Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher
Jun. 10th, 2007 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Faeries.
Black magic.
And a genuine fallen angel living inside your head.
It never rains but it pours.
Harry Dresden is the only wizard in the Chicago phone book. He consults for the police department on 'unusual' cases, and has even appeared on talk shows. And this makes him no friends on the White Council of Wizards, who find Harry brash and undisciplined. However, now that vampire wars have thinned the ranks of wizards, they need him, and he's assigned to investigate rumours of black magic.
Harry's other problem is an old friend's daughter, all grown-up and already in trouble. Her boyfriend insists he's innocent of what looks like a supernatural assault straight out of a horror film. This impression turns out to be ... well, pretty accurate, as Harry discovers malevolent entitites feeding on fear in Chicago. All in a day's work for a wizard, his faithful dog, and a talking skull named Bob ...
Oh dear. Having quite enjoyed the last couple of this books in the series, Butcher goes and ruins it all with a book that repeats everything that was wrong in Fool Moon.
Where to begin ... Well for starters, I read this feeling as though I'd missed a book somewhere along the line. Butcher casually deals with a number of things that happened off-page, which turn out to have a certain level of importance for this plot-line. For example, there's a scene where Dresden meets up with the Winter Lady, Maeve and he talks about something that Maeve tried to pull at Billy the Werewolf's wedding, using it as a bargaining chip. Because we haven't seen what happened at the wedding, it's something that has no power or air of credibility to it and it feels like a desperate attempt by Butcher to pull his plot along. There's also the fact that Butcher has changed some of his characters to suit his current plot structure - the return of Lily and Fix, the Summer Lady and Summer Knight for example sees both of them much changed by their power - Fix is more confident and something of a shag monster whilst Lily is clever and manipulative. It's a bolt from the blue and whilst I could have bought into it had you see this this mentioned or happen in an earlier book, for it to happen now just reads like lazy writing.
Butcher also continues the Murphy/Dresden romance angle, which irritated me in Dead Beat. At least he has the two characters actually talk to each other about it, which is an improvement, but he puts it in only to nix it for those old chestnuts of not wanting it to ruin the friendship and not wanting the same things. The whole thing is shaping up as one of those Tragic Romances That Were Never Meant To Be and it irritates the hell out of me because it's such a cliche.
Female characters are still a big problem for Butcher, and I was particularly disappointed with what he did with Molly Carpenter. Previously a bright, somewhat precocious teenager in Death Masks, she's now become the stereotypical teenage cliche - running away from home, having tattoos and piercings, blah blah blah. Her mother, Charity, fares a little better - her opposition to Harry at least gets an explanation now (albeit one that's somewhat radioed in) and you see her as a warrior woman in her own right, but then Butcher has her succumb to the 'everyone likes Harry' theme that pervades the books because really, we're all supposed to believe that Harry is a wicked cool guy and no-one on the side of right can dislike him without being an obvious schmuck. It's Murphy however who gets the roughest ride because not only is she stuck with the whole relationship thing, but she also ends up, in the space of 3 chapters (most of which exposition) being busted down to sergeant and losing control of SI and all for being AWOL for 24 hours. Butcher doesn't even try to come up with a coherent explanation for it - in fact, he has his characters admit that it's stupid for the Chicago PD to do it, even though Murphy's got a good success rate, but rationalises it with the fact that the PD is stupid and that's just the way it is. This is obviously supposed to fit into the wider story-arc, but it's been handled in a way that's so utterly lame that I came close to throwing the book at a wall in disgust.
The plot itself rambles. Butcher's trying to do two things - firstly, building on his backstory by fleshing out Harry's new role as a warden and his discomfort with his involvement with the White Council whilst pushing him further into it; and secondly by developing the war between the Red Court and White Council by showing the involvement of the Faeries and other entities whilst at the same time hinting that there may be an uber-villain behind it all who's pulling everyone's strings. The way he chooses to do both these things is by having a main plot strand of someone bringing horror movie villains to life to scare and kill horror fan patrons. The problem is that this main hook isn't fat enough to sustain Butcher's aims and in fact, he seems to lose interest with his main plot as he confuses it by bringing Molly into his backstory. The result is that whilst Butcher carries the reader through the book at his usual breakneck pace, the story itself is unsatisfying. Once again, Butcher is trying to jump-cut his main story arc so that he can take you to the next significant segment and once again, he's doing it in a lazy and unsatisfying way.
The Verdict:
Not very good. This is a rushed and botched attempt to give the reader the information needed for the next book in the arc, i.e. it's filler - and not particularly entertaining filler at that - cliche packed and ripe with stereotypes. Avoid.
Black magic.
And a genuine fallen angel living inside your head.
It never rains but it pours.
Harry Dresden is the only wizard in the Chicago phone book. He consults for the police department on 'unusual' cases, and has even appeared on talk shows. And this makes him no friends on the White Council of Wizards, who find Harry brash and undisciplined. However, now that vampire wars have thinned the ranks of wizards, they need him, and he's assigned to investigate rumours of black magic.
Harry's other problem is an old friend's daughter, all grown-up and already in trouble. Her boyfriend insists he's innocent of what looks like a supernatural assault straight out of a horror film. This impression turns out to be ... well, pretty accurate, as Harry discovers malevolent entitites feeding on fear in Chicago. All in a day's work for a wizard, his faithful dog, and a talking skull named Bob ...
Oh dear. Having quite enjoyed the last couple of this books in the series, Butcher goes and ruins it all with a book that repeats everything that was wrong in Fool Moon.
Where to begin ... Well for starters, I read this feeling as though I'd missed a book somewhere along the line. Butcher casually deals with a number of things that happened off-page, which turn out to have a certain level of importance for this plot-line. For example, there's a scene where Dresden meets up with the Winter Lady, Maeve and he talks about something that Maeve tried to pull at Billy the Werewolf's wedding, using it as a bargaining chip. Because we haven't seen what happened at the wedding, it's something that has no power or air of credibility to it and it feels like a desperate attempt by Butcher to pull his plot along. There's also the fact that Butcher has changed some of his characters to suit his current plot structure - the return of Lily and Fix, the Summer Lady and Summer Knight for example sees both of them much changed by their power - Fix is more confident and something of a shag monster whilst Lily is clever and manipulative. It's a bolt from the blue and whilst I could have bought into it had you see this this mentioned or happen in an earlier book, for it to happen now just reads like lazy writing.
Butcher also continues the Murphy/Dresden romance angle, which irritated me in Dead Beat. At least he has the two characters actually talk to each other about it, which is an improvement, but he puts it in only to nix it for those old chestnuts of not wanting it to ruin the friendship and not wanting the same things. The whole thing is shaping up as one of those Tragic Romances That Were Never Meant To Be and it irritates the hell out of me because it's such a cliche.
Female characters are still a big problem for Butcher, and I was particularly disappointed with what he did with Molly Carpenter. Previously a bright, somewhat precocious teenager in Death Masks, she's now become the stereotypical teenage cliche - running away from home, having tattoos and piercings, blah blah blah. Her mother, Charity, fares a little better - her opposition to Harry at least gets an explanation now (albeit one that's somewhat radioed in) and you see her as a warrior woman in her own right, but then Butcher has her succumb to the 'everyone likes Harry' theme that pervades the books because really, we're all supposed to believe that Harry is a wicked cool guy and no-one on the side of right can dislike him without being an obvious schmuck. It's Murphy however who gets the roughest ride because not only is she stuck with the whole relationship thing, but she also ends up, in the space of 3 chapters (most of which exposition) being busted down to sergeant and losing control of SI and all for being AWOL for 24 hours. Butcher doesn't even try to come up with a coherent explanation for it - in fact, he has his characters admit that it's stupid for the Chicago PD to do it, even though Murphy's got a good success rate, but rationalises it with the fact that the PD is stupid and that's just the way it is. This is obviously supposed to fit into the wider story-arc, but it's been handled in a way that's so utterly lame that I came close to throwing the book at a wall in disgust.
The plot itself rambles. Butcher's trying to do two things - firstly, building on his backstory by fleshing out Harry's new role as a warden and his discomfort with his involvement with the White Council whilst pushing him further into it; and secondly by developing the war between the Red Court and White Council by showing the involvement of the Faeries and other entities whilst at the same time hinting that there may be an uber-villain behind it all who's pulling everyone's strings. The way he chooses to do both these things is by having a main plot strand of someone bringing horror movie villains to life to scare and kill horror fan patrons. The problem is that this main hook isn't fat enough to sustain Butcher's aims and in fact, he seems to lose interest with his main plot as he confuses it by bringing Molly into his backstory. The result is that whilst Butcher carries the reader through the book at his usual breakneck pace, the story itself is unsatisfying. Once again, Butcher is trying to jump-cut his main story arc so that he can take you to the next significant segment and once again, he's doing it in a lazy and unsatisfying way.
The Verdict:
Not very good. This is a rushed and botched attempt to give the reader the information needed for the next book in the arc, i.e. it's filler - and not particularly entertaining filler at that - cliche packed and ripe with stereotypes. Avoid.
