2821

My sincere gratitude to netgalley.com and the publisher for the ARC of The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear, and here is my honest review in exchange.
A teenaged boy destined to fulfil a grand purpose, a mysterious island home to magical creatures and people, and a violent clash between humans and gods – all of this set amidst the Anglo-Spanish war of the Elizabethan era – are ingredients for a cracking fantasy-adventure, and I expected The Unfinished Land to be one. But was it?
Reynard, an English boy with gypsy ancestry on his mother’s side, is adrift alone in the ocean on the wreck of his uncle’s ship, blasted away by the Spanish armada while transporting foodstuff for the English fleet. He is rescued by a Spanish warship which is also lost in the ocean, shrouded by a heavy mist. The ship is forced to land on an island, suffering some damage that needs repairing. One lowly old sailor, who is instrumental in rescuing Reynard, is not what he seems, and is no stranger to the mysterious island. After some terrible events on the beach that result in the destruction of the ship and most of its crew, Reynard is taken on a fantastic journey through the island in which he meets a variety of magical creatures and people, towards the centre of a war between mighty forces, to fulfil a higher purpose that is incomprehensible to him.
The author has built a fantastic, magical world, filling it with fascinating creatures and features. There are the splendidly coloured drakes (gigantic dragonflies that become paired with blunters – humans who drink their nymphal fluid), trees that can walk away if they want to, roads – called trods – that reveal themselves only to those worthy of treading them, and Eaters who steal time from humans and leave them to age and die. And there are the Crafters, who create worlds and histories and destinies from their imagination, aided by the words brought to them by the Travelers and their servants – the ones who roam the earth to bring back news of humanity.
But, excellent world-building alone serves no ultimate purpose in the absence of a coherent plot, and that is where this fantasy fails. The plot moves along nicely enough initially, until Reynard is told that he has been brought to the island to fulfil a grand purpose. It takes on some wild turns from this point onwards, and any sense of comprehension that the reader has is utterly, irrevocably lost. Just like Reynard, the reader is left struggling to understand what goes on and the purpose of it all. Exasperatingly, almost every character Reynard, and the reader, encounters speaks in riddles. The author’s extensive use of archaic English – thou, thee, thy, trow, knowest, hast, and so on – compounds the annoyance. There are some traces of Norse and Celtic mythologies in this novel, but nothing is developed sufficiently to be recognizable. All the magical things, so painstakingly created, seem to be serving no purpose at all. The multitude of characters, though interesting in their own right, too dissolve into obscurity towards the end of the story. The ending itself is as confounding as the rest of the tale.
In an effort to make sense out of this bizarre novel, I read it almost twice, and still came up with nought. For me, The Unfinished Land is a fantastical journey through a magical wonderland that leads, most unfortunately, nowhere at all! ( )

The story has a rough start for sure. The flowery, archaic language doesn't help here either (it just slowed me down even more so that I have a hard time continuing the story ... putting it down frequently). It gets a little more interesting once they get on the island and the Spanish sailors are no longer much of a factor. At that point, the world building gets more interesting and I started to enjoy the story more. To say the inhabitants (time vampires, travelers, crafters, et al) of the island were a tad eclectic would be a significant understatement, but trying to figure out exactly what was going on in this confusing puzzle of a land is about the only thing you have (not much in the way of action). Some of it I could figure out was a mashup of various Eurocentric mythos ... some of which I would have liked a bit more clarity on. Unfortunately for most of it ... the ending comes up rather abruptly and leaves a lot of things ... unfinished?

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.
#TheUnfinishedLand #NetGalley ( )