Friday, November 6, 2020

Farewell to Shannara

Note to the reader: Since The Last Druid is Terry Brooks' final Shannara book, this review will contain spoilers not only for it but for some previous books in the series. The Shannara books have sold millions of copies so it is unlikely that there are too many people interested in them who haven't read at least some of them, but in case you are one of those people and you would rather learn plot details and book resolutions the old-fashioned way, you should probably stop now and read the rest of this entry later if you'd care to.

Terry Brooks said he began his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, when he was in law school and wrote it in and around his studies as a way of coping with the stress of law student life. After trying his hand at fiction in several genres, he read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and found the field in which he thought he could produce material people would want to read. Ballantine Books bought the manuscript and tailored it for the launch of their new Del Rey Books line, recruiting well-known fantasy illustrators Greg and Tim Hildebrandt to provide cover and some interior art. It was a best seller and launched Brooks' career as an author. Although he's produced a couple of other series, the "Magic Kingdom for Sale" books and "Word and Void" stories that he eventually tied in to the Shannara universe, the Shannara series has been his mainstay and the books for which he is best known.

The whole series, with the Word and Void novels worked in as prequels, spans several thousand years of history, of humans as well as non-human races like the Elves. Its prehistory stretches back to when magic was common on the Earth and in the books themselves jumps to the days in which it began to reassert itself after being long forgotten. The hinge of this history is the time of the Great Wars, a combined nuclear and supernatural conflict and ecological disaster that nearly wiped out all life on the planet. The overall arc of the nearly 30 Shannara books covers conflicts between beings who would use either magic or technology to control the world, work evil on it and exert their will over others and beings who would let everyone live in peace with each other and as they wish. Both the Elves and human sorcerers called Druids try to watch over the power of magic to keep it from falling into the hands of the first group. The Druids' order seems susceptible to temptation to this dark side, with Brona the Warlock Lord being just such an ambitious man and later the main villain of the initial novel. Into the mix we have beings of evil called demons -- usually imprisoned in a mirror universe called the Forbidding but who sometimes cross over.

Over the course of the books Brooks has boiled his groups of antagonists and protagonists down to just a few. Human beings in the Southland are almost all a part of an expansionist and somewhat corrupt state called the Federation, while Elves still retain their ancestral home in the West centered on the city of Arborlon. The various magicians and would-be dictators either rise from one of them or try to take control of them through their own machinations or through the Druids at their fortress called the Keep. He added the semi-futuristic feature of flying ships powered by a mix of magic and science, perhaps to let him expand his geography without building in months of travel time for a culture limited to foot and wagon transportation.

That world is the one into which Brooks introduces his final "Fall of Shannara" series of four books. An ecological disaster has forced a distant nation, the Skaar, to invade the four lands to find space for themselves before their land freezes into inhabitability. The Skaar are fierce warriors with the added gift of being able to make themselves invisible. They spy out the situation and through treachery and the cooperation of the ambitious, power-hungry Druid Cilizia Porse, massacre the Druid order and take it off the board. They occupy the sparsely-populated Northland and then turn their eyes southward. When Last Druid begins, Porse has trapped her only Druid foe, Drisker Arc, in the Forbidding and cast the one other person who might oppose her power, Tarsha Kaynin, into an abyss. Druid Blade (a guard captain) Darcon Leah and the disgraced Skaar princess Ajin d'Amphere travel into the freezing north with a plan to reverse the ecological damage and allow the Skaar to return to their homeland. Drisker Arc must travel the Forbidding to locate the long lost Ilse Witch, Grianne Ohmsford, herself trapped after her defeat of the Straken King in 2013's Witch Wraith.

On its own merits, Last Druid is a two-star book at the end of a one-and-a-half-star four-book series. Brooks' writing is more than a little careless and the book feels as padded as any he's produced. A sequence in which Drisker Arc and Grianne Ohmsford travel to and invade an impregnable fortress surrounded by a deadly swamp repeats the same kind of trek we've seen in at least five different novels, with no real payoff. The three novels Tarsha spent worrying over trying to rescue her brother from the emotional and mental breakdown earlier abuse had brought him were a waste, as he has no role in the endgame, either for Tarsha or Cilizia, who killed him. Although Ajin was responsible for the infiltration and sneak attack that caused the deaths of almost all of the druids under his care -- including a woman with whom he was involved -- Darcon Leah falls in love with her. Brooks doesn't ever really show us how that might happen, he just tells us it does. The teased confrontation between the Skaar invasion force and the Federation Army falls apart when a woman who assassinated the man who assassinated the Federation Prime Minister and who turned out to be a Skaar assassin herself, schemes and plots to set the Feds up for a fall -- only to kill the Skaar king because she's tired of lying to people and being his pawn.

Earlier books drew the characters of the captain and crew of the Behemoth, the airship that went to Skaar, but Last Druid just turns them into a crew of redshirts. Young Shea Ohmsford, when he was introduced, was a mysterious youngster who bore the name of the main hero of the first Shannara book. He's important enough for the story's resolution but he could have had any name; there winds up being no significance to that choice. Over and over again Brooks tells us things instead of showing them, dulling their impact. After Clizia is defeated, Grianne asks Tarsha to take her "home," to the Tanequil. The initial sentences of the dialogue disappear in favor of what might as well be meeting notes of their conversation. The whole four-book "Fall of Shannara" series could easily have been two books, and maybe even one.

On the well-known Goodreads scale, three stars doesn't actually mean that a book is better than a two-star or worse than a four-star. It's supposed to be a measure of how much the reader liked the book. But everyone uses it as a quality rating, and based on that Last Druid earns its third star not for any real aspect of its own. Brooks does two things in the book that give it the star it doesn't otherwise earn. The first is to offer Grianne Ohmsford a redemption after Witch Wraith crapped all over her. She had been the Ilse Witch of the book of that name in the "Voyage of the Jerle Shannara" series, herself damaged by the machinations and lies of an evil wizard. Redeemed by the end of that book, she was one of the protagonists of the "High Druid of Shannara" series, leading the Druid order until an attempted coup trapped her in the Forbidding. After escaping, she offered her life in trade for the woman her nephew Pen Ohmsford loves and entered a kind of spiritual suspended animation as a servant of the Tanequil tree. The tree returned her to the world in Witch Wraith to defeat the demon lord Tael Riverine, but not as Grianne -- it returned her as the hateful Ilse Witch. Her role in defeating Riverine was narratively tiny and Brooks never offered a good reason either for him as the author or the Tanequil tree as a caretaker for the damaged Grianne to sentence her to a return as the evil Ilse Witch. Though it takes a four-book slog to do it, he does get her out of the Forbidding and back to the Tanequil, where she can find the peace of forgetting.

The second reason this book earns a third star is because Brooks had the courage to put an ending on his series and make it a good one. Drisker Arc dies when he and Grianne return from the Forbidding, and Grianne herself re-enters her peaceful existence with the Tanequil. This leaves Tarsha as the titular "Last Druid," since in an earlier book the ghost of Allanon -- the major Druid figure in the earlier books -- directed she be ordained even without training and study. Drisker's last message to her tells her she can decide if the Druid order will continue and if magic will continue to be a part of the Four Lands. Or she can close Paranor away and let magic fade from the human part of the world as the science represented by airships and the weather control device that saved the Skaar homeland takes control.

This is an important pivot point in the Shannara world. The gradual darkening of the world that led to the Great Wars came because human beings set magic aside for faith in technology. The world was unbalanced and its people unprepared for the assault of demonic forces that almost destroyed it. If Tarsha decides to let magic fade the same thing might happen. On the other hand, the Druid Order has constantly fallen victim to ambitious wizards tempted by power and the ability to use dark magic to get it. Which will she choose?

In what is probably his best stroke of genius since creating the Shannara universe in the 1970s, Brooks leaves Tarsha at peace, contemplating her decision with a true friend at her side who has just expressed his confidence she will choose to do the right thing because she has the wisdom to do so. In other words, he doesn't tell us which way Tarsha picks. The ambiguity provides more than simply a great storyteller's resolution; the kind that brings an end to the current narrative while leaving open the reality that the greater story behind it will go on and on. By leaving Tarsha at peace while she considers he implies that whichever way she chooses will indeed be the right choice: Allowing magic to fade will not lead to another technologically dominant era of terror, and re-founding the order of the Druids will not be plagued by secrecy, manipulation and ambition. Her choice however it is made will be one that brings balance and a promise. Schemes and tyrants and manipulators will still make their plays -- the continuing great story needs antagonists, after all -- but it will take a new direction.

Of course, that ambiguity makes a liar out of the series title: "The Fall of Shannara." Nothing falls, nothing comes to a complete end. But since it's unlikely that kind of ending would have fit this series of books, that's probably for the best. His ability to realize that earns The Last Druid its third star.

The Shannara books speak in a young adult voice. Even when they describe great battles or evil deeds or developing love they do so in a tone that suggests the narrator knows about these things but is somehow still innocent of their direct experience. Where Game of Thrones would suggest -- probably at swordpoint -- spending the night together, Shannara wants to hold your hand. A definitive ending would have foreclosed on a hope-filled vision of things working out right this time and belied the open-ended optimism expected of such a viewpoint.

That voice, in addition to some of his own touches and what is, in many places, some truly wonderful writing, may have been a large part of the series' appeal. For his final sequence, Brooks brings all of those skills to bear and shows the deftness that has only surfaced now and again since the days of the first books in the series. He ends the book -- and the canonical tales of Shannara -- very very well and fittingly.

Brooks is in his mid-70s but may have some more ideas about different interstitial books in the Shannara world. He's described the fall of the old world and the rise of the new one that would eventually grow into the Four Lands. He's given us the initial rise of the Warlock Lord and the creation of the Sword of Shannara. But there may be pieces of the history still in his mind to relate. He's said that they won't move forward from The Last Druid, so this world will have definitive closure -- even if the closure is wisely and paradoxically open-ended. He can still put together a good standalone book: the three grouped as "The Defenders of Shannara" are probably as strong as anything in the series since the first trio. So if he does move on and have another piece of the Shannara mosaic to uncover, we can hope that's how it will be done.

Either way, he has wisely said, "Here endeth the tale." And he has done so in the best way possible -- with hope on the horizon and the invitation to the imagination of the reader to continue it on his or her own.