I'm going to interrupt my story about my vacation so that I can review a book I finished. I just don't want to forget anything about it.
I finished reading The Gilded Chain by Dave Duncan near the end of my trip. It took me forever to read because the writing was terrible. The plot was interesting though, and that's the only reason I continued to read it.
The very base of the book is the idea that specially trained soldiers can be connected to someone by having a sword driven through their heart, therefore making them unconditionally loyal to this person. If their ward dies, especially if it's violently, they'll pretty much go insane. They're able to be released, or retired though, if they're knighted.
Sounds pretty interesting, right? It'll be easier to just make a lit of everything I found wrong...
1) The narrative was bad. It was written as if the main character was speaking, but the book was in third person. if Duncan had written it in first person, it would have been amazing, or if he had not included the thoughts of the main character in the narrative.
2) It went way too fast. I understand skipping several years while someone was growing up, then skipping a few uneventful years later on. However, Duncan skipped two years while the main character went on a journey, and later mentioned things such as shipwrecks, pirates and sickness, all of which would have been fascinating to read about.
3) He uses multiple names for characters. Even the main character has two names; Durendal and another that I can't remember at the moment. When it's the main character, you learn to remember the multiple names, but Duncan would on occasion use nicknames or pet names for other characters, making it hard to follow.
4) It kind of feels like he was writing the whole book with a thesaurus open next to him. It's a fine line between sounded smart and sounding fake when it comes to using large and fancy words. Personally, I don't think it fits when it comes to speculative fiction. Keep it for literature and non-fiction, because most people who read speculative fiction are doing it as a escape, and don't want to have to keep looking up words.
Now of course there were some good aspects about the book, or else I would never have continued with it.
1) The descriptions were very good, especially of the people. It was very easy to envision everyone, except for the main character. This is probably due to the fact that the narrative is almost written in his voice, and would have sounded even more unnatural.
2) The plot. As I mentioned before, the plot is very good. I love how it runs along a timeline, rather than a few days or weeks with flashbacks and complicated twists. This means it's strictly linear and easy to follow, even with several time skips. It's also kind of broken up, so that once one plot twist ends, another begins.
And that's all for this book. It's a good read if you can get over the poor writing. I should also mentioned that this book is about fifteen years old, so there has been lots of time for potential improvement. I have another book by Dave Duncan that I'll try reading later. Unfortunately, it happens to be the third in a series (I bought it at a library book sale), so it might take me a while to get the first book.
