Uncertain, Fugitive, Half-fabulous

I did not expect to like this one as much as I did. Sure, I'd heard good things about the series, and had always kinda meant to read it, but just about everyone who raved about it (or about any of Weis and Hickman's combined work) would talk about how amazing said books were when read at a relatively young age. So when I found this one used and cheap I was in a mood for epic fantasy, but wasn't considering much more than fun.

Now don't get me wrong, "fun" is probably the best word to describe Dragon Wing, but it's really, really well-done fun, that's more complicated than it seems when you think about it, and expertly crafted escapism is, I've always thought, just as lofty an artistic goal as any other. (I used to insist that it was the MOST lofty, but I've finally come around to "literary" works, which isn't to say that I prefer them.)

The thing about this book that really made me realize I'd been grabbed by it, was when it occurred to me, rather suddenly, that I didn't know who the hero(es) were, nor if there would even be one. Again, I'd come into it expecting well-done but generally trope-fulfilling fantasy, and I knew it began a 7 book series, so I expected that pretty soon I'd have my hero and my villain and know who I was rooting for. The style of the book is so entertaining, and at times genuinely funny and fun, that it took me quite some time before I noticed that I was following disparate characters with no idea of how this was all going to work in a plot context, nor which sides they'd be on when they collided. It doesn't call attention to its moral ambiguity like, say, A Game of Thrones does (I loved that book, by the way), but it's there nonetheless. There's only one main character who seems genuinely decent, good, and well-meaning, and he's largely useless. Within the last 20 pages or so, I finally had a handle on how I felt the series would, as a whole, go, but it was a more interesting one than I had anticipated.

This is just one way that the book defied my normal fantasy expectations. It is, on the one hand, a very "classic" fantasy world, with elves and dwarves and wizards and dragons, but at the same time, it splits them up in ways that other worlds only hint at, or changes them altogether. Elves as violent bigots and dwarves as oppressed but unaware proletariat was pretty great (shades of Wagner's Ring Cycle in there, actually), and it was handled very well. I did not expect so much of the book to be caught up in dwarvish internal politics, but it was great when it did, in no small part because the dwarves -- or, excuse me, Gegs -- were great fun to follow, and the free indirect voice was good at picking the right moments to move into someone's head, and the right moments to view the whole world with ironic detachment.

The characters, in general, were engrossing, and especially so because I really didn't know what each of them would actually end up doing. Certainly, not every one was amazingly well-rounded, but what was there was great and what wasn't there wasn't necessary for the story to keep bounding along. At times, the dialogue could feel a little cliche, or try a little too hard to be funny, but it was never distracting. The depth of the worldbuilding and the ambiguity of the plot keep things moving at such an entertaining clip that many times I had to stop for a moment and think, just so I could realize how dark some of the themes had gotten, and how bleak the world we were looking at actually was. Now that's good escapism.