Review
An e-copy has been sent by the author, Juddy Anderson C. Punzalan, in exchange for an honest review.
It’s not always that you stumble upon a novel—more so, a high fantasy—that is written by a Filipino author. That alone intrigued and made me read this book. Alas, that soured quickly as I went through it.
Was it the writing ?
Indeed.
It was part of the many reasons, however.
As I took off into the story, there are obvious technical issues. Addressing the narration, it becomes quite tedious as you go through the novel. The narrator jumps from one character to another like a dog traipsing through a meadow: curiously smelling everything it sees with its head in the clouds having little to no care about anything else. Yes, not even the sanity of its listener (as for this case, reader). Moreover, there was a noticeable lapse with the use of character perspective. Parts become flimsy as it spirals from an interesting read with an enormous potential to a perplexing story that loosen its grip of readers. This made a huge gap in the novel and allowed the thought that perhaps the writer themselves are having confusions in their process of writing.
In a reader’s perspective, I believe it would have had better flow if the perspective was given more compression. Maybe choose 2 or, heck, even 5 characters to round up the perspective. It provides for an easier precision in story-telling and it becomes less of a chore to write and read. And if, in any case, we are to stick with the current way of perspective, it would have been better to allow room for smoke to build up before putting it off and jumping into another perspective. I swear there are a lot of jumps that I was so overwhelmed, confused, and irate . It’s like watching an action movie with each fighters having a clip of their actions side-by-side. Who are you going to follow is all but a choice for you to decide.
Let’s not even go with the chapter breaks because this will become too long a blog post. I can go on and on with writing alone but let’s reduce it to these for now.
What about the characters ? The world ? The magic ?
A collision between reader and characters did not happen. I felt nothing for any of them. We ran a parallel line as we both try to discover the secrets that lie within the unanswered questions of the story but as all parallel lines end, we never met. It’s that moment when you start work and meet your coworkers but never really become friends with them. You are there for the task alone and there is no real interest in having real connections with the people.
Despite being a huge character-driven reader, though, what saddened me most is the lack of texture within the world. Given that this is a high fantasy novel, a stalwart structure of environment is to be expected. However, the world felt more like an afterthought than anything else. The inability to smell the forest, hear the rush of river and rustling of grass, or bask in the gorgeous scenery shattered one of the many foundations this book could have had.
On the other hand, the magic was interesting. An idea of how they manifest was laid down, but it was not mused upon enough to give it any firm impact. The existence of the magic made it a fascinating story yet is much a trifle as the world.
The outgrowth of problem with the technical collapsed the entire novel. I was thrown into such a reckless read. Missing was the corporeality of the characters, the conceptualization of the world, and the very reason why and how the magic existed. Hence, it was a novel with no pillar to found its story. Disappointing as it might have been, I plowed through the book and all I ever gained was that The Archon of Peace is a novel with so much potential.
