I wrote something about the first Falcon Lord book last month, here.
I would now like to add a few words about the sequel, the title of which also serves as the headline to this blog entry.
I can't be as enthusiastic. We return to the same familiar island and meet the old gang again, and the plot is handled well -- a nice mix of the new the old, and some twists on the elements that are carried over.
BUT ... Metrov's command of prose style seems to have left him. I'll give just one sentence by way of example.
In the midst of the climactic battle of good and evil, when all his epic machinery comes together, Metrov writes this: "The fighters became pawns in a dizzying ballet, a symphony, cacophonous and head-splitting, orchestrated by a devil's baton."
There are lots of ways in which I hate that sentence.
Let's start with the end: "orchestrated by a devil's baton." An orchestra might be conducted by a devil, and by a natural metonymy it might also be conducted by the devil's baton. But the music is not "orchestrated" by a baton. Orchestration, the adaptation of a piece of music for an orchestra, and perhaps for a particular performance, is something that is done with a pen (if you're old-school) or with a computer, not a baton. This sort of misfired metaphor just sends us away from the battle entirely.
But now back up ... are these fighters caught in a ballet, or are they being bombarded by a symphony? The two images are quite different, the latter a good deal more passive than the former, and their juxtaposition without a by-your-leave in the middle of these sentence helps describe or evoke this battle not at all.
Back up again ... "pawns in a dizzying ballet"??? There are some ballets with chess games in the development of the story, and thus with dancing pawns as characters. But I can't imagine that such a ballet is more 'dizzying' than another -- not at any rate for the dancers who were playing the pawns, who are the ostensible subject of our interest here.
The writer seems to have forgotten at this point that "pawn" has a simple literal meaning known to people, and that its use as a word for "dupe" or "tool of the powerful" is a metaphorical extension of that literal meaning.
Personally, I think he would have been better off sticking with the dance metaphor throughout. In that case, this sentence might read, "The fighters became unwitting dancers in a dizzying ballet, one in which their feet moved to music that was head-splittingly cacophonous, orchestrated by the devil himself."
Just trying to help.
I would now like to add a few words about the sequel, the title of which also serves as the headline to this blog entry.
I can't be as enthusiastic. We return to the same familiar island and meet the old gang again, and the plot is handled well -- a nice mix of the new the old, and some twists on the elements that are carried over.
BUT ... Metrov's command of prose style seems to have left him. I'll give just one sentence by way of example.
In the midst of the climactic battle of good and evil, when all his epic machinery comes together, Metrov writes this: "The fighters became pawns in a dizzying ballet, a symphony, cacophonous and head-splitting, orchestrated by a devil's baton."
There are lots of ways in which I hate that sentence.
Let's start with the end: "orchestrated by a devil's baton." An orchestra might be conducted by a devil, and by a natural metonymy it might also be conducted by the devil's baton. But the music is not "orchestrated" by a baton. Orchestration, the adaptation of a piece of music for an orchestra, and perhaps for a particular performance, is something that is done with a pen (if you're old-school) or with a computer, not a baton. This sort of misfired metaphor just sends us away from the battle entirely.
But now back up ... are these fighters caught in a ballet, or are they being bombarded by a symphony? The two images are quite different, the latter a good deal more passive than the former, and their juxtaposition without a by-your-leave in the middle of these sentence helps describe or evoke this battle not at all.
Back up again ... "pawns in a dizzying ballet"??? There are some ballets with chess games in the development of the story, and thus with dancing pawns as characters. But I can't imagine that such a ballet is more 'dizzying' than another -- not at any rate for the dancers who were playing the pawns, who are the ostensible subject of our interest here.
The writer seems to have forgotten at this point that "pawn" has a simple literal meaning known to people, and that its use as a word for "dupe" or "tool of the powerful" is a metaphorical extension of that literal meaning.
Personally, I think he would have been better off sticking with the dance metaphor throughout. In that case, this sentence might read, "The fighters became unwitting dancers in a dizzying ballet, one in which their feet moved to music that was head-splittingly cacophonous, orchestrated by the devil himself."
Just trying to help.
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