Review of Dragon Hunters (DVD) and The Prince of Nothing Trilogy (books) 

Yesterday, a film I've been waiting to see for two years finally arrived in my mailbox. Chasseurs de Dragons, a French 3D animated film has come out on DVD, sadly never receiving U.S. theater distribution, despite an Oscar nomination. However, the English language DVD release has been given a lovely treatment, with Forrest Whitaker cast as one of the lead characters and the mouth animation redone in English.

When I saw the French trailer two years ago, I was mesmerized both by the charming animation and the humor. (You can watch the trailer—the same edit I saw in French, but cut from the English-language footage—at the official website, along with a lot of other fun stuff. The site, however, take a while to load, so have a bit of patience.) 

The story is not in-and-of-itself hugely original: two ersatz "dragon hunters" who travel about slaying lesser dragons (like the bag-o-goo dragon), hoping to get paid by grateful peasants are recruited by a little girl who dreams of knights (and becoming a girl knight) to slay a world-eating dragon. The girl's heart allows the thoughtful-but-quiet fighter to travel to the end of the world and slay the dragon. But the world itself is unique: floating islands connected by bridges which collapse and collide. And despite being somewhat stock characters, the girl, Zoe, is adorable; the cynical manager of the pair of dragon hunters offers a nice foil; and Lian Chu, the dragon hunter, is full of surprising antidotes to stereotypical masculine heros. 

Dragon Hunters is rated PG-13 for reasons beyond me. I recommended it to a friend with a 7-year-old daughter and he asked about its scariness. I don't think there is anything that would scare somebody that age, but I spend little time around children. Until the end battle, most of the dragons are more cute than threatening. One especially creative dragon is made up of hundreds of swarming bats that come together into a giant pumpkin-headed dragon. When the dragon forms, it chuckles. 

I really loved this movie. Visually, it's on par with the best of Hollywood 3D animation outside of Pixar, despite a $20 million budget. While the story is not as adult as Pixar films, I enjoyed every minute. Enough that I ordered the DVD today. And I rarely buy films. 

When I was writing my first novel, my best critic was a writer friend who would periodically get angry with me because he felt I wasn't pushing myself hard enough to make the weaker parts of the story good. He saw the potential of the strong sections and wanted me to achieve that level of quality across the entire work. That is the source of my loathing of The Prince of Nothing. The series is set in a fascinating universe and has so many moments of promise that its failures are maddening. Why didn't his editor step in and demand the changes required to make this work?

Of course, a key fact to the development of the series is that Bakker spent twenty years writing the first novel, The Darkness that Comes Before and the overwhelming problem with the series is present from the first page. The problem has a name: Anasûrimbor Kelhus. Kelhus is a Dûnyan, a culture that has been removed from the rest of humanity for millennium and practiced selective breeding to create hyper-intelligence and reactions.

After some background material at the start of The Darkness that Comes Before, Kelhus is in the north, accompanied by a trapper. Kelhus quickly has perfect insight into the man's psychology and is able to dominate him. Since the narration is from his point of view, you quickly learn Kelhus is a condescending, arrogant asshole. I almost didn't make it past the opening.

But then the story moves on to follow other, more interesting characters, particularly Drusas Achamian (Akka), a sorcerer who nightly relives the forgotten apocalypse of millennium before that nearly destroyed humanity. An awkward outcast, Akka is the central point of humanity in the series, along with Esimet (Esmi), a Mary Magdelene figure (to Kelhus's Jesus).

As Kelhus travels south (picking up a tortured gay barbarian who is the only one to mistrust über-manipulator Christ, erm, Kelhus, and the throw-away barbie, Serwë, Kelhus's first worshiper), Akka and Esmi's story provides us insight into the culture of the Three Seas area.

By the last third of The Darkness that Comes Before, the storylines begin to intersect.  The religion of the Three Seas has a new prophet who has declared a Holy War against the false religion of the south. If this sounds like Christianity vs. Islam circa the Crusades, it's because Bakker drew great inspiration from the Crusades. And that inspiration is the novel's brightest moment.

As the forces of the Holy War gather in the capital of Nansur, a diminished empire on the boarder of the heathen states, the princes and Emperors fight to control the Holy War for their own purposes. Bakker does an admirable job depicting the courtly manipulations and the impact of the Holy War on those outside of the court. 

Unfortunately, while The Darkness that Comes Before ended on this brilliant note, the following novel, The Warrior Prophet tells the story not of the politicking as the Holy War goes to war, but of Jesus, erm, Kelhus's hoodwinking the gullible into believing he's their savior. 

Yeah, yeah, we get it: blind faith is stupid. If Bakker didn't devote so much of the book to the Dûnyan philosophy of Logos—what comes before—perhaps it would be tolerable. Or if Kelhus couldn't read everyone perfectly and manipulate them. If he wasn't infallible. Somehow Bakker missed the point that as a literary work, the Gospels work because Jesus is not God, but human. Also, the philosophy might be impressive to an intellectual high schooler, but not to anybody whose given these issues much thought.

 The Warrior Prophet has ample doses of Akka and Esmi to make it interesting. The Prince of Nothing fan community has a lot of people who dislike both Akka and Esmi: Akka is disliked for being unmanly, self-doubting and self-pitying. Esmi is disliked for being sexually disloyal (a prostitute). Critics often find little reason that Akka would have any loyalty to her, while he is depicted as loving her above all else. But their relationship is the grace note of TWP. In them, Bakker examines how we find love in need. Unlike so much of the Logos based psycho-babble that is mired in Greek concepts of mind-body separation, he has insight here and the pain they each feel in their shortcomings and failings has verisimilitude and impact.

In the third novel, The Thousandfold Thought, the Akka/Esmi relationship is tested further, as Esmi becomes Kelhus's concubine and spymaster. In faith, she finds forgiveness for her past and is able to become something more than she could within her relationship with Akka. But—while she denies it—Kelhus cannot return her love. He cares only about domination and power—all must submit before their lord. 

Alas, the rest of the book is trying. Kelhus's rise to even greater power is such a drama-suck that I began skimming the novel, reading perhaps a sentence per page for any part that didn't feature Esmi and Akka. I had stopped reading for enjoyment and only to figure out what the plot was. 

The end of the book features Kelhus completing his quest—meeting his father—which entails a lengthy discussion of grade-school philosophy (Bakker, interestingly, was in the process of getting a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt was writing this). Perhaps the target audience is younger or less schooled in philosophy than I (I minored in philosophy as undergraduate, but don't count myself a master of logic, skepticism, metaphysics or religion).

The fan community tells me that the problem with the Prince of Nothing trilogy is a matter of marketing: it's not a trilogy at all, but a 9-part series. They insist that if I read the next book in the series, The Aspect Emperor, that Kelhus is finally shown to be flawed and his madness becomes interesting. I'm sorry: Bakker expended something like 1,500 pages with Kelhus as an overly obvious metaphor for why faith is bad and in the process destroyed much of what was interesting in his series. I'm not going to invest in another 500+ pages to have that paid off. Tolstoy managed to give us an entire nation in 900 pages in Anna Karenina. If you require more than 1,000 pages to start to develop your theme, you've got problems. Problems an editor should have spotted and headed off, regardless of your 20 year investment.

Had Bakker restructured this series so Kelhus is always viewed from the perspective of others (and has a moment or two of humanity and even a single significant failure) this could have been a masterpiece. And that is why I loathe it so.