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46 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Slightly hyped, but still very more-ish, February 23, 2010
The first truly hyped release of 2010, The Left Hand of God has a lot going for it - at least, on the surface. Gritty, dark fantasy cover art, great word of mouth & a tantalizing plot all add up to a lot of sound and fury. And, to give it credit, Hoffman does write a very more-ish book, fast-paced from start to finish.
The book's protagonist is Thomas Cale, an orphan in the care of the Redeemers. The Redeemers are a sinister, reclusive religious order that stress penitence & punishment (also torture and the occasional bout of pedophilia). Although the orphans are cut off from the world, it doesn't take much for Thomas to figure out that the abandoned kids are being trained into an army of killers.
The first part of the book (and probably the best), takes place in the Sanctuary. Cale and his friends scuttle around like rats - survival is their only goal. Oddly, I've always enjoyed the opening "before the prophecy happens" sections of high fantasy epics, and this is a pretty good one. Compared to Garion's kitchen or Frodo's farm, Cale's miserable orphanage is quite a change.
Fortunately for them (and unfortunately for the reader), Cale and his friends manage to escape. The latter two-thirds of the book take place in the trading city of Memphis, the vague capital of an Venetian-like trading empire. Cale works his way up the ranks and somehow gets mixed up in the local politics. Eventually, predictably, we learn that everything revolves around him, and some prophecies come into play. Whew.
Unfortunately, the book relies too much on pace and energy, and not enough on plot, character development and good old-fashioned world-building. While things are constantly moving, the merest hint of a pause (say, a chapter break) was enough disruption to remind me that book wasn't actually that gripping. Cale is a bastard. There's a bit of character development, in that he momentarily reconsiders his continuous foul mood, but then decides to stick to it anyway.
Besides perpetual and overwhelming gloom, there's not much else to define the world. At best, it could be considered a vague medieval analogue (like something out of KJ Parker), but the confusing use of historical names just confuses things. Geographically, places are just where they need to be. History and society are pretty much just how they need to be at the moment, often in implausible ways. The entire Empire of Memphis, for example, refuses to believe in the crossbow. And even when demonstrated, their entire military staff decides that archery is a bad idea? Peculiar.
The Left Hand of God isn't even cinematic - it is televisual (I think I may have just coined that term) - very punchy, very hasty, but ultimately, very thin. This is good documentary evidence of the post-Wire generation of fantasy authors, but, equally, feels like an experiment gone slightly awry. With less haste and more consideration, the series could be redeemed, but that may be too much of a departure from the author's natural style.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Left Hand of God - Review, July 8, 2010
This review is from: The Left Hand of God (Hardcover)
The Left Hand of God is a confusing book. It is as if the author, Paul Hoffman, took a history of Classical and Medieval Europe and ran it through the blender. Once the source material was a rich broth of ideas, Paul, with a story teller's flair, reassembled the whole mess into something new. However, he did not quite end up with a cake.
The Left Hand of God just never gels together into something greater than the sum of its parts. As you read you see flashes of Harry Potter, Karen Miller's Godspeaker Trilogy, or alternate history fantasy, etc. The last is especially jarring. Mr. Hoffman's re-use of familiar terms is off-putting. Every time it seemed that I was sinking into this new world a very familiar term would pop up and yank me back to the present. Trying to reconcile the fact that Jesus of Nazareth makes an appearance is difficult. It breaks my immersion.
What exacerbates this issue of reality intruding into fantasy is the enormous amount of irrelevant information pouring off the pages. While the use of historical terms may have been intended to be comforting and familiar to a fan of history, the majority of them are not needed and simply confuse you. The narrative is constantly speaking of far away lands and nationalities and then promptly forgetting them.
What really illustrates this problem is the world map supplied with the book. It is very small. It focuses on the two primary points of interest, The Sanctuary and the Great City of Memphis; excluding all else. The maps conveys the idea of a narrow narrative focus. Yet, the main focus of the Redeemers is their War with the Antagonists along two great Fronts. This is repeatedly referenced yet is agonizingly absent on the map. The story steadily doles out new people, facts, places, names, etc that are not on the map. If the tale is suppose to be focused on this little corner of the world, then why does it constantly wander off?
The most damning aspect of this deluge of useless trivia is trying to figure out what is important and what isn't. Some things seem important, such as the scented pellet Cale finds during his ordeal with Redeemer Picarbo, but are never mentioned again. Others, such as Arbel Materazzi's brother Simon, are equalling confounding. Without any foreshadowing, Simon appears, figuratively, out of thin air seeming to serve no more purpose than to cement the relation between Cale and the ruling Materazzi. Will Simon become a central figure or will he simply be dismissed with a laconic "that is that," as with Solomon Solomon?
My worst complaint with the narrative are the jumps. Mr. Hoffman sets the stage for conflict and then promptly leaps to the resolution. This left me angry. Everyone knows a Hollywood movie has a happy ending, its the path there that makes the movies interesting. When the plot leaps forward from conflict to resolution without traveling the intervening thorny path you feel robbed.
I did enjoy the book though. It was amusing and interesting. More than anything it has a feel of promise. Perhaps all its component parts have not yet meshed very well but maybe in two or three more books I will get the cake I want.
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22 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing., August 23, 2010
This review is from: The Left Hand of God (Hardcover)
The rise of fantasy has, in my opinion, produced two kinds of cliche-oriented reactions within the publishing spectrum: entertaining, inventive, and/or enjoyably derivative trilogies, and fascinating ideas and worlds mired by barely serviceable prose, lackluster plotting, and/or a general failure to maintain cohesion (in the plot, worldbuilding, character development, and/or the writing). Both groups aren't always separate, since sometimes a book with weak prose can still be a thrilling read, but usually they are. Unfortunately, I think The Left Hand of God fits into the latter of the two groups.
The novel sounds intriguing enough, and Hoffman's book does deliver on a number of the points described in the synopsis for the U.S. edition, but overall, The Left Hand of God falls desperately short in three key ways.
The first failure has to do with point of view. While the synopsis indicates that Cale is the main character, Hoffman's writing fails to adequately display that, almost as if Hoffman didn't seem to know who the book was supposed to be about either. The first quarter of the book does focus on Cale, but the rest of the novel switches randomly from POV to POV to give the reader the thoughts of basically anyone in the room at that moment, or even people who are completely insignificant to the actual plot. None of this is done between chapters, which might have been okay, but within chapters, sometimes between paragraphs, and sometimes between sentences. One second we're hearing Cale's inner thoughts, and the next it's someone else. And before you can grow used to the transition, Hoffman switches again.
From a purely stylistic standpoint, this is simply poor writing for two reasons: 1) trying to tell your readers everything everyone is feeling about everything sucks the life right out of the story, because very little remains a mystery, and 2) switching POVs in the middle of paragraphs is unnecessarily jarring and almost as annoying as inconsistent tenses. Sadly, Hoffman violates one of the golden rules of writing on a routine basis in order to give as many perspectives as possible--i.e. "show, don't tell." I suppose you'd have to in order to perform the aforementioned task, but breaking the rule so clearly, with no regard for its eccentricities and ambiguities, is careless. The prose suffers as a result.
The Left Hand of God also suffers from narrative inconsistencies. For example, the synopsis indicates that Cale isn't aware of the world outside of the sanctuary. The problem? This isn't actually true. He doesn't understand the customs of the cultures that exist beyond the walls of sanctuary, sure, but, as we learn later in the book, he is both aware of the outside world and instrumental in the Redeemer's plans for those places (i.e. he actually designed their plans). This leads me to another inconsistency, which is Cale's fighting ability. When Cale first exhibits these abilities, it's a shock both to the reader and to the non-Redeemer characters. Why? Because it's never mentioned beforehand. One moment he's just some poor, beaten-up, grumpy guy, and the next he's the Roman equivalent of a ninja. It's all rather convenient, and obviously so. Narratives aren't supposed to be convenient. They're supposed to feel believable. Nothing should feel as though it doesn't belong.
The last problem I had with The Left Hand of God was the general unbelievability of some of the events that occur throughout the narrative. Characters do things that are completely contrary to who they are, despite Hoffman's attempts to establish them as pretty clearly in one particular form. Perhaps the worst instance of this is when Hoffman writes the Materazzi as a Spartan-esque warrior class, but then proceeds to have them lose a battle in the most idiotic manner conceivable--a thing that no military of the Materazzi's caliber would do. Likewise, characters fall in love at random, sometimes despite legitimate reasons why they shouldn't. I may have rolled my eyes more than once while reading. The point is, Hoffman's novel regularly devolves into nonsensical plot points, which sucks it dry of the potential established in the first chapters--the strongest part of the book is the beginning.
The Left Hand of God isn't without positive qualities. Hoffman does have a knack for tension, and, as I've just mentioned, the beginning third of the book, while a tad long, is quite strong and intriguing. Plus, the interior of the book is quite beautiful, with nice texture for the pages, an awesome map, and a good design for the pages and chapter headings. But it's not enough to have some great ideas, a relatively strong beginning, a nice interior, and a few generally entertaining sections. A novel needs to be more than that, and, unfortunately, I don't think The Left Hand of God comes close to meeting the burden of minimums. The biggest problem for me is that I had high hopes for the book. It had a lot of potential and there truly were some good moments. But I ended up being disappointed and thinking that this isn't the right direction for fantasy at all. Let's keep the mediocre writing standards to the vanity presses, please.
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