Across the Nightingale Floor; Tales of the Otori Book One by Lian Hearn
Book review by Sarah Zettel
I love finding a book I could not possibly have written.
Across the Nightengale Floor is unusual in several respects. The first is, in this day of books that require you to reinforce your nighttable before you put them down, it’s a thin volume. Now, I do enjoy a fine, fat fantasy, but it takes a very good story to sustain that kind of length. Mostly, it seems like authors and editors just don’t know when to stop.
Lian Hearn, however, gives a lovely, spare tale, very much like a Japanese watercolor -- just a few simple brushstrokes and colors are laid on the paper, and yet the image is complete.
The plot is fairly straightforward. In a country that is similar to ancient Japan, a young man escapes the slaughter of his village by an evil overlord. He is taken in by a noble lord who raises him as his son, who helps raise and train him, always with the aim of revenging themselves against the evil overlord. Oh, and it turns out the young man is actually a member of a family of assassins and gifted with extrordinary physical abilities, such as amazing hearing.
What the above sketch misses is the amazingly complete culture Hearn has built in this slender book. So much fantasy seems to be acted on a poorly completed set and the constructions will wobble if you poke at them, or think at them.
The scenery Hearn builds for us does not wobble. We see a vibrant, complex, layered culture in motion. It has a long past, as well as a future. It has religion and faith, as well as laws and politics. The good lords are not always kind, and the cruel lords can be polite and sophisticated. And everyone has very good reasons for what they are doing, if not always the right reasons.
Acting on this stage are a whole range of surprising, entertaining and sympathetic characters. We even have that rarest of all fantastic creations -- women who are strong and believable acorrding to the rules of their own culture, and who are not just twenty-first century Americans in fancy dress. As if this weren’t enough, there are not one but two beautiful romances, and plenty of suspence and action. The ending is a cliff-hanger, but the story still feels complete.
How Hearn accomplished all this in so few words, I have no idea. As I said, I could not possibly have written this book. But I really, really enjoyed reading it.
Sarah, I really enjoyed this book, and am looking forward to the sequel. Thanks for sharing it with us!
Posted by: Lisa | October 20, 2003 at 10:49 PM
ling address? please email me if you do. god bless you.
Posted by: cara | June 22, 2005 at 03:38 PM