What a Mess, But It’s Finally Over.
Feist Spurts And Sputters to the Merciful End.
Rating: ★★
[INTRO]
Good god, I’m tired of this.
Ever the completionist, I knew I was in for a slog when I started reading the series beginning with Magician: Apprentice back on Labor day of 2020. Almost three years to the day, and I am finally on the other side of this 30 book saga.
While I plan on doing a complete series retrospective, this focuses solely on the ending trilogy and will not be as kind as the intensity and interest of the early books are now way behind us.
Feist has simply been fumbling the ball since the end of the Serpent War Saga, a complete 18 (!) books ago. Yes, there were moments of intrigue and possibilities (Conclave of the Shadows and The Darkwar Saga come to mind) however what I hoped to be the trend – new meaningful characters, actual meta purpose – completely fizzles out.
Part of my high rating for those trilogies was the promise that he could take those strings and finally tie this thing in a knot. With how the Chaos War Saga plays out, however, makes it easy to recommend stopping the entire series after the Serpent War.
Feist simply cannot complete a macro idea which is rather necessary to complete a 30 book saga.
[ANALYSIS]
If I had to press one angle that makes everything so unsatisfying in this Trilogy is that there are constant bait and switches. Things always seem important in this book, and then they aren’t. Unfortunately, what seemed important was WAY MORE interesting and worth diving into than what eventually gets deemed important.
The prologue for the trilogy follows a demon child named…Child. On one of the other planes of existence, a war wages where demons are locked in a battle of attrition, eating one another to assume their memories and abilities.
We follow Child grow from her initial serendipitous success, ignorant of the world and all alone, into a mammoth power able to explain the world due to her successfully navigating the food chain. She builds a cadre of other demons who respect her with one notable advisor who is capable of magic. Together, they build quite the duo.
Don’t worry about the possibilities: Child and the advisor eventually become simulacrums over previous characters in the book who have died.
I get Feist wanting readers to be able to relive a few more moments with their favorite character, and he does this appropriately in other places. The ones with the Demons just too frustrating though: they are given the memories of past characters by Gods. Who cares about the details, it just happens! Isn’t it fun to have Nakor back though?
Except you can’t go two sentences without someone bringing up how they aren’t the actual character, but they act enough like the character that it reminds them of the character, and wouldn’t we want that character back….
But it begs the question: why the big ordeal with Child’s rise? Why give her a character arc at all if she is just going to live out what a dead character would do leaving her with absolutely no agency? He completely guts his own good work!
At the end of book two, some wacky shit starts to happen. I’m going to do a poor job of it, but here is a quick, no-cheat summary from my memory:
As Pug, Magnus, fake-Nakor, and fake-Miranda work on navigating an ancient magic device with their minds, they successfully crack the code for it to only unleash unparalleled power into Midkemia. The heavens rush forth unlocking ancient creatures only the likes of MMORPGs have seen. As the world becomes flooded with the angel-like demi-gods wielding tridents on horses, a messenger sent to warn them gets interrupted, a plan for saving the universe foiled.
Oh no. What’s to happen?
Well don’t worry as I’m not sure we ever visit any of that too deeply. We instead go back down memory lane with each character visiting people from their past in an adjacent plane of existence with no other than Macros the original who has been dead for 18 books guiding them through each experience.
The world eventually gets saved by a strange combination of metaphysics, Oprah Winfrey’s Manifestation philosophy, and of course…love.
“We are Mind learning about itself, the totality of the universe trying to understand itself fully. All of us, every conscious being on every world in every reality. We are all connected; nothing dies because what we learn is part of Mind.”
Macros or perhaps Carl Sagan talking about stars.
It is all a bunch of psuedo-science gobbledygook with none of the sentiment to make it work.
If there was one moment where a little bit of swelling happened in my chest, it was when we finally reach the absolute final epilogue. Magnus returns to Crydee searching for an apprentice and finds a boy full of wonder. Talkative and open, the innocent child speaks of the world through a pure lense. The child is none other than Pug reincarnated, and you can only be happy that he can finally live a life for himself without the responsibility he has been carrying for 29 books.
[CONCLUSION]
I guess at this point, I shouldn’t come to expect anything else from Feist. The characters are good, the stories themselves are tight good micros, but once again, there is no nailing of the bigger picture.
Other People’s Takes:
- Bits And Books: “Anyway, do yourself a favour and read this. You’ll be sucked in from the first few pages (which reminded me a little of the start of the Disney film adaptation of The Sword in the Stone) and be enthralled throughout the rest.”
- Superior Realities: “Considering all the stumbles this series has had over the
yearsdecades, and considering the massive weight of history and expectation pressing down on it, Magician’s End does a fairly admirable job, though it remains a book with significant flaws.” - Hûw Steer: “But once I got to the second half, I could not put it down. It’s a love letter to all 29 books that came before, and it’s wonderful.”
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