Annoyed Review: The Tower of Living and Dying, Anna Smith Spark

I'm not sure if I have read a book before that I enjoyed less than this one. certainly not within the last few years. This is in large part down to the style... It quite simply might just not be for me.

I suspect that a large part of my ire and irritation with it comes from me not being a native English speaker. I can read it very fluently and I speak it just as well (sort of). But when a novel goes against the grain like this one does, when you have a style that wavers between poetry and stream of consciousness writing it can be incredibly jarring, and so it better make god damn sure it does it right.

And for the most part it just simply does not. The poetic style that Anna-Smith Spark is so lauded, so known for, isn't quite so present in this novel. There are beautiful flashes of it throughout but on the whole it seems to me that what people are so very insistent to call 'her poetic style'  are instead 'the limitations in her writing style trying to masquerade as a conscious choice to make it more poetic'. Taken on its own, that's pretty great: take your weaknesses and turn them to your advantage, make something new, something to make you stand out among the barrage of post GoT grimdark fantasy writers.
But it is quite frankly sorely lacking in its execution.

I've always been of the school that you should write as you wish. There is no single homogeneous way of writing. Experiments should be encouraged, but the damn fact of the matter here is that this novel just comes off as rough, as a draft that needed more work, more time. Because, again, there's really good parts here, but they are few and far in between. And in between there's a lot of irritation: self-contradictory information (to the extent that things contradict each other within paragraphs), logical fallacies, massive inconsistencies within points of view, grammatical errors that can not be accounted for by choice of style, switches in point of view within a single line (multiple sentences within a single line; one of those is in first person, the second in third), too vague almost minimalist-type description and yet, at the same time, description that is too tainted by hyperbole; poetry driven to extremes, to excess, without bounds, without good sense, to the extent that you get to have colours rather than pictures... it's vague-speak is what I'm getting at, but this might again be part of that non-native-English-speaker background so, you know; fine, this one's one me.

Nonetheless, past the novel's halfway point I found myself  hurrying on to get it over with rather than give it the benefit of the doubt anymore. At a certain point, you've lost my good will, my attention and my patience.

Regardless of anything you could say to explain or explore Anna Smith Spark's style, this book needed some serious editing.

God damn how annoying.
How about I say something good, instead?

Okay then: the psychological aspects are very good. They feel real.
The characters make a very human kind of sense: Driven by emotion, tortured and inconstant, always ready to be altered by the fears, the paranoia and the joys of the moment. They aren't remarkably intelligent or have anything to make them stand out (I'm talking psychologically here) from the common herd of humanity, they feel part of them. And yet Spark wants to marry the myth of larger than life characters; A practical God of Death and Goddess of Life, to a very grounded human narrative and for the most part, despite the deeply counter intuitive goals of the former, they do come across as (mostly) believable. They come across as very fallibly human, their actions and responses are pretty much always inspired by selfish motives, driven by self-destructive urges, by lust or greed.

And in fact, I quite love a lot of what Spark puts out here. The context is pretty great, it's just the wrapping that sucks.

I do know she has dyslexia. This is fine, as I said, this can be worked with. And then you have the beautifully poetic prose. Fine, this is a choice, can be molded into something stunning.

But you need to be aware that these things together do not allow for a good editing process. Poetry is something that is incredibly hard to edit. It's called "poetic license" for a reason, after all.
And then sneak in the errors, and who is to say these are mistakes?
Fine. You accept it as it comes with the territory. So you gloss over the style, because it does indeed deliver occasional poetic beauty amidst the mud of errors and grammatically flawed sentences.

Because the contents are there, the promise of grimdark destruction and violence is there. And when it is delivered it is interesting to behold, though the originality of its delivery, its inventiveness, isn't as gripping or surprising as it once was, but there's probably better to come, right?
But past the halfway point. our principal protagonist, his actions, no matter how vile, have become rote. You see, there is another glaring problem here: Despite the darkness, despite the violent actions that are taken, none of these seem to come as a surprise. They are completely inside the remit of our main character, and as such they are expected.
The problem is that Marith doesn't have a baseline, no status quo to start from. He's not any one thing. Instead he is all the violence. Instead he is all the love and all the adoration for Thalia. He is the golden boy. He can't die. And he is so fucking boring and everything to do with him is boring. He isn't interesting, and yet he is the plot.
And then a lot of the actions he takes lead directly to failures, and the ways in which those failures are responded to do not make any human sense. I understand what is being said, what Spark was going for: The Iron Men and Saints type of faith and fervour, the heights that belief and love and faith can drive us to, the actions they can make us take, but the problem is that I don't believe it for a second. I've read, seen and felt better than this and this book can not convey what Spark wants me to see, feel and believe.

Thalia is just as problematic. Believable and yet, rote. I suspect this is because both she and Marith are supposed to be two sides of the same coin, light and dark, life and death, a dichotomy made manifest in two people in love. They are characters second, first they are the writer's intent. It's what makes them dull, what makes them predictable. Book 3 in the trilogy is called the House of Sacrifice... is it just me or can just about anyone guess from this paragraph where this all is leading to?

The Sorlost plot and characters are interesting, and the best parts of the book take place here, but it is an incomplete and unsatisfying narrative that absolutely needs a continuation. It's also absolutely nothing new, this has been done before, in wildly varying shades, if not shades exactly like this one. The only place it really differed from what I had seen before, was in the relationships between particular characters.
And that's pretty much the only place where the book shines; the relationship between the principal character of the Sorlost story and his lover was pretty riveting at certain points, to the extent that I felt that the book had scored a few points in a way that I hadn't seen done before. Except, of course, it doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't end up anywhere concrete or justified within the bounds of the novel.

Ugh, fucking hell. I'm done with this.

The Tower of Living and Dying is not well written. Its story is not well considered.
This book will not be remembered in the fantasy genre. And it shouldn't.

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I'll buy book three. I'll read it. Because that's just what I do. If I start reading something, I will finish it.

But if I don't like it then the blog post for it will consist of a single fucking line, ire condensed into a single sentence of dismissal, and to hell with any valid points anyone might make. To hell with seeing the good behind the bad. Some things just aren't worth it, there's way better things out there.