By Patrick Rothfuss
The book opens on a typical evening at the Waystone Inn, the Innkeeper, Kote, is serving the regulars and one of them is regaling the others with a well known tale when the peace is shattered by one of the villagers turning up having been attacked by a strange creature. When shown its carcass, Kote seems to recognise what it is and that sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the inn becoming the rest stop for a historian called Chronicler. Chronicler recognises the innkeeper as the (in)famous Kvothe (sounds like quothe) and eventually persuades him to dictate to Chronicler his life story and thus the real meat of the tale begins.
As a boy, Kvothe lives a carefree existence travelling with his parents and their band of troupers, entertaining villages and towns with plays and songs and acrobatics and juggling. Kvothe is something of a prodigy. Very intelligent and a fast learner he can perform any number of roles – on the stage as an actor or lutist or backstage as manager or huckster – as required, and so life would seem set for him to take over the troupe eventually. One day he meets a man called Abenthy, an Arcanist, who joins the troupe, becoming something of a mentor to the young Kvothe. He introduces him to the fundamentals of Sympathy – magic to you and me – and to medicine and science and a host of other subjects and, sensing the innate talent in Kvothe, encourages him to, one day, join the university at Imre where his natural talents can be honed by tuition from the masters.
Tragedy strikes when the troupe stops to rest at a standing stone. Kvothe wanders off alone into the forest and when he returns he finds the entire party – including his parents – slaughtered and a strange group clustered around the fire there. One of them quips about “..someone’s parents singing entirely the wrong kind of songs” forcing Kvothe to believe they are the Chandrian, an evil people believed by most to be a fairy tale, and subjetc of a ballad his father had been composing. Kvothe gets away and, in shock, and after some time spent foraging in the woods he makes his way to the city of Tarbean where he ekes out a wretched life of begging and petty crime until eventually – driven by thoughts of revenge – he leaves the city and heads for the university.
Once enrolled he sets about learning all that he can about the Chandrian but his efforts are curtailed when a run-in with the university bully gets him banned from the university Archive. It’s a setback, but Kvothe is in this for the long haul and the rest of the book recounts his many exploits as a talented but impoverished student, making friends with a small band of loyal friends, battling a rich and vindictive bully, dealing with professors that lurch between hostile, indifferent and insane and meeting the love of his life.
But all the while, as the tale is told, deeper, darker mysteries are hinted at in the present. Things are not quite what they seem. Why is the great Kvothe hiding out in an inn, pretending to be a innkeeper? Who – or what – is Bast, his loyal companion? Why have they chosen the Waystone Inn as their hiding place? Who – or what – are they hiding from? The sense that something big is about to happen is never very far away and I suspect there is a much bigger tale to tell over the course of the next two books.
This really is one of the most enjoyable and impressive debuts of recent years. The story feels familiar, like an old friend, drawing the reader deeper and deeper in, page by page, but while the writing embraces some standard fantasy fair, what Patrick Rothfuss does brilliantly is to unwrap his main protagonist, Kvothe, slowly, revealing layer upon layer of a man who, given a prodigious talent and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, is always learning, always seeking the truth, trying to do the right thing (though not always succeeding) and each lesson learned builds surreptitiously upon the one before so that along the way, we watch him become something undoubtedly greater than the sum of his parts. He is a legend and a hero, not because he does legendary or heroic things, but because his exploits become exaggerated in the telling by other people and before long his reputation is working both for and against him.
The book is beautifully written, the language is rich and descriptive, filled with detail in all the right places yet unfussy, with room to breathe. The characters, even the minor ones, are richly drawn and well rounded and despite the narrative switching from third person to first person throughout the book, the changes are deftly handled and work well, even lending added poignancy to the narrative in places. The world that Rothfuss has created for his story is also something of an achievement. The way Sympathy (magic) works is entirely new and entirely plausible and the relationship between politics, religion and myth is nicely played out, making class and wealth as much a part of the everyday as magic and the arcane arts.
Not that it’s all good of course. Kvothe’s ability to survive on gut instinct and live on his wits are what makes him fun to be with, but even the nicest guy becomes tiresome when they can do no wrong. And literally he does no wrong. He knows everything, he guesses right about every situation and even when it looks like he might have finally met his match, dumb luck plays on his side and he comes out on top. Everything he tries to learn comes easily to him and he’s not just good, he excels, always. If you actually knew someone like that, they’d get on your tits!
Also, and inevitably, while it’s a rollicking good yarn, it is the first of a trilogy so nothing gets resolved by the end of the book. This is expected of course, you need to leave some things open for resolution in subsequent books, but The Name Of The Wind does kind of leave you hanging in the middle of nowhere. I believe it would have been better to end the novel by ending Kvothe’s time at the university, thus setting up the next stage of his life for the new book – but then Mr Rothfuss very likely has tricks up his sleeve that I know nothing about.
Finally, if you look beneath the surface you will find some inconsistencies in the plot, but given that the narrator is a superb actor (as he keeps reminding us) and this is supposedly his story, we have to wonder about the reliability of the narrative. There is something of a tradition of the unreliable narrator in some fantasy so you have to ask – is the whole book just one big act?
For all that though, I cannot recommend The Name Of The Wind highly enough. Ostensibly it’s a simple tale, but it is refreshingly different, well paced, with likeable characters that feel real, a rich world that reeks of authenticity and a story replete with dark edges and humour in equal measure, something you see all too rarely in fantasy.
Let’s hope the rest of this epic tale lives up to the undoubted promise of this first outing.
The Name Of The Wind is published by Gollanz and is available from Amazon