Post by Cass on Apr 9, 2012 6:45:40 GMT 10
Giantkiller's Bookshelf: Finnikin of the Rock,by Melina Marchetta
by Rachy
‘It’s a love song to the relationships between fathers and sons and brothers and lovers and husbands and wives and enemies and neighbours and mothers and daughters.’
This is how Melina Marchetta describes Froi of the Exiles, the sequel to Finnikin of the Rock. This is also an extremely apt way to describe Finnikin of the Rock itself. Finnikin of the Rock tells the tale of a young man called Finnikin, and his guardian, Sir Topher, who have not been home to their beloved Lumatere for ten years. Not since the ‘five days of the unspeakable’ when the royal family was slaughtered and the kingdom put under a terrible curse, trapping those caught inside the kingdom and forcing those who tried to escape the bloodshed to roam the land as exiles, dying of fever and persecution in foreign camps. Ten years later, Finnikin is summoned to meet Evanjalin, a novice with an incredible claim, that the heir to the throne of Lumatere, Prince Balthazar, is alive. Finnikin, Sir Topher and Evanjalin are determined to return to Lumatere, and their determination leads them on a quest around the kingdom seeking a way to return and to gather the exiles of Lumatere so they can return home. Finnikin begins to believe he will see his childhood friend, Prince Balthazar, again, and that their cursed people will be able to enter Lumatere and be reunited with those trapped inside. He even believes he will find his imprisoned father and the men of his father’s guard. But Evanjalin is not what she seems. And the truth will test not only Finnikin's faith in her . . . but in himself.
Finnikin starts off quite slow. There’s an overload of information that is difficult to make sense of, whether it's in what actually happened in the prologue, what's happening now and what the characters are hoping happens. As the story progresses, and the quest Finnikin, Sir Topher, his mentor, and Evanjalin, the novice, becomes clear, the story also becomes clearer as more and more hints are dropped about what happened to Lumatere and what has happened to Lumatere and her people in the ten years since, and what the quest is going to accomplish. After the slow beginning, the action does begin to pick up and the story vastly improves, with twists and turns and reveals of information keeping anticipation for the ending high. While there are still slow stages in the novel, the rest is quite fast-paced and significantly clearer, though a reread is almost necessary to go back and appreciate all the nuances Marchetta places throughout the novel. Marchetta’s first step into fantasy, a departure from her well-known Australian ‘coming-of-age’ novels, isn’t a failure, and the common elements remain, a well-crafted coming of age journey and wonderfully real characters and relationships between them.
Marchetta has a definite skill in making her characters wonderfully relatable and heartbreakingly real. Both Finnikin and Evanjalin are beautifully crafted, as is the rocky relationship between them. The supporting cast is also wonderfully done, and the network of relationships showcased across the novel is a delight to read and painfully real. The experiences related by the characters are also painfully, horribly real, both inside and outside of Lumatere, and Finnikin doesn’t shrink away from the grim reality of the war. Marchetta’s writing is surprisingly gritty and grim, and while no A Song of Fire and Ice, the horrors seen and experienced from displacement, war and as a result of a hostile takeover are not glossed over at all.
Despite the slow beginning and the slightly shocking grittiness of Finnikin of the Rock, I wished I had read it and not been disappointed that Marchetta had veered from her usual genre when I first picked it up. Second time around, the beginning was still slow, but Finnikin was worth the wait. Marchetta’s skill at crafting relatable and real characters hasn’t diminished at all, and the relationships between the loveable characters bring wonderful angst and reality to the novel.
Rating: 4/5