I just finished Blood of Elves, the third Witcher book by Andzrej Sapkowski. (Or the first depending on how you count--the first two are short story collections, this is the first novel.)
I picked this up because at the rate Netflix is going it will be a decade or never before they get to the end of the story, and it's based on already published books, so I figured I'd read those. And in a way the Netflix series is very faithful to the books--most elements that appear in the books are in the series. And in another way, they are very not faithful.
Cause here's the thing. I say this with love, but Blood of Elves is structured like a bad fanfic. It has no structure. It is a thing and another thing and another thing. The last fifty pages are a long discussion on the nature of magic and then the book ends. He loves fifty-page long dialogue scenes with no dialogue tags. He jumps around in both chronology and location with no rhyme or reason. Very major plot points that you infer must have happened, happen off screen. The book just jumps forward and you appear on the other side of them.
For example--this book has no map in the frontispiece. There is a part of the story where the characters literally roll out a map of the world and discuss the geopolitics, pointing out different kingdoms and cities on the map. Naturally I would like to follow along on a map. I google a bit and you can find maps--this was a video game. Of course there's a world map. But Sapkowski has deliberately not endorsed any map of the Northern Kingdoms, even one drawn by a collaborator, because
things move around for him.
He's a pantser. I've never read epic fantasy by a pantser before. (True, I don't read a ton of epic fantasy, but still, there are genre expectations.) If he wants to spent fifty pages on a crowd heckling Jaskier's performance, that's what he'll do. If he wants to ignore the character that the book is ostensibly about for two hundred pages and follow Geralt taking piece work protecting a convoy, that's what he'll do. The plot, as such, starts on page three hundred of this book. I'm not kidding.
It's all pleasant enough, don't get me wrong. I'll keep going. But the main thing I'm seeing the adaptation doing is that Sapkowski did not have a plan for where he was going and the show runners do. So they have structure and foreshadowing and stuff and very important world events are actually shown rather than being off screen.
( More spoilery details )All this makes the books seem worse than they are? They go down very easy. But you do get to the end and are like--what was the point of all of that? Where are we going?
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