The Anvil of the World

This book is so astonishingly mediocre that it's difficult to even have an opinion about it. I think at least part of the problem is that it's really difficult to identify basic literary elements. Is there a plot? Is this characterization? A joke? What's going on here?

I think this is what happens when someone that isn't actually funny tries to write humor and Make a Statement at the same time. The result? A heavy-handed piece of environmentalist propaganda full of unrelated things that are bizarre but not actually funny.

The main character, Smith, comes across as a strange dichotomy because he is portrayed as being clueless AND effective. (Of course you find out later that he's only effective because some magic is inhabiting him and using him to transport it around. So really, he's just clueless.) The secondary characters include a demonic magician, the son of a Saint that married a Demon, and a well-travelled cook that, Forrest Gump-like, was apparently involved in every major event in recent history.

The entire novel is tiresome from the beginning to the end. Every time it looks like it might get interesting (a train under attack by assassins!) the author ruins it by introducing an amazingly trite explanation (they're ecoterrorists!).

The very last scene is actually reasonably well-done, yet it bears no relation whatsoever to the rest of the book. Maybe the author came up with an idea for a short story and decided to add about 300 pages of text just for the heck of it.

Rating: 1.0