2007-06-13 An irritating mess (minor spoilers within)

I think I could have forgiven a lot of what was wrong with this book, were it not for the dildo scene. Lian Hearn officially lost my goodwill with the dildo scene.

To be honest, the plot really falls apart in this book. Hearn rushes the battles (and in any event, the prophecy robs them of any dramatic tension) and butchers her own characters in order to get to the climax. For example, Arai is transformed from a character who risked everything to protect Kaede in Across the Nightingale Floor to a two-dimensional despot who betrays the principles he fought for and forces Kaede into an arranged marriage with Fujiwara as a punishment for marrying Takeo without his permission. In turn, Fujiwara is transformed from a potentially interesting and multi-faceted character into a stereotypical evil gay husband who wants Kaede just to add to his collection and who gives her a dildo on their wedding night in order to humiliate her.

Kaede remains the biggest problem character in this book and again, I wonder if Hearn had a clear idea of what to do with her. There is undoubtedly potential to have had Kaede try to gain some political control on her own behalf once Takeo leaves for his campaign - in terms of the book's internal logic, it would not have been impossible, given that Lady Maruyama had power in her own right and Kaede is the heir to her lands. Instead, Kaede gives up any idea of being taken seriously by the men when they seem to ignore her, and on a whim that comes out of nowhere, decides to return home to her father's lands (and hence to being captured by Lord Fujiwara). Her sisters, who in Grass For His Pillow she had tried to be strong for, are carted off to be hostages in Arai's court for no other reason than to give her no reason to fight. It's a stupid set up, made more irritating by the way in which Kaede just walks into it. I felt no sympathy for a character whose plight was entirely of her own making and I found it contrived that the men supposedly protecting her (including her family servant who ultimately betrays her), all choose to do nothing to help her.

Hearn also changes the narrative structure. In the previous two books, she alternated between Takeo's first person perspective, and the third person account of Kaede's misadventures. For this book, she introduces a new third person perspective to follow Shizuka as she returns to the Tribe at Kaede's insistence. This is done purely to try and tie off the Tribe loose ends and it sticks out as a result, particularly as the attempt to show how the Tribe is not even loyal to its own (forcing Yuki to commit suicide for no other reason than that she would not have raised Takeo's son to hate him) is cartoonish.

Hearn's attempts to introduce a sense of an historical time-frame to the story here, have been absent from the previous books. The effect is curiously to loose the fantasy element but also makes the Hidden's obvious relationship to Christianity (which has been present throughout the story) somewhat jarring.

The battles are perfunctory and even the final fight between Takeo and Kotaro made me feel nothing other than "Isn't it over, already?". Hearn cannot resist the temptation to fall into melodrama and the final fire at Fujiwara's house and the terrible effect on Kaede produced only laughter in this reader, given that even a soap opera writer would be ashamed of it.