2004 comic fantasy, second in the J. W. Wells series. Paul Carpenter
continues to blunder his way through magical hazards.
And if he were more interesting I'd like him more, but, well, I
really don't. The ideas here are great, but they're filtered through
this dullard who pays no attention to them and is completely incurious
about the weird things that surround him, until they start threatening
him and he finally has to take action. And pretty much everyone here
is unremittingly horrible, especially the women. (The exception is the
real protagonist, "Mr Tanner's mum", who's constantly pulling Paul out
of the trouble his own carelessness has got him into; and of course
she never gets a word of thanks, or even as far as I can tell her own
name.)
He left her at the front desk and wandered back to his room,
thinking, All this and dragons, too. Dragons, on the other hand,
were probably something you could learn how to cope with, given time
and patient tuition.
Apart from that… well, the writing is excellent of course, and if it
weren't for the lack of sympathetic characters I'd rate this much
higher. But the usual excuse for a protagonist who doesn't know how
the world works is to be an audience substitute who needs to have
everything explained, and not only do people aggressively not explain
things to Paul, he's distinctly less interested in this world of
wonders than the audience is. (Well, they were at least interested
enough to pick up the book.) Occasionally he suffers a complete
personality reversal, presumably when Holt realised that he does
actually need him to do something to make the plot happen other than
just sit and wait for the bad guys to win.
Still. The writing is wonderful; Holt is superb at that. It's just the
characters and, because the plot is driven by the characters, the
plot.
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