Review : Auri Makes Soap

Well, here's that rarest of things in which I review a fictional book !

I very much enjoyed the two Kingkiller Chronicle books, so let me get the obvious elephant out of the way first.

Like every other fan, I don't understand what's taking so long for the third. They're wonderful books, to be sure. They're good hearty reads, complicated, engaging and accessible. Rothfuss manages to make a tale of potentially bewildering complexity easy and enjoyable to follow. But while they have some moments of beautifully-crafted writing...  still there's nothing that deep or profound about them. For goodness' sake, Rothfuss, nobody's expecting you to solve the mystery that is mankind here ! Get on with it man !

I shall return briefly to this at the very end.

Anyway, The Slow Regard of Silent Things was another "may as well give it a go because it's cheap" pickup on a book-buying binge. Maybe it would placate my Kingkiller nostalgia gap at least a little bit. Tide me over, as it were.

It didn't.

I'm not going to give this book a rating because the author gave fair (in fact commendably ample) warning that I might not enjoy it. As he says at the beginning : 

If you haven't read my other books, you don't want to start here. Without the context of those books, you're going to feel pretty lost. Even if you have read my other books, it's only fair to warn you that this is a bit of a strange story.

In the afterword he goes even further, actually apologising to the readers after a fashion :

It doesn't do the things a story is supposed to do. A story should have action, dialogue, conflict. A story should have more than one character. I've written a thirty thousand word vignette ! The closest thing I have to an action scene is someone making soap. I spend eight pages describing someone making soap. Eight pages of a sixty page* story making soap. That's someone a crazy person does. People are going to read this and be pissed.

* He's recounting a discussion of an earlier draft. The final page count is actually about 150. 

To which his discussion partner responds :

Fuck those people. I felt more of an emotional connection to the inanimate objects in this story than I usually feel toward entire characters in other books. It's a good story. Let those other people have their normal stories. This story isn't for them. This is my story. This story is for people like me.

After that extensive disclaimer I can't possibly bear the author any ill will, at least as far as this particular book goes. So, fine. And if you enjoy the book, if it resonates with you and gives you something meaningful, if you get something out of it... that is absolutely all well and good with me. I certainly won’t stop you. 

But all the same... I personally didn’t enjoy the book, and there’s no reason I shouldn’t explain why. 

So to give similar due warning, if you enjoyed it, then chances are that this post isn’t for you.

In fact you should probably stop reading right away. You almost certainly won't appreciate my views on the matter. And that's okay. 

Enough preamble. The problem I have with the book is... Commander Uhura. 

Eh ?

Slow Regard isn't a bizarre crossover, hilarious though that might be. No, Uhura is famous for being the black woman on TV in the 1960s who “wasn’t a maid.” In fact she was very much more than not-a-maid but a skilled communications officer, capable of many other duties, aboard a pseudo-military ship. She just so happened to be black. The point was that skin colour should be no imposition of any kind. She was defined by what she DID, how she behaved, her skin colour quite properly incidental, humanity having long since moved on from its earlier, pointless bigotry. She had character and capabilities revealed by actions and behaviour.

By contrast I'm also reminded of some of the outreach efforts I saw at last year's National Astronomy Meeting. One fictional depiction of scientists was aimed quite rightly at a young BAME audience. But the young, black, female scientist it featured as its protagonist was worlds away from Uhura. She was defined by the colour of her skin. She existed only to fulfil that role, to tick that box. In her stories, nothing much happens at all and she doesn't actually do anything except represent minorities. That's it.

As you may imagine, I have a problem with this. To appeal to diverse audiences, to be inclusive for its own sake, is right and proper. But you can’t do it like this. You have to show that the under-represented person can actually DO things. Otherwise you not only create a boring character and a boring story, but worse, you reduce your characters to the very thing you’re trying to get people not to focus on. To say, "don't worry, you won't have to actually do anything, you can just show up and be black" is not inclusivity, it's insulting.

Likewise in this novella there is no plot of any kind, no events of any insight. Literally the most exciting thing really is that Auri makes soap. That’s it. There is not a word of dialogue nor a single other character. It is entirely constructed from Auri’s thoughts and (mainly) feelings and nothing else. What "happens" in the "story" is that Auri projects her own feelings onto the gloomy world she lives in, anthropomorphising everything around her, imbuing it with personality. She has unpredictable mood swings in response to how she perceives how the stones are feeling today, conducting all kinds of little rituals to keep everything in its proper place.

To be fair, that’s actually a nice trick for 30 pages or so. But it wears very thin indeed after 50... let alone 150.

I completely get the need for an author to write this to explore their creation, a work they need to create in order to get to the main stuff. But I’ve no idea at all why they'd share it with anyone. Auri is broken, neurodivergent maybe. Yes, okay, good. Well done. That's an important issue to examine. But if that's all, what am I supposed to get from this ? All I end up focusing on is not Auri's worth but her apparent total pointlessness, or possibly the deplorable lack of a proper social care system in Temerant. 

I mean, it's fine to write about feelings purely for their own sake (really, it is), but why in the world you'd do this to the utter exclusion of anything else whatsoever, in a fantasy novel, this I cannot fathom. 

On the other hand, thank goodness it's not a backstory – that would only have ruined Auri's mystery. Answering the questions of why Auri lives in the underthing, how she came to be estranged from the world, how she maintains her sanity, all this would have been a mistake. But failing to even acknowledge these as the most obvious questions – not giving so much as a hint of curiosity about them – feels even worse. Hints would have been deliciously tantalising, but we don't even get even the most ambiguous or indirect reference of any kind.

And again, absolutely nothing happens. Auri has nothing really to be afraid of, nothing to really inspire joy or hurt or anything else, so her feelings become totally random and uninteresting. It's nice to see our own little daily rituals brought to full flower but this doesn't need an entire novella. "A day in the life" is just of no benefit for a character like Auri... would anyone want a story about a day in the life of Gollum ? Probably not, and he at least does stuff. Auri doesn't. This book not only avoids the obvious questions, but it raises no new ones and gives no new insight into Auri's character that couldn't have been done in a conventional story with a plot.

All in all, it's utterly pointless. I don't hate it, can't hate it, because there's absolutely nothing of substance here to hate. It's as bland as plain pastry – hardly something to get excited about but hardly something to spit out in disgust either.

It does make me wonder though if Patrick Rothfuss isn't just hugely pretentious. It feels like he's being an anal perfectionist about a world that doesn't require this level of perfectionism. I know, I know, I daresay his magnum opus means a very great deal to him. The problem is that nothing he's presented so far conveys any sense of what that meaning actually is. There are some great characters in his novels, incredibly clever plots and first-rate storytelling... but, at the end of both the Kingkiller novels I came away feeling somewhat empty. Plenty of stuff happens in them, but what does it all mean ?

Blowed if I know. It's interesting that Rothfuss knows full well how the work will be largely received and has made peace with this. I just wonder if there's really some much deeper symbolism beneath the surface that's escaped my attention (entirely possible) or if Rothfuss only thinks there is (also entirely possible). I just don't know. But to me, it feels like Rothfuss thinks he's creating something as monumental as the Sistine Chapel, something which must be a flawless masterpiece that will inspire generations to come, when in fact he's just writing a good story. And they are very, very good books. I just don't think they're of the scale of achievement that the author thinks they are.