Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta - review (and some musings on fantasy writing)

In one sentence: I wanted to like it more than I did.

Collecting it from the bookshop at the end of term, this was an eagerly awaited bit of holiday reading.  As I mentioned back here , I'm a definite fan of Melina Marchetta's writing.  Josephine in Looking for Alibrandi, and Francesca in Saving Francesca come off the page and into your head with such immediacy, in their flawed authenticity, with such clear voices, and both are books I reread every few years for the pleasure of spending time with them.

One of the non-school* books I've been (re)reading this year has been Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series.    As with many fantasy/historical books, she has a world and a canvas and a considerable cast of characters.  It can be a catch, that considerable cast of characters.  Because I don't want to be fumbling with who's who, and where they fitted in, and what they did, and how I should feel about them.  As a reader, I don't like feeling lost.  In Gabaldon's books (and to be fair, I'm up to my umpteenth rereading of them, so I do know them well - but this remains true when I read each new one the first time too) I don't get stuck on who's who.  Even if I do go back to remind myself of exactly what they did and how she tells it, I'm not floundering as to who they are and how they fit in to the story.

This morning, I galloped through Finnikin of the Rock.  I'm a fast reader, but that doesn't stop me following/enjoying a book's story (ie. I don't think it's because I read it at my usual pace that I got lost).  The story happens in a multi-kingdom world; the kingdom from which Finnikin and his companions have come, Lumatere, has had bad things happen, and the arc of the story is their journeying towards a restoration of good.  Along the way, they have, as you would expect, assorted setbacks, challenges and adventures, meeting various people and acquiring the information necessary to return to Lumatere and prevail over the bad guys.

There is a quote from Primo Levi's work, If This Is a Man, which from memory references the Nazi persecution of the Jews**, at the start of the book, and for me this lay like a heavy hand on the narrative.  Persecuted people seeking relief/redemption: but just like you gotta be careful if your school debating team thinks of mentioning Hitler (as some will do in relation to almost any topic), this is a big ghost to raise.  The bad guys occupying Lumatere are, by and large, very off-screen, and maybe it would have been good to see them in action on the page, rather than seeing refugee camps resulting from the persecution, and hearing of black fog concealing Lumatere.  I wanted to care more than I did.

So Finnikin and his companions give us a view of the assorted peoples and geographies of the Land of Skuldenore (and it's that sort of shape, in the maps at the front, and somehow the name doesn't work for me - are we inside a skull, a dream, what?) as they journey onwards clockwise through Skuldenore's various kingdoms, and a couple of fairly guessable mysteries are unravelled, (don't most readers know that if you ain't seen the whole body, maybe that person isn't dead?) and it seems to take rather longer than necessary for the hero and heroine to finally get together (there's a line between engaging obstacles and irritating ones to such things).

Meanwhile, I found myself losing track of who some characters were, and after the big battle towards the end, either couldn't remember who some of the people were who died, or why I should care, because I hardly knew them anyway.  There were other characters I was clearly meant to care about, but didn't, and plot points whose point eluded me, and I can't remember why there are two goddesses worshipped in Lumatere, somewhat competitively; and thinking it over, I wonder if part of the problem, for me, was that although I'm sure Melina Marchetta has this world in great and wonderful detail in her head, this somehow didn't transfer to the page.

And so I felt lost, more than engrossed, and while I finished the book, and will certainly put it in the way of our many students who love fantasy books (and for whom voracious barely describes their reading appetite) it's not one I'll buy for myself (as I did with Alibrandi and Francesca), and I won't be investing in multiple copies for the library (as I did of those two in particular) unless it generates that level of demand.

It's a challenge, writing fantasy, to create a believable world.  First it has to be real enough to you, and then it has to be real enough for your readers, who don't know it when they first come to it.   You only have to see the success of successful ones - Hogwarts, or Middle Earth, to name two among many - to see how it can be done, how engaged readers become in these worlds, how real they are to them.  Take Robin McKinley, who's created several believable and engaging fantasy worlds (more Damar, please!  and more from the world of Sunshine!)

While the geography gives a context for the plot, it shouldn't necessarily feel as though it only exists to serve the plot (I still remember being annoyed that the mother in the Swiss Family Robinson seemed to have a Tardis-like canvas bag that she filled when the shipwreck was happening and which always seemed to have tucked in there whatever the plot, I mean family needed on their island.  I cannot imagine how she fitted it all in there, nor how it was able to be carried anywhere with all that stuff inside).  In Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea, the landscapes illustrate the narrative - Ogion's calm approach to the rain on Gont, the desertlike surrounds of the tombs on Atuan (not forgetting all that is implied in the labyrinths below) and so on.  Skuldenore felt convenient, rather than real.

Let alone, when I think about it, the many other books based on places I've never been, where as a reader I still feel like I'm there, Chicago in The Time Traveler's Wife or wartime/postwar Guernsey in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society to name two I've read this year.  It's suspension of disbelief, and confidence the writer instils in you as they tell their story.

If you base your books on a world you know, then some stuff will just come to you because you do know it, inside out and upside down, because you've lived there.  With a fantasy world, there's everything to create - how and where people live, how they interact, how society and hierarchies work; and the world's geographies and surroundings.  That's the game and the challenge for the writer, and their responsibility to the reader***.  And for me, somehow, I felt on the outside of Skuldenore, and distanced from many characters, and indifferent to them.  I didn't want to, but I did.

If you've read it, I'd be interested in your thoughts.  As/when I get comment from students next term, I'll add to this entry.  On a minor note, I think the cover's lovely, but I wonder if the spangly twirly bits will be offputting to some of the boys.  Dunno.

So am I disappointed in this one?  Yes, I am.  Would I read another Melina Marchetta book?  Every time.  I'm still a fan.  The link at the bottom to the image source will also take you to a short video of the author discussing her ideas about this book.  According to this blog entry , her next book is a sequel to Saving Francesca, with Thomas as the main character and set a few years on, when they're in their early twenties.

Added later: For an alternative, more positive review of Finnikin from a NZ children's bookshop, click here.  I think my review is probably the one to which he refers, so it's good to offer you, the reader, different perspectives on the book. 


*bit too much bodice-ripping for a school library, but I can't tell you how many people I've successfully recommended them to.  First in the series is Cross Stitch, if you're in Australia or the UK, or Outlander if you're in the US or Canada.  They're unclassifiable, in that they're historically accurate time-travel romantic military-history fiction damn good reads.  Or something like that, with the first three centring on the Jacobite rising of 1745 and the later ones on the American War of Independence.


**it does.  Here's the Wikipedia entry on Primo Levi.


***I'm writing a novel myself, a long-term project, and am finding just those challenges in creating its world, so this is something that's of interest to me from both reading and writing points of view.

Image source and link to an author video of Melina Marchetta talking about Finnikin of the Rock.