Wildfire - Jo Clayton

So this is a really interesting post for me to write. Wildfire, published in 1992, is possibly the first real fantasy book I remember reading. It hooked me into the genre completely. Previous to that I had read mostly children's lit, including things like Indian in the Cupboard and Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, that often had fantasy leanings, but this book was something completely different. I found it in my stepsister's castoffs, so it must have been when I was around 10 or so, so let's say around 1995. The pretty, ornate cover caught my eye, and I've fallen down the rabbit hole ever since.

As you can see, this copy has been well-loved. The binding was retaped somewhere around ten years ago.

I had never experienced anything like this book before. The heroine was beautiful, fascinating, with amazing powers, but flawed in that she didn't know how to use them and often made her situation worse by them. She was at the mercy of a vast pantheon of gods and powers, as she tried to navigate her way through a lush world that was completely alien to me. I didn't always understand what was going on, with the world's own language sprinkled in throughout the text, but it felt immersive to me, that I was getting a sense and flavor of the world without having it spelled out, so that you could perceive the meanings of these nonsense words through their context.

I kept this book ever since, re-reading here and there. I found the first book in the series, and now I discovered the third a few months ago. But in the last year I've been reading works with a more critical eye, looking at their structure, rather than just their story, so I picked this one up again.

Honestly, it's shit.

No, really. I experienced this with the Redwall series and also the Dragonriders of Pern series, too. All things that made huge impacts on me as a kid, and as an adult, suddenly lack the luster and sparkle that I remember. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, apparently. The 80's and 90's fantasy boom produced some really hilariously bad novels (especially covers) doing pretty much everything that is a publishing no-no today.

First, the plot is barely coherent. There's really very little tying events together in a logical way, but it's difficult for me to give a very specific example. The magus Navarre brings news of Varney's kidnapping by the Mezhmerrai to Varney's father, who promptly drugs, tortures, and sells Navarre to a wizard. But Navarre's sojourn as a drugged and broken slave is really just a few chapters long, before his friend Kitya shows up and kills the wizard, oh but a mini-god shows up, and Navarre gets his with his curse, and they all get scattered. We move through these elements SO fast that it feels like we're just barely touching on them without really exploring what's happening. It starts to feel more like an outline than the kind of story I really want to see.

Plus, the ending is a literal deus ex machina. The area's god Meggzatevoc comes down and sorts everyone out neatly, punishing the wrong doers and ejecting our main characters from his land.

I think this is one of the issues I have with writing God characters. There's really no established rules for what the gods and powers in this book at capable of. Why didn't Meggzatevoc just do this earlier, if they were making so much trouble for him? There's a subplot in the book of the city electing an Augstadievon (what that is, we never know) with a group of plotters trying to kill off candidates. The Diviners of the city can't figure out who it is because they're cloaking their meetings in smoke. Can't Megg just put a stop to that? God characters just make this whole thing too easy to solve, especially when they're only used for narrative convenience.

The language is a mixed blessing. I still do appreciate the immersive quality that Clayton imparts to her worldbuilding, however, it really could do with some explaining. So much ends up as literal nonsense because we have no idea what these made-up words mean. If you're going over the head of your reader, it's just not going to work.

Lastly, what the fuck is this formatting.

At several points throughout the novel Clayton splits chapters with numbers. We stick with one character for a scene, then abruptly shift to another, then another, or back. She uses this weird poetry-like formatting at parts where, it seems, powers are battling, there's confusion, the wrystrike curse is hitting them.. and honestly, this is not good. This is bad. Don't do this. Format normal. Your publisher will thank you for it. Use your skill at writing to convey confusion, if that's what you're going for: not cheap tricks.

So there I go, destroying another aspect of my childhood. It was fun while it lasted, but now I'm going to take what I've learned from this book, and move forward. I still have book #3 to read just for completion's sake.. I'm sure you'll hear all about that when it happens.

Overall: 2 stars

Amazon: Wildfire

More reviews: Wildfire on Librarything (Average 3.19 stars)

Wildfire on Goodreads (Average 3.63 stars)

Still pretty because somewhere deep down I'm still ten years old.