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The Wizard of Camelot | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Simon Hawke | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Wizard of 4th Street | The Wizard of 4th Street, The Wizard of Whitechapel, The Wizard of Sunset Strip, The Wizard of Rue Morgue, The Samurai Wizard, The Wizard of Santa Fe, The Wizard of Camelot, The Wizard of Lovecraft's Cafe, The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez, The Last Wizard | ||
Long before Wyrdrune and Kira stole three runestones, before Al-Hassan's quest for power unleashed the Dark Ones upon the world, before magic was even an accepted and common part of the modern world, there was the Collapse. The entirety of civilization was caught in riots, protests, and senseless killings. Natural resources were running out, making the simplest aspects of life such as heat and food a chore, if not a risk. And it is into this world that Tom Malory, ex-soldier and cop, will unleash Merlin Ambrosius. And Merlin, in turn, will save the world by teaching it of magic. But that will be no small task in a disbelieving world of the twenty-second century.
I had problems with this book right from the start, because it's an entirely unneccesary addition to the series. Readers who have read the previous books will already know the pertinent details. How the world was going to hell, and Merlin saved it by reintroducing magic. More information simply isn't needed, but boy do we get it.
That would be all right - extraneous, but all right - if had been a decent telling. But it's not. The main character is pretty much only along for the ride, something that always ticks me off. He doesn't learn any magic, even though he - and the readers - suffer through several different explanations of magic's history, and how and why it works. Malory offers a few suggestions and warnings to Merlin regarding how to handle the modern world, but the wizard mostly has things well in hand already, rending Malory moot. As a result, all he does in the climax is all he did for the majority of the book: provide a point of view to watch events unfold. By all rights, he shouldn't even have been at the climax; by all rights, Merlin should have, and would have, persuaded him to stay home, out of danger. It's not like he can actually contribute, after all.
For that matter, the story was really pretty boring. There was almost no conflict of any type in the first three-quarters, and even the last bit isn't exactly all the gripping. There's a lot of explanations of magic, or tangents to explain this or that aspect of what is going on, such as what kind of shows are on television, but few actual hurdles to overcome. As a result, the book reads mostly like, "This is what happened," and not, "Can he pull it off?"
There's also the fact that for a story that takes place a few hundred years in the future, it certainly doesn't feel like it. That can be understood, kind of, in the other books, but in this one the world actually runs on real technology. Yet it still feels and looks just like today. It's today if everything bad you've ever heard on the news happened all at once, every day, but it's still today.
Lastly, it contradicts the earlier books in one important aspect. In nearly every volume, it is mentioned that Merlin had made all resistance to his teachings disappear - literally. There never were any bodies, but those who spoke up against him too strongly, who posed too great a danger of stopping his quest to return magic to the world, they vanished, never to be seen again. Yet that doesn't happen here. There is one fatality, but no vanishings, and nobody ever seriously stood in his way. Hawke tries to cover the discrepancy by claiming these tales were rumors begun later by political enemies, but that rings very, very false. There was no hint in previous books that they were only rumors, after all.
The Wizard of Camelot would have been far better placed as the first book of the series, or possibly the second. It might have worked as late as the third book. But the seventh? No. The history was too well established for the inconsistencies to stand any scrutiny. And its essential aspects had been repeated often enough that telling the whole thing was largely a waste of time. The author's and the readers' both.
Buy this book only if you're obsessive about reading or owning the entire series. Otherwise, it's definitely something to be skipped. You won't miss anything.
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