Subject: (whorl) Petty complaints (RTTW spoilers)

From: William Ansley <wansley at warwick.net>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 01:08:24 +0000

At 6:03 PM -0500 2/13/01, <akt at attglobal.net> wrote:

>From: Kieran Cleary <kcleary at jb.man.ac.uk>> Subject: Re: (whorl) Pig,
>Godling
>
>>  Alga,
>>
>>  Couldn't agree more re Pig. Did he like deciphering that dialect? He
>did
>>  nae!
>
>It fashed my een! And my kin are Scottish on my mother's side--which
>made it all the more irritating! I know where your kin are from despite
>that "uk" in your address....

Hi, alga and all.

I finally had time to finish RTTW. I can't say that I was all that 
thrilled with it either, for a variety of reasons. I found Pig's 
dialect quite irritating as well; there were some things he said that 
I never figured out.

(Now that I think about it, I suppose that the fact that Hornsilk 
could always understand Pig could be taken as more evidence that 
Hornsilk was really Silk all along. In TBotLS, Silk could always 
understand, Tick, that highly annoying catacrest that always used 
random consonants at the beginnings of the words it spoke. (Something 
that has always bother me: what was the catacrest's real name? It 
couldn't have been Tick, if that's what it called itself.))

In fact I got heartily sick of all of the "distinctive" ways Wolfe 
came up with for his characters to speak in this book: Pig's dialect, 
the village of the Yodas, Olivine's repeating, Olivine's repeating 
herself, Prolocutor Italics and Remora's mumblings.

>  > The encounter with the godling struck me as very similar to one of
>Sev's
>>  meetings with Juturna ('I would save you'), or with the hierodules,
>where
>>  they kneel before him. In a sense, the godling is a debased version of
>a
>>  hierodule, and recognises Silk as the 'holy one'.
>
>Well, yes. But I do think the operative word is "debased." I love
>Juturna and the hierodules and think they are used *extremely* well by
>the author (especially in that last book that some on this list like to
>put down), but as I said in an earlier post, the godling, to me, seems
>like a Hollywood special effect that serves no purpose other than cover
>art.
>

I was also bothered by the impossibly large size of the (big) 
godling. Wolfe should make up his mind, is he writing science fiction 
or isn't he?

As far as the cover art goes, this book far surpassed all of the the 
others in the wrongness of the cover, in my opinion. The artist 
apparently read the book with very little attention.

On p. 53 the godling is described as having "a smooth, domed head." 
No mention of a hat or hood. So where does the artist come up withe 
the very peculiar headgear he puts on the godling's head? From p. 139.

--------------------
The yellow flame of the candle rose; he shut his lantern, mesmerized 
by the end of the godling's thumb, the smoothly rounded face of a 
faceless man wearing a peaked hat that was in fact a claw.
--------------------

So the artist puts a hood with a bizarre, claw-like forward thrusting 
peak on his godling's head but no claws on his hand. I guess it's 
just me, but I find this profoundly irritating.

More complaints to come!

William Ansley

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