Somebody Broke the Winds and Now Everything is Foul

Temple of the Winds (The Sword of Truth #4)
By Terry Goodkind

Considering all the praise on the book jacket and all the positive press that this book has gotten, it feels weird saying that this book just is not that good. Temple of the Winds, the latest addition to the story of Richard Rahl, feels like the weakest entry in the series so far. Terry Goodkind has some very pointed weaknesses as an author that show up consistently though his Sword of Truth series as it sort of stumbles up and down in quality, and in Temple of the Winds every one of these flaws shows up at full strength. Clumsy exposition, check. Aggressive deus ex machina, check. A world that feels disjointedly mismatched with the moral system that the story adheres to, double check.

A smooth and unobtrusive use of exposition is very difficult to accomplish, but it’s important. The reader needs to know about the world. The reader needs to know who the characters are, their motivations, the mechanics for why they can do the amazing things they do and the reasons why those things could not be used to solve the entire problem of the story in the first five pages of the narrative. When you read enough, you just start to groan when you hit a page where the story essentially just stops and tells you everything about a character. But Goodkind does not stop at clumsy exposition heavy character introductions. It seems as if no character in the world is familiar with the place that they live in. There are constant excuses for exposition about the lands or peoples to come up and be discussed that just feel unnatural. As a reader you end up feeling like the characters are giving each other history and geography lessons for your benefit.

The other real problem Goodkind does a lot is very heavy handed deus ex machina. Everything seems to work out in the end for the characters. Frequently it even feels like they are working against everything they say they want to accomplish, which makes it all the more strange when it works out for them. One example really stuck out at me, and I have never been able to get over it. There is one part where a character acts counter to all their decisions and voiced intentions leading up to that point, and the author never explains why. Then, in the end, it all works out anyway despite every character making a mess of things and fumbling their way along. It’s very clumsy to explain this without giving away spoilers.

On top of it all, the world just does not seem to fit together at all. Richard Rahl’s set of ideals just do not align with the way the world works and the whole story, like the others but more heavy handed in this case, just ends up feeling like a square peg getting rammed into a round hole. There is this whole world with complex characters and all kinds of strange conflicts and entire nations full of families with children who need decisive leadership in a time a great international distress looking to Richard Rahl, but he goes to individual homes of his favorite little league sports team when the kids start getting sick. The purpose of these scenes is of course to make you feel really terrible and connected with the plight of the plague victims that form the heart of the threat in this story. It really does not work, though, because at those moments it feels like Richard Rahl is only able to care about people who are right in front of him. It’s done for the purpose of the readers seeing this pain and feeling the way Richard feels, but it undermines his character and on the whole makes it impossible to care about the whole world.

Goodkind tries to mask over all of these problems by making this the goriest book in the series so far. It feels like some of the grotesque events and actions and the results of the plague are supposed to mask the major weaknesses in the narrative. It even works a little bit, but not for long. Once one problem rears up strong enough for you to see it through the dark tones of the novel, they all start popping out together and everything falls apart.

During previous reviews for books in the Sword of Truth series there was a question as to whether it was worth reading a bad book in order to stick to the narrative and be rewarded by future books in the series. A pattern has definitively been established at this point in the way these books are written. It is pretty safe to say that although the story is continuous from book to book in this series, that the heavy handed exposition makes skipping books entirely possible. If you are in love with this series, and do not feel like these weaknesses are present in any of the previous novels, then you should read this book. It is certainly more of everything from the previous books. However, if you thought the other books were just okay, give this one a pass. No major plot points happen that wont be explained in detail in the next book. Sure, some things happen in this book that directly move things along in the next one, but they are only details, and they are details that will definitely be explained in flat exposition. You can safely give this a pass and it wont hurt your journey through the Sword of Truth series. There are a lot of decent books in this series, but this one is only for real fans who just want more and who can weed through the weaknesses to get more of what they love from the characters.