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| The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner |
(Spoilers ahead. I tried to avoid anything explicit, but it’s impossible to review the book without them.)
The Thief (The Queen’s Thief 1) was originally published in 1996 and was well received with several awards and nominations. It’s now been reissued by a new publisher to reach a new generation of readers.
I belong to the generation that would’ve read the book when it originally came out, but I hadn’t. I think I would’ve loved it then. However, time has done its thing, and it hasn’t been altogether kind to it.
The book follows Gen, a thief who is made to join a mission to steal a piece out of mythology, located in an enemy kingdom. It’s either that or remain in the gaol, so off he goes with a nameless magus (if his name was ever given, it wasn’t used again), his two apprentices, and a man of arms.
They sneak into the enemy kingdom through mountains. It’s slow going and the narrative is slowed more by a bunch of completely unnecessary stories about gods. You can skip them all. With a great difficulty, they finally achieve their impossible task. And then things go wrong.
The book is narrated by Gen in the first-person point of view, and if I recall correctly, there weren’t many of those in fantasy back when the book first came out. It was a very odd choice for the story, and it wasn’t done very skilfully, especially when the story required other peoples’ point of view. The narrative was very impersonal, and in parts he just told what happened, even the dialogue. A brief sample of the next book at the end has a third person POV and it worked better.
Even though we spend the whole book with Gen, we learn absolutely nothing about him. I don’t know his age even. He has no inner monologue. He observes the others, but rarely comments and never in a meaningful way that would relate to him. Even when he is in charge, the reader isn’t with him, except for the brief part where he does the actual stealing.
The narrative is so impersonal, that for the entire book, I was convinced Gen is a woman. I know he was referred to as ‘he’ already at the beginning, but nothing about him made me believe it. He didn’t sound like a man inside his head. He didn’t even need to shave after having been in a gaol for a long time, even though a great show was made of washing him otherwise. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, but it never did. Nevertheless, I think the story worked fine, if not better, with my version of him.
The reason for the odd narrative is revealed at the end when it turns out that the whole story is a lie. The reason Gen plays everything so close to his chest is because he lies not only to his companions but to the reader as well. And I hated it. It’s not the clever twist the author probably intended it to be. It’s just disgustingly lazy, aching to ‘it was just a dream’ ending. Nothing we learned about him is true (except the gender, apparently). So, in a way, it was good I wasn’t invested in him, and that I imagined him as a woman. My version was as true as what the readers got.
The stupid ending ruined the book, prompting me to give it two stars. However, since I was fairly entertained until that point, and liked most of the story, slow and old-fashioned though it was, I’m giving it three stars. But I won’t be reading the rest of the series.
I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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