Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta

The end notes state that the author is claiming as virtue her complete ignorance of the fantasy "canon." The virtue, of course, is not being driven by the traditional/conventional devices of the genre. The pitfall is, of course, that she is left vulnerable to all the cliches which she does not know to avoid. A minefield without a map. It is possible that she missed one or two of them, but not many - although, there are no dragons.

The experienced fantasy reader will have spotted all the hidden characters and decoded the totally cliche mystic prophecy and all the micro plots within the first few chapters. Given all that, it still read pretty well up to the last ten percent. At that point, I got the feeling that she had lost control of the story. She had finished all the action, but had neglected to get the two main characters in bed - or at least definitively headed in that direction. So rather than going back and embedding that in the main story line, she meanders around for much too long rather than just getting to the point - "and they got married and lived happily ever after." After several hundred pages of high drama - all of a sudden we are confronted with a cliche scene with the heavy duty fantasy standard of the symbolic crone, matron, and maiden (or Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) leading somehow to an utterly ridiculous comic declaration scene, from which she tries to go directly to the heights for the finale. It worked for Puccini in La Boheme, but here, not so much.

Now, after all that crabbing, it was mostly a good read. Those fantasy quest addicts who blasted through all of the Shannara books and other derivatives of derivatives will probably love it. It seems that it won awards in Australia - the land of its birth. Perhaps something was lost in translation. I did enjoy it, it kept me coming back - even during finals week. Perhaps I am merely annoyed by the superior "I can write rings around you slobs who write fantasy without knowing anything about it" attitude. Actually, the fantasy is a fairly minor element of the story. The curses and prophecies could have been dealt with in other ways, and the "walking the sleep" could also have been worked around. Beyond these, we have medieval warfare without the restrictions of history or geography - although, I suppose that alone makes it fantasy.