Storm Front, chapters 18 and 19, in which repetition masquerades as exposition

So, how was your week?  I got a temporary cat (while his usual people are out of the country for a month) and he's very snuggly and he's pretty sure he needs to be fed twenty-nine times a day or society will crumble.

Here in the Department of Analysing Terrible Books the hate engine keeps chugging on.  We're closing in on the final act, with about a quarter of the book to go, and by the looks of it we have nothing to look forward to, so I added a puppy.

(Content: childbirth, parental death. Fun content: magicians, puppies, and the writer's-block panacea.)

Storm Front

Chapter Eighteen: If I Monologue Enough Maybe You Won't Notice These Plot Rails

I could just write MAN ANGST for a couple of lines instead of talking about the actual events that open this chapter.  It starts with "Have you ever felt despair?" and continues with "When I'm in turmoil [...] I go for walks. It's just one of those things I do" and eventually Dresden starts spewing backstory, but leave that a moment.  What we have here is something I tend to think of as emotional hipsterism, a hallmark of the truly pretentious man.  Sometimes he feels despair--but you've probably never heard of it.  He, you must understand, has difficult feelings that even he can't just shrug off immediately, despite his manliness, and so he must go for a walk--who can fathom the oddity of this?  Admittedly, the wizards in this world would make more sense if they were all solipsists.

Dresden refers to his wandering around Chicago at night as "pretty stupid, in retrospect", despite the established fact that he's carrying a heat cannon and a bulletproof shield.

Anyway, we hear a bit about Dresden's parents.  Of course they're both gone now, no points for guessing that, but for the lightning round question, cast your vote: which parent had a formative influence on Dresden?  If you guessed "his father, because his mother died in childbirth", you get all the points and Butcher gets none.  I looked up some statistics just to see how vanishingly unlikely that is, and the answer is 'very', especially when noting that mortality is closely related to the mother's socioeconomic factors of health and (spoilers, like you care) Dresden's mother was actually a fantastically powerful wizard.  (I don't know if Dresden knows that yet.)  I read enough to learn that Dresden's mom was actually killed by a curse, but I'm going to throw out a wild frickin' guess that Butcher decided on that later, as part of Operation: Continuity Is For Suckers.

So here the death of Dresden's mother is not merely sidelined but actually framed in reference to his father: "He wasn't there when I was born. He wasn't there when she died."  We're told that dad showed up a day later, "gave me the names of three magicians" (not Potter, blessedly, but Harry Houdini, Blackstone, and Copperfield) and then took him on the road with his travelling stage magic show.

(Dresden's dad wasn't an actual wizard, and I have so many questions about his parents' life and marriage and arrangement.  Did he know his wife was hella magical?  Did he care?  Did he choose to stay away because he felt inadequate?  Did he ever ask her to teach him?  It turns out that Dresden's mom's signature move was portal-hopping, so why wasn't she on the road with him?  Why didn't he have any actual enchanted tricks crafted by her?  Or friends in the wizard community?  Or did she hide all of that from him for undoubtedly super selfless reasons that coincidentally make this plot way simpler?)

In any case, Dresden's dad then died abruptly of an aneurysm when Dresden was six, and that sense of loneliness and despair is exactly what he feels now, facing certain doom from either his enemy wizard or his court session on Monday.  Which... I mean, Dresden has been in a lot of life-or-death situations before, even ones just referenced in his anecdotes, like He Who Walks Behind or his evil magic teacher for starters.  I know that if you want to shoehorn in some dead parents, you've got to make your own opportunities, but connecting his current situation to a six-year-old's fear of abandonment just doesn't ring true for me.  Others are welcome to make a countercase.  (Did neither of Dresden's parents make arrangements for the care of their son?  You'd think maybe this would be a moment for a wizard friend to swoop in and explain that he's Dresden's godfather.  But I guess Dresden's trying to hammer home DESSSPAAIIRRRRRR and so he leaves the backstory hanging in tension.)

Dresden finds that he randomly walks back to Linda Randall's apartment, a terrible idea if I ever heard one, exceeded only by his subsequent decision to magically unlock the door, duck the police tape, curl up on her bedroom carpet and fall asleep.

"This is stupid, Harry," I told myself. I guess I wasn't in the mood to listen.

The last three chapters have been an amazing parade of contrivance towards set pieces that Butcher clearly decided he wanted to feature but didn't know how to justify.  (Maybe I'm unrealistic, but surely you don't leave a fresh murder scene completely unguarded after just a couple of hours?  Surely there's some newbie who could stand to spend the early hours of the morning standing by a door and preventing entry or tampering?)

Dresden awakens when the sun has risen and literally talks to himself for half a page, with line breaks like dialogue, forcing me to picture him now as Smeagol/Gollum snipping at each other.

"Get off the floor and get to work." 

"Don't wanna. Tired. Go away."

He's telling himself to go away.  I could perhaps let this go as internal monologue, but literally speaking aloud to himself?  I feel like I'm reading fanfiction.

A shocking break from tradition follows: Dresden looks around the room and sees evidence that Linda was an actual person: "a high-school yearbook [...] several photographs serving as bookmarks" and a framed photo of herself at graduation between her smiling parents.  It's not much, especially since it's used to imply how happy she used to be before she got into sex work and everything was terrible forever, but it's the first hint we've had that she had any depth of character.

But that's just a preamble, because this whole weird walk and break-and-enter and murder-scene nap was all a prolonged version of that cliche where our hero is searching desperately for something, can't find it, gives up, lets his gaze fall in a random direction, and there it is, the next plot token--a little plastic film canister exactly like the one he found at the Sells' beach house.  It has a full an undeveloped roll of film inside.

Just how atrociously bad are these cops?

I mean, okay, you know there's magic involved and you can't explain what's going on and maybe there is no mundane evidence that could help, but of all the things in the room to overlook, a full roll of film didn't strike anyone as potentially important evidence?  It could be anything!  It could be blackmail material she was going to use against someone powerful!  It could be secret government documents!  It could be the first non-blurry sasquatch photos!  What kind of hard-driven murder investigator sweeps a crime scene and misses a roll of film because it's slightly under the bed?!

It's not like there was much else in the room for it to get lost in, given the total lack of character-building possessions.

Dresden immediately grabs his rod and sets forth to find "this photographer", implicitly dismissing any possibility that Linda might have taken the pictures herself.  Why would she have the pictures if she didn't take them?  Is there something I forget about her alibi, or does Dresden just assume she couldn't possibly have any skills or interests outside of sex work?  Whatever.  The chapter ends as somebody else unlocks the apartment door and bursts in.

Old noir master Raymond Chandler gave us the one-size-fits-all solution to any stuck plot--a man bursts into the room with a gun**--but Butcher has already given us alternatives such as toad demon attack, the spontaneous existence of tracking spells, and various meddling sex objects women, so I'm not sure if this is a nod to the classics or just running out of ideas.

Chapter Nineteen: The Latest Findings From The Faculty Of The Screamingly Obvious At We-Already-Knew-That University

Dresden hides behind the opening door and the stranger who enters doesn't notice him, despite his eyes sweeping the room in a panic.  (Dresden informs us that it's exactly this panic that causes him to miss Dresden in his peripheral vision, which doesn't really jive with human instincts, but sure, whatever.)

His hair, a listless shade of brown, was drawn back into a ponytail. [....] He was a good-looking man, or so it seemed, with strong lines to his jaw and cheekbones.

I went searching on variants of the phrase 'listless brown' to see if maybe this was just a kind of hue adjective I've never heard before, but all I found was this (you are welcome):

Pictured: an excellent but fatigued puppy.

Personally I feel like the listless ponytail is going to seriously detract from any dude's attractiveness, but who am I to tell our hero which men he should ogle?  More importantly, Hot Stranger Man makes "a strange, cawing little sound" when he sees the bloody bed and immediately dives to search underneath it.  Dresden immediately concludes that this man is the photographer in question, again for no reason I can perceive.

Dresden kicks the door shut, flashes his badge, and startles the man with a solid bluff check: "I knew we'd catch you if I just waited".  (Again, why aren't the cops watching this place?  Isn't returning to the scene of the crime an actual thing killers are known to do?  Google suggests it's not purely a TV tradition.)  The man defends himself as an innocent newspaper photographer, but Dresden produces the film roll and keeps pressing.

I tried to think of what Murphy would sound like, if I was downtown with her right now, waiting for her to ask me questions.

Or... like, maybe what a private detective would sound like if he was questioning someone connected to both of his current cases?  I mean.  This is literally your job, Dresden.  You should not be improvising this.  These are actual skills that you are supposed to have been trained in by actual people.  You are not an everyman hero swept up in circumstance.  You are on billable hours.

Their exchanges remain stupid ("Am I in some kind of trouble?" "We'll see about that."  Of course he's in trouble!  He broke into a cordoned-off murder scene!  You don't need to bluff on this, man!) but the guy identifies himself as Donny Wise before realising that Dresden isn't an actual cop.  He tries to run, Dresden slams the door shut with magic, and Wise freaks out that he's "one of them" and begs for mercy.  When Dresden says he's trying to catch the killer, Wise demands to know why he'd risk death if he wasn't even sleeping with Linda.  Dresden, never one to miss a humblebrag, just says "Who else is going to?", thus ignoring a much smoother opportunity to think about his motivations, instead of the pages upon pages of unprovoked navel-gazing we've had up to now.

Wise demands the film in exchange for telling Dresden all he knows, and insists the film itself is useless "if you don't know what you're looking at".  Then why is it so important to steal it back?

Wise says that he knew Linda because he sometimes does magazine photoshoots with sex workers around town, and she called him in to photograph her through the window at the beach house Wednesday night.  He saw the thunderstorm sorcerer orgy inside, took all the shots as requested, and delivered the film to Linda the next day.  He didn't recognise anyone else inside.

"I wasn't looking. But they wasn't being too particular, if you take my meaning. Turned my stomach."

I don't think I do take his meaning.  'Not particular' doesn't sound like weird kinky stuff.  Was it gay stuff?  Was that the stomach-turning part?  Fuck you too, Donny.  Anyway: Dresden intuits that Wise actually wants the film back so he can blackmail people, though he claims he'll destroy it.  Dresden, genius of the year, instead says "Fuego" and incinerates the film on the spot without actually checking whether Wise is telling the truth.  Also, if that was really Wise's only involvement in this incident, why does he react to demonstrations of magic with 'you're one of them'?  He saw naked things happening, not telekinesis.  Was it magic sex?  (Create your own most disturbing 'was this your card?' joke.)

Dresden lets Wise go, despite not actually getting any information out of him that we didn't already know or at least mightily suspect, and still with no reason that Wise should know wizards are real, let alone involved in this case.  Dresden finally takes the unfathomable leap of induction that it wasn't chance that he was sent to the Sells' house before knowing it was important in this case, concludes that perhaps Monica knows more than she is letting on, and sets out to find her.

I'm 90% sure that Monica never gave Dresden her address and we have no proof that 'Sells' is even her last name, so I'm not sure how he plans to do that, but it doesn't matter because the next chapter opens with him arriving at her suburban home, no questions asked.

I just don't know, y'all.

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

**The blogqueen also suggested the alternative "a gun bursts into the room with a man", which I hope to work into my own writing someday.

The Eye of the World, chapters 39 and 40, in which it appears that the plot starts up again

Sorry about the delayed post--I had written something up for Wednesday about Terminator Genisys, which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially in the way it recentered the storyline away from 'Sarah is important because she's the mother of Slab Hardcheese John "Manly War Messiah" Connor' and onto 'Sarah is important because she's a colossal badass who takes control of her own life, and her victory is that she reclaims her agency from the cycles of predestination'.  But reading that post over again, I found that I didn't have much else good to say about the movie in terms of politics or representation (the Dysons, a black father-son team of computer geniuses, get sidelined compared to T2, everyone is straight, and there's an awkward new patriarchal dynamic between Predestined Love Interest Kyle Reese and Sarah's foster dad).  So I shelved that post for future considerations and instead you get more WOT after all.  Take it.  Take it and feel my pain so that catharsis may purge your own anguish

(Content: villainously pretty men.  Fun content: villainously pretty men.)

The Eye of the World: p. 582--618

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Weaving of the Web

We're back in Randland, where Robert Jordan once again taunts me with the prospect of a timeskip that didn't actually happen:

Next to the day when Egwene and Perrin walked in, alive and laughing over what they had seen, this was the day he had been waiting for most.

Egwene and Perrin have not actually walked in yet; Rand is just looking forward to it.  Mat is exactly the same as he's been for the last 300 pages, surly and paranoid and not wanting to do anything, and I'm not clear on what this special day is that Rand has been looking forward to, but apparently it means everyone is rallying in the street.  The innkeeper informs Rand that a beggar has been seen in the city, asking for Rand and friends by name, and this is Deeply Suspicious--not because random strangers looking for visitors by name probably have secret motives, no, but because Caemlyn has a welfare program and therefore there's no excuse to beg.

"...Even with things as hard as they are. On High Days, the Queen gives it out with her own hands, and there's never anyone turned away for any reason. No one needs to beg in Caemlyn. Even a man under warrant can't be arrested while he's taking the Queen's Bounty."

Which: really?  Okay, but really?  Props to Caemlyn for establishing a no-questions-asked food program, but these matters are far too complicated to just be waved off.  Logistics: who decides how much bounty a person gets?  Can they collect for their family as well?  Who checks what they are and aren't allowed to take?  Can a person pick up the Bounty for their neighbours, and what kind of documentation is needed?  Or can a perfectly self-sufficient individual just pick some up anyway, since no one's turned away, and then deliver it to whomever they choose?  What if they need to pick up Bounty for multiple neighbours, because they live in a building that houses multiple seniors with mobility issues?  Can someone take the Bounty, drop it off elsewhere, and then get back in line for a second helping?  Is any kind of identification needed?

Is medication included in the Bounty?  What happens to the family head with a sole income who loses her job because of a fire in the dairy and not only has to get food enough for her husband (veteran, blinded in combat with those vile Darkfriends) and four children but also pay rent on the apartment and also pay the apothecary for regular elixirs to help Tiny al'Timmy with his bad lungs and her husband's frequent infections?  How much help does the Queen's Bounty give to her?

And you can't be arrested while taking the Bounty, okay, but what's the statute of limitations on that?  If the local cops decide that last week's murder was probably committed by Dayo ay'Oade, on the basis that he's foreign and brown and they just knew he couldn't be trusted, how safe is he when getting the Bounty?  Is he free game once he leaves the plaza, or after sunset, or what?  Is there anything at all to stop the cops from following Dayo six blocks away from the Queen and then making with the truncheon-based brutality?  Or grabbing him while he's on his way there?  What if Neal al'Caffrey runs into the Caemlyn Museum of Pretty Artifacts With Complicated Backstories, grabs The Sword That Was Broken And Reforged And Then Cracked Again But You Can Hardly Notice It, sprints out the door and straight into the welfare line?  Do the cops just have to stand there uselessly while our thief waits to get his municipally-allotted bread?  When are they allowed to start chasing him again?  Can honest citizen Strangleford ay'Killsman successfully avoid incarceration for his entire life by hanging onto the right baguettes?  IF YOU WANT TO WORLDBUILD FOREVER THEN AT LEAST JUSTIFY YOUR WORLDBUILDING, JORDAN.

But where was I?  Right: there are lots of reasons that the Queen's Bounty can't be as simple and perfect as we're told, and thus reasons why some people might beg anyway.

Rand leaves the inn, having been warned to keep an eye out for trouble.  We finally get a sense of the tensions, because people are wearing significant amounts of red or white around town, with political significance: red says "Yay Queen Morgase" and white means "The Queen and the wizards have ruined everything".  Rand didn't realise this when he decided to disguise his heron sword with a red wrapping, and now he's part of it too, to his regret, since the reds are heavily outnumbered.  But--ah, at last we get some explanation, because apparently people are celebrating the capture of the false Dragon, who is to be presented to the Queen today before he's dragged off to the wizards.

Rand, political genius, notices that a crowd of white-banded citizens charging down the street thinks nothing of intentionally shoving aside some Whitecloaks and stampeding onwards, showing a level of defiance and fearlessness that, in his estimation, means that could try to depose the Queen any day now.  Rand disappears into a singing crowd, providing us with this Tolkienesque lyric:

Forward the Lion / forward the Lion / the White Lion takes the field. / Roar defiance at the Shadow. / Forward the Lion / forward, Andor triumphant.

I can't make that scan, let alone fit a catchy tune, and it doesn't even pretend to have a rhyme.  That is maybe the worst rallying song I've ever heard.  Rand follows the crowd until it reaches the palace, guarded by red soldiers against a near-rioting crowd of white, but he's forced to run when the aforementioned beggar finally appears and spots him.  Rand thinks about going back to the inn, but isn't willing to miss his sole opportunity to ever see the Queen, having apparently forgotten that the Queen literally shows up to hand out food bundles to the poor on every holiday.

After a couple of vitally important pages of Rand running around the city to no avail, he finally climbs a hill and a wall to get a view of the plaza, and the procession arrives with hundreds of soldiers guarding a sixteen-horse wagon, flanked by Warders and bearing a cage guarded by eight Aes Sedai.  For a change, we get some description I actually like:

Logain was a king in every inch of him. The cage might as well not have been there. He held himself erect, head high, and looked over the crowd as if they had come to do him honor. And wherever his gaze swept, there the people fell silent, staring back in awe. When Logain's eyes left them, they screamed with redoubled fury as if to make up for their silence, but it made no difference in the way the man stood, or in the silence that passed along with him.

I'm assuming he's a villain, although right now I feel like I'd enjoy seeing him as a protagonist too, as long as he wasn't Our Hero.  A good guy who has his own goals and concerns that aren't identical to Rand.  Or if he's just a villain who wants something other than the end of the universe.  I'm good with either of these things.

Rand wonders what the Aes Sedai are there for, gets told by a previously-unnoticed little girl that they're stopping him from using magic, and is so surprised that he falls off the wall.  Cliffhanger!  Well.  Clifffaller.

Chapter Forty: The Web Tightens

Rand dream-hallucinates a bit and wakes up on the ground, bloodied and rattled.  The girl arrives, climbing down a tree in very fancy dress that goes on for a paragraph, including velvet slippers and much embroidered silk.

He could not begin to imagine who would choose to climb trees in clothes like that, but he was sure she had to be someone important.

This is it.  If ever anyone asks you to summarise the Wheel of Time book series for them, just flip to the second page of chapter forty and show them this line.  This is the truest most finely distilled essence of this book, cold-pressed and oak-aged until it could cut through anchorwood.  Reading this sentence and understanding its every nuance is exactly the same experience as reading the entire book.  You're welcome.

She's also, he can tell at a glance, deeply self-possessed and (shocker) stunningly beautiful (blond and red-lipped, which Rand possibly thinks is just how girls look, because he can't conceive of makeup).  She's different but, in his estimation, just as hot as Egwene.

He felt a twinge of guilt, but told himself that denying what his eyes saw would not bring Egwene safely to Caemlyn one whit faster.

I--wait, what?  He's creeping on some random girl who just startled him into injuring himself, his first thoughts on seeing her are '10/10, would bang like a gong', and he assuages his guilt at ogling someone who isn't his not-girlfriend by telling himself that he can't save her by not ogling other women?  Does that compute for anyone?

She's followed by her younger brother, and they quickly identify each other (unnecessarily, but for the reader's benefit) as Elayne and Gawyn, and since Elayne has a habit of playing vet to the injured animals she find, she immediately busts out her first aid kit to patch up Rand's skull.  While doing so, the siblings have a bizarrely private discussion that serves as a huge infodump about how the Queen is semi-secretly in love with her First Prince Regent and they both want to get married but neither one will 'bend' to... something that we're not clear on.  It becomes increasingly obvious, but eventually Rand needs them to spell out that they are children of...

"Morgase, by the Grace of the Light, Queen of Andor, Defender of the Realm, Protector of the People, High Seat of the House Trakand."

The prince and the 'Daughter-Heir' (ye gods that's a bad title--if the queen always rules, why isn't her daughter just 'heir'?) are legitimately surprised Rand didn't realise he had climbed into their backyard, and insist on knowing his name before he leaves.  On hearing he's from Two Rivers, Gawyn starts spouting off regional facts, until they get interrupted again:

The young man who stood there was the handsomest man Rand had ever seen, almost too handsome for masculinity.

I... wow.  He no-homo'd so hard he tried to reassign someone's gender.

Rand, if you think a dude is hot, that doesn't mean he's a woman, that means you think some dudes are hot.  It's not a big deal.  I was so much more comfortable with myself once I acknowledged that was a thing for me.  You can repeat "he's so smokin' I could almost swear he's a gender I'm attracted to" all you want, but if you want to insist that you're so straight you sleep on a bed of rulers, maybe don't follow that up with:

Dark of hair and eye, he wore his clothes [...] as if they were of no importance.

Aw yeah they aren't.  Just cast aside those unimportant clothes, Galad.  Apparently Galadedrid Damodred (I kid you not) is half-sibling to the royal kids, sharing a father but not the queen as his mom, and he's quite popular with both the loyal reds and unruly whites in the city.  He tries to convince Elayne to get rid of Rand immediately for her own safety, but Elayne tells him to shove off.

"I hate him," Elayne breathed. "He is vile and full of envy."

Ohhhh, right, villainous prettyboys, gotcha.  There is definitely something maliciously suspicious about beautiful men who go around making perfectly good straight boys question their orientations.  On the plus side, Gawyn vouches heavily for Galad, saying he's saved his life twice, so maybe there's a chance he's not evil?  Wait, I just remembered his name is Damodred.  Carry on.

The palace guards arrive and there's some back-and-forth of orders and superseding orders between the captain and Elayne until word arrives that the queen demands to see the intruder and also her kids, so they march off, though not before Jordan realises he forgot to give us a long description of the gardens, so Rand abruptly remembers that scenery exist and takes it all in before they leave.  There's another page of Rand trying to figure out what position to take in the procession and when he's dragged before the throne, and another describing the carved walls of the room and the woman seated behind the queen, knitting furiously.  The queen is of course beautiful and flawless and commanding, and the knitter quickly proves to be Elaida, the queen's personal wizard.  The children are scolded for going to get a look at Logain, ridiculously dangerous as he is, and questioned about Rand, but Elayne says that meeting a commoner face-to-face with no attendants has been an important bit of education.

Morgase rapidly rises several ranks in my listing of favourite characters by pointing out that Two Rivers hasn't been taxed or hosted royal soldiers in generations, which makes Rand's status as a queen's subject somewhat suspect.  I could have done with someone making that explicit five hundred pages ago, instead of leaving me wondering what in blazes this world was doing, but at least we have canon now.

Elaida in the meantime notes that Rand is a pasty ginger and thus unlikely to be from that region, and when she notices the heron sword, all the guards freak out.  There is much suspicion, et cetera, Elaida declares that the sword is rightly Rand's even if he's too young to have earned it, and that he's dangerous.  Morgase does what a queen must do: put exposition ahead of remotely natural dialogue.

"Is this a Foretelling, Elaida? Are you reading the Pattern? You say it comes on you when you least expect it and goes as suddenly as it comes. If this is a Foretelling Elaida, I command you to speak the truth clearly, without your usual habit of wrapping it in so much mystery that no one can tell if you have said yes or no."

That is definitely how real people talk to other real people with whom they have a long history of this exact process.  Sigh.  Elaida does indeed Foretell, but it boils down to the shocking plot twist that bad things are happening and Rand is plot-relevant.

They recommend locking him up, but Queen Morgase declares that she trusts him and she's willing to gamble that he isn't telling super-outrageous lies in the hopes that people will think no one would tell a lie that outrageous, and she commands him escorted away to go free.  Elayne takes a final opportunity to tell Rand he's hot, and Gawyn does the same tells Rand that while Morgase thinks Rand has a Two Rivers accent, he looks like an Aielman.

Wait, aren't the Aiel people from a desert or something?  What kind of vengeful author-god would populate a desert with pasty gingers?  (No points for the obvious answer: 'one who will eat his own hands before he makes someone brown plot-relevant'.)

Oi. That's enough recapping for now.  But for the first time in many weeks, I didn't feel like I could blithely skip past multiple pages at a time without commenting on the stuff contained, which I have to take as a sign that the plot has begun happening again, even if this chapter didn't apparently have any plot consequences apart from introducing us to the royals.  Unlike the parade of interchangeable wagon-drivers and innkeepers up to now, at least I can be confident we'll see all of these folks again.

There are fewer than two hundred pages left to go in this book, folks.  Who wants to lay bets on whether Jordan is capable of writing something that resembles a climactic sequence in that much time?