Books I Really Didn't Finish: The Witchwood Crown

We’re navigating new frontiers of not finishing books with this one. Soon I’ll be writing posts about not reading books at all, and then my blog will spontaneously merge with r/books.

As an experiment, I recently walked into my local library and picked out the chunkiest, heftiest fantasy tome that I could find, without bothering to look at the synopsis or even the title. That book turned out to be Tad Williams’ The Witchwood Crown.

This was an inauspicious choice for a few reasons. Firstly, my only previous exposure to Tad Williams is The War Of The Flowers, which is to this day one of the dullest books I’ve ever tried to read. Second, The Witchwood Crown is actually the first book in a sequel trilogy to Williams' Memory, Sorrow And Thorn series from way back in the 80s, although the author forward states that it was intended to stand alone so I didn’t let that stop me.

I girded my loins, cleared my busy social calendar, opened the book...and made it four chapters in before I gave up and swapped it out for something more interesting.

I just...I can’t. I can’t even, with this shit.

The first chapter opens with a woman named Tanahaya, part of a race called the Zida’ya, musing to herself about how humans are as mayflies compared to her people, who live for centuries in their serene forest homes and they’re elves, they’re just Tolkien elves with a different name and a vaguely Japanese cultural aesthetic for some reason, Jesus Christ what is it with the fucking elves

I honestly don’t understand how people can write this stuff without falling into a coma. Reading it is excruciating enough, God knows what it would be like to have to live with Shan’anda’landa’land’alar, First Zephyr of the Elv’en people or whatever in your head for several years. 

Granted, this is a sequel to a fantasy trilogy that started in 1988; maybe these tropes didn’t feel quite as played-out 33 years ago as they do now. Maybe, after years of gritty grimdark fantasy, people are hungry for wispy elves giving thanks to Mother Sun and riding horses named Spider-Silk. I guess it’s possible.

After the elf chapter we get a wise kingly king and his rambunctious princely prince son, and this is the stuff that made me drop the book. The elf shit is at least entertainingly bad, but sombre kings being all wise and sombre and kingly is perhaps the least interesting subject in the world to me. I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to see eye to eye with the epic fantasy genre until it gets over its fawning attitude towards monarchy, and there’s absolutely no sign of that happening any time soon.

For all that I mock grimdark fantasy (like I did two paragraphs ago), it at least tends to be a lot richer and more interesting than this hokey nonsense.