Invasive Reading

I've previously written about how I don't like Terry Brooks novels as much as I did when I discovered them as a teenager -- and how they made such an impact on me then that I keep reading them anyway. So, another year, another new book. His most recent release is The Skaar Invasion, the second of four books in The Fall of Shannara, a series meant to conclude the story of his long-running Shannara fantasy setting.

After this second book, it does certainly seem as though I'm going to get the closure I'm hoping for out of this series. Shannara has always been both serial and episodic, with Brooks releasing new connected trilogies all the time, but skipping decades and centuries in between. It didn't strike me as needing an overall "end point"; I figured that he could just eternally keep time jumping to new stories. But this new book (and this now halfway-complete set) has legitimately made it feel like a capital-E Ending is coming.

Plot moves are big this time around. Long-established elements of his fantasy world are being upended and destroyed. Callbacks to earlier books in the series abound -- and they feel quite deliberate this time, rather than the unintentional self-repetition of a long-time author. Yeah, okay, I'm onboard, the Shannara books could have an ultimate conclusion, and Brooks is doing a good job in constructing it.

That said, the story is big and largely satisfying, but the writing itself far less so. The characters all feel rather shallow, lacking enough to truly separate them from one another, and even less to separate them from similar archetypes Brooks creates in basically every new set of books he writes. There are, as ever in his work, tacked-on romances without any true sense of passion. Lengthy narrations masked as character introspection (from characters who don't seem like they should be so self-aware). Not enough personality revealed through action rather than thought.

This book was not a dense read, but it nevertheless took me a couple of weeks to get through it. The experience was a weird combination of not entirely enjoying it, while being engaged by the boldness of the some story moves and curious to see what would happen next. It's an experience I haven't really had with a book since years ago when I tore through a few Dan Brown novels and then just as quickly gave up reading any more.

That this novel, and Brooks, seem to be on a clear path to closure (and that there's enough promise in the plotting to suggest it's going to be worthwhile) tips the balance for me into calling this a B- book, rather than the some-level-of-C I'd give it if I were being more influenced by the writing itself. Still, I have a couple of friends who have also read lots of Terry Brooks -- and who have given him up -- and I'm not yet rushing to tell them they should give this series a try.

We'll see if he sticks the landing.