The Autumn Castle

[stillsostrange]

I'm about a quarter through now and enjoying it a lot. Wilkins' prose is clean, in breath of fresh air sort of way. Not cluttered with scaffolding and too many 'ing' verbs and weaselly junk. I have a huge prose hang-up lately that can trip me out of an otherwise good story. GGK does some things breathtakingly well, but--at least in StS so far--I find his overall prose bland and untight (I won't go so far as to call it sloppy, but...). My red pen hand starts to twitch after a few pages. Wilkins doesn't trigger that response, and I am happy.

But the villain... Oh dear. He's Eeeevil. In that spoiled child with no moral compass kind of way. I believe in such people all too well, but they're not very interesting. And he gets equal pov time, so there's not even any ambiguity about it. Nope, he's Eeeeevil all right.

Back to work...

ETA: I should add, in the villain's defense, that he doesn't think of himself as evil. He's definitely the hero of his own weird little movie. He doesn't run about wringing his hands and cackling. But he's still Eeevil, and I find narry a trace of sympathy for him.

Comments

[shawn-scarber.livejournal.com]

I heard so many people sing praises over GGK's prose, and then I started reading Song of Arbonne, and now I'm wondering what they were talking about. I find it very hard to read now without getting over critical of what I read.