The word that best describes my experience with Jack Whyte's The
Skystone is "languid." I don't want to describe his inaugural
Camulod novel as "boring" or "slow" because neither is quite
accurate and both carry far too many negative connotations, but
Whyte does love to take his time.
And damn!...does he ever take his time. It took nine novels and
thirteen years to complete his retelling of the Arthurian legend.
This series is NOT for the impatient. Nor is the first book.
Whyte plods and winds his way through the telling of the story of
Publius Varrus and Caius Brittanicus. A pair of Roman soldiers
stationed in Britain in the dying days of the Roman Empire. They
are the men who give birth to the Arthur legend, both literally and
figuratively, and it is Varrus who creates the Lady of the Lake --
a statue cast out of the eponymous Skystone -- and eventually,
Excalibur.
Jack Whyte is nowhere near the finest writer of his generation, nor
even a contender for the finest writer of fantasy-historical
fiction, but there is something compelling about his Camulod books,
perhaps because they feel possible, and part of that possibility is
the languid pace. Nothing happens fast. This is a book of
generations. It is a story of time and patience and potential, not
a Hollywood action film of the bang-pow here-and-now. A plan like
Caius Brittanicus' would take time, and it would take the loyalty
of a man like Publius Varrus and the skill of them both to pull it
off, but it couldn't happen overnight, and Whyte never lets
it.
What The Skystone does well is to make a beginning, to set the
stage, to get us ready for everything that is to come so very
slowly. Whyte sets himself the task of a beginning, and here, he
succeeds very well. By the end of the series the languid pace may
be a little too slow; it may actually be a little bit boring, but
in The Skystone it is simply languid, and that is the perfect pace
to set for a tale the author intends to drag out over a decade of
writing.
Don't be afraid to read the books now. They are all there, all
ready to be read. But when you are finished, make sure you imagine
what it was like to be a faithful reader way back in 1996. Languid
they may be, but languid must have been excruciating.