In which I introduce the incredible notion that women are people.

“Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.” Emily Coates 

Wise Man’s fear would be the perfect book if Patrick Rothfuss could just stop being in love with his main character, Kvothe. Rothfuss is a skilled writer and proficient in building words, but everything in this book is about how awesome Kvothe is – when, in reality, he’s a 16 year old boy who sort of bumbles around. Mistakes do not happen to Kvothe, but if they do some crazy happenstance will swoop in and magically transform said mistake to a feat of beauty and wisdom.

I had high hopes for this book. I certainly recognised the faults of the first one, but I decided to overlook this in favor of enjoying humor and warmth and well-crafted entertaining ideas. Unfortunately wise man’s fear takes all the mistakes of The Name of the Wind and repeats them ad nauseum until the very concept of storytelling has been deconstructed into an old man flopping his collection of sexual conquests around in your face. Flop. Flop. Flop.

This book is twilight for dudes.

The book sort of starts where the last one left of; dealing with Kvothe’s crazy school antics and his weird interactions with Denna. We follow an excruciatingly long and boring subplot (there are a lot of those in this book) about breaking into his enemy’s room to retrieve Denna’s ring (Denna lost it because she was shtupping the enemy of the guy we’re supposed to believe she is secretly in love with). Which finally means that people are like “maybe you should take a semester off”. And as luck would have it (!) one of Kvothe’s rich friend’s is all, I know a rich dude you could stay with – far away, yai!

So he goes there and is immediately the best and wisest of the land – foiling an assassination plot, and assisting “old rich dude” in wooing “young pretty lady”. Then for a totally weird reason he’s sent on a weird side mission to hunt down some bandits along with some mercenaries. Kvothe uses LIGHTNING and wins that battle. Then he runs off with a 1000 year-old fairy in the forest and has sex for what feels like 700 pages.

And lets dwell here a moment, shall we (as apparently Rothfuss also decided to do for six thousand freaking boring pages). In the rest of the book, more stuff happens, but this part was just. I mean. A 16-year-old boy meets an immortal fairy whose sole purpose in life is to lure men to have sex with her, she’s done this for thousands of year in a parallel universe and, after she takes Kvothe’s virginity, she’s all like “That was your first time?! No way?! You pleased me like no other man ever has!” Which brings me back to my point: Twilight. For dudes.

Anyways, he gets back to the living world, completely without repercussions, but now the most skilled lover in the world. Then he has an adventure to the Adem society; a society based loosely on martial arts principles. Here women are the most skilled fighters; not because they are better than men, but because men just feel too much. Look, I recognise what Rothfuss is doing here. He doesn’t hate women, no he loves them, he actually thinks they’re better than men! It’s such an old fallacy that it would be laughable if he didn’t believe so earnestly that the Adem society was any sort of representation of the superiority of women.

Look, Patrick, women are people, men are people. Some men are emotional and let their feelings get away with them in a fight. Some women are emotional and let their feelings get away with them in a fight. Men are people. Women are also people! We are neither better or worse than men as a gender and we certainly do not need your adorable little favours. Please, no need to take out time in your busy schedule of portraying women as whores solely there to fulfil the needs of men. Especially not when you follow up with quotes like this.

“Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.”

This is an actual quote by Kvothe. Not only is he comparing women to objects; he’s suggesting that they cannot play music unless a man is skillful enough to extract it from her. I don’t care if you are a musician and instruments are, like, your favorite thing in the world. Women are people. We are not instruments. And we are certainly not just sitting around waiting for a dude to have sex with us, excuse me, I mean “extract our own true music”. This is Twilight. For dudes.

Anyways. In the rest of the book things happen. None of them seem to have any bearing to the overall story arch and absolutely none of them lead to any kind of character development in any of the characters. Kvothe is still insufferable – everything bad that happens to him is caused by his sheer stupidity and he always gets out of it by sheer luck. Coincidence does not a story make. I suppose there are other people in this book, but I would be hard pressed to even put a word to some of the other props that Rothfuss claims are characters.

And still. It’s like a bad boy, I know I shouldn’t, but it’s so funny, so well-told you almost forget that it’s a steaming horse turd of a book. This book is what happens when you give a child a barbie doll and they spend all day building the house and picking outfits and then mom calls for dinner, they look at the well-built house and the nameless doll and decide “Fuck it, Imma publish this shit”.

 

This rant was cross-posted on my blog.