Terry Brooks had a very clear intention when, in an attempt to combat the boredom of law school, he began his now-famous Shannara series: to write a classical adventure story. "An adventure story, something wonderfully dangerous, filled with hair-raising escapes, men and women of character and purpose, dangers that threatened from every quarter -- that was what I wanted to write and that was how I would escape the mind-numbing predictability of law life." ¹ Throughout his long career, in each of his Shannara books, his focus has been to entertain, to take the reader on a ride that they can see and hear and feel and to instill in them that heady sense of wonder and excitement that only good fantasy can provide. While his characters always struggled internally with variations on classic heroic angst, the characters always seemed a vehicle for an exciting story, not the other way around.
With the publication of Running with the Demon in 1997, however, Brooks's focus shifted inward. Subtitled "A Novel of Good and Evil," Demon was the first book of the Word and the Void trilogy, essentially a pre-apocalyptic urban fantasy dealing with an ongoing and very existential struggle between the magically empowered Knights of the Word and the demons serving the Void. Given the post-apocalyptic nature of the Shannara universe and the various hints given by Brooks that the epic fantasy series was actually set in a far future version of our own world, it wasn't too surprising when he decided to connect the two stories. The release of Armageddon's Children (and subsequently, its sequel, The Elves of Cintra), first book in the Genesis of Shannara trilogy, canonized the struggle of the Knights of the Word as the ultimate precursor to the Shannara stories.
The first two Genesis books set the stage for the apocalypse. Set in a near future United States where the government and civilized life as we know it has already been wiped out, the characters, consisting of two Knights of the Word, a group of street children, and the reclusive Elves, are poised at the brink of a final, more devastating disaster. The Gypsy Morph, Book Three of the trilogy, offers an anticlimactic conclusion to a promising story. There is adventure to be found in the Genesis of Shannara, but it seems to be primarily located in the first two volumes. While Armageddon's Children and The Elves of Cintra saw the motley band of good guys escaping the devastation of their homes and setting out on journeys both perilous and filled with adventure, The Gypsy Morph sees them struggling to journey's end in comparative exhaustion, with little but overwrought emotional drama to occupy them as they reach their destination. Although we enjoyed the read and thought the book had a few great points to its name, ultimately, we were unsatisfied.
]]> CJ and I both read The Gypsy Morph, sharing a review copy I received in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Ultimately, we both remarked on essentially the same things, and generally agreed on what we liked and disliked about the novel.Brooks bookends the story with a short account of a new character, Wills. Without going into too much detail (since spoilers are a concern here), the Wills character is one who has no direct involvement with the main characters or their converging plotlines but whose influence on the larger picture is enormous. As a storytelling device, this aspect of The Gypsy Morph made the novel a more gripping, evocative piece of fiction. Wills's personal demons are just that: personal. This disconnected but central character is haunted not by the vicious creatures that hunt Logan Tom and his companions, but by the decidedly non-magical demons of his own psyche. The message seems to be that even when the enemy is at the gates, the fiercest struggle lies within.
This internal focus on character is common in Brooks's writing these days. When he does it well, he does it very well, but at points following the constant emotional dialogue of each character gets boring. With an increase in the number of point of view characters (as compared to his earlier fantasy work) comes a tendency on the part of the author to set a scene, then cycle through several characters' thoughts about that scene, their thoughts about their fellow characters, their thoughts about their fellow characters' thoughts ... you see where this is going. To put it bluntly, characters in Terry Brooks novels do a lot of sitting around thinking about their situation. This first became noticeable for me in the Word and the Void, in which Nest Freemark and John Ross' penchant for solitary maundering compliments the tone of those novels more appropriately. We enjoyed it there, but in a Shannara novel we expected more adventure and less contemplation.
This is not to say, of course, that the story is entirely lacking in action. A couple of battles with demons and one abduction in the night enliven things, but overall the book is more about tying up looses ends than introducing new conflict.
Plotwise, The Gypsy Morph is simple: following the events of The Elves of Cintra, the various, scattered characters begin moving toward each other, all following the reappearance of Hawk, who has returned from his sojourn in the gardens of the King of the Silver River aware of his true identity and newfound power but painfully ignorant as to his role, other than a vague sense of where to lead his followers. Some of the action occurs off-camera, so to speak, as the author struggles to bring every different plotline to its conclusion.
Hawk, the eponymous gypsy morph, is a particularly impotent character in this novel. The first half of the trilogy seemed to be setting him up to be a leader of some note, but once revealed as the gypsy morph, quite the opposite happened. Hawk began as a divinely-inspired yet practical chieftain for his followers, a Moses for his own time, destined to lead his Ghosts and anyone who chose to join them to the promised land. After discovering that he was at least partially a creature of magic, Hawk came back as a mere bloodhound, guiding the survivors instinctually, in fact but not in spirit, to a destination even he could not envision. Ironically, Mr. Brooks spent more time exploring the internal dialogues of supporting characters than he did Hawk. A potentially great fantasy protagonist went from complex character to vehicle for deus ex machina -- which, of course, is exactly where this story has been heading all along.
Hawk's character is representative of the theme of faith that is inherent to the work of Terry Brooks. Just as Brooks has always refused to delve into the mechanics of his system of magic and the world of fairy from which it derives, with Hawk he chooses not to explore the nature of his supernatural side farther than the simple declaration that Hawk is partly human, partly a being of elemental magic. Hawk himself knows no more than that. The fairies and the magic they represent are not characters in and of themselves as they are, essentially, in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, and the reader is left to take a lot on faith, much like Hawk's own band of doubtful followers.
Those hoping to see an overt connection to the Shannara future at the end of this trilogy may be disappointed, but looking back it could only have ended in the way that it does. The ending is one of the book's strengths and readers may be surprised by how it happens, but the fact that the story is well-bracketed with strong beginnings and endings does not make up for the mediocrity of its middle.
Needless to say, the span of time between the end of this story and the beginnings of the world of Shannara we know and love will prove an immense and fertile ground for sequels to Genesis.
¹ Terry Brooks, Author's Note on The Sword of Shannara, http://www.terrybrooks.net/novels/shannara/sword-note.html, 1991.
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