I just finished rereading The Shamer Chronicles for the third time and I can’t get these books out of my head. It’s rare for me to read anything more than once, so, obviously, I love these books a lot, but maybe, if I write about them somewhere, then I’ll be able to forget about them for now.
I don’t really read much fantasy, which is because most fantasy writers do nothing but rip off Tolkien, and LotR made me snore. I’m not particularly fond of wizards running around the place with their magical wands in hand and reciting spells, or righteous heroes riding their unrealistically endurable horses while hypocritically waving their swords around and trying to destroy the root of all evil.
The latest fantasy series I picked up was A Song of Ice and Fire, and the reason why I picked it up was because it’s the polar opposite of most fantasy out there. It’s set in a Crapsack World, is very gritty, and is firmly set on the Cynicism side of the Sliding Scale. But now that I think about it, it’s the opposite of The Shamer Chronicles too.
The Shamer Chronicles are extremely idealistic, have black and white morality, and the peasants live pretty good lives, there don’t even seem to be any feudal lords to chase them around. There are City States all over the place, and going with all logic they should be having war every weekend, but for some reason it’s very peaceful up to the point where the Big Bad rolls in.
…So shouldn’t I dislike this series?
The Shamer Chronicles are, first and foremost, very original. Seriously, how many fantasy books out there have a protagonist whose power is to shame people? And how many fantasy books do not kill off said protagonist’s family in the first chapters of the book? Seriously? The books lack a lot standard fantasy cheese. There are no suspiciously intelligent dragons, no dwarves or elves and no evil wizard sitting in his evil tower surrounded by his evil land populated by evil creatures.
And there’s a difference between being cheesy and standing up for morality.
I am a fan of shounen, but one has to admit it has one giant Wall Bang-y pitfall: often pushing for morality WRONG. You have the protagonist sitting around and talking about how they want peace and how killing and/or fighting is bad, just to have them do exactly that in the next chapter.
Getting back to fantasy, that was exactly what Eldest did, with YODA Eragon’s mentor version 2.0 rationalizing out for him why there has to be a war now. No one even tries to resolve the whole thing in some other way, no one even gives it any deeper thought. Eragon is “good” but he is going into a slaughter of thousands, and the books see nothing wrong with it.
In Shamer Chronicles, regardless of all the idealism going on, the characters are not acting like hypocritical dumbasses.
At one point in the series one of the characters wants to go into the Big Bad’s war camp straight on because he doesn’t want people dying “for him”. His motive is “good”, but instead of him going there and solving the problem with a Wall Banger or two, he gets called out on the fact that he’s simply being selfish all because the world does not work the way he wants it to. But the books don’t go against themselves either, and that particular thing does not get resolved with blood and carnage, but something much smarter and something that is very much on the “White” side of the Sliding Scale Of Morality. You rarely see a character doing something that is both smart and the right thing to do.
The series is idealistic but it does not ignore reality. I liked the scene where after one of the characters accidentally reveals the location of a certain group of people to Big Bad’s henchmen, he keeps worrying about a teenage girl who was with them, noting that “you can’t not notice those breasts and legs”. Back when I first read the series I was 14 years old and I was astonished at a book even hinting to rape, especially a book written for 10-12 year olds. A lot of fantasy written for adults does not do that.
…Though the series was a bit naïve at points. Like, for example, one of the things that made the Big Bad all big and bad was how he fought his wars. He’d poison wells, look for people to bribe or simply divide and conquer, and the protagonists would point out how dishonourable that was. And whenever they would do so, I would just smirk. There are no rules in war, especially not in a medieval-ish setting, and honour is only for fairy tales.
I didn’t think of that when reading the series for the first two times, and the reason why I thought of it this time was because of A Song of Ice and Fire. Tough one has to admit that writing a cynical take on fantasy is much easier than writing a story that pushes for morality and does not degenerate into a steaming pile of cheese.
Another thing I didn’t “notice” when reading the series for the first two times has to do with the fact that the latest book I read before rereading The Shamer Chronicles was War and Peace. So the pacing threw me off a bit. Tolstoy spent hundreds of pages setting up the plot of his book, while Lene Kaaberbøl took exactly eleven pages doing the same thing. Somehow, I felt disappointed, and I can’t help but wonder what The Shamer Chronicles would have been like if Kaaberbøl spent disproportionate amounts of time elegantly wallowing in completely insignificant tidbits the way Tolstoy did it in War and Peace. I bet it would have been ten times as awesome.
Now onto something that the books would have been better without.
The protagonist of the series is named Dina Tonerre, and at the beginning of the story she is ten years old. That’s all well and good, but the problem is that the author spends too much time making sure that the readers don’t have any Fridge Logic moments, which often results in Dina acting like a genius. Seriously, the darn girl takes care of things that would have never even come to my head, not now and especially not back when I was ten years old. That would always break my suspension of disbelief and make the instances where she acts like normal little girl really stand out.
Dina does not catch the Idiot Ball, she catches the “Genius Ball”, all to make sure the plot goes in the direction it has to without leaving any plotholes behind.
And that’;a bad thing. The plot should be a natural result of what your characters are, not the other way around. Though this was something that mostly plagued the first book, and in the later books Dina’s IQ was much, much more consistent.
I’d really like Kaaberbøl to write a sequel. No, not with Dina as the main character, she has gotten WAAAY to powerful at the end of the last book to be suitable protagonist of anything that isn’t a shounen manga or a superhero comic, but I’d like to know more about the world beyond the peninsula that the books were set in and the family that Dina’s father comes from. Kaaberbøl created a very interesting world and I can’t help but be curious about it.
But before the gods that I’m sacrificing sheep for answer my prayers, I’ll try to find that other fantasy story that Lene Kaaberbøl wrote: The Morning Land.
