To Green Angel Tower Book

Well, that was... something. Tad Williams, it seems, was ahead of his time in having the final volume of something have to be split across two volumes, as I actually read To Green Angel Tower across two paperbacks, each of which had 800 pages. It was a very long, meandering, interesting journey, at times bogged down by tedium, but at times full of tension, building up to a dramatic finale.

In writing about the first book of this series I mentioned that this is kind of like a brother to The Wheel of Time and early Guy Gavriel Kay. Like, it's really interesting to see how it fits in the lineage of fantasy - you can see both the parts where it was obviously inspired by the likes of Tolkien and the parts where it has provided some inspiration to some of those who have come since in turn. For me, finding this trilogy years later, it's like looking into an old family photograph and seeing a picture of an uncle you'd never seen before. Maybe you only knew his name because it was mentioned in passing a couple of times.

Then it's kind of stunning to see how he looks like the rest of the family but he's also his own person, and you kinda wish you knew what his story was. In real life if this happened you probably wouldn't know about this uncle because he's in jail or something, so obviously this analogy isn't perfect. Imagine if he walked through that door one day, though, and wanted to tell you all about his life story in great detail. Some things would bore you, but mostly you'd be really curious, and he's a good storyteller, your uncle, and since you've thought about him your whole life you'd want to hear about it all anyway. That's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.

Epic fantasy, swords and sorcery and all that at some times, kind of a gothic horror at others, prose that gives off a legitimate sense of dread. It's a fun read, though it's dense; even a long book doesn't usually take me almost a month to plow through. That's not because it was boring, though, but because I wanted to savor it, and I did. It isn't something to rush through. There are many strands to the plot, all over the world, and unsurprisingly, they all come together in ways that I didn't expect, although of course I'm not exactly notorious as a plot guesser anyway.

Cheesy at times, yes, wrapped up in fantasy cliches that were perhaps a bit more fresh in the late 1980s but have been tread many more times in the years since, sure. But then again, humans have told a lot of stories by now and it's hard to make something that's completely unlike anything that's been done before. What you can do is build a world that is all its own, with a rich history that is not just another Europe analogue, fill it up with characters, and make stuff happen. I liked the journey up the fantasy family tree.