Fair Warning, there are minor SPOILERS to be had here about the plot.
If The Name of the Wind is a half-finished puzzle of an interesting world with a boring protagonist, then A Wise Man’s Fear is a puzzle that hasn’t been started. The pieces have been sorted into colors and borders, but nothing has actually been put in place. The things that made the first book worth looking at are unbuilt here. The ruined potential is rather depressing.
To start off, my biggest issues with the first book are still here, though this time they were expected. Like the first, this book is set up with Kvothe—who is still too clever for anything truly terrible to impede him—telling his story to a small group, meaning the narration is him talking. Like the first, this book is loaded with long conversations, too much dialogue, not enough paraphrase, and a memory that couldn’t hold so many vivid facts. It’s simply not believable, and really, it isn’t an efficient way to write a story. None of this is new.
Whereas the first novel had some minor pacing issues, this one is overgrown with them. It takes too many pages for Kvothe to leave the university, and by then, the place has grown stale. It’s no Hogwarts. The minor climax that gets Kvothe to leave the school is pretty fun, but the time it takes to get there ruins the payoff. And whereas Kvothe is sad to leave the school, the reader is finally happy that a change of scenery is going to happen. Kvothe is supposed to do or find something very important (kill a king perhaps), and we know that that won’t happen at school.
There are four periods of transition in The Name of the Wind as Kvothe moves from one place to another, and all of them are fairly enjoyable. But once Kvothe finds a new place to bed down, the book lapses into a kind of lethargy. Even Kvothe grows bored.
Kvothe leaves the university for Tarbean, a large city with a very sick Mayor. Our noble hero with no real flaws must figure out what’s wrong! He does, of course (and too quickly), and then this section of the novel just gets boring.
See, the king really needs a smart and clever musician to help him woo a lady. Kvothe spends the The Name of the Wind being terrible and obtuse around women—and his friends are always quick to tell him this—so the fact that he needs to help someone else get a lady is ironic and funny. Finally we find some tension! Or we would if Kvothe wasn’t so good at it. After a handful of chapters that go on too long, Kvothe has himself another victory. There’s just no struggle or conflict.
While in Tarbean, he finds Denna again. They continue their coy romance which, at this point, feels a bit played out. There’s a mounting mystery about Denna and her abusive patron, but that’s never resolved in this book. A pity that, as that was interesting.
Soon Kvothe is asked to move on, this time to hunt down some bandits with a few mercenaries. A very large leg of the book takes place with them simply hunting down bandits. All of the characters grow bored,and as the characters grow bored, so does the reader. This section just drags on and on. Not all seemingly glamorous work is glamorous, and the characters are allowed to be bored, but the reader should never be bored. That’s simply bad storytelling.
To make matters worse, the characters get into this habit of telling each other stories at night. Kvothe, our unforgetful narrator, decides it would be important to renarrate every story ever told around that campfire those years ago. Some of these fables are actually pretty good, but they just do not need to be in the book. They take up space and grow tedious. The “story within a story” is an important literary tool, and this book takes that tool, abuses it, but then does absolutely nothing with it.
Here is where A Wise Man’s Fear decides to attempt a “darker and edgier” tone as well, and it doesn’t really work. It’s hard to view Kvothe as a killer, but as it turns out, he’s quite good at stopping bandits. Up until this point, I never thought him capable of anything terribly violent, so Kvothe’s mannerisms and actions come off as highly unbelievable.
Once that section is over, Kvothe winds up in the Fae world where he spends many chapters learning how to have sex from Felurian, a kind of elf. There’s no good reason for this, and the entire section should have been removed.
After being in the Fae world, Kvothe follows one of the mercenaries back to his land, and the last chunk of the book is spent in Ademre, which becomes a kind of second university for Kvothe, only now he learns martial arts instead of magic. Like the above sections, this one starts off interesting, grows boring, and then Kvothe leaves unscathed due to his wonderful ability to succeed at everything.
While this book weaves its way between boring and somewhat interesting, there’s a growing theme that makes such easy victories important. The Kingkiller Chronicle is about a man who had everything and then fell. He had power and magic and wealth, but something happened and now everything is lost. He’s an empty shell who runs an unprofitable inn, and he just wants to lie down and die. This is why the first two books are the way they are; this is why Kvothe is such a perfect hero.
Kvothe is always quick to tell everyone that his story isn’t a happy one, but that isn’t the case if parts one and two are taken as they are. He overcomes everything, gets to have sex with a beautiful Fae lady, and winds up wealthy at the end. But the fall hasn’t happened, and the fall is the most important part of his existence and this story.
I have to wonder if the third book could retroactively make these two books better, but as they stand now, neither are particularly good. The Name of the Wind isn’t terrible by any means, and it has some good ideas, but A Wise Man’s Fear is simply a long and tedious work with no payoff. Given that, it’s hard to recommend either book, and since the third novel won’t be out anytime soon, there’s no reason to pick any of these novels up. The entire series hinges on the third novel living up to the expectations set for it, but really, why didn’t Patrick Rothfuss just start there and go forward with Kvothe’s story of attempted redemption?
