Wow. I just finished In the Realm of the Wolf by David Gemmell a couple hours ago, and it was AMAZING. So amazing, in fact, that I want to write a post examining my reaction to it before I write the review.
You know that ecstatic, otherworldly feeling you get when you finish an amazingly good book? Where you feel like you just came home from a long, epic journey and you can’t stop thinking about it? Where your mind is racing with all sorts of new and beautiful ideas, as if you’ve opened your eyes for the first time?
That’s how I felt after finishing this book.
As a writer, I want more than anything for my readers to have the same experience when reading my books. I don’t expect everyone will, but I want to be able to connect with a good chunk of my readers this way. David Gemmell does this for me, and my main question is therefore: how does he do it?
Looking back, I’ve got to say that the book started good and steadily got better, right up until the awesome finish. The first two chapters were good, but around the third chapter, my expectations started to be exceeded. It wasn’t until the last half of the book that I realized just how much I was connecting with the characters, and when the climaxes hit, I found myself rooting for them more than I usually do.
So I guess escalation had something to do with it. Gemmell starts with a pretty simple plot: Waylander has to evade a bunch of guild assassins out to kill him, but he doesn’t want to because his wife just died and he’s depressed. Then more and more characters get involved, and the stakes steadily grew until the fate of global empires hung in the balance.
Yet throughout it all, the focus was always on the personal conflicts and the impact of the events on the individual characters. The vast armies sweeping the land were more of a background setting element than anything else; the real story lay in the choices the characters made and why they made them. And when the characters started confronting their demons, I rooted for them as if they were my close, personal friends–or more than friends.
Yet Waylander himself is very much a larger-than-life character. He’s a better hunter and tracker than the Sathuli tribesmen, a better swordsman than most of his opponents, by far the best crossbowman in the Drenai saga, and a cold, efficient killer with a body-count of hundreds. Not only is he rich enough to support the bankrupt king of Drenai singlehandedly with his vast financial assets, but in each of the three books in his trilogy, he plays the most pivotal role of any character in the rise and fall of nations and empires.
And yet…I can still connect with him. Why is that?
Maybe it’s because he’s far from perfect. He vanquishes hundreds of soldiers, assassins, monsters, and demons, but he doesn’t escape uninjured. In Realm of the Wolf, his less-than-perfect swordsmanship is a key element of the plot.
It’s the internal conflict, however, that really makes me connect with him. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not a cold, unfeeling killer, nor have I lost my whole family to roving bandits–but I can understand his struggle to find happiness in the face of so much evil, both within him and without.
Or maybe it’s not so much that I understand him as that I’m fascinated by him, and I don’t know why. It certainly helps that he has a soft side–that he’s not a complete monster. In all the books, his quest is always to save lives, not just to take them, and every once and a while he does something to keep my sympathy. The way he spared the Sathuli scout in Realm of the Wolf, for example.
Overall, though, I think it’s the characters and their conflicts that made this book come alive. Waylander is basically an adventure tale with some interesting characters; In the Realm of the Wolf is also an adventure tale, but the personal stakes are much higher, and the focus is more on the characters than on the rise and fall of empires.
Anyways. I still feel like there’s something elusive that I’m not quite getting, but those are my thoughts after finishing this book. If you didn’t find it helpful, I hope you at least found it interesting. And if you have the chance, read the trilogy! It’s goood!
Recognizing what makes a great novel is difficult, and making a great novel yourself even more so. Great writing can’t be replicated, unfortunately, and even then there will be plenty of people that won’t think it’s that great. The world of writing is such a fickle one.