Two Andrzej Sapkowskizn
.1.
I was, prior to the TV adaptation, no particular aficionado of the Witcher video games. I asked my gamer son and he supplied me with one key datum: ‘they changed it so that if you keep killing cows a demon appears to stop you. In the first version you could just keep killing cows, since you got money for each cow, so you could just kill thousands of them and get all the money, but in the third game they’ve stopped you doing that.’ Good to know, I feel. Then, of course, Henry Cavill, upon whom my wife has something of a crush, played the character in the successful Netflix adaptation, but at that point I’d never read any of the books upon which games and movie are based. So Season of Storms was a first for me.
Season of Storms will be a last for me.
Hoo what a bad book. On the upside, it’s entertainingly bad rather than just depressingly bad: a mismash of High Fantasy generic clichés, with the Witcher himself a Van Helsing/Clint Eastwood gunslinger combo (“the Van with No Name”) roaming the world killing monsters and having sex with large-breasted sorceresses. If there are nuances to this formula in other Witcher volumes I am, and will I’m afraid remain, unaware of them. In this one the Witcher kills a monster, has his magic swords stolen from him and then spends a very long time looking for them. He’s tortured by an unscrupulous magician, gets into more fights, goes on a sea-voyage, fights a cave-troll. There’s a superbly irritating character called Dandelion who interrupts the action with songs on his lute, like the bard in Asterix. The aged king is going to marry a seventeen year old, and this entails some kind of opaque political conspiracy-ising. On his travels the Witcher meets alluring raven-haired women and flame-haired women and sometimes has sex with them.
The whole has been translated out of Polish into a deliberately fruity High Fantasy idiom by David French (‘nought like a Witcher for dealing with troubles!’) and without access to the original it’s hard to know how much is French and how much the echt Sapkowski. Suffice to say the writing is bad: fond of needless repetition (‘Gonscorek was dead. He was, quite simply, deceased’ [35]) and often just baffling: ‘Sorel Degerlund grinned a vicious smile, a smile calling to mind centipedes squeezing through gaps under doors’ [155]. Indeed, sometimes, the sheer pressure of stylistic badness squeezes the prose into something that’s almost memorable: ‘a stentorian voice tore through the hubbub of the fracas’ [34]. But mostly it’s stuff like this:
The bodyguard … was a half breed, the result of a cross between an ogre and a dwarf. The result was a bald dwarf with a height of well over seven feet. [85]
If the seven-foot-tall dwarfs don’t bounce you out of the story, the unreconstructed 1970s sexism might. The women have ‘raven hair’ or ‘fox-red hair’, wear dresses with ‘plunging necklines’ and ‘cross their legs provocatively’. One female character is described as ‘a moderately attractive blonde’ [121] and some of the women are fat, farting hoydens (‘the Witcher, who always maintained there was no such thing as an ugly woman, suddenly felt compelled to revise this opinion’ [17]). But most are boobsome babes: ‘erotically alluring red hair … attractive figure … plunging cleavage’ [47]. A female warrior wears the following practical and credible outfit: ‘leather shorts with the legs split at the seams to accommodate her thighs. Two belts crossing her chest were pretty much all she had on above the waist.’ The Witcher is seduced by a busty sorceress called Lytta Neyd. ‘You lured me,’ he complains, afterwards. ‘Like an insect. With magical freesia-and-apricot pheremones’ [67]. But his insect-pheromone-related objections in no way prevent the two of them bonking all over the place for pages and pages and pages. ‘I do have a bed you know,’ Lytta tells him, a fact upon which the narrator dilates:
Indeed, she did have a bed. An enormous one. The bed was huge and had a canopy. The bed linen was of silk. It’s no exaggeration to say that they made use of the entire bed, of every single inch. Every inch of the bed linen. And every fold of the sheets. [65]
This erotic olympiad includes one of the flat-out weirdest similes for breasts I’ve ever encountered.
The Witcher brushed Lytta’s hair from her back. Slowly one by one, he unfastened the hooks and eyes and slid the dress from the sorceress’s shoulders. After that he utterly devoted his hands and attention to a pair of galleons under full sail. Galleons one would search for in vain on all the maritime routes, harbours, ports, and registers of the admiralty. [70]
Sexxy.
The worldbuilding is perfectly cavalier where consistency is concerned: it’s a pseudo-medieval world of magic, swords, horses, taverns, and castles that is also furnished with wicker chairs, checking accounts (‘“Please make out a cheque for four hundred crowns from the sum to the paid” she instructed the clerk. “I know the bank takes a commission’ [244]) genetic engineering and steam engines. In amongst the many hey-prithee archaisms characters say such profoundly un-medieval things as ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ and ‘that says a great deal about the individual’s psychological state’. For every ‘ye gods! Begone I say!’ there’s a ‘there’s a commotion down there in the suburbs’ [116]. The plotting is higgled-piggled, the tone veers all over the place and the overall effect is profoundly adolescent. Then again, so-bad-it’s-good is its own genre, and in this book is a remarkable example of the mode. On the evidence of this, it doesn’t look good for poor old Henry Cavill. Serves him right, for my wife having such a crush on him.
.2.
And, non-Witcherly, here’s Sapkowski’s The Tower of Fools (2002/2020).
By chance, prior to reading this novel I had just finished reading another historical novel set in 15th-century Europe: Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, a classic of world literature about which I wrote at, I confess, too great a length here. To turn from that to Andrzej Sapkowski’s novel The Tower of Fools (2002; translated into English by David French 2020) is to be struck by the things Sapkowski emphasises that Scott tends not to dwell-on. For example: naked ladies (‘Adèle was utterly, completely, totally naked’ [8]), amply-bosomed boatwomen (‘Reynevan did his best not to stare at her sturdy thighs, visible beneath her rolled-up skirt … her shirt clung to breasts worthy of Venus’ [84]) and sexy flame-haired witches (‘the woman was sitting with legs casually sprawled, allowing them an impressive eyeful of things normally kept covered’ [167]) — not to mention sexy flame-haired lesbian witches (‘the witches were kissing passionately and voraciously … the one behind was utterly preoccupied with the breasts of the one in front, which she had pulled out of her unbuttoned blouse’ [429]). There’s also quite a bit more piss than is the case in Scott: ‘the urine matured for around two weeks in large vats’ [120]; ‘there were a great many horses, stamping their hooves in puddles of urine’ [515].
Sapkowski’s two slightly gormless but up-for-it young heroes, Reynevan and Scharley, gallop around Europe having various adventures, encountering all sorts of people, and meeting various freaks, devils, hamadryads and monsters. You can read a long way in Walter Scott without encountering a buggering werewolf (‘as a human being it had perverted tendencies, which remains with it in wolfish form; it lies in wait for someone to drop their trousers and expose their privates — the wretch usually seizes its victim from behind, holds him fast … and then … you understand’ [218; ellipses in original]). You will be relieved to know that this creature is dealt with promptly: ‘a punch on the nose made the werewolf howl’.
Every cliché of medieval-set historical fiction is supplied: people carouse in taverns, old hags cackle, brigands roar, sinister priests plot. ‘The black knight thundered at them with upraised sword and cloak flowing behind, so fast he was tossing up divots of turf’ [452]. The Hussite wars are raging, the Inquisition is torturing people — ‘red hot irons, and the standard strappado and screws on the fingers and toes’ [231] — and there’s a lot of violence and death, all described with a kind of gurning, adolescent glee:
The ball struck Ekkehard of Sulz in the chin and tore off his head. A fountain of blood gushed from the neck of the advocate of the anti-Hussite crusade; his head slapped against the wall of the barn, rolled across the field, finally coming to rest in the grass, its dead eyes watching the dogs as they sniffed it. [290]
And let’s not forget the constant supply of ladies who are not only naked, but utterly, completely, totally naked (‘her small round breasts with nipples hard with desire, her slim waist, her shyly clenched thighs, full, beautiful’ [446]). Scott, it’s not.
