Review: The Wise Man’s Fear

The Wise Man’s Fear is the second book of the Kingkiller Chronicles which Patrick Rothfuss introduced to the fantasy world with his debut novel The Name of the Wind. The Wise Man’s Fear picks up where the first novel left off, and I would strongly suggest that you start with the Name of the Windif you haven’t already, as some of the plot-lines carry over and it definitly does build on the foundation laid by the first book. That said, I also think it could stand pretty well on its own.The story is delivered through a frame narrative in which the main character, Kvothe, now a hero immortalized in story, tells the truth of his story to a travelling scribe. This narrative sets up the primary conceit of the story: that we get to hear the wild exaggerations of his exploits before we get to hear the actual–generally more down-to-earth reality of the tale. The weaving of levels of story is done with varying degrees of success.  The delivery of the exaggerated facts and the revelation of the truth is woven masterfully throughout the story, but the overarching frame story and the digressions of the narrator leads to some pacing issues as Kvothe glosses quickly over things that the reader might be interested in hearing about, and lingers long on things that the reader might not.The story itself contains many elements that will be familiar to any regular reader of fantasy novels. You have your wizard’s school, your absentminded but powerful master wizard, your mysterious powerful villainous force. But they are all tied together in delightful, and occasionally hilariously subversive ways. The novel delights in fantasy tropes and loves to turn them in unexpected ways.

The main character, Kvoth is well developed and motivated, though he does become an all-around polymath powerhouse of arcane and martial might through the course of the story. But what can you expect of a fantasy hero? Though Rothfuss does take the standard and play around with it, not only is Kvothe a cunning smooth-talker, a stealthy rooftop acrobat, a creative and powerful magician, a master swordsman, martial artist, and rising star in political machinations he is also  a world-class musician, composer, storyteller and the worlds best lover as well.

Which brings us to the larges problem this story has with pacing, Kvothe travels from place to place and spends long periods of time in different locations in-between. During one of these journeys he just abandons the plot (and his time-sensitive delivery of a massive quantity of gold)  to travel to a far away place to learn the ways of the force. . . I mean the Adema, but we don’t have Han Solo and Leia being captured in Cloud City to keep our interest as this is a first person single-viewpoint narrative (frame aside). Not that that section isn’t interesting, it just pulls us away from the expected flow of the narrative. The novel has several of these shifts in place and pace which can be a little jarring, but if you are willing to put up with some digressions and downtime, it all works out quite well in the end.