Subject: Elizabeth Willey: The Well-Favored Man

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1993 23:14:13 GMT

"The Well-Favored Man", by Elizabeth Willey, is an enjoyable first novel.
Since that statement has a dangerous air of faint praise, I'll start with
the bad news and then go on to the good.

The worst of the bad news is that the milieu is gratingly similar to that
of Zelazny's 'Amber' novels -- a similarity which didn't escape the blurb
writers.  Instead of Amber and the Courts of Chaos, we have Argylle and
Landuc.  Instead of the Pattern and the Logrus we have the Spring and the
Well (elemental-based, rather than lying on an order-chaos axis).  Instead
of Trumps we have Keys, instead of Shadows we have Eddies, instead of the
Maze, we have the maze.  There is no Oberon, but there is a Prospero.  (And
Ariel -- an elemental of Fire.  I thought Anderson's portrayal of Ariel as
an Air elemental made more sense, myself.)  And we have the (related) royal
families of the two realms, both capable of drawing on their respective
power sources and of travelling the worlds that lie between them.

The closeness of the similarity is unfortunate.  In the first few chapters
it is massively distracting.  After that, it intrudes less, precisely
because the strengths of the book lie in other directions.  One of the
biggest single differences (despite a cover-flap claim to the contrary) 
is the relative absence of intrigue:  The royal family consists (mostly)
of reasonably-adjusted and likable individuals with no particular desire
to seize the throne.  (On the contrary, it's a somewhat boring job that's
treated like a hot potato.)  The cover blurbs compare this book to the Amber
novels and to Kushner's "Swordspoint", and one can see why:  Much of its
strength lies in mannered conversation.  The mannered conversation in "The
Well-Favored Man", however, lacks both the polish and the nastiness of
Kushner's and Zelazny's novels.  Willey's characters are more pleasant.

The main character is Gwydion, the ruler of Argylle since his mother was
killed and his father disappeared, whom we encounter at the start of the
book, hunting an unusually large manticore:  More and more monsters with
no business in Argylle have been appearing of late, and they've been getting
nastier and nastier.  'Nasty' takes on a new meaning when his sister
Belphoebe (if you have a picture of a woman with a bow going through the
woods you are, unfortunately, correct) informs him that a great dragon has
been sighted.  How nasty is that?  Well, most of the methods that come to
mind for dealing with it would also take out Argylle.

The first confrontation with the dragon ends with most of the confronters
injured, and with the dragon temporarily driven off.  In practical terms,
the main effect is that, as far as the dragon is concerned, Gwydion has
now made it *personal*.  As if that's not enough, Gwydion's uncle -- a
superb mage of suspect sanity -- turns out to have a scheme for resurrecting
Gwydion's mother.  A woman he's never seen or heard of turns up, claiming
to be his sister.  And the wine cellars are running out of room.

Tor didn't do Willey many favors with this book.  What would have been a
strong new entry at $5.99 is a doubtful purchase at $23.95 -- not that
it's well enough distributed that many potential customers are seeing it.
(There are reasonable expectations about what kinds of books get introduced
in paperback and what kind get introduced in hardcover, and they are
ignored here.)  The cover art is exceedingly ugly:  What's supposed to be
a fight between a great dragon and a great gryphon looks instead like a
plasticine dragon coiled around an ugly chicken.  (No, not that kind of ugly
chicken).  And the editor (nothing personal) could have made the difference
between a good book and an excellent one by asking the author to tighten
the book up by about fifty pages -- and to rework the opening section so
as to present background information more smoothly and less intrusively.

The weaknesses of the writing are typical of first novels:  The novel is
not as tightly plotted as it might be, we sometimes get cleverness (or
worse, exposition) when we should be getting on with the story, and the
characters all sound alike when they are being clever.  The weaknesses are
outweighed by the strengths:  The writing is literate and intelligent, the
characters are (with one major exception) interesting and likable -- and
by the end of the book the reader cares what will happen to them.  The
plot 'twists' are honestly enough foreshadowed. 

Bottom line:  If you enjoy a well-written light fantasy, buy this book.
But buy it in paperback.  

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope