Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski – A Book Review

Blurb:

For more than a hundred years, humans, dwarves, gnomes and elves lived together in relative peace. But times have changed, the uneasy peace is over and now the races once again fight each other – and themselves: dwarves are killing their kinsmen, and elves are murdering humans and elves, at least those elves who are friendly to humans …

Into this tumultuous time is born a child for whom the witchers of the world have been waiting. Ciri, the granddaughter of Queen Calanthe, the Lioness of Cintra, has strange powers and a stranger destiny, for prophecy names her the Flame, one with the power to change the world – for good, or for evil …

Geralt, the witcher of Rivia, has taken Ciri to the relative safety of the Witchers’ Settlement, but it soon becomes clear that Ciri isn’t like the other witchers. As the political situation grows ever dimmer and the threat of war hangs almost palpably over the land, Geralt searches for someone to train Ciri’s unique powers. But someone else has an eye on the young girl, someone who understand exactly what the prophecy means – and exactly what Ciri’s power can do.

This time Geralt may have met his match.

 

Author: Andrzej Sapkowski

Publisher: Gollancz

Date Published: 21/05/2009

Page Count: 320

My Chosen Format: Paperback

My Rating of ‘Blood of Elves’: 2 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon UK, Amazon US

 

Review:

The Witcher is one of my favourite videogame series (closely behind Assassin’s Creed and Final Fantasy) so it was with massive amounts of excitement that I picked up a copy of ‘Blood of Elves’ and dove right into it.

Never before have I been so happy to start a book yet even happier to finish it. I mean, seriously, I thought I was going to have to DNF this part way through. If it was any longer than it was, I think I just might have. It pains me to have not enjoyed this as it was one of those titles I just knew I was going to enjoy. What do you know, it turns out I don’t know everything.

It started off slow. And when I say slow, I mean ridiculously slow. It seems to take forever to move on from what feels like the first scene. The book seems to be filled with more conversation than anything, conversation that progresses so slowly and, in some cases, loops back on itself that you no longer care what it was they were talking about. One of the worst things about the conversation is that the author uses it in place of describing actions. “I did really well there. Ah, did you see how hard I threw that? And that one went even further.” It just smacked of lazy writing and took me right out of the scene. If the author doesn’t care enough to tell me what’s going on, why should I care about his story?

The book also relies heavily on politics and political intrigue (most of which is explained in such a painfully dull manner that it ceases to be intriguing after the first couple of paragraphs … yet carries on for a good ten to twenty pages.) The main players in the politics game cease to be characters to me and are just names on a page that I continually hope never appear on said page again.

The action, what little there is of it, is very fast-paced and exciting. It’s a shame the author couldn’t apply such traits to his conversations, dull descriptions or politics. I literally cannot remember caring about anything throughout the entire book other than my self-imposed rule of not ‘DNFing’ books if I can help it. When the only driving factor is my own stubbornness, it doesn’t say a great deal for the book. In fact, the only reason I gave it a two instead of a one is because some of the scenes are interesting. For me, a one is only given if everything is terrible or I genuinely can’t finish it.

I may be a tad spoilt by having played the games and can instantly tell that the characters in the books and the characters in the game, even though they are the same characters, do not transfer across well. In the game, they are likeable. In the book, they are anything but. Every character seems bratty and snappy where conversation is concerned and just thoroughly unlikeable as a whole. The only character that seemed in anyway enjoyable to read was Geralt, and he doesn’t appear in the novel nearly as much as I would like. He, and he alone, saved this from a one star rating.

I also keep calling it a novel. I do so purely because that is what it is billed as. What it actually feels like is a series of loosely connected events that just happen between the same front and rear cover. Each chapter spells the end of one of these events and the next chapter gives no indication if it is happening shortly or years thereafter. After the third ‘chapter’ I soon began to lose interest in this style.

I had read the Last Wish (a short story collection in the Witcher Universe) and enjoyed it. That was because it was Geralt plying his trade killing monsters. In this, we see one monster, barely, and there isn’t a whole lot of action. It just felt thoroughly dull.

I really wanted to like this one and am a tad upset that I didn’t. Not sure I’ll be carrying on with the series unless I find them all incredibly cheap/for free. I certainly won’t be paying full price again for a Witcher novel just in case I am in for the same level of tedium. I know I had a similar experience with the first Assassin’s Creed book I read and the following ones turned out to be gems, but I just really don’t have the same feeling about this.