Vignettes in the Life of a Professional Monster Hunter

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish, (tr.) Danusia Stok, Great Britain, Gollancz, 2007, pp. 384.

Andrzej Sapkowski (b. 1948) is a Polish fantasy writer. He is best known for his book series, The Witcher. His books have been translated into about 20 languages. The current book I am reviewing is considered the first book in the series and is a compilation of short stories the author had written before.

I first came to know about Andrzej Sapkowski when I came across the Witcher games. When it comes to fantasy stories I have always been particularly drawn towards dark fantasy. The morally ambiguous world of Gerald of Rivia (the protagonist of the series) perfectly fitted my taste in the genre so I thought I might go and explore the novels from which the games are derived.

 The Witchers, in plain language, are monster hunters for hire. Trained since childhood and genetically modified through experiments they are stronger and have greater abilities than almost all human beings. They inhabit a world which was originally populated by elves and other supernatural creatures but with the arrival of human beings everything changed. With their fast-growing numbers and agricultural techniques, humans slowly took over the land, pushing the supernatural creatures into the periphery or reducing them to a second-tier status within their lands. The Witchers emerged 300 years before Gerald’s birth when this confrontation was still strong and society needed the help of warriors to fight these creatures. By the time of Gerald, the confrontation has winded down and humanity emerged victorious. Though there are still occasional fights for which Witchers are in high demand, overall their place in the world has gone down.

It is in this environment, where the high time of the Witchers is gone, that Gerald goes around making his living by ridding the world of supernatural creatures. Refusing to take sides in any conflict, he prefers to stick to his professional task at hand. As he states to a man who offers him a lot of money to not finish a task he had undertaken,

“But I, Lord Ostrit, do not care about politics, or the successions to thrones, or revolutions in palaces. I am here to accomplish my task. Have you never heard of a sense of responsibility and plain honesty? About professional ethics?”

Or another time when he was offered a large reward to kill a princess by a wizard because she was considered to have evil mutations within her, which in time would make her into a monster. A claim Gerald considered as absurd and therefore refused, stating he only killed monsters for money. When pressed by the wizard that it was the lesser evil he responded,

“Evil is evil, Stregobor,’ said the witcher seriously as he got up. ‘Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit, I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”

The stories themselves are mostly based on a reworking of J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world mixed with more European folklore (particularly Slavic mythology). From what I understand, the later books in the series follow the novel format but the current book comprises of seven short stories of monster hunting undertaken by Gerald. They have been appropriately made more violent and, to put it succinctly, sexed up for a contemporary audience.

For example, the story of the princess and the wizard I mentioned above is based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. While the Disney version of the story had been made extremely kid friendly I am not sure the original had as much violence as Sapkowski’s version (It’s been some time since I read the original Snow White story). In the book, Snow White (she is named Shrike in the tale) is kept trapped in a tower by the Wizard and her step-mom, besides multiple other princesses in various locations, in fear of their supposed mutations. In time, many of these princesses are killed off. Accordingly, the step-mom sends Shrike to the forest with a hunter to be killed but he takes pity on her and spares her, after taking her belongings and raping her. Shrike puts a brooch-pin into his brain and runs for it. After moving around a bit, and trying to stay alive by sleeping with men for a bowl of soup if necessary, she falls into the company of seven gnomes. They become bandits together and begin terrifying travellers. Eventually, Shrike begins hunting her tormentors who start dying in mysterious ways. She ultimately becomes the chief favourite of a prince, whose father and siblings mysteriously die making him king before he himself ends up dead. When the Witcher story begins, this hyper-violent version of Snow White confronts Gerald as the Wizard asks for his help to take her down.

There are other stories with fairy-tale motifs as well. There is a story based on the Beauty and the Beast while in another tale the author mentions the story of Cinderella in passing, she being a girl who somehow got chopped into pieces at midnight leaving behind just her left glass slipper (not that the original with the step-sisters chopping their feet to fit the slipper was any less gruesome).

But it is not completely doom and gloom in the book. There is a fair bit of action and humour which make it an enjoyable read. Though I won’t consider the book worth reading more than once but I would recommend it to people as something worth reading on a pleasurable afternoon.

War and Adventure in a Fantasy Land

Joe Abercrombie, The First Law: Book One: The Blade Itself, 2006, Gollancz, London, e-book, pp. 544.

Joe Abercrombie, The First Law: Book Two: Before they are Hanged, 2007, Gollancz, London, e-book, pp. 592.

Joe Abercrombie, The First Law: Book Three: Last Argument of Kings, 2008, Gollancz, London, e-book, pp. 704.

Joe Abercrombie is a British fantasy writer and film editor. He is most famous for his fantasy trilogy called The First Law, which I am currently reviewing.

Fantasy and detective fiction are two genres of fiction I absolutely love. They are what I might term as my guilty pleasure. Recently, I was sick and while waiting to recover I decided to read Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series. Dealing with a Fantasy Land where war is happening between different regions it chronicles the heroics of a small group of adventurers who set out to fight an evil that plans to bring the whole world to its knees, or so the storyline makes us believe at the beginning. By the end the books completely overturn this well-worn cliché in fantasy books and makes you wonder, evil was stopped no doubt but did good really triumph?

The characterisations are particularly good and complex in the book, especially for a fantasy tale. Told from the perspective of multiple main characters the book allows us to see different situations in different light. The two main protagonist of the books are undoubtedly Logen “Bloody-Nine” Ninefingers and Sand Dan Glokta. Logen is the most famous, or maybe better to term infamous, warrior from the Northern wilderness. He has spent his whole life in war and slaughtered men, women and children in a manner so ruthless that it leaves most battle hardened warriors from the North quaking in their shoes. Though he has lived a violent life, Logen in his middle age has started regretting it. Having lost all his family to war he wishes to make amends but does not know where to begin. A chance misfortune sends him tumbling, both figuratively and literally, out of the North and he ends up journeying to save the “world”. Though his past is always hinted at, it is not until the third book that we get to see his dark and violent side when he returns home.

Sand Dan Glokta on the other hand is a torturer and member of the Royal Inquisition in the Kingdom of Union. He is not a member of this merry band of adventurers but has a different trajectory in the books which overlaps with theirs at times. An intelligent, handsome and promising young colonel in the army, he was captured in war by the Gurkish Empire a few years before the start of the book. He was tortured for 2 years straight in the Emperor’s prison until a prisoner swab was held and he came back home. He described the experience to another character in this manner,

“I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go.”

The experience left him permanently disfigured and crippled. Intensely loathed by most people due to his disfigurement and cruelty as a torturer, the man is one of the few people amongst his colleagues to have a conscience. Yet at the same time he completely ignores it and throughout the whole book he keeps asking questions of himself, why does he do what he does? Why does he continue living when his life has nothing but pain? Some of the other characters are just as complex and interesting, particularly Bayaz, the first of the Magi.

The story is also compact and does not meander much. The goal throughout the book is to find an otherworldly stone filled with magical powers to fight the Gurkish, who have over the centuries created around 100 people called Eaters who have supernatural powers. The first book starts off slowly as it brings together the different characters of the book. The second book mainly chronicles the adventurers on route to their quest to the edge of the world while the third book chronicles the fallout after they come back. The third book overturns much of the personalities of the characters that we witness until then, and we get to see the dark and violent side underneath the surface for many of them. Though I have to admit, I didn’t particularly like the ending. I enjoy bittersweet endings but the author pushes the envelope on the meaning of the word ‘bittersweet’ for there is not much ‘sweet’ in it. Overall, it is a good series to pass your time without thinking too deeply about it.

A Blast into the Past

J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany & Jack Thorne, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: Parts One and Two, Kindle edition, 2016, pp. 241.

Joanne Rowling, who writes under the pen name J.K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist and screenwriter best known for writing the Harry Potter fantasy series. The books have won multiple awards and sold more than 400 million books to become the best-selling book series in history. It has also been the basis for a series of super hit movies.

John Tiffany is an English theatre director and has directed many international successful productions such as Black Watch and One.

Jack Thorne is an English screenwriter and playwright who has written for radio, theatre, film and most notably for TV shows.

The reviewed book is a rehearsal script for a play which was performed in London in June 2016. It is a two-part stage play written by Jack Thorne based on an original new story by Thorne, J.K. Rowling and John Tiffany. A continuation of the Harry Potter series of fantasy books, it is officially considered as its eighth instalment. The book begins nineteen years after the events described in the seventh Potter book. It follows Harry Potter, now a Ministry of Magic employee, and his younger son Albus Severus Potter, who is about to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

In many ways the Harry Potter books have a special place in my heart, for my love for fiction was, to a large extent, fostered by them. While I was growing up reading books for entertainment was not a very popular thing in my neighbourhood. Though we used to read comics but books were a big no. My elder sibling did have a small store of a few Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton, fairy tales, etc. But these books, after a certain age, are not ones you feel like revisiting. The first ‘proper’ fiction which I read happened to be Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the fourth book in the series). A neighbour’s relative while visiting had brought the book and happening to see it, I borrowed it. I sat down to read it and was hooked. I finished the book in a single sitting lasting 14 hours and after I was done, reread it again. After 2 days I returned the book and became a lifelong fan. For the next few years I slowly collected the rest of the books in the series and read them. But for a long time they were the only piece of ‘good’ fiction I owned and therefore I would reread them again and again. I have reread every single book in the series at least thrice and some more than a dozen times. It was only towards the end of my schooldays that I began reading other fiction. Though it would be incorrect to denote the Harry Potter books as the only reason for my turn towards books but it was one of the major reasons for it.

Therefore, when I turned towards this new addition to the series it was both with excitement and mixed feelings. I have actually had the book with me for more than a year but only chose to read it very recently. People who have read until now might be a bit surprised considering how I have characterised myself as a big Harry Potter fan. There were a few reasons for it. Firstly, I just don’t read as much fiction anymore. From once reading 50-60 fiction per year I have severely cut down on it. Nowadays I mostly stick to non-fiction. Secondly, in many ways the Harry Potter novels closed with a very satisfying ending and I did not know how to react to one more book in the series. Thirdly, the new book is not a novel. It is a rehearsal script for a play which is not even written by J.K. Rowling but “based” on a new story by her. To understand the problem please allow me to elaborate.

A rehearsal script means that the whole book consists only of dialogues and to really appreciate it we have to go and see the play. I have only once before read something of this sort. It was a novel adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Poirot play Black Coffee. I hated the experience as reading the overdramatized story was downright painful. In a play I might have liked it, in a novel I hated it. Secondly, most of the writing was done by Jack Thorne. My experience with book continuations written by other authors after the original author stops has been generally dreadful. For example, I read the continuations of the classic mafia novel the Godfather by Mario Puzo. Written by Mark Winegardner and called The Godfather: The Lost Years and The Godfather’s Revenge I hated them. The author completely changed the personalities of multiple major characters because of which it felt like I was reading up about strangers instead of some familiar friends with whom I had got acquainted during the course of Godfather.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child turned out to be a mixed bag. It did not manage to either disappoint me as badly as I feared nor reach the heights of the original series. The story begins with Albus Potter reaching Hogwarts. A quirk of fate results in him becoming best friends with Scorpius Malfoy, son of Draco Malfoy one of Harry’s worst enemy during his student years. He then ends up getting sorted into Slytherin and finds out he doesn’t quite have the talents his father is famous for. This leads to his increasing bullying in Hogwarts and his estrangement from his father. Albus becomes fixated on saving Cedric Diggory, the boy who died in the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when he overhears Amos Diggory talking about his son’s death with Harry. He and Scorpius therefore use Time Turners to go back into the past and change the outcome which unfortunately has unforeseen results in the present.

At the outset, the plot is a little bit thin. Albus after hearing Amos talking about his son with Harry only once decides to go out of his way to rectify the past? But if we ignore this glaring problem with the plot and start imagining how it would look in a play, well you could see some of the magic again. The book is also extremely funny at times. Nonetheless, I wish Thorne had not mutilated Ron Weasley’s character. He has been turned into a buffoon to provide the laughs in the play. Though funny, it goes completely against his personality. All in all, as a Potter fan I enjoyed taking a ride back into nostalgia land.