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Peter V. Brett
Harper/ Voyager 2008
ISBN: 978-0-00-727615-8
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One of the things that has always bugged me about a lot of Science Fantasy writing has been the apparent need of the author to exposit on every single facet of the major protagonists' development. Sure, situation and context are important, but do we really need to know every damn thing that happened as our (inevitable - it is Fantasy, after all) hero grows from callow youth into clueless adulthood? Just as obviously, writers whose narrative fall back on the bastard child of deus ex machinae and fait d'accompli or, like Topsy, the character was just growed...
In The Painted Man, Peter V. Brett [making a relatively auspicious debut] manages to avoid boring us all to tears as he gives us, if this were a recap of the Premier League, and extended highlights package of our three, main protagonists and the actions and events that shape their lives. With each specific character vignette , Brett increasing narrows the focus of his narrative intent, drawing the reader's attention to character aspects, be it flaws or positive traits that come to mark and refine them as they move forward into the increasingly important interactions of the developing story. That being said, while Brett shapes the lives of his characters well and has them progress along their paths in a logical and ordered fashion there is, at times, a certain clunkiness to his characterisations (on a human level) that clearly denotes an author still learning certain aspects of his craft and, further, one whose literary scope is world and narrative in stead of character driven. This is not to suggest that the characters are either unsympathetic or a poor fit for their world but rather that they bear the mark of poorly sanded stereotypes whose edges creak alarmingly as they go around corners: especially the female lead, Leesha, who, sadly at times, reads like an introductory guide to Woman's Studies at a somewhat addled university and Arlen, one of the male leads, whose guilt-induced revenge fantasies come straight out of the psychiatrists Dessk Reference (junior edition).
Don't let the above dissuade you from reading The Painted Man, for it is a good read. Brett has a easy, approachable style that is warm and inclusive and has the hallmarks of classic story-telling. The prose itself is not, by any stretch, sophisticated, on a par - perhaps - with Jordan or Feist, certainly nothing like the verbal complexities we have come to expect from the esteemed Mr Erikson and this is, to my mind, a good thing. The Painted Man relies on readers being swept along by the pace and flair of its narrative and if Brett were to stray from this path into bloated exposition, which neither his world nor characters could bear the weight of, The Painted Man would grind to an undignified halt. For that matter, don't expect to get weighted down with grand flights of intellectual complexity . While, as I mentioned above, Brett's characters suffer a bit from amateur psycholgist's-hour syndrome, the construction of his world is (mercifully) bereft of such nonsense. The world of The Painted Man is, in essence, the everyman world of solid fantasy that is, Hamlets, Farms, Small towns etc although there is, to raise the world above the merely humdrum a solid, if unspectacular, history woven into the narrative which gives a solid, rational explanation for the actions that take place in this book (and I see, from Amazon, a second is to be released in 2009). As I stated above, with reference to the characters, events don't just happen in the world of the Painted Man, the happen because their is precedent, history and reason for such to do so and because of this you can forgive a little gaucherie every now and then.
Those of you not asleep by this point will have noted that I haven't been particularly forthcoming with the plot. Frankly, I think to do so would be do do The Painted Man a dis-service in that the simplicity of the initial ideas will lead one to believe that The Painted Man is not worth the time such is its debt to many of the time-honoured tropes of Fantasy writing but, whilst acknowledging the existence of a debt should necessarily prelude the idea that the writer can actually do something useful and - indeed - new with them and in this I believe Brett has succeeded. There is also the point that The Painted Man is clearly a set up for a more (I desperately hope) complex series of interactions to follow.
In conclusion, The Painted Man is not the most challenging work of fantasy ever written and it has its faults (as one would expect of an author moving without their training wheels for the first time) but it is fun, it is engaging and it is worth your time.
This post has been edited by iscariot: 26 October 2008 - 04:46 AM
