Customer Reviews

Exile's Song (Darkover)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

When I was 18 I adored the Darkover series, so I opened this novel hoping to recapture some of that spirit. But I can't ever be 18 again, and I can't ignore all the problems that made this book deeply unsatisfying. The basic plot, for one, was already done (twice!) much better in The Bloody Sun. The characters are all fairly flat, with a couple of identifying quirks substituting for characterization, and none of them have much motivation to speak of -- instead of complexity, we have simplistic stimulus-and-response behavior that just doesn't ring true.

Even in the case of Margaret, our Heroine, there's not much depth, and very little emotion: we're told that she's feeling this way and that, and she thinks about her feelings constantly, but we're never allowed to participate in those feelings.

The transformation of the bitter hard-drinking Lew of her memories (which I found quite a plausible and interesting development of the character) back into Good Old Darkover Lew, everybody's pal and passionate good-guy, as soon as he reappeared was sudden, unmotivated, and made me wonder, if all he needed to make himself a happy, well-balanced man again was to come back to Darkover, and nobody minded his coming back, why didn't he do it years ago and spare everybody more trouble?

Plus, the confrontation with the Big Secret Villain, which should have been the climax of the novel, occurs about halfway through, leaving the rest of it anticlimactic, aimless, and rather pointless. (Lots more whining and histrionics all around, though and some seriously bizarre family dynamics.)

I will only mention in passing the clumsy prose, and the extreme padding that turn a sparsely-plotted book into a heavyweight for no particular reason.

It would be easy to attribute this book's faults to its not having been actually written by MZB. But MZB turned out her share of serious clunkers over the years, and I've never read any of Adrienne Martine-Barnes's solo efforts. so that wouldn't be entirely fair. Exile's Song does hit most of the expected notes in a Darkover book, it just hits them dully, without any real originality or freshness or invention. It's a connect-the-dots, color-inside-the-lines version, flat and predictable.

There are books in the Darkover series that do have freshness, originality, and real strength of feeling. (The Heritage of Hastur, say, or The Forbidden Tower, or The Bloody Sun.) I'd head there for my fix, not to Exile's Song.

The book wasn't that bad...although a little overdone. The thing that upset me the most was that the whole Regis & Danilo relationship that was so carefully built before was shattered. Regis got married, and Danilo just gets to stand in the background, smiling? That bothered me so much, the rest of the book seemed dry. Although I would still reccomend it to others, especially those that haven't read Darkover before.

Marion Zimmer Bradley is a wonderful author, but I'm sorry to say that she doesn't show the story development that she usually has. Her character development is still great, but not good enough for 4 or 5 stars.

The story of Margaret Alton is quite interesting. She goes to the planet of her birth and learns that she is a telepath with the "Alton Gift," among other gifts. The back-of-the-book-synopsis says that there's a 'trap that was set for her centuries before her birth,' and that was what interested me in the book. But the 'trap' is the gift. She learns that she has these things about half-way through the book, and then you are looking forward to this 'trap,' but that is the trap.

The characters are neat, but as for the story, it is weaker than it could have been. Nice try Ms Bradley...I'm still looking forward to other Darkover Novels (I've heard that this one isn't the best one of the bunch...)

I wanted to like this book. I really did. I had read most of the older Darkover books while much younger, and this seemed like a promising start to re-exploring the series.

This is part 1 of a "trilogy" of sorts featuring Margaret Alton.

Exiles' Song
The Shadow Matrix
Traitor's Sun

In brief, Margaret Alton was born on Darkover, child of the senator from Darkover, but does not recall much. She grew up estranged from her father who she recalls as distant, drunk, and emotionally abusive. She is sent to Darkover to study music, and hilarity ensues. Or not.

The first part of the book is promising, and is a "stranger in a strange land", "fish out of water" story. Then it segues into a road trip story, mutates into an odd romance of sorts. It starts coming off the rails when she encounters her uncle, a cardboard cutout of a character who rants at her in the best patriarchal style. There is a lot of (yawn) tension as he announces she is to marry his oldest son who I believe was a scarecrow with a tape recorder playing "The Best of Male Chauvinist" stuck in its head.

Now let's see. Our protagonist is an adult woman being pressured into marriage...and is a powerful telepath able to control other people's minds.
She responds by:

a) taking action and declaring her independence
b) using her vast powers to show everyone who is boss
c) blithering about like a moron and waiting until Daddy-ex-machina shows up miraculously reformed from his abusive ways and fixes everything.

Guess which one...

Oh yeah, and the "Alton Gift" which is the power to control other people's minds is used in this story to...

a) advance the plot
b) set up the sequel
c) might as well have been the "Nestle Gift" the power to make delicious chocolate for all the difference it made to the story.

Guess...

Overall, a decent start, a bleh ending. I almost suspected that a different person wrote the second half.

I first discovered Darkover more than ten years ago and happily plunged in. After several books, I had to come up for air as internal inconsistencies mounted within the series. Characters' relative ages and degrees of kinship changed, as did distances and directions across the terrain.

Every few years, I try again. IMHO, this book encapsulated MZB's strengths and weaknesses in a single volume. Marguerida Alton is a vivid and likeable character, but the plot (or half-plot; I suspect the original manuscript was split into this book and _Shadow Matrix_, which I've not yet read) was essentially _The Bloody Sun_ starring her instead of Jeff Kerwin. Still, she's trotted out the same concept several times (_The Spell Sword_ et al.) while still managing to keep things reasonably fresh.

Another reviewer wondered about Jeff's reappearance as Damon Ridenow. MZB herself apparently forgot about her rewrite of _The Bloody Sun_, in which he first appears. In the original version, Jeff's dad was Arnad Ridenow, as the infodump in this version sets forth. However, the rewrite switched paternity to Lew Alton's uncle Lewis-Arnad Lanart-Alton, who was at that time the Heir to Alton. Jeff himself is (IIRC) some twenty years older than Lew's *father* in TBS, and yet Jeff and Lew show up here as nearly the same age.

This sort of thing drives me mad, especially when the inconsistent genealogies and chronologies weren't even needed to move along the plot of this book. If anything, the persistent infodumps slowed things down.

Without the inconsistencies and incompletion, I might've given this book an 8 or 9. As matters stand, a 6 is the best I can do.

Somehow I missed out on Darkover until recently; I have been a science fiction fan for many decades but this series had slipped through the cracks. My first exposure to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Darkover was by way of this book. On first reading my full attention was captured about things "Darkovan." I found Margaret Alton and the Darkover described in "Exile's Song" to be completely captivating.

I set out to acquire all of the older books in the Darkover series and now have a complete set, all in hardback except for "Two to Conquer" which I understand was only printed in paperback. I have now read all of the books in the series, some more than once, and cannot understand the negative comments made by some of the other reviewers about this book.

I suppose this is further support for the old saying, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I, for one, found this book to be captivating and rewarding; some of the older books in the series, on the other hand, I thought to be rather tedious with some verging on boring.

The most recent book "Hastur Lord," is in the rather tedious/boring category as far as I'm concerned but this one is certainly not in that category!

If you are new to Darkover, as I was, this book worked well for me as an introduction to the series; perhaps it will work for you too.

Having read every previous novel including Sword of Aldones (which, by the way, seems to me better than its replacement Sharra's Exile, I liked Dio's role in it), I heard tell of Exile's Song and thought "wow! Great! More Darkover after all!". I was disappointed. The only interesting element in this is the presence of the shadow matrix. Everything else was just rehashing the Ashara Is Revealed As An Amoral Manipulator plotline from "Sharra's Exile". Plus, I was really annoyed with the threshold sickness thing. How many times do we have to have this described? Although it's true that the characters don't know about threshold sickness, it would be nice to fans to give some variety to the disease. This nasty form was well done in "heritage" already. Let's have something new, for once: how about a terran who comes to darkover and is (gasp) NOT telepathic?

I have been reading and enjoying Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series for several years now. I purchased this book on the strength of knowing that I have never been disappointed by a MZB novel. Although this book did not disappoint me I felt that it was slightly rough around the edges. It is a novel in a series that has "Series Novel Syndrome". SNS being the problem wherein if one has not read the previous volumes then one will miss miss major points of "historical" fact that are key to some of the major points of the story. Although I have read all of the previous novels I found myself having to recall several previous Darkover story lines in order to follow this somewhat convoluted plot. I loved the book and recommend it to any Darkover fans but newbies to Darkover beware, you should read at least "Sharra's Exile" first to get the most out of this novel. "Sharra's Exile" by the way is a wonderful novel and is MZB at her very best

I believe that this book was good but the most exciting stuff came 1/3 of the way until the end. The information concerning her mentor was important but did not need to take up almost a third of the book. It would have been a better book to have it start with the Death of Professor Iverson and have her muddle her way through discovering all that she needed to know. But, it also seems that there is another story out there waiting to been told, more of Ashara Alton and the mysterious age of chaos that only talks about the end of that time in other novels. MZB needs to develop this more from the point of view of the maiden that comes to rescue a realm (ie, the current state of darkover) as opposed to letting Ms Alton swoon and sway with confusion for the entire plot. Its great that MZB wants to set the stage for future writings, but I think this book looks at trying to connect the entire Darkover past with what lays ahead...too much information, simplify MZB...please

For those who have heard of Marion Zimmer Bradley's tales of the planet of the bloody sun, this would be a good book to start with. It gives a synopsis of sorts of a great many of the previous books in the series, and while it's no substitute for those books, you'll at least have an idea of what's gone on in all those previous books.

The plot, I have to admit, is something straight out of the pulp fiction school, and sounds like something Bradley has done before - but that doesn't detract from the excellent quality of the writing, something that's been sorely lacking in the more recent Darkover novels. Still, this novel made me want to go back and reread even those. Who knows - maybe I'll change my mind about them after reading this one.