Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love so light she probably didn’t notice it herself. It wasn’t dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with a crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and the spark fades almost too fast for you to see. But still, you know it’s there, down where you can’t see it, kindling.

I have already reviewed Patrick Rothfuss’s first novel in the Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind. I liked it very much, especially for the masterful writing, but was worried about where the author might take the story.

My fears (wise man that I am) were validated in The Wise Man’s Fear, the second book in the series. The author went some places I didn’t want him to go. And yet he didn’t drive me away, and I want to read more.

Each book in this trilogy involves a single day in which Kote the Innkeeper tells his life story to a character known as the Chronicler. Kote is in actuality Kvothe the Kingkiller, a figure of legend in his own world and time. A poet, a singer, a warrior, a magician. Now he has retired from the world, but he will tell his story for these three days. No more.

The first book told us how Kvothe, born to a family of traveling performers, lost his parents, survived for a time homeless, and finally found entrance to the place he dreamed of – the great institution known as the University.

In The Wise Man’s Fear we follow him as he struggles with poverty, the regulations of the school, and the enmity of a fellow student who uses magic against him. He hones his powers, slowly mastering magic, but eventually finds himself in a place where taking a hiatus from his studies is a good idea.

Invited to enter the service of a nobleman in a distant land, he leads an expedition to clean out a nest of highwaymen, which leads him into a prolonged liaison with a faery woman, and then into an alien culture where he studies an arcane method of fighting.

Here we come to the parts of the book that troubled me. First, there’s the interlude with the faery woman. This stuff is not for children – the section is one long sex scene.

And yet… it’s not quite what you’re thinking. It’s rare, in real life, for sex scenes to be truly “necessary to the plot.” But here it is. It’s a well-written and elegant sex scene (which is very rare), and it provides an excellent approach to the great fantasy challenge I’ve struggled with myself – how to portray the Faery people properly. How to portray the strangeness, the alien quality, inherent in such creatures of trickery and night fears. Author Rothfuss does that job very well in this section, so I can’t complain (just don’t let the kids read it).

The next part – the foreign culture where Kvothe learns martial arts – was even worse (from my perspective). As you know if you read this blog, I am very intolerant of the trope, which has become almost universal in contemporary fantasy, of the Warrior Woman. And in this book we have a whole culture which appears to be matriarchal, and where women are considered better warriors than men.

And yet…

Just when I was grinding my teeth, Rothfuss does something remarkable. He adds a codicil, so to speak, to the narrative, which seems to be an admission that in inventing this semi-Amazon culture, he is dealing in physical impossibilities.

That intrigued and mollified me.

So, all in all, I’d call The Wise Man’s Fear an outstanding work of fantasy, well worth reading – for adults. And I very much look forward to the third volume.

(Oh – one serious quibble. He describes an archer fighting with bow and arrow in a driving rain. I don’t think you can actually do that – the rain stretches the bowstrings. That’s a strange slip-up in a book this well done.)