Customer Reviews

The Iron Tower Omnibus (Mithgar)

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

First I must say that most of the other 1-star reviews have detailed this trilogy's manifest faults awfully well - there's not a lot for me to add. I have to say that I'm in agreement with all of the negatives, to wit:

Tolkien plagiarism - well, duh. This makes the "Sword of Shannara" look like a masterpiece of originality in comparison. The very beginning, with the "young buccan Warrows" (McKiernan's strength sure isn't in his naming) practicing their archery, is just about the only scene that doesn't seem like a LOTR swipe. OK, the warrows are a little more warlike than the hobbits. So what? They also have a piece in the appendix called "On Warrows" - they're quite short - they tend to stoutness - they live in a peaceful country all their own and like to avoid the big folks - there's a town on the verge of their country called Stonehill (Bree) populated by men and Warrows, with an inkeeper named Bockleman (Barliman Butterbur) - four of them take part in most of the action of the book, with one Tuck (Frodo) being eventually responsible for the downfall of the bad guy Modru (Sauron) and his boss Gryphon (Morgoth). You get the idea.

But I guess one can plagiarise pretty baldly and get away with it. I don't think McKiernan got sued - if he did, he must have settled quietly - his books are still out there. So let's let go of that. If he's writing a copy, well, how does he write it? Not well at all I'm afraid. His heroes and villains are all paper-thin - Modru comes off as a James Bond villain at best, cackling about his plans to his helpless female prisoner and hissing a lot, and he's evil because....uh...he's evil. The heroes have no personalities either, and most of them cry a lot. There's no sense of landscape, of culture, of history, it all just feels tacked together, all makeshift and cheap, all no more detailed or interesting than the average AD&D game I was playing in college around the time this was first published. Others have mentioned how McKiernan flips back and forth between "quarrels" and "arrows" (it should be the latter in most cases) indiscriminately, but his writing is remarkably lazy and poor throughout. He uses the passive voice an awful lot and throws in archaisms and umlauts and accents recklessly, I guess to make it feel "old" and "epic", but he only succeeds in making himself look illiterate and pretentious. He also has one very curious trait that I've never seen anywhere before - he likes to abbreviate words that are not normally ever abbreviated, e.g. "landscape" becomes " 'scape". This choice and several other equally mysterious ones like using an apostrophe before non-abbreviated words ('Day) help contribute to the general sense that the guy never wrote so much as a letter between college and the writing of this book - and his editors didn't do him any favors.

And he's awfully, awfully obvious. When Tuck finds the Red Quarrel early on, we're never in the slightest doubt that he'll be using it to complete the Big Task and destroy the Big Nasty; when the heroes go underground in Dimmen-whatever (Moria) we know they'll have to face the Balrog-thing; when the eclipse is first mentioned there's never a shred of doubt that they'll have to reach the Big Bad Iron Tower before it. And so on. This is a book almost wholly without subtext, except maybe a very cynical one: how badly can a book be written, and how obvious can it's debt to LOTR be, and yet still be published - and even cherished by fantasy fans with little taste or experience. The answer saddens me.

The only question that really plagues me after reading "The Iron Tower" is simple - why was it written? Mr. McKiernan is obviously a fan of Tolkien and, to be more precise, "The Lord of the Rings," which he even admits in the preface. No shame in that. I too adore Tolkien's work, and, in my mind, "The Lord of the Rings" is the greatest fantasy story ever told. But in spite of McKiernan's admiration for said genre pioneer, he was content to take "The Lord of the Rings" and recycle it, albeit with a handful of different character names. And while he was busy attempting to pass this story off as his own, he forgot everything that made Tolkien so wonderful in the process - and anything that makes good fantasy in general.

"The Iron Tower" isn't only a shameless copy of a beloved tale, but it's also quite poorly written. One has to wonder if McKiernan was out of elementary school when he began jotting it down. Dialogue between characters is particularly absurd, and again it is because McKiernan attempts (and severely fails) to copy the more classical style of Tolkien. One example of thousands is this: "Hai! You have named it well; for Jet it was: no horse is blacker!" And aside from the poor quality of this tidbit, any Tolkien fan, even unfamiliar with McKiernan, will think to themselves, "Hmmm... Shadowfax, anyone?"

The book opens with very clear parallels to "The Lord of the Rings," but, at first, there are at least a few interesting touches to keep things mildly entertaining. But things get steadily more offensive as the story progresses. Complete with a party of three Warrows (or Hobbits, if you prefer), an Elf, a Dwarf, and a future King with a magical sword, the party of heroes is forced by perilous circumstance to enter an abandoned Dwarven mine (aka, Moria) that was evacuated for fear of the Ghath (aka, Balrog) - a beast who still lingers in the mines. But as McKiernan might say, "Hai! Lo! That be not all!" For as the companions are debating a course of action, they are attacked by a tentacled beast that lurks in the water just outside the magically concealed gateway. Where have I heard this before? Except, of course, it was much more thrilling in its original format, to say the very least.

Yet there's more still. "The Iron Tower" is complete with its own version of Ringwraiths, wargs (called vulgs), orcs, and more. Surprisingly, the only thing that's missing is a Gandalf character. But I can assure you, had McKiernan included one, the company would have temporarily lost him in the Dwarven mines to the dreaded whip of the Ghath. For goodness sakes, the book even comes complete with an appendix at its conclusion! Perhaps McKiernan thinks that his world of Mithgar is as detailed and as rich as Middle-earth just because every creature, character, or place encountered has a different name to each race. ("Kraken!" cried Galen. "Maduk!" shouted Brega.)And just to note, to fuel further audacity, Tuck (aka, Frodo) carries a short sword called Bane that glows at its edges when enemies are about. Stings, doesn't it? Get it? STINGS?

Simply put, "The Iron Tower" is a fraud. It should never have been published. In fact, there should be some sort of law against it. I have in my day read and even enjoyed many Tolkien knock-offs ("The Sword of Shannara," or "The Eye of the World," for example), so I am open-minded about these matters. But "The Iron Tower" goes too far. It is shameful. It is outright theft. Fans of Tolkien should heed this advice well: steer clear unless you're looking for a good laugh. And for those who are not familiar with Tolkien, don't you dare accept McKiernan as a suitable replacement, for your own sake. There are a handful of interesting moments, but not enough to outweigh the wrongs that were done in allowing this series publication. With more work, McKiernan might have paid homage rather than desecrating sacred ground.

McKiernan in his foreword tells us that he is paying homage to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Homage? Hmm. According to the American Heritage® Dictionary "homage" is defined as: "Special honor or respect shown or expressed publicly." I fail to see the "honor" to Tolkien in McKiernan's "The Iron Tower" trilogy. While it is true it is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, McKiernan's books are less like flattery and more like regurgitation. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind if a writer is heavily inspired by the work of another. Even Tolkien himself drew much of his thematic elements and ideas from other ancient and mythic sources (Beowulf for example), but he reconstituted those ideas in such a way that they seemed fresh; not copied or reprinted. He was reinventing not simply rewriting.

Unfortunately, such is not the case with McKiernan's work. His ideas are directly lifted from the pages of "The Lord of the Rings" without any attempt at originality.

In McKiernan's story, a Warrow (Hobbit) named Tuck Underbank (Frodo) embarks on a quest to defeat an ultimate evil, Mordu (Sauron) who dwells in the evil land of Gron (Mordor). Along the way he encounters a dwarf called Brega (Gimli), an elf named Gildor(Legolas), a human warrior (Aragorn), etc, etc, etc...The Tolkien plagiarism's go on and on.

He even includes a scene where some of the main characters have to pass through an abandoned Dwarf city called Kraggen-Cor. The city is abandoned because some terrible monster (Ghath) drove all of the dwarfs out long ago. The only way into the subterranean city is through some magical doors that they have some difficulty getting open. While waiting at the doors, a monstrous squid/octopus-like creature attacks them. And yes, there is even a battle with the Ghath in the dwarfin city on a narrow bridge over a bottomless cavern.

I have a one hundred page rule when it comes to books; if the book can't engross me, can't keep my interest by the hundredth page I give it up. In this case, morbid curiosity kept me reading these books; like a horrible car accident, I couldn't tear my eyes away. Page after page I kept telling myself "it can't get any worse" and page after page I was proved wrong.

As bad as the plagiarism is, the writing is even worse.

The epic scope of Tolkien's story is GONE. Tolkien's writing was marked by mystery, grandeur and a poignant sense of loss and realism. All of this is missing from McKiernan's work. The characters in "The Lord of the Rings" (and the "Hobbit" for that matter) were three-dimensional; they seemed almost to have stepped out of the history books and not a novel. Tolkien made us care about his characters and what happened to them. McKiernan is incapable of doing this with the cardboard cutouts that populate his world. For example, Tuck Underbank is written to be a tragic/heroic figure and spends A LOT of time crying and sobbing about this or that. The narrative, time and time again, tries to make us feel sorry for him. After a while, I just started rolling my eyes and hoping someone would put him out of his misery. Throughout the story the dialogue is stilted, completely unnatural and pathetic. This may be one of the only times in history where a story would have been improved if none of the characters spoke.

Rather than "honoring" Tolkien with "The Iron Tower" trilogy, McKiernan dishonors the great writer. For those looking for a well written, enriching story in the style of Tolkien or just a good epic fantasy: Look elsewhere.

"Lord of the Rings" is one of the most beloved novels in literary history. It also, unfortunately, resulted in huge numbers of shameless imitators. Of all these, no fantasy is as horribly imitative as Dennis McKiernan's "Iron Tower" trilogy. Literally everything in this book is derived somehow from Tolkien's work, and it's so painfully written that reading it is a chore.
In the peaceful land of the Boskydells, the tiny Warrows are readying themselves for war against the evil Dark Mage Modru and his hordes of Rucks, Hloks, Ghuls and Ogrus. Tuck Underbank and his teammates arrive at the citadel of Challerain Keep to help the High King, only to be driven out. Only a small band of Elves, Dwarves, Men and Warrows hold the key to defeating Modru and saving the world from eternal darkness.

The "Iron Tower" trilogy is very painful to read: McKiernan copies so much from Tolkien that an experienced fan can pick out the elements as they appear. What's more, it's horribly written. The old quest story has been done to death, and so has the band-of-several-races saves the world. In fact, Tolkien's work is one of the few in which it actually DOES work; McKiernan can't manage it, and therefore features that sort of plot in just about every book he writes.

And while McKiernan may say (as he does in the foreword) that he's just homaging Tolkien, I found otherwise. A homage is a nod to someone in an otherwise original book; McKiernan just copies everything. In here you'll find shallower duplicates of Galadriel (dull Elf seer Rael), Frodo (Tuck), Sting (Bane), Legolas (Gildor), Aragorn (Galen), Brega (Gimli), the abandoned Dwarf city of Moria (Kraggen-Cor) complete with its own versions of the Watcher and the Balrog (the kraken and utterly unscary Ghath), hobbits (Warrows), mithril (silveron), Theoden (Aurion), the Rohirrim (Vanadurim) and the Shire (Boskydells). Many secondary elements like the sunken island of Atala, Gyphon and Modru are also derived from Tolkien's extended works. Even a few names (Gildor and Laurelin) are directly lifted. Painful? You bet.

McKiernan's writing is even worse. His dialogue is absolutely absurd, full of weird platitudes and bad invented languages. (It doesn't count as an ancient language if you misspell the words!) The Warrows switch accents constantly, sometimes in mid-conversation. Cockney, pirate, formal English, old English, early twentieth-century English, and some that were just weird. After this, I never want to hear "Lor," "Yar," "Ar," or anything else like that. He describes boring travel in intricate detail, so we get pages of the characters just riding from point A to point B. (And note to McKiernan: did we need a detailed description of how Tuck's mom embroiders? Who cares what noise the needle makes?) But battle scenes are plodding and bloodless, and the characters don't stay in any peaceful place for very long.

McKiernan's attempts at fleshing out this story achieve nothing. He has about sixty names for every species, building, forest, mountain... you get the idea. (I could not care less what Elves call Dwarf mountains, okay?) There is also a boring series of appendices, timelines, songs, translation keys. But just having a lot of different words for the same things doesn't make Mithgar even slightly interesting.

Character development and conflict is nonexistant. The characters don't have any motivations except "we're good, we have to save the world" or "we're evil, we have to destroy it." When they fight, they make up in about a page; they have a tendency to start laughing helplessly like escaped mental patients. And when all else fails, McKiernan falls back on preaching about gender equality and a kidnapped princess. (Does anyone see a contradiction here?) The climax is straight out of a bad horror movie and is the silliest thing I've ever read.

The characters are even more annoying: Tuck Underbank (nothing like "Underhill," right?) cries incessently and can't make a single decision for himself. Galen is, simply put, boring and pompous. Gildor is the token Elf, also very boring; Brega seems like he might be interesting, but he quickly loses his gruffness and becomes boring too. Danner is a psycho-hobbit who spends the whole book getting offended; Vidron is the most three-dimensional character in the book, but his constant coddling of the annoying Warrows takes away from the idea that this guy is a great general. But the female characters are outright offensive. Merrilee is a whiny twerp who bursts into tears after a battle (why? Because she's a girl) and needs Danner to tell a crowd that she's the equal of a guy. And Laurelin is a sugar-sweet, innocent, golden-haired paragon of virtue who spends the book crying.

The feeling coming out of "Iron Tower" was that McKiernan wanted to rewrite "Lord of the Rings" as HE thought it should have been written (come on, Frodo does NOT need a girlfriend). But his attempt is a dismal failure.

Let's face it, every fantasy author must copy Tolkien at some point in his or her career, whether or not they refer to it as "a tribute". Some are more obvious about it (take this trilogy, for example--I mean, Gildor? Did he have to go that far? Khazad-dum/Kraggen-cor and following sequences, Sting, warrows/hobbits, vulgs/wargs, Galen/Aragorn, Laurelin-princess/Laurelin-Valar tree, Rael/Galadriel, Brega/Gimli, and the rest were bad enough, but did he have to be so blatant as to [borrow] the name?!) than others (Mercedes Lackey has a "Lake Evendim" in her Valdemar novels). However irritating this can become to dedicated Tolkien-lovers, if the book is good enough, none of this matters.

"The Iron Tower" isn't good enough.

If I may bring him back into the rant, Tolkien is often accused of being sexist. Certainly he is; the man thought feminism was a sign of the Fall. BUT he had Eowyn! He had Luthien! He had Galadriel, the most powerful elf in Middle-Earth! Who does McKiernan have? Merrilee? A spoiled hobbit-brat--oh, excuse me, WARROW-brat--who breaks down after every hint of a fight and can't speak for herself when her position is first debated? What kind of warrior is this? And don't even THINK of telling me that Laurelin is anything even remotely resembling a heroine. What does the girl do? She sits there crying, knife in hand, while her 15-year-old brother-in-law is nearly killed! She's a disgrace to the feminine gender. Eowyn would be ashamed of her--and she's not the only one.

Even sexism can be ignored in small quantities, or even not-so-small quantities, such as Tolkien (again), or David Eddings' Elenium/Tamuli (and Eddings had Mirtai! Ehlana and Sephrenia, too...). But McKiernan's idea of an interesting novel seems to be battle scene after battle scene after battle scene. For R.A. Salvatore (another Tolkien-imitator), this WORKS. But R.A. Salvatore's battle scenes have an intimacy and sense of presence that make the reader feel as if he or she is fighting the war. McKiernan's fights bored me nearly to tears. Nothing really truly happens. In between the battle scenes is nothing but more boredom.

I'd hoped for something better from the elves. I love elves. Elves are so beloved, retold, and steryotyped that they are all too easy to ruin--and McKiernan does it completely. Like all of the characters, the elves are two-dimensional cardboard puppets. No motivation, except the painfully over-cliched "Oh, look, an evil Dark Lord is returning. Let's send someone to represent us in the group of heroes that must now save the world!", which doesn't even count as motivation anymore, no development, nothing. The characters simply aren't real. There's no one you can sense outside the story, no one who remains with you after you close the book. There's only the memory of a very long and fitful nap.

If you want quality fantasy, try Tolkien. Try Salvatore. Try Lackey. Try Bertin. Try Eddings. Try Pierce. Try the other Pierce. Try Pullman. Try Davis. Try Cunningham. Try Lindskold. Try SOMEONE, but this series simply isn't worth it!

... I hated this book, and here's why: Professor Tolkien was truly an expert at languages and world-building. His words leap off the pages and into our hearts because everything about his Middle-Earth seems utterly real, true, and historical. McKiernan is simply a ..., and not a very good one.

There is very little attempt to give Mithgar a history or a backstory. The world and its characters are plunged into war almost immediately. With almost no glimpses of the good in the land, we don't know what makes Mithgar worth saving. The characters themselves also have very little history. I wondered, for example, how Laurelin and Galen met, and why Laurelin was staying with his family instead of her own, but no explanation is ever given. There is a lack of interesting, complex characters like Tolkien's Gollum, Gandalf, or Eowyn.

The languages he has his characters use are a complete ... of Tolkien, particularly the Dwarf language. However, the way the characters speak (especially the Warrows) is inconsistent. One minute they sound like Spaniards, the next like pirates, and the next like some insane British/American redneck crossbreed. It nearly drove me nuts. McKiernan needs to leave invented languages to the experts. (It took Tolkien more than twelve years to write LoTR, and the languages were something he worked on his entire life.)

I was confused by the way McKiernan described the weapons used by the Warrrows. He says they use bows, and then goes on to tell how they fletched or loaded an arrow, a quarrel, or a bolt. Well, which was it? I'm not an expert, but it's my understanding that arrows are used with bows, and quarrels or bolts with crossbows, but the Warrows freely switched between all three.

I was forced to skim a great deal of the book because of endless pages that began something like "On the first day..." and told how many miles the host had ridden and where they camped for the night. Then "On the second day..." there is more of the same. And the third and the fourth and fifth. Boring!

Now, I know that it's supposed to be OK for men to cry, but this book goes beyond silly with the amount of tears. The hero Tuck cries on practically every other page, and at one point I was actually giggling out loud because I could not believe that Tuck was sobbing again already.

And finally, this book contains the ultimate in cliches: a kidnapped princess. Oh please! We've already seen this storyline 1000 times. Where's the originality?

Don't hate on a writer who took a love for the Lord of the Rings and turned it into a whole new world. Part of reading and enjoying the books that are out there is to disband your belief and live the story. This series is so similar to LOTR and is one of the reasons that I read it at least once a year, but Mckiernan went and developed a whole world that goes much further than most of the books that I have read.

I didn't have high expectations for this trilogy-in-a-book when I purchased it, and that's a good thing. I found the writing to be tedious. The author spent too much time describing Mithgar's history and geography that could have been better spent on character development. Only a n00b fantasy reader would fail to recognize who the "hero" of the story was going to be from the first chapter on...especially if they've ever read Tolkien. The ending was never in doubt -- only if I would hang in there long enough to read it.
The only way I found I could still enjoy the story, after reading the first book and a half carefully, was to start skimming past the pointless detailed histories of kings & cities. Those segments added nothing to the story.
This is a decent "plan B" book to keep somewhere in your home, so that when you're absolutely out of fresh reading material and you can't get to the store any time soon, you'll have something to occupy you for a bit.

The Iron Tower is the first book in a long and popular series. The author readily admits that he was greatly influenced by Tolkein (and what modern fantasy writer wasn't, in some capacity or another?). McKiernan's writing is slightly simplistic in this first book, but it is a good story and it is worth the read. The rest of the Mithgar books do get better as the world of Mithgar and the other planes are better developed and the history of the world is written and explained. Don't overanalyze the book, and don't judge all of the books by this first one. You also have to get past the first bit, because it does seem at first that it is blatantly copied from Tolkein. I promise, it's worth the read, if only to establish the setting for the other 12 or so books in the series.

This is a very good book, very similar to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. In fact there are a lot of close similarities, but I don't think its anywhere near plagiarism. If you enjoy high fantasy you'll probably like The Iron Tower.