When it comes to fantasy novels, it's important to draw your reader into the world you are introducing them to as soon as possible. With Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, I was entirely immersed in the world so quickly, I was surprised I had only read 30 pages and the actual story hadn't started yet. It's a book that tells a story retrospectively about the childhood and learning years of a man who had made his name formidable in The Four Corners of Civilisation, the world The Kingkiller Chronicle is set in.
The Four Corners of Civilisation, the world Rothfuss has set this novel in, is developed in a way that feels very real as if it could exist somewhere. As Kvothe tells his story, details about the world he inhabits are woven through very carefully so that it isn't a trickle nor is it a tiresome info dump. Instead, you learn about this world through experiences and circumstances, another people's culture or language won't be explained until it is relevant to something that is happening in Kvothe's life for him to bring it up and even then, the details vary from person to person. Everyone remembers different details to the tales of Taborlin the Great or the story of Lanre and the formidable Chandrian, storytellers will tell their own versions in inns and taverns and their audience may pipe in with a slightly different version of it. Details developing the world and the story are also not rushed - the series' name, The Kingkiller Chronicle, implies that a king and the killing of one plays a large role in it but there are few details throughout the book so far that indicates any ties to that title. The world and the protagonist are being fleshed out and developed throughout this book in order to raise the stakes and make whatever comes next mean something.
The main character, Kvothe, is an interesting character in that he chooses his own path before anything pushes him towards it. He is a naturally curious character who is at first drawn to learning because of its challenges, always wanting to overcome harder obstacles no matter what they may be. It is later that his hunger for knowledge becomes the way to understand what happened to him and his family, trying to learn about it helps to make sense of everything. It was quite enjoyable to see a protagonist who was already quite confident and a bit of a showman from the start, rarely shown to be nervous or unsure of himself, very aware of his strengths and how to use them. His childhood experiences from travelling and performing in his parents' troupe to living on the streets for a few years all lend to these characteristics further into the story. He's one of the rare fantasy protagonists I've come across who wants to build a reputation for himself so that people know who he is and what he is capable of. Kvothe still seems to retain many of these characteristics in the telling of his own story but it seems they have been toned down or he has lost something in himself, giving us an inkling that there are many things that happened to him that we do not understand the effects of just yet.
The foe of the story is mostly absent throughout with scatterings of information about them making it so that there is not much conflict on the page just yet with an as yet unready Kvothe. There are glimpses of them when it is necessary, during Kvothe's first encounter with them and later at a time when he could have forgotten about them but never did. It's definitely building up to that eventual confrontation to come in a future book as it seems like something that needs to be built towards before it is the complete focus of the story. By no means does this indicate that the story is without antagonists, there are enough characters to antagonise Kvothe and throw every obstacle they can in his way to ensure his failure. These are people he proves wrong time and time again.
Reasons to Recommend:
- Fans of high fantasy
- A magical system that is tied to knowledge more than anything
- Well thought out world with its own folktales alternating with every telling
- A man character who is both outwardly and inwardly confident in themselves in most matters
- A villain whose formidability is being built up to
I'm rating this book a 10/10. It's a worthy entry into the high fantasy genre and the very few misgivings I had about it were not enough to make me rate it any lower. I can't wait to read the sequel and am so glad I don't have the long wait ahead of me most people have had for the third book.
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