The Weavers of Saramyr

I picture Chris Wooding as a chef, cooking up a broth in an oversized pot. He’s made several simple, tasty dishes beforehand, but now he’s aiming for a more refined clientele. He has already decided on the ingredients he’s most comfortable with: supernatural powers, monsters, suspense and a crowd of heroes who have to infiltrate the enemy stronghold. But now he needs to throw in some things that will make people take him seriously. How about some grisly deaths and child-rapes, for that superficial shock value? How about some clever words from the thesaurus? Oh, and why not mix in some unconvincing politics. And for the extra-spicy part, how about random lesbian sex?

And we all know what page his cookbook is open on. Stan Lee’s Uncanny X-Men all the way.

The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray was extremely enjoyable because it was clearly an author having a lot of fun and writing what he was most comfortable with. It was a little bit silly, but it was meant to be, and worked much better for it. Here, Wooding is forcing himself to write in a way that really doesn’t suit him, and it’s much to the detriment of his style. He just doesn’t seem to have any inkling of when he’s using phrasing that seems too comic, too overblown or too archaic for the situation. I cringed at a dead girl being described as an ‘erstwhile companion’, and someone ‘swearing an impolite oath’ had me shaking my head. On top of that, he uses obscure, mostly archaic words like ‘limned’ at every opportunity, often twisting sentences painfully to accommodate them, while simultaneously making elementary mistakes (like using ‘omnipresent’ as a synonym for ‘ever-present’) and punctuating this mess with baby-words like ‘wodge’. Speaking of which, it’s entirely natural for a fantasy writer to include some indication of whether he or she is British, American, Australian etc., but if I’m not mistaken, Wooding at one point affects an Americanism, whilst in several other places using phrasing that clearly indicates that he is a British writer. Perhaps this was not conscious. I hope not.

The style isn’t the only element I found unappealing. There’s a lot we have to swallow. Wooding creates an intricate world in excellent detail; he’s at his best when describing the three moons, the architecture, the religious traditions of Saramyr. But the plot he lays on this foundation is weak. We have to believe that the Weavers are tolerated, despite being monstrous, because they are useful. Fine. But that the nobles don’t just get rid of them, by fair means or foul, once they go murderously insane is dubious. We are told that there is firm religious belief, but we never see it – the holy character never really seems to believe. We have to accept that the entire population is so stupid that they don’t notice the Weaver monasteries are at the epicentre of the blight on the land. We have to accept that there are people who are to be feared, despite the fact that just about every single evil person in the book turns into a coward and a weakling at the slightest threat. And then we must believe that the people hate aberrants. This is the stickiest point of all.

In a world where the weavers look like monstrous corpses, and there are demons that are perfectly well-tolerated, the weavers have convinced the people they hate aberrants. Yet it just doesn’t seem convincing. Yes, there’s a precedent, as with the Nazi propaganda and a dozen other examples. But there, the ‘enemy’ was always visible, always seemed a threat. Maintaining hatred of a race/mutation that is already stamped out seems less likely, especially when just about everyone who meets an aberrant in the book decides they like them after all.

The plot is overlong, and rather shoddy. There’s no clear impetus for most of the events, and certainly no clear goal until the very latter parts of the book. The viewpoint jumps and lurches around, sometimes twice in the same paragraph, and we often have lengthy sections about things that don’t particularly matter. Monsters and random guards are produced at will to provide a bit of action, but soon become tedious. The twist at the end is unimpressive, because it just makes you think, ‘Why on earth didn’t he betray them years ago? And in a much simpler manner?’ It seemed like a twist for the sake of a twist, and everyone involved in it promptly died anyway, so it made no real difference at all. And then the ending dragged on for at least a chapter longer than it should.

All in all, I’m very disappointed. I will read more of Wooding’s work at some point in the future, but I don’t think I shall bother with The Skein of Lament any time soon.