The Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind – Review
Popular Fantasy Novelist’s New Contemporary Thriller
Nov 2, 2009
Like an enchanted shapeshifter, Terry Goodkind’s latest novel looks like one kind of beast but turns out to be something entirely different.
The cover design gives the impression this is a mainstream thriller. In fact, the blurb declares it’s a ‘stunningly original thriller’.
But a few chapters in and the reader will realise The Law of Nines is a long way from James Patterson or Lionel Davidson. Every good thriller needs a mysterious woman but when she says, ‘I’m not from your world’ and turns out to be a sorceress from another universe then most thriller fans will think that’s a plot twist too far.
Sword of Truth
Goodkind, of course, has a readership in the millions as the creator of The Sword of Truth fantasy series. These 11 novels, with titles such as Wizard’s First Rule, Phantom and The Pillars of Creation, suggest his fanbase will be ready and perhaps looking forward to his shift into a contemporary setting.
Non-fantasy readers, however, will goggle at dialogue such as, ‘You really are Alexander, defender of man’ or ‘You mean you’re an alien? From Mars, or something’.
Alex is a struggling artist whose mother has lost her mind and grandfather is a bit of an oddball. In the opening chapter Alex saves a rather clueless young woman from being killed by an out-of-control truck. The truck’s passenger looks like he’s ‘stepped out of a nightmare’. That’s because he has. He and the driver are from a parallel universe, fifth dimension or somewhere beyond the Light Horizon. It’s hard to say exactly.
Mysterious Jax
The young woman is Jax, who’s mysterious and gorgeous. Alex shows her a landscape he’s painted from his imagination which just happens to be where she is from, also the parallel universe, fifth dimension or whatever (how he does this is never revealed).
Alex is on the cusp of his 27th birthday, a dubious event for him. It is the age at which his mother went mad and he soon learns there is dangerous significance in the adding together of the two and seven in his age (hence, the Law of Nines).
He will also inherit 50,000 acres of prime Maine wilderness, but this looks like turning into a poisoned legacy. Jax tells him that villains from her twilight zone are visiting his universe with mischief and murder in mind. Alex and his inheritance are key to their plans and Jax needs him to help thwart the evil-doers.
Violent Action
The action is good at times, particularly the violent episode set in the institution where Alex’s mother is incarcerated and he and Jax become imprisoned. But these highlights barely punctuate longueurs in which the reader learns about Jax’s world of magic second hand (we never leave earth to see her realm) and her sense of awe at Alex’s world of technology.
The first half of the book is particularly slow. So the reader gets Jax marvelling at ‘huge metal things floating in the air, or carriages moving without horses…’ etc. The writing is chock-full with this faux sense of wonder and no sense of tension.
Her ‘otherness’ is clumsily portrayed when she, for instance, asks for tea in a cafe and then asks Alex, ‘How do you make tea work?’ She then bursts into tears because she fancies one of earth’s cups of tea but doesn’t know how to make it. Just the sort of thing to distress a visiting sorceress, but it's also ridiculous and twee.
Clunky Dialogue
The dialogue, on the other hand, sounds genuinely alien. It has no idiomatic feel and clunks by with sentences like, ‘We need to get out of here, and we need to get out now.’ Adjective overload further kills the pace, with ‘dead’ silences, ‘hard’ glares, ‘soft’ sighs, ‘silent’ thoughts.
Some characters irritate rather than intrigue. Alex learns that gramps is working in his basement on a device that extracts ‘essences’ before the old boy disappears from the story. We learn no more about what he was up to. A femme fatale, Bethany, also appears and is dispatched without doing much for the plot.
Fantasy fans may have amazing powers of suspended disbelief and many will go with the far-fetched flow here – they should certainly check out the mini-movie Goodkind’s made of an episode from the novel on his website for a taster.
Convoluted Premise
However, even die hards may be let down by the novel’s premise, in which Jax’s world has been talked into abandoning magic for our technological gizmos, and is way too convoluted to explain.
Meanwhile, traditional thriller devotees will certainly not be enchanted. Or thrilled.
- The Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind. US: Putnam Adult 978-0399156045. UK: Harper Collins 978-0-00-730365-6
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