By Tanith Lee. Pulp pap, of course. I knew that when I bought it, you can tell from the cover. But good or bad pap? Middling-verging-towards-the-bad-side I think. But nonetheless I did finish reading it, and did quite enjoy perhaps the first two thirds.The cover, whilst fantastical, does as so often somehow summarise the book: a beautiful fragile woman helpless in the protection of a strong manly warrior. Indeed, as several Goodreads reviewers - well, practically every reviewer - note, women get a pretty bad book: largely passive, just waiting to be raped it seems. If TL weren't female this would be rather pathetic male fantasy; as she is, it is... hard to explain. Maybe it is what she thought the genre demanded. Just possibly it is a reductio-ad-absurdam of the conventions of the genre. But the female fragility is amenable to need: sometimes they die at a touch, but where necessary they survive long enough to give birth to a future plot character.
Does the book have anything to say, or is it merely fantasy epic for fun? I tend to the latter. For example, things are kinda poorly thought out - one example of which is that there's a map in the front, but it is missing many of the places visited in the text. A better example is the lowlands telepathy. In the book, this is merely part of their passivity - they don't, on the whole, speak. But it would be a valuable skill, with many obvious applications, not least military. None of that is explored.
In the end Our Hero rides off into the sunset, discarding any obligation to help out and fix the mess he has made, to help build society anew.
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