The third book in William Nicholson’s Wind on Fire trilogy is Firesong, and Your Humble Blogger picked it up from the Young Adult shelf at the library a day or three after finishing the second one. This is usually a mistake, and probably was in this case as well. I didn’t enjoy the third anywhere near as much as the first two; I think that’s mostly because of the book itself, but it may well be because of overload.
Anyway, one interesting thing about the books is how different they are thematically, and how different the world’s zeitgeist is. I’m not using that properly, I know. But look: in the first book, The Wind Singer, although the protagonist had some sort of vaguely-defined ESP, there wasn’t much in the way of supernatural power in the book. Well, that’s not true, there were two or three eerie things that couldn’t well be explained with aspects-of-the-world-you-don’t-know, but on the whole the things that happened adhered more or less to physical laws as we know them, and the protagonists completed the quest by cleverness and persistence. Yes, Ira was a prophet, but that mostly meant that she shouted “oh, unhappy people”; she didn’t actually prophesy anything much. In the second, there’s a great deal of exploration of the protagonist’s untapped power; by the end he’s not only using telepathy and telekinesis but Mental Experts Meet in Mind Battle Until Famed Psychic’s Head Explodes!! (see p. 12) In the third book, our protagonist learns how to fly, how to change the state of matter with his mind, and how to sing. There is no longer any doubt about the outcome of the quest because there is nothing the protagonist cannot do. Plus, it turns out he’s got an army of thousands of undead kamikaze psychics even more powerful than he is, just waiting for him to show up and, um, something. And a cat.
But see, the third book isn’t about the quest and how difficult it is to fulfill, it’s about the integration of constructive and destructive tendencies. And about faith, the third book is all about faith, particularly faith in a crazy dying prophet who somehow Knows which way to go. When I read books like this one, I wind up thinking to myself ‘are these people supposed to be good examples or bad examples?’ Because when the woman starts in with her future-telling, any sign of doubt or dissent is portrayed as a Bad Idea, and the only way to survive is total submissiveness to her crazy ranting. In the first book, the prophecy is color, it’s in the background and it’s interesting enough, but nobody needs to rely on it. In the second, it’s a unifying force for the community, but the Questers fulfill their Quest without making use of it other than as a general sense that Things are Going to Change Soon. The third book, however, relies entirely on the prophecies of the prophet, which in my opinion is a Bad Idea.
Digression: has anybody tried, for anything more than comic effect, a Cassandra who is only right most of the time? The community couldn’t rely on her pronouncements, since every fifth or sixth one wouldn’t come true, but her warnings would be true often enough to sway people’s opinions a lot anyway. It would be hard to make a city that she would fit into, since I would expect her to be killed or at least driven out. On the other hand, she could well be driven out into a nearby cave/shrine/hideout and consulting her would be totally taboo but everybody does it anyway... End Digression.
Mr. Nicholson is still very good at the things he is very good at. In particular, he’s magnificent at interludes where our protagonists find themselves in totally unfamiliar surroundings, where the locals are very different from them, and then they either turn out to be helpful rather than threatening, or threatening rather than helpful, or really really scary rather than just threatening. Then the situation is resolved and our heroes move on. There are two of those in the third book that are as good as anything in the first two, which is saying a lot. And, you know, if I’d waited a month before reading Firesong, I would probably have liked it more.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
Apparently, I’m incapable of answering a direct question without veering off onto a tangent:
There are a couple of YA trilogies that do something like what you’re asking for with the unreliable Cassandra: John Christopher’s Sword of the Spirits books (The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands, and The Sword of the Spirits) and Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s Green Sky trilogy (Below the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration)
Both of these series start off with Eye Candy and with Vision. For the titular prince in waiting, the eye candy is the mysterious powers and prophecies of the church and the vision is of him ascending not just to power but to leadership in changing the world for the better. For the characters who live in their tree-homes above the root, the eye candy is the renaissance of childlike psychic abilities and the vision is healing of an old wound.
I don’t want to spoil these for you in case you decide to read them, but suffice to say that neither series ends on a triumphal note; neither their eye candy nor their vision turns out to be exactly the panacea that it appears to be in the first book of each series. Various internet comments about the Sword of the Spirits books seem to take this as a sign that the books are crap. My memory (and it has been more than a few years) is that both series are well-executed tragedies.
Eh. For what it’s worth, the second-to-last paragraph should have ended “…the vision is the healing of an old societal wound.”
And I completely forgot to make the point that ties them back into the Cassandra question, which is that in both series, the Vision is driven by a Visionary: in Sword of the Spirits, it’s the church Seers; in Green Sky, it’s the protagonist of the first book (whose powers come to include some prescience). Both are perceptive and compelling, but they are by no means infallible.
I read Sword Of The Spirits as a kid, and really liked it; I re-read it a few years ago, and still did. I don’t remember the unreliable-Cassandra aspect, though! Hoom.
Well, the Seers aren’t so much Cassandras (in that they’re not warning of impending doom), but they do have a powerful vision for the future that may or may not be accurate and may or may not be As Advertized.