The Iron Tower Omnibus (Mithgar) Review

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The Iron Tower Omnibus (Mithgar) ReviewFirst I must say that most of the other 1-star reviews have detailed this trilogy's manifest faults awfully well - there's not a lot for me to add. I have to say that I'm in agreement with all of the negatives, to wit:
Tolkien plagiarism - well, duh. This makes the "Sword of Shannara" look like a masterpiece of originality in comparison. The very beginning, with the "young buccan Warrows" (McKiernan's strength sure isn't in his naming) practicing their archery, is just about the only scene that doesn't seem like a LOTR swipe. OK, the warrows are a little more warlike than the hobbits. So what? They also have a piece in the appendix called "On Warrows" - they're quite short - they tend to stoutness - they live in a peaceful country all their own and like to avoid the big folks - there's a town on the verge of their country called Stonehill (Bree) populated by men and Warrows, with an inkeeper named Bockleman (Barliman Butterbur) - four of them take part in most of the action of the book, with one Tuck (Frodo) being eventually responsible for the downfall of the bad guy Modru (Sauron) and his boss Gryphon (Morgoth). You get the idea.
But I guess one can plagiarise pretty baldly and get away with it. I don't think McKiernan got sued - if he did, he must have settled quietly - his books are still out there. So let's let go of that. If he's writing a copy, well, how does he write it? Not well at all I'm afraid. His heroes and villains are all paper-thin - Modru comes off as a James Bond villain at best, cackling about his plans to his helpless female prisoner and hissing a lot, and he's evil because....uh...he's evil. The heroes have no personalities either, and most of them cry a lot. There's no sense of landscape, of culture, of history, it all just feels tacked together, all makeshift and cheap, all no more detailed or interesting than the average AD&D game I was playing in college around the time this was first published. Others have mentioned how McKiernan flips back and forth between "quarrels" and "arrows" (it should be the latter in most cases) indiscriminately, but his writing is remarkably lazy and poor throughout. He uses the passive voice an awful lot and throws in archaisms and umlauts and accents recklessly, I guess to make it feel "old" and "epic", but he only succeeds in making himself look illiterate and pretentious. He also has one very curious trait that I've never seen anywhere before - he likes to abbreviate words that are not normally ever abbreviated, e.g. "landscape" becomes " 'scape". This choice and several other equally mysterious ones like using an apostrophe before non-abbreviated words ('Day) help contribute to the general sense that the guy never wrote so much as a letter between college and the writing of this book - and his editors didn't do him any favors.
And he's awfully, awfully obvious. When Tuck finds the Red Quarrel early on, we're never in the slightest doubt that he'll be using it to complete the Big Task and destroy the Big Nasty; when the heroes go underground in Dimmen-whatever (Moria) we know they'll have to face the Balrog-thing; when the eclipse is first mentioned there's never a shred of doubt that they'll have to reach the Big Bad Iron Tower before it. And so on. This is a book almost wholly without subtext, except maybe a very cynical one: how badly can a book be written, and how obvious can it's debt to LOTR be, and yet still be published - and even cherished by fantasy fans with little taste or experience. The answer saddens me.
The Iron Tower Omnibus (Mithgar) OverviewDennis L. McKiernan's Mithgar books are among the most beloved in all of fantasy fiction. The Iron Tower includes the first three novels set in the world of Mithgar-collected in a single volume for the first time-with an all-new introduction by the author.

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