Harkfast Q1
Harkfast is written in a style which was both narratively particularly brutal and textually filled with strange and archaic words. How did this style work for you?
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I really didn't mind either - actually, I liked the words. The brutality I could take or leave - it doesn't entertain me, but I can live with it.
As to the prose styling, I got on with it rather well - it was the right level of descriptive vs action for me. Sometimes the story lagged, but I never stumbled over the writing itself.
I liked it at first, but after a while it got to feel a bit like hard work. Some of the vocabulary was familiar to me through various routes, other bits were new. Again, at first I looked things up but after a while I just assumed meaning from context
The unrelenting brutality of the setting - embraced as normal by both sides - made me think of both current Grimdark settings and the role playing game FATAL. A fascination for nastiness for nastiness' sake and complete lack of humor or frivolity. In my experience, the usual response by humans to this sort of thing is playing it for laughs, leaning into the bleakness for black humor. Witness Soviet humor. There is none of that here, just assholes being assholes because what else is there but to be an asshole.
As for the many obscure words, I love learning new words - I have an extensive vocabulary and widening it is a joyful experience. However, the sole purpose of language is communication, and putting in too many obscure words makes on think that they are not being used for clarity and better definition, but for pretension. They pull the reader out of the story, making them more conscious of the form than of the substance. The reader tries to figure out the meaning if it is not sufficiently clear in context, snapping the thread of the story. Rae made no effort to make his antique and unfamiliar words clear in context, rather parading them stark and unapologetic. In the Hunting of the Snark and Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll playfully invents dozens of words ad nihil, yet they are all immediately clear in context, and the poems can be read with relative ease.
Totally agree about the lack of vision. Given Ruan's youth you'd expect it to come from Harkfast at this stage, but he seems to play things so close to his chest that not much leaks out to us as readers. As an Arthurian retelling you might contrast it with Jack Whyte's Excalibur (The Saxon Shore in the US, I think) where the Merlin figure has very clear aims and visions. That also has a lot of fighting and death, but on the whole isn't nearly so grim as Harkfast.
And if this is Arthur retold, where's the vision of what could be?
Bingo!