This is the second installment of the series I started back in May (you can see the first one here, covering Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy). I view it as an important part of any writer’s job to keep up with their genre, and that’s how I came up with the idea of reacting to every fantasy novel (or series) as I finish them. Today, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the first two (and to date, only) books of Patrick Rothfuss’ incomplete Kingkiller Chronicle — The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear.

For those unfamiliar with the series, the first book was released in 2007, followed by the second part in 2011. As of 2022, the third part is yet to be released, and there is a growing feeling that it may never be seen. As such, I don’t think it makes sense to wait until I’ve finished all three parts of the trilogy to share my reaction, although usually I would want to view a work in its entirety before giving an opinion.

The Story Format

The Kingkiller Chronicle (as both books are part of a single contiguous narrative) is told through a story-within-a-story narrative device. In a third-person narrative set in the story’s present day, the main character, Kvothe, recounts his story to a scribe known as Chronicler: these sections are interleaved between the larger portions of the text, which are presented as first-person narration by Kvothe.

While we as readers have some tantalizing hints at who Kvothe became as a person and the things he accomplished, the details of his story are revealed through his own words, by the events he chooses to recount to his biographer.

And that’s a problem.

Too much fuel

When he sits down to begin telling his tale, Kvothe is quite emphatic on one point: his Chronicler must copy the story down precisely as he tells it, in his own words, neither adding or subtracting from the narrative as he sees fit to spin it.

However, he could have done himself — and the readers — a favor by allowing his long-suffering biographer to have a free hand with cutting.

It’s somewhat jarring that for a tale told by one of the Edema Ruh — a traveling people who, in-story, know all the tales of the world and take great pride in retelling them) Kvothe seems to possess absolutely no instinct for brevity or pacing. Put together, the first two books of the planned trilogy come to a weighty 1,660 pages, and I can say with dead seriousness that literally half of that does nothing to advance the story.

… and too little fire

The central thread of the story is how Kvothe went from an orphaned boy, violently separated from his traveling trouple when they were massacred by a sinister collection of ancient figures known as the Chandrian, to become the feared figure he is known as today: Kvothe the Arcane, the Bloodless, a figure of legend. A figure who, one presumes, will at some point interact with the Chandrian again, since hunting them down for revenge is his primary motivation.

Over the course of those 1,660 pages, virtually nothing happens to advance that central plot.

• Kvothe’s family is attacked and killed within the first hundred pages, driving him to flee and scrape out a meager existence on the streets of the city of Tarbean. While living on the streets he hears a chance tale recounting the history of the Chandrian, hinting at who they really are. This is the last you’ll hear of them for a while.
• During his time at the arcane University, Kvothe makes a number of attempts to learn about the Chandrian, but is bafflingly stopped by a rather contrived plot device that prevents him from accessing the archives at all. Narrator and reader alike are left similarly frustrated as hundreds of pages go by without a single bit of plot advancement.
• Near the end of the first book, Kvothe travels abroad in search of his love interest (more on that later), and happens upon a recent attack by the Chandrian. Finally, it seems that the main plot thread is becoming active! He doesn’t truly learn anything new about the mysterious villains here, but at least they’re back in the narrative… right?

Wrong! The rest of the book plays out without returning to them, focusing instead on Kvothe’s life at the university, primarily his struggles to raise money and pursue his love interest. There’s a confrontation with his primary school antagonist at the end, and the stage is left both cluttered and empty as we head into the second book.

The Wise Man’s Fear (evidently, an editor)

The second book, The Wise Man’s Fear, is longer by about 50% than the first. But if you assume that means more actually happens in it, you’d be wrong.

It begins by tying off secondary plot threads from the first book, moving with fair speed into Kvothe becoming adrift from the University for a term. The scene then changes entirely as he departs for a distant land to take service under a powerful nobleman who desires his talents for mysterious reasons.

Kvothe’s time with the nobleman, Maer Alveron, begins interestingly enough. He bluffs his way into the confidence of the powerful lord, employs guile and subterfuge to fulfill the tasks the Maer sets for him, and there’s some genuinely good secondary plot development and clever writing. Soon enough it ends, however, and moves into a vast, barren section of both the world and the narrative.

Kvothe is sent on a quest to hunt down some bandits who are waylaying tax collectors. For the next several hundred pages, he and his dysfunctional band sit around, doing quite often literally nothing. If this part of the book is meant to frustrate the reader as much as the characters, it succeeds — but since Kvothe was entirely willing to gloss over an entire journey by sea with a pirate attack in the middle, I’m baffled by why he decided to include this part of his tale in such detail.

After the bandit subplot is finally resolved (with a brief sighting of one of the Chandrian to boot!), we veer into a bizarre tangent where Kvothe chases a legendary fae into the woods and spends about the next hundred pages making love to her. He emerges from that tangent and goes straight into another, traveling hundreds of miles out of his way to learn a whole new culture and way of fighting. The sole tie to the actual plot that seems to be involved in this sequence is that he hopes to learn more about the Chandrian from the land he traveled to, a reward that is finally dispensed in a single poem at the very end.

And finally, with those subplots ticked off, Kvothe returns home to the University. There is a very real feeling of homecoming: both character and reader have been away from anything meaningful for quite a while.

The second book then ends without any further development of the main plot.

A Note on Characters (one in particular)

For such a long narrative, the Kingkiller Chronicle does a pretty fair job of limiting the cast of characters to a number one can easily keep track of. Unfortunately, I personally feel that the utilization of those characters is less than optimal.

Throughout his travels, Kvothe encounters a variety of interesting people, but the one he keeps coming back to is his love interest, Denna (who also goes by several other names). Kvothe is frustratingly infatuated with her, which does a good job of conveying that feeling when one of your friends is head-over-heels in love with someone and you just can’t see it. Of all the female characters Kvothe shows interest in at various points, Denna is certainly the least interesting, and it was a constant source of frustration for me that she kept cropping up and adding very little to the story.

I’ll admit this one is a very personal criticism, and your mileage may vary. Personally, I thought Devi was obviously Kvothe’s real soulmate, and I kept hoping he’d wake up and see it. Which is a win for the story, since it succeeded in making me care.

Conclusion

As much as I don’t like to say it, there were times when I genuinely had trouble making myself finish the second book. When the story is interesting, it’s very engaging: the prose is well written and clever, the dialogue smooth and believable. At its best, this is a story I’m happy to read, and I’d be happy to come back for more.

But there is just so much dead space.

I’m not bothered by subplots. I like a good, slow buildup. But when hundreds of pages go by without even touching on the main plot, that’s where I start to lose my interest. Far too many times, the narrative spends pages or even whole chapters on things that are interesting, but not remotely relevant. There’s no focus to the story, which is particularly disappointing when it is theoretically being recounted firsthand by a master storyteller.

I wanted to like the Kingkiller Chronicle, and at times I even did. But for the second time in my reading life, I’m not intending to finish the trilogy, even if another volume is published. My time is too precious (and I’m too slow as a reader) to spend hours turning pages waiting for things to become interesting again. The Kingkiller Chronicle made me smile, it made me intrigued, but more than anything else it made me frustrated. That’s not what I’m looking for in a fantasy novel.

There’s a good story in those 1,660 pages. But it would have been so much better to just tell it, and save the other 1,000.