at least he's acting like he really did hit his head.
Kvothe asks Devan to help bury the dead scrael, and apologises for possibly breaking a couple of Devan's ribs.
I Have An Interrogative: 13
For lack of a better count. We'll pay lip service to Devan's smacked skull later but the cracked ribs never come up again. Cracked ribs take a very long time to heal because they're difficult to set properly - and if they're not set properly they're actually an incredibly dangerous injury, as the jagged edges of the break can do all sorts of damage to important internal bits of you.
Kvothe says he's already cut the wood for the burial, and Devan says "Just like the children's song".
Is This The Real Life: 6
This is the song he quotes:
“Let me tell you what to do.I know I gave the rhyme a pass last chapter, but as I re-read this I'm realising that I actually hate the way Rothfuss handles nursery rhymes. The basic idea that children's songs are often veiled references to actual history is sound, but the key word in that sentence is "veiled". What makes nursery rhymes so effective as a channel for plot-relevant information is just how twisted that information becomes in the translation to apparently-harmless nonsense. Ring Around the Rosy is the one that most people know as a reference to the Black Death (though that one's probably false, urban legend does refer to a second verse that's more explicit than the first), but there's also Humpty Dumpty, about a legendary battle cannon destroyed in the English Civil War, and more rhymes than I can count about the religious purges under Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I (both Three Blind Mice and Goosey Goosey Gander are about finding and killing illegally-practising Protestants).
Dig a pit that’s ten by two.
Ash and elm and rowan too—”
The point is that Rothfuss' nursery rhymes, which basically list off the attributes of the Chandrian and then describe in nice, handy instructions how to deal with them, don't act like real nursery rhymes at all. And it's a shamefully missed opportunity, honestly, because there's near-infinite mileage to figuring out a mystery by unwrapping all the layers that go into a nursery rhyme: what does it mean? How did it get from bloody religious purges to a voyeuristic goose? Is there a hidden interpretation that points to a deeper level of the mystery? Was the more-commonly-accepted interpretation planted by someone to hide parts of the real mystery?
Like I said last chapter, Barry Hughart does this absolutely masterfully in Bridge of Birds, building a rhyme and then folding layer upon layer of distortion, double meaning and interpretation into it. Rothfuss got as far as "sometimes nursery rhymes refer to real stuff" and then didn't bother with all the intricate plot origami that's supposed to go along with that.
I Have An Interrogative: 14
I Know Stuff: 5
For lack of a singular appropriate count. A common nursery rhyme with this direct a description of an evil force really does invite questions about why the Chandrian aren't taken more seriously, especially when we find out later that the Chandrian are pretty sensitive about being spoken or sung about. The result is that it reads like Rothfuss wants to show he knows nursery rhymes are significant, but doesn't actually know how or why.
Anyway, Devan gets partway through getting up to help Kvothe bury the scrael, then he passes out and bonks his head on the ground again for good measure. I maintain my assertion that I like how Devan's head injury is handled in the immediate aftermath of the scrael attack, but that second bonk does make his subsequently quick recovery that much less realistic. Oh well: it was good while it lasted.
Kvothe makes sure Devan is still breathing and accidentally bleeds all over him in the process, revealing that he hasn't come out of the scrael attack nearly as unscathed as he looks. It's a good detail that mitigates some of my annoyance at the contrivance of the whole scene, as we view Kvothe both from Devan's point of view (mystery badass single-handedly defeats a swarm of things that shouldn't exist and comes out without a scratch), and Kvothe's own (killed the things but holy shit ow). Kvothe sets to burying the scrael, and the chapter ends.
NaNoPadMo: 12
On principle, for the chapter as a whole. Yes, it's much more entertaining than the last bout of wheel-spinning, but it's still stretching Devan's journey out in a way that delays getting to the actual plot, and that arguably robs us of a much more powerful reveal of Kvothe's fight against the scrael later on.
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