I recently borrowed a The Knight from a friend. Part one of a duology called The Wizard Knight. Strongly rooted in Norse mythology, this fantasy follows a young boy as he stumbles into a land of fairies and giants, seeking to remember his past and become a hero.
In some ways this is a conventional fantasy, such as Able's origin in our world, but in other ways it is completely new to me. One of these new elements is the plot...or lack thereof. When reading, one usually expects a hook, a stirring rise, and a dramatic peak to the action, before dropping off to a conclusion of some kind. Not so, The Knight. With this story, the main plot seems to take place in the background, rather brought to light by inference as Able, narrating in the first person, throws in comments about grand battles and convoluted politics that happen outside the tedious day to day wanderings of the confused hero.
SEMI-SPOILER ALERT
What we the audience see, Able stumbles out of a cave where an Overcyn gives him a bow string. Then he wanders into a forest and meets an old man who takes care of him. Then he meets a knight who sends him back into the forest where he meets a fairy queen. She turns him into a strapping, handsome man. When he goes back to the knight he gets lost and finds a woman and her baby. Later on he gets a dog. Able leaves the woods and travels to a town and gets on a ship, thinking to lose the dog. He beats up the captain, pirates attack, and the dog catches up. After Able gets wounded the dog jumps overboard to find help and fairies take Able to the sea and teach him the way of water. He climbs a tower and drinks some water. By the time he gets back to the ship, years have gone by. The ship takes him to a town where he goes into a volcano, meets a dragon, and years pass. He finds the ship again, and the dog. Then he goes to become a knight and gets sent on an adventure after picking a fight with the local knights and hunting for the fairy queen. Then the dog comes back.
The actual story seems to pick up sometime in the latter half of the book, but even then, one is not certain what the point of the whole book is exactly. But the great thing is that none of that matters. The story is beautifully written and simply making sense of it all is half the fun. And the magic is rendered in a refreshingly clever way: many books have lately tried to make magic more of a science (Harry Potter comes to mind, as does Howl's Moving Castle and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG) but The Knight takes the magic spells and sorcery cookbooks back to the basics by making magic strange and more elemental. My favorite example was when the fairy queen kisses Able and declares that he belongs to her. Able's response: "I knew it was true." Magic!
Now I'm on to the second book, The Wizard. It promises - for now - to be much more linear, though some of the fairy-land frolicking does come into play from time to time, and seemingly random characters are still cropping up without notice. The dog is back, Able is looking for trouble, and there is still no word from America. I'll write again once I've read to the end.
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