J.M. McDermott, Last Dragon (Wizards of the Coast, 2008)
Sometimes, late at night, we have some odd conversations in the staff lounge here at GMR. A few months ago I was on my favourite corner of the sofa (the one with the brown fake-fur throw) when Claire Owen came in and lobbed a book in my general direction.
"Here! Tell me what you think of this mess. I can't make any sense of it. You've been around here a lot longer than I have; maybe you can figure it out." I'm not fast enough to catch most thrown objects any more, but I managed to move my feet out of the way and the book missed them. I picked it up and flipped it over to read the back cover. "…a remarkable first novel that will leave critics and readers alike in stunned awe," I read out loud.
"That's a polite way of putting it," Claire said with a snarl. "I'd've stopped at stunned."
With a challenge like that, of course I had to read it. It took me a couple of months to get through Last Dragon, and then even longer to figure out how to describe it.
"Stream of unconsciousness." That will do, I think. These are the deathbed letters of the Empress Zhan to her former lover, Esumi. They speak of her childhood, her training as a warrior; her wanderings with her uncle Seth to find her grandfather, who had murdered the rest of the family; her hideous winter journey with a motley band (including her grandfather's reanimated corpse) to save another land from conquest.
(Minor quibble: everybody keeps referring to grandfather's reanimated corpse as a golem. Now a golem, according to most accounts, is a creature molded from inanimate objects by a holy rabbi and given life, usually to protect the rabbi's community. This is nothing like murderous old gramps! He's more of a zombie than anything else.)
Appropriately for a dying old woman's ramblings, there's nothing linear about any of it. Each chapter is made up of segments, ranging in length from a paragraph to perhaps a page and a half. They're all more or less related, in that they're happening to more or less the same people (I think), but they jump around in space and time, and I fear that Zhan has breathed in too much milkweed smoke in her long life. Episodic isn't the half of it, as many of these fragments aren't even enough to make an episode.
Now, if you like this kind of thing Last Dragon is sure to charm you. If you don't, as I don't, and as Claire doesn't seem to, Last Dragon is so disjointed as to appear to have been dismembered.
You can find J.M. McDermott on the Web here.
