Ciri’s Grand Adventure

As the series has stretched on, I have to admit that The WitcherCreated by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, this franchise spawned not only nine books (with more on the horizon) but also a successful series of video games and a (less success) television productions as well. (the books, not the television series, which I have bitched about enough already) has gotten… weird. Unfocused, maybe. It’s pretty clear there’s a direction for the story, and where everything is going, but here, even in the sixth book (out of seven for the main series), it still feels like the series is trying to figure out what direction to take the whole saga. Honestly, if I didn’t already know that this was the next to last book in the main saga, this might have been a point where I dropped off the series. There’s a lot that happens here, but it doesn’t always feel like we’re actually building to something.

I think a key reason for that is because half of The Tower of Swallows is really just an extension of the fifth book, Baptism of Fire, which was a very directed book, mostly focusing on Geralt and his band of followers he picks up along the way, but that book didn’t reach any kind of real conclusion for its part of the story, and this sixth book functionally gets Geralt and company no further. And that’s when it actually focuses on Geralt and isn’t telling its own story about Ciri. Oh, and that story also doesn’t get to a proper conclusion either, leaving its character stuck in a new position but no closer to her goal, either.

And I get that we’re in the middle of a saga which has one clear endpoint in mind. Naturally we aren’t going to get true conclusions for any of these stories until we reach the final chapter of the final book. But there’s a difference between leaving us hanging, waiting for what’s next and at least giving us some kind of pause point that makes us feel like we’ve accomplished something. Most of what happens in this novel leaves us no closer to the final goal of the saga than we were when the story started, and it becomes tiring after a time to feel like we’re spinning our wheels while we wait for the author to finally just commit and get to the freaking point.

Let’s take Geralt as our example. The last book had him aiding Rivia in a decisive battle against Nilfgaard. Afterwards, he’s knighted by the Queen and, officially, made Geralt of Rivia. This book then has him immediately flee his position as a knight and pick right back up with his fruitless quest to head towards where he thought Ciri might be, even though he (and everyone traveling with him) knows that this is a pointless endeavor. Along the way they pick up yet another companion, a bandit ruffian named Angoulême, and they head towards a camp of Druids who might be able to finally point the crew in the right direction. Except they don’t, and the elvish sage that eventually talks to Geralt is no more helpful either. And then we’re left with these characters functionally in limbo as the book flits off elsewhere.

We honestly didn’t need most of this story as it doesn’t actually advance Geralt’s tale at all. He would have accomplished just as much traveling with Queen Maeve and fighting evil alongside her army as he would have scarpering off and doing fuck all elsewhere. You get the vibe that the author, Andrzej Sapkowski, knew he had to include Geralt, since this is his series, and that he had to have Geralt do something, but he didn’t actually have anything important for Geralt to do here so, unlike in previous books where Geralt takes a backseat so other characters can have all the spotlight, here he gives The Witcher a pointless quest that leads nowhere just to make the character feel important.

By a similar measure we also have Yennifer who, last we saw, had escaped from the Lodge of sorceresses, teleporting halfway across the world so she could try and track down Vilgefortz. Her assumption was that finding him would help her find Ciri, since Vilgefortz wanted Ciri, and so we find out that she landed near an island nation and convinced the king there to aid her, letting her take three boats of able-bodied men out to the middle of the ocean where, she suspected, Vilgefortz somehow was laying in wait. As it turned out, she was right, and she gets captured by Vilgefortz so he can use her to track down Ciri. And then… that’s it. We are once again left in a place where Yennifer’s story doesn’t actually go anywhere, and because she doesn’t really accomplish anything, and she also doesn’t somehow accidentally push Vilgefortz’s story forward either, nothing is really accomplished by her for an entire book.

By that same metric, Vilgefortz is supposed to be a main villain of the series but, after book four, Time of Contempt, he practically vanishes. Yes, he has goons running around doing things in his name, but that doesn’t make for a compelling villain. His stooges are interesting, and some of them (which we’ll get to soon) actually do pretty major things in this novel, but on the whole Vilgefortz is more of a threat than reality and that threat becomes less and less interesting the longer he is absent from this saga.

The one character that does get a lot of focus this time, and who does sort of get her story pushed forward (although only by degrees, which we’ll get to), is Ciri. When we pick up with her she’s been hanging out with the Rats for a novel and a half’s worth of time. She met up with the Rats at the end of book four, and then we saw a couple of small interludes with her in book five, but she was largely absent from the narrative during that book. Now, though, we get to follow her with the Rats as they tromp around the countryside, acting like bandits with big swinging dicks, before they all get killed off by a bigger fiend that just wants Ciri.

Before we get to the fiend, though, I do want to comment on the Rats. I have to admit that I didn’t hate the Rats. I didn’t particularly like them, but that’s mostly because they’re barely in the story even when the novels actually do focus on Ciri. They’re ruffians, and not particularly nice ones, but I didn’t develop strong feelings for or against these characters. I know plenty of fans of the series hate the Rats, and I’m not sure why. By a similar metric, though, I don’t know what possessed Netflix to greenlight a series about the Rats (which then got edited down into a single, stupid movie). There’s not enough to these characters to care about them either way.

Especially not when the lot of them are all killed off by master bounty hunter, Leo Bonhart. In comparison to the Rats, Bonhart is actually an interesting character. He’s evil, a pure dark kind of evil, and once he gets his hands on Ciri he relishes in torturing her, trying to break her so he can have his own little pet “witcher girl”. He makes her do horrible things for his amusement, and he pushes her character forward along her path in ways I’m not sure she’d have ever gotten on her own. Just his mere existence in the story forced her away from the Rats, who she was kind of using as an emotional crutch, so she could pick up as Ciri and be herself once more. He’s a solid antagonist for that reason.

But at the same time, the story still doesn’t really push Ciri far enough. She goes from lost with her friends, the Rats, to, by the end of the novel, lost in another world populated by elves (because she teleports through a tower to a different dimension). Yes, it’s a new step for her journey, but you could argue she’s just as lost, and just as far from her goal, as she was at the start of the story. If you’re looking for actual narrative momentum that tells you, “yes, this is where Ciri is supposed to go,” well, you don’t get that. Ciri moves around the board for a time, just like all the other characters in the novel, but if you simply condensed down the events of this book into a couple of chapters in the previous novel, I don’t think you would lose much at all.

And that, I think, is the big issue with this story. It feels like Sapkowski had a goal of writing five main novels about The Witcher (not counting the first two books, which are short story collections), but by the time he got to this book he’s already run out of major material to cover. So he pads, and moves characters around, and waits, but very little actually gets accomplished. I just want to see these characters get on the way to their final goal, and that goal feels just as distant now as it did before. I like these characters, and I enjoy this world, but enough is enough. Give us the conclusion already and stop wasting our time.

Thankfully now, of course, we have the concluding book. But if I had been reading these novels back when they were first getting published (especially if I were reading them in their original Polish back in the 1990s) I would have been so irritated not knowing how much longer this was going to take. Spacing stories out to develop momentum is good, but only if momentum happens. The Tower of Swallows is a book where a lot happens, but there’s no narrative momentum to carry us. If I had been reading these books when they first came out, I would have stopped reading at this point because of that.