Swordspoint
Tonight I finished reading Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. The book takes place in a fictional, quasi-Renaissance-era environment and mainly involves the swordsmen and other commoners who live in the city of Riverside, and the nobles who live on the Hill above it. The plot involves a swordsman who becomes involves in plots of power by one noble and of revenge for rejected passion by another. It's not strictly a fantasy novel in that it contains no magic - other than the setting, it could be historical fiction.
I'm afraid I was rather disappointed in the book, finding the writing to be rather languid (and even a bid turgid), where I had been expecting something lively and trippy. Also, the swordsman - Richard St. Vier - turns out to be the main character, and his rather detached, depressed air didn't really interest me. On the other hand, young Michael Godwin, a noble who seemed to be going through the process of breaking out of the stiffness and stolidity of his caste (by taking up swordfighting, for instance), interested me quite a bit, and he basically drops out of the book two-thirds of the way through, as the whole thing ends up as an exercise in political maneuvering.
It wasn't a struggle to get through, but it seemed to me that it could have gone in a couple of different directions from its beginning, and went the one I found less interesting, with a correspondingly lesser payoff. Yes, 'disappointing' is the right word for Swordspoint. Pity.
So, I guess it hasn't been a good day for me for fiction, eh? Well, I expect that to change when I start my next Bujold novel tomorrow, and watch last Friday's Homicide.
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