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A review by ceridwyn
The Tales of the Otori Trilogy by Lian Hearn
2.0
I found much of the first of the Tales of the Otori series - Across the Nightingale Floor - completely compelling. Hearn sets the action in a supposedly fictionalized version of feudal Japan, however the characters and culture are so firmly placed in the world of ninja and geisha that world building doesn’t actually seem necessary (or indeed to have taken place). It is as if Hearn has set the series in feudal Japan while giving herself an out for making mistakes (of course I could just not know enough to spot the integral differences between medieval Japan and the world of the Otori).
This established setting allows Hearn to rid the first book of almost all exposition about location. This is what I found so compelling about Across the Nightingale Floor – I didn’t have to wade through long, involved description about how a place looks, but got to experience it through the characters’ reactions. I’m not at all visual so I tend to ‘flick through’ any expository writing that contains more than two sentences of description. I much prefer to understand the setting through a character’s reaction to the place - more of a kinesthetic explanation that provides a feeling - rather than knowing exactly where the pillars are in a room. Unfortunately this lack of adjective-laden description faded away by the end of the first book and by the end of the third book in the trilogy I was skipping hunks of waffle about the way various locations looked.
Throughout the trilogy Herne uses two points of view. The lead male character, Takeo, is written in the first person and, as the key active participant in the story, his chapters have an immediacy and life that is really appealing. The chapters featuring Kaede, the lead female character, are written in third person narrative. In Across the Nightingale Floor I was not immediately bothered by the huge contrast between the two styles, particularly because Kaede was an active, energetic, modern-revisionist type heroine. Swapping between perspectives was jarring to me but it didn’t lessen my enjoyment particularly.
However, as Kaede falls in love with Takeo, she becomes more and more a passive participant in the story. She is always an object of desire but in the second and third books she becomes unable to combat this in any meaningful way in plot terms. Because Kaede’s point of view chapters are written in third person I, as a reader, got further and further away from any immediate understanding of her motivation and character. Herne kept telling me what she was thinking, not showing me and this made me more and more annoyed and I ended up disliking a character I had really enjoyed in the first book of the trilogy.
I think if Herne had chosen to keep the point of view in the tight first person and had Takeo as the sole narrator the books would have been stronger and more enjoyable. By writing Kaede's chapters in the third person, the marginalization and disempowerment of her character (that could have been seen only as a result of the historical and cultural setting) were increased and given tacit approval by the author. By the end of Grass for his Pillow I was truly pissed off with this narrative technique and if I hadn’t already purchased Brilliance of the Moon I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it.
This established setting allows Hearn to rid the first book of almost all exposition about location. This is what I found so compelling about Across the Nightingale Floor – I didn’t have to wade through long, involved description about how a place looks, but got to experience it through the characters’ reactions. I’m not at all visual so I tend to ‘flick through’ any expository writing that contains more than two sentences of description. I much prefer to understand the setting through a character’s reaction to the place - more of a kinesthetic explanation that provides a feeling - rather than knowing exactly where the pillars are in a room. Unfortunately this lack of adjective-laden description faded away by the end of the first book and by the end of the third book in the trilogy I was skipping hunks of waffle about the way various locations looked.
Throughout the trilogy Herne uses two points of view. The lead male character, Takeo, is written in the first person and, as the key active participant in the story, his chapters have an immediacy and life that is really appealing. The chapters featuring Kaede, the lead female character, are written in third person narrative. In Across the Nightingale Floor I was not immediately bothered by the huge contrast between the two styles, particularly because Kaede was an active, energetic, modern-revisionist type heroine. Swapping between perspectives was jarring to me but it didn’t lessen my enjoyment particularly.
However, as Kaede falls in love with Takeo, she becomes more and more a passive participant in the story. She is always an object of desire but in the second and third books she becomes unable to combat this in any meaningful way in plot terms. Because Kaede’s point of view chapters are written in third person I, as a reader, got further and further away from any immediate understanding of her motivation and character. Herne kept telling me what she was thinking, not showing me and this made me more and more annoyed and I ended up disliking a character I had really enjoyed in the first book of the trilogy.
I think if Herne had chosen to keep the point of view in the tight first person and had Takeo as the sole narrator the books would have been stronger and more enjoyable. By writing Kaede's chapters in the third person, the marginalization and disempowerment of her character (that could have been seen only as a result of the historical and cultural setting) were increased and given tacit approval by the author. By the end of Grass for his Pillow I was truly pissed off with this narrative technique and if I hadn’t already purchased Brilliance of the Moon I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading it.