Customer Reviews

The Painted Man

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was a little unsure of this title at first glance. But after hearing how Brett came up with the concept from a short story he wrote for a writing class I decided to give it a shot. And I have to say I am truly glad I did.

The Painted Man is a story of a world where demons rule the night forcing humanity to huddle within the safety of painted wards and a young boy named Arlen as he struggles to understand the his world and ultimatly how he fits into it all.

It's a gripping story from the get go with believable (if a little flat at times) characters that you really come to care about and fast pace action that keeps the story from becoming boring in parts where many writers would have floundered.

There were some pacing issues I had, mostly involving the jumping in forward of the story but at the same time it wasn't jarring or annoying enough to make me stop. In fact I honestly couldn't put this one down and read it nearly non-stop over the weekend.

The Painted Man takes a lot of traditional fantasy tropes but spins them into some new and fresh that gives me a lot of hope for the genre. I can't wait for the sequel and whatever else Mr. Brett has in store for us.

A very good start for a trilogy. Masterfully crafted world and fine, three-dimensional, living characters. I loved it how Arlen's character was never developed into a mysterious superhero type, but retained his human weaknesses that showed from time to time. This made him all the more interesting. And the question that is revealed at the end - how much humanity is still there? Is he becoming totally inhuman? - makes me wait the next instalment all the more eagerly.

Looking back, I think Leesha was somewhat overdone, she was becoming too dominant, too much of a Mary Sue Warrior Woman type of character. Too perfect. Well, let's see what the next books will make of her.

All in all, definitely a book worth reading.

one of the best concepts for sci fi in a while the story is really interesting in the way it develops

In a fantasy world where demons rise at night - rock demons, fire demons, water demons and air demons the inhabitants of this world hide behind wards at night. Wards are intricate patterns painted by Warders and forms a magical barrier where through the demons cannot pass. Tales are told of a Deliverer who lived centuries ago and fought against the demons. There are five Free Cities, and each has their abundance of a certain commodity, which is sought after by another Free City.

The Painted Man tells the tale of Arlen (with a dream to become a Messenger), Rojan (with a dream to become a fabled Jongleur) and Leesha (destined to be an Herb Gatherer). They eventually come together and in an epic last stand against evil. They teach the people of this world that they are able to fight and they need not cower in fear every night.

I tend to shy away from books, which have more than 300 pages, because the story (for me) becomes long-winded. However, when I read the last word of The Painted Man, I wished that it wasn't finished.

My first full-fledged fantasy, I am now hooked on this genre.

There's a "first time" for everything we do. When I read this book, I could FEEL that this was the authors first work. There was an awkward, sort of clumsiness to the writing. At times, some things seemed to be described in too much detail, at others, characters seemed to rush into things way too quickly. That being said... there is an innocence and sweetness that comes with every "first time" and I was able to find it in this first book. All the well known fantasy writers had to start somewhere and I can see this being the possible beginning of a great writing career. I've ordered the 2nd book: The Desert Spear and wish the author the best of luck and hope to see his books continue and his writing improve.

This book is excellent. Engaging, well-written, with a minimal number of characters and a minimal amount of fuss. It's damn near a perfect book - I couldn't stop reading it - until very close to the end, where I think the author takes a shortcut because his characters weren't doing what he wanted them to do.

He inflicts a trauma on one of his characters, which is no real surprise; but the character's reaction to the trauma is so utterly *wrong*, both based on previous behavior and on the way people react, that it completely threw me out of the book. It's as though the writer simply couldn't immagine having this happen to himself so he gave up empathizing with his character and guessed. It comes back a few pages later for a line or two, then goes again, then comes back. The very last bit of the book is ok, and I'll still read his second book in the series. It's just that based on how really fantastic the beginning of the book was, to see him give up like that at the end was really disappointing.

Hmmmm... well I get the feeling I'm on my own here given the reviews, but here goes:

The warded man/painted man is set in a kind of alternate future where after the age of science, the world has been thrown back into a dark age, where ancient elemental demons known as "Corelings" have once more risen from the earth to feed upon mankind. Man's only salvation rests in the magical properties of "wards", magical symbols that can be written on homes, and earth to keep the creatures at bay. The story has three protagonists altho it centres mostly on Alren a young boy who's mother is killed in a demon attack and sets out to seek a way to fight the Corelings. Then there's Rojer, a crippled musician who discovers that music itself can be a weapon against the demons, and Leesha, a healer who learns that what can cure can also cause harm. We follow each character from childhood to maturity across a sizeable time span. Although adhering to the traditions of the hero's journey, Brett does a nice job of avoiding the cliches that a lot of epic fantasy books fall into, however the book has many problems that really detract from what would have been an - if not massively original - at least, very enjoyable and entertaining read.

The first and probably worst of these is that Brett's writing is surprisingly amateur and limited, to the point that it actually becomes incredibly intrusive. He uses endless adverbs in his dialogue tags (he said angrily, she said hopefully, etc) as well as an awful lot of "Arlen said", "Leesha returned", "Bruna snapped", "Steve went on", which are really superfluous and distracting. Brett's vocabulary seems noticeably small, resulting in naturally repetitive descriptions and unimaginative prose that fails to evoke any lasting impression. I lost count of the number of times someone's "eyes bulged", someone "gasped" or someone "spat on the floor". Sometimes there's so much spitting and gasping in a conversation that you wonder if Brett has ever observed a real conversation. In fact every time someone hears something they don't like in the world of the Painted man, they lean over to spit somewhere. Women, men, children... I'm surprised that even the corelings didn't flob at things when they couldn't get past a magical ward! I genuinely wondered through the first few chapters whether I was reading a children's book (which would be no bad thing at all), and when the first adult subject matter came up it actually seemed starkly out of place.

The second point, is that it's slow, and boy is it really, painfully slow. You can boil the actual happenings of the first 8 chapters and summarise them on a post-it note, in fact you can even boil down the entire dramatic content of the book and scribble it on an envelope. I find it immensely hard to stick with books that seem so obsessed with 'world building' that they basically end up being nothing more than meticulously crafted settings looking for a story. The Painted man is probably one of the worst offenders for this I've read in a while. Brett writes hundreds of pages of mostly directionless village based drama with characters whose existent purely to impart back story directly to the reader. There's the continually inviting questions of the 11 year old Arlen to permit older characters to prattle on endlessly about the world, there's Hogg, the shopkeeper who wastes the best part of a chapter pointing out how village trade works, and the Jongleur, whose sole purpose is to describe some 300 years of history, which he bizzarely and very handily does every year!

I appreciate there's scope, but it's hardly complicated or broad and even if it were, you only have to read something like George Martin's: A Game of Thrones to see how complex historical threads and richly detailed world building can be seemlessly integrated into unfolding stories. Brett always steps way beyond the line of what the reader needs to know at that moment in the tale and what they don't, which cripples pace and really sucks the pleasure to be had out of reading the book. Further, you're given no opportunity to discover things for yourself; to have an "oh my god!" or "what the hell is that?" moment that immerses you into the fantasy world as the protagonists make their way along their story paths. EVEN the novel's central revolving device is introduced through dialog as the story opens in the aftermath of a demon attack. Why didn't he show this scene? Why wasn't this the hook of an opening; throw us right in and experience it first hand? Brett seems determined to take every opportunity of creating conflict, excitement, and drama and water it down into retrospective chatter or paragraphs of narrative and it's so frustrating!

The third problem really is characterisation. The Painted Man is populated with characters that are either so one dimensional that it's like being hit over the head with them or so contradictory that they lack any kind of realism. Pretty much without exception, they are the most unsympathetic, downright unlikeable cast of characters I've ever read. I'm still not sure whether this was intentional or just a result of Brett favouring the use of events to drive character, rather than the other way around. Shopkeepers are greedy, mothers are verbally and physically abusive, fathers are cowardly, downtrodden and in one instance even sexually abusive. Wives are harlots and liars, husbands are subservient, young men are reactionary thugs who chop wood and little else, and sexuality itself is regarded with a base disdain that Brett seems to continually impart in lots of really superfluous dialog about "bloodied sheets", "de-flowering", "slapping stomachs", "budding breasts" and endless insults about various things "between legs". In fact his uneccessarily detailed accounts of the the sexuality of young girls and lecheous ways of women is either purile or decidedly uncomfortable, and the entire thing is so utterly pointless in narrative terms that you wonder why any of it had to take up so many pages.

To me great fantasy always has a basis in reality. If you make the characters, families, societies, conflict, troubles etc as human as possible, you'll capture the heart of the reader. At the end of the day fantasy is just a setting, the human condition is universal. It's very tough to care about the characters in the warded man, because they're victims of a poorly constructed story. They have so little of worth fighting for and so little to care about that I found them impissble to connect with. It's that connection that what makes you champion your heroes, understand and fear for them, cheer and love them. The only flashes of such empathy I had, came from much lesser characters and even in some cases, the Corelings themselves. But unfortunately even as the protagonists are pretty basic and unappealing, the antagonists are like clunky blundering monsters from straight out of a computer game.

And this leads to the novel's main theme: The demons. The story basically has little to offer other than this constant threat, which is pretty much the identical device used in the film "The Village". They ring bells to announce the arrival of the night, they paint symbols on things to keep them at bay etc. Obviously there's a more to Brett's interpretation, but because this is the central conflict, it becomes old very quickly and the drama that underpins it is nowhere near enough to cause any kind of page turning excitement. In fact it's pretty much the opposite. And then of course Brett even manages to pretty much ruin the main dramatic twist by the title of the book!

I really desperately wanted to like this book - especially as I heard it's just been optioned for a film - and I thought that from the synopsis it sounded like it could really have something good going on. Clearly for many people it does, but personally it was a real disappointment. I don't think Brett is exclusively to blame here, and I think you have to allow a certain slack to a first time writer. He clearly has some great ideas and some desire for interesting characters but somehow they never really take form in a succinct, dramatic or sympathetic way. It's like there's something good here trying to get out, and with some refinement, reevaluation, or even a restructuring it could well have been, but as it is, this was a really unrewarding chore to read. I think possibly if Brett had envisioned a single story rather than a trilogy (which so many fantasy writers seem so obsessed with) it might have worked better. It actually amazes me that there's a quote from Terry Brooks on the front of the Warded man, when if you read Terry's "sometimes the magic works", Brett seems to be a prime example of all of the writing pitfalls that Terry rebells against! Anyhow, regardless of my disappointment, Brett is clearly onto a very good thing with his demon trilogy and I wish him the best with it. Sadly there was nothing in this novel to make me want to read anything more.