It was about three years ago now when I found The Gathering
Dark in a charity shop for 50p. Having
just gotten back into magic earlier that year, I snapped it up (and what a
bargain – Amazon lists it at £14.99!).
It was a fairly appropriate first step in a way, despite being several
years old. One of the themes of the
current set was ‘trap’ cards, and The Gathering Dark was certainly that.
Having read a fair few Warcraft and WoW novels (several of
which are written by the same author as TGD), I had low expectations but they
were actually somewhat exceeded. Now, let’s
be clear, this was no classic of fantasy writing, but it was solid enough – a
sort of literary equivalent of period costume movies like Kingdom
of Heaven: entertaining enough if
you don’t wish to tax your brain too heavily.
The plot made sense, the characters were just about deep
enough to be fairly engaging, and the writing was passable. I soon learned that this was the exception
rather than the rule.
That Christmas, I asked for the Shards block novel, Alara
Unbroken. My God, what an awful mess of
a book! AU showed me clearly the
difficulties that must stem from attaching a story to a game, rather than vice
versa. The first problem was that the
overarching story of the Alara involves five different worlds or ‘shards.’ In-game, this gave identity to cards and
colours, and worked very well. In the
novel it was a disaster. The author,
Doug Beyer, tried to give page time to all five shards, meaning a whole host of
characters of varying importance was necessary to breathe life into the
shards. And yet, almost all of the
well-developed ones were on Bant, rendering the other shards’ characters
redundant.
The novel lacked direction, and would have been far better
served to ignore the other shards.
Sarkhan’s subplot on Jund was tedious but relevant, so too Ajani’s on
Naya. Grixis and Esper are barely
memorable – something about humans trying to escape the demons of Grixis, while
Esper was something an artifact chap swimming in the sea… or something.
Then, of course, all the loose threads (a very appropriate
description) culminated in a huge battle between Ajani and Nicol Bolas, making
the other subplots feel even less important.
These kinds of fights are rarely entertaining and, in my experience,
most novels try to avoid them because of it.
Not to be perturbed, though, Beyer dived head first into his best
impression of a Dragonball Z battle. It
was dragged-out, dull, and oh so very predictable – and I don’t just mean in
the fact that the good guy won. The way
Ajani won could be seen coming from the first time you knew they would fight
one another.
A lot of MTG story nerds decry the fact that there is only
one novel per block nowadays (there used to be one per set). AU showed me both sides of that coin. Heads: less books means less poorly-written
novels tacked onto a story which is designed primarily to be a card game. Tails: more books would have given each shard
room to breathe and develop in Alara.
As I alluded to earlier, the problem really comes from
trying to staple a novel onto a card game with only skin-and-bones story. The fact that very few decent authors need
this kind of work is also an issue, of course.
Sometimes it’s going to work, other times it will fall flat on its face
but almost never is it going to be better than a “real” book. Experience has borne this out for me to the
point where I will only buy canon novels when they’re a) cheap and b) I have
nothing better to read. Then again, with
Innistrad being famously ‘top-down design’ perhaps the next novel will be
readable. Fingers crossed!
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