Ending of The Knight

Alan Lewis · 13 Jan 2005, 05:00 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: alanarc at frontiernet.net (Alan Lewis)
Date: Thu Jan 13 05:00:51 2005
Subject: (urth) Ending of The Knight
References: <002401c4f836$d8948130$55fcaccf@GWB>
Message-ID: <016f01c4f96f$e54de530$3f87d2d1@VALUED7B9600FA>

>The Wizard Knight series?  I consider this a single novel that is meant to
>be read that way. In a couple years it will no doubt be offered that way.
>Unlike the Latro books, I don't consider it a "series". Does anyone
>disagree with that? Does anyone think the books were intended to be
>ultimately read as self-standing novels?

Now that I have finally caught up, I can contribute to TWK discussion.  I 
take exception to the terms posed in this question.  Since Knight and Wizard 
the books in the same series, by no means should we expect them to read like 
self-standing novels.  If they were, then I would argue they are not so much 
books in a series, but books set in the same book-world, like Long Sun/Short 
Sun are.

Of course length of material inevitably has a part to play in this.  No 
doubt once Wolfe realized his story was going to take at least x many words, 
he would have realized he was probably looking to two books for all intents 
and purposes.  But I would argue he then wrote them that way, that there are 
fundamental differences between the two books.  For one thing, Able 
pre-Skai, and Able post-Skai are different characters.  In the first book he 
is the true neophyte, a complete outsider; in the second book he is (as 
essentially an Overcyn) the ultimate insider, a pro.  In Arthurian terms, in 
the first book he is Parsifal, and in the 2nd he is alternatively 
Lancelot/Arthur.  In each book he complains at different times that he's 
"just a kid."  In the first book we believe this is true, even though the 
other characters treat these statements as ironic self-reflection -- when he 
complains so in the Wizard, I think we take those statements the same way, 
and aren't buying him as a kid anymore.

Also the narrative structure is different in Wizard, with considerable 
narrative occurring outside his POV.

So I agree with GW on this one, even though it seems like I have little to 
no company.

Alan

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net