First Impressions | Beginning R. Scott Bakker

Around the blogosphere of late, there's been a moderate amount of excitement about the release of The White Luck Warrior, by R. Scott Bakker. Orbit kindly sent along a review copy my way a couple of weeks ago, which I duly wrote up for The BoSS before filing the poor, misbegotten thing away next to my similarly unread edition of The Judging Eye.

This I did because The White Luck Warrior is volume two, and The Judging Eye volume one, of the second of three inextricably connected trilogies. And as we all know by now, I don't tend to start such stories anywhere except the start. But some of the praise lavished upon The White Luck Warrior has been such that I simply had to give this series a shot. Shall we say anything Wert can enjoy, I can enjoy better?

Well, perhaps. But there are a few sure-fire ways to ensure any given book gets my attention, and among those, comparisons to the work of one Guy Gavriel Kay will win the day, as like as not. I can't recall now who drew the parallels aforementioned, or where, but drawn they were, and my interest was promptly piqued. So I went ahead and bought the EPUB edition of The Darkness That Comes Before from kobobooks.com, to read on my shiny new eee Pad Transformer. I stripped away the DRM - apologies to Adobe Technologies, Orbit, the author, et al, but I'm afraid I have my ideals - and imported the tiny resulting file to Aldiko, which has quickly, despite a fair few hitches, become my e-book reader of choice.

And then?

Well... then I fell a little bit in love.

Because I can see the rationale behind the Guy Gavriel Kay comparisons; I can quite understand why someone would make them, given Bakker's impeccable craftsmanship. The man, I'll say, is a writer's writer. His language is simply phenomenal: measured, evocative, and perfectly poised. Bakker ably achieves the picturesque in his prose without - as yet - having fallen victim to the purple. The text of The Darkness That Comes Before is a thing of beauty, truly.

Yet the complexity of the world of this book, this trilogy, this trilogy of trilogies, simply staggers. Confounds me, even. You'll recall I only fell a little bit in love with The Darkness That Comes Before; that would be why. I'd have gone all-in otherwise, except there's just so much to come to terms with.


And that too would be well, but for the fact Bakker seems little concerned with questions of accessibility, even in this, the first novel of series supposedly nine long volumes long. He seems dreadfully prone to digression... to lengthy musings on imagined histories and philosophies which, however informative, however pretty and pretty impressive - and they are - serve to stall the narrative before it's even begun to gain the sense of momentum I'm sorely missing.

There's a quote from a review on the Amazon.co.uk listing of The Darkness That Comes Before which quite encapsulates my feelings in this regard. So sayeth one Cynthia Ward:

"Bakker attempts to make his complex world clear to readers by filling the prologue and opening chapters with the names of characters, gods, cities, tribes, nations, religions, factions, and sorcery schools. For many readers, this approach will have the opposite effect of clarity. It's like demonstrating snowflake structure with a blizzard."

My progress with The Darkness That Comes Before has thus been slow, so far. I'm perhaps 150 pages in, merely a third of the way through, and that's after three reading sessions before bed on three consecutive nights... sessions which so often see evening turn to night and night return to morning. That hasn't happened with this one, not yet; though I can certainly see the day coming, if only Bakker would pick up the pace some. As is, The Darkness That Comes Before seems to be going nowhere fast, and I'm getting nowhere fast with it.

Yet Bakker's language is undeniably lovely; his prose so beautifully, beautifully hewn it's a real treat irrespective of what narrative it may or may not serve; and what little tale-telling there's been in this first book of The Prince of Nothing, I've been absolutely enraptured by. For instance the lengthy prologue, set a full 2000 years before the story's primary thrust (as I understand it), was phenomenal. If there's more of that, and I expect there will be, just as soon as all the foundation stones have been levered into place... well. I'll gladly cast the rest of my chips into the pot for that book, and make no mistake.


So onwards!

And with a little white luck, upwards too. Fingers firmly crossed...

What say you all on the subject of R. Scott Bakker, anyway? I understand he's a somewhat outspoken sort, and as I touched on at the outset, the excitement surrounding his latest publication has been palpable around and about the speculative aspect of the blogosphere. Yet he doesn't sell terribly well, does he?

Speaking of which, am I wrong to vaguely recall some talk of Bakker quitting the writing game entirely? I've only this little experience of his work, and already I think that'd be a desperately sad day for genre readers everywhere.