The Iron Ring

Why, after the failure of The Arkadians, would I read another book by Lloyd Alexander?  First of all, I am trying to go through the "A" section at my local library.  Second of all, authors can write good books and bad books: I loved Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground, but I consider The Idiot one of the worst books I have ever read.  The Iron Ring acted similarly.  While The Arkadians was a miserable failure, The Iron Ring was quite good.  The only major flaw was that it had enough characters for a book twice its size, which made those characters a little hard to keep track of at times.  Most of the characters, however, were very different from each other, which made it much less painful than the average too-many-characters book.  The story was quite interesting.  I enjoyed the ending and the nature of Jaya came as a surprise for me.  The entire premise, in fact, mesmerized me from the start.  Though many of the main characters seem to have values that are western as compared to the implied rest of the book's populace, it seems to do this less than most other books.  Tamar only starts to dislike the caste system near the end.  This quirky novel fascinates and compels, and anybody who picks it up will certainly want to follow it through to the end.

The Arkadians

This is a what could have been a quite complex and interesting story.  It was hampered by two things.  The biggest hindrance was the the writer.  Lloyd Alexander has a thing about the reader always knowing what the motivation of every character is for every action.  Now, that isn't that bad in itself.  An author could really have something like that either way.  It's how he shows each character's motivation that weakens the book: by speech.  Even in the most unlikely ties, the characters will say exactly why they, or in some cases, another character, is doing something.  They can also be quite fond of talking to themselves for the same reason.  The writing style itself also has a lot of room  for improvement, giving this little gem quite early on: "If I didn't know I was awake, I'd think I was asleep."

The second thing that makes this book bad is the ending.  The truly evil baddies are burned in an all-consuming flame.  Fronto, a donkey who takes the whole book up in his quest to be human, is also in that flame... but guess what?  The author stated earlier on that he could also turn back into a human by being burned.  So all is good for the good guys.  Can't have one of them harmed.  That would just be awful, wouldn't it.  There are no less than three mairrages arranged between prospective couples in the book in the last fifteen or so pages.  The almost evil guy who was only a victim of circumstance gets off easy, and the only good guy not mairred seems to be the I-can't-believe-it's-not-a-satyr kid, who is too young.  Honestly, can anything turn out better at the end?  Based on the rest of the book, the ending is completely unrealistic in how happy it is.  The second most ludicrous happy ending I've ever read, rivaled only by Eoin Colfer's Airman.  This book had a decent story, but it was by no means a good book.