When McKillip’s characters deal with riddles they are really dealing with history through the filter of trivial pursuit. But in The Hobbit Bilbo and Gollum play a riddle game involving genuine riddles–short poems that force you to identify a concept or non-Proper noun using some unconventional characteristics or semantic wordplay. It’s especially surprising given in her recently written introduction she cites the book’s riddle contests as a clear Tolkien influence. I wasn’t so sure going in that I was excited to read about a master of riddles, but while McKillip seems to have thought very carefully about the philosophy behind “riddling” it turns out what I and probably you think of as riddles don’t really feature. With the recommendation out of the way, I’d like to also add a note about the title. Riddle-master isn’t a masterpiece, and the publisher makes a mistake perhaps in comparing it to Tolkien on its omnibus cover, but it is a fine story that will not disappoint those who enjoy well-written fantasy. While I can go back and nitpick about a thousand things in her world-building, I can’t argue with the results: I was fascinated by the story and cared about the main characters and their problems. That doesn’t mean I wish there was a little more narrative urgency, or more of a sense of human failings in the peoples of her world, but she makes it work when it really shouldn’t. McKillip does such a nice job on the primary characters that she gets away with it. This sounds like a receipe for boredom, and in a lesser author it would have been.

In Riddle-master vast stretches of narrative pass without any contact with the forces of evil, such as they are. Further, even if, say, Sauron is not physically present his agents often are and, failing that, the Ring embodied his evil. In Lord of the Rings Tolkien kept his villains generally off screen, but their malevolent presence always weighed on his characters and thus the reader. McKillip has built a world that feels alien not because of magic or customs but because it seems almost entirely populated by wise and friendly people. I found it very interesting that in the Riddle-master books, the villains hardly get any screen time and when they do, they tend to be disguised through various means as wise and friendly characters. Even a truly friendly character is difficult to do realistically. But there’s a more subtle issue: it is much easier to write a sadist character or a power-hungry jerk than it is to write a genuinely wise character. There are a lot of reasons for this: often the villain is driving the action, gets the cynical and sarcastic lines, and does interesting things like tortures people. It is often a feature of mediocre fiction that the most memorable characters are the villains. Riddle-master Trilogy by Patricia McKillip Decemat 12:00 am | Posted in 4 stars, Book Reviews, Fantasy | Leave a comment

Riddle master book