Solar Flare: Science Fiction News

The Stone of Farewell is book two of Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn fantasy sequence. I was fairly impressed by book one, The Dragonbone Chair, so could Williams maintain the quality for the second book?

Well his writing is certainly as skillful as ever, unfortunately the slow pace of the first part of The Dragonbone Chair returns in The Stone of Farewell and it doesn't speed up. There's a lot of redundancy in this book. It's great for building atmosphere and presenting us with a fully realized world, but more than once I found myself wishing that Williams would just get to the point.

I've seen it said more than once that High Fantasy stories are largely travelogues. That is clearly true of The Lord of the Rings, which is the defining work in the genre. While I'm not sure it's always true, The Stone of Farewell certainly fits this pattern.

All of the central characters in this book go on one journey or another. In the case of many characters, all they do is go on a journey and you do have to wonder if all this traveling couldn't have been achieved with a few less words typed.

But this review is sounding a little more negative than I really intended. There is a lot to enjoy in this book. Simon shows slow but steady growth from boy into man and while his whining can be annoying at times it very much fits the teenager that he is.

We also start to get a feel for the larger picture. There is a lot more going on here than the fate of one human kingdom and while we still don't really know how it all fits together, or even how the three swords are connected, we definitely are given the feeling that the whole world is threatened.

Perhaps one of the reasons that I found myself frustrated with the slow pace of this book is because I really do care about how things will turn out. The characters have been so well developed that I'm interested in their individual fates. Williams has piled on the misery and gloom so thickly that I'm just keeping my fingers crossed they will catch a break eventually.