Sapkowski's quintet gives the fantasy genre a bad name.
Sure there are some good things, but they are far outweighed by the bad. That Polish flavour I spoke of before, that gave this series such a unique appeal, is pretty much completely gone by the end of the Ciri Saga.
From the small but emotionally engaging adventures of Geralt as he hunts unique monsters and fucks tons of women (and it's warranted to be this crass, as the books do a hell of a lot worse) to the story of Geralt, Yennefer and Ciri in a world at war.
Though the scope has opened up, the lands nonetheless seem more lifeless than before, populated as they are by the usual Tolkien Suspects: Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Humans, except with a more plausible realism to each of these, a tendency to be more down-to-earth, more prone to cynical or down-right 'human', shitty behaviour. There is no unifying enemy though, so bereft as they are without a great enemy to fight against, these races have of course set to squabbling amongst themselves. Mainly, it's the humans versus everyone else, and this brings with it an element of xenophobia coupled with distasteful and hateful dialogue.
Said dialogue occasionally got awful, quality-wise I mean, and by the end of the series it became truly insufferable. I'm not sure how much of this is down to the translation, and this is an important thing to note in translated works like this, but somehow I doubt that the blame can not be put on Sapkowski.
Because there are other problems here, content-wise. There's a pervasive streak of, if not outright misogyny, then it's at least something that's a shade close to it. I was also of the opinion that this got worse the longer the series went on. This may just be attrition speaking though, being worn down the longer the story unspooled, although I'm very certain that the kind of sexist, women-hating talk spouted off in the last book was a far cry from women as lustful sex-objects, always willing to ride the Geralt-train.
In the short stories, it was charming and engaging but it got old pretty quick. Also because, the more women are interested in him, the less sense Geralt's bitter exclamations make that he's feared and hated because he's a Witcher because the man does end up getting an awful amount of... fun.
In the last novel especially it gets to be the worst of all as the main villains start barraging our protagonists (and us) at various points with a verbal avalanche of loving descriptions of all the evil things they're going to do to them. It was ridiculous and distasteful. An edgy child's depiction of evil. And to make it all worse: the motives of the various enemies practically all hinge on them getting Ciri pregnant, whether this is going to be unwilling or not.
It was awful.
Some of this can be excused. The artist is at liberty to choose his story after all, tone-deaf as it may be, if you can't take it you need to get off the bus, because even though it might not work for you, it will undoubtedly work for others. However, when it is a question of competency...
My actual main beef with the five books, the huge immersion-breaking thing for me was Sapkowski's highly irritating tendency to break his narrative structure. Now, I'm not averse to a challenging story structure, but this was extremely badly done, without control, and no method to it. The times where this happened it felt as if Sapkowski had become bored by his own story and felt the need to switch it up, to approach his plot in a different way just in order to keep writing. The few ways that I thought this was done well can be counted on one hand. But there's more places where it just fails outright. In the Lady of Lake in particular there is an approach that showed promise but ended up leaving the narrative with some massive, glaring plot issues, and a paradox the size of a mountain.
Every book, every new part in them, every other chapter introduces a throwaway manner to approach the story. For the most part it's just plain old exposition city. Whenever we rejoin our characters they'll barrage us with the specifics of their journey since the last time we saw them.
This isn't done in the manner of a competent writer, and rather in a cliff-notes fashion. The pacing is all over the place, and none of it is any good. The books themselves are not self-contained.
And on top of all of that there is the ending, the dull and very, very unsatisfying ending.
Final Thoughts
When I had read them I thought both The Last Wish and the Sword of Destiny short story collections were phenomenal, and I am still of that opinion. But the Ciri saga, those 5 books that follow the collections, are garbage. And I thought I would be outnumbered in this opinion but the verdict on the final books of the Ciri saga seems to be largely unanimous: A let-down. A disappointing ending. Crap.
This series is only as well-read and well-known as it is because of the CD project Red's video games. And I see a lot of readers deriving satisfaction from Lady of the Lake's ending as the Wild Hunt allegedly continues the story in a grand manner... except of course for the fact that this is impossible.
There can be no continuation because there's a pretty damn definitive ending for two specific characters. Sure, it isn't explicitly stated, but it's heavily implied. I'd explain it in detail, but that would constitute spoilers, and because it's not as if this reading of that ending could not be handwaved away in an instant in any possible future novel, because it can. But the Ciri saga was originally obviously also meant to end the Geralt part of the series as well.
Atrociously written and atrociously plotted, this series does not merit its popularity. Avoid reading these books.
I am curious to see if Netflix's The Witcher can, just like the videogames, adapt Sapkowski's mess into something more pleasing.
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