Customer Reviews

The Pillars of the World (Tir Alainn Trilogy)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I've read all of Anne Bishop's books, and I've loved every single on of them. Sense this book is set in a different world then all of her other books, I was wondering if she would be able to create a world just as interesting and with characters that could live up to her previous work. Well, Pillars did. The details of the book were very solid and the characters were all very well written. The plot was also very well done. It was interesting even when they were only dealing with minor characters thinking. Ari the main character is a young witch living all alone after the death of her mother and grandmother. She gets intangled with the Fae due to a trick played on her by the local gentry that forces her to look for a lover on Summer's Moon. She ends up meeting one of the Fae in his other form. Eventually you also learn that there are Witch Hunters moving through the land, and they are slowly coming towards Ari. Eventually you do learn what the Pillars are and I promise that everything is wraped up very nicely. It's good from start to finish, and I couldn't have asked for anything better.

First, be warned that this story is not set in the same world as the Black Jewels trilogy. It is much less violent and dark, and the characters are slightly less engaging. It is set in a new and unique world where the fae cross back and forth from their world to the world of men much like Greek Gods. But something is causing pieces of the fae world to vanish into mist, and all the fae who dwell in those places are lost. The remaining leaders of the fae, the Lightbearer, Lucien, and Dianne, the Lady of the Moon, are searching for the reason the bridges are being closed. The Muse and the Bard keeping hearing rumors of Wiccanfae, and the failing of the Pillars of the World, but the flighty fae have long since forgotten what these are or how to fix them.

Meanwhile in the human world, an evil man, called the "Witch's Hammer" has rapidly gained power by organizing witch hunts and destroying and perverting all magic in the land that he finds. The witches have power over the elements and he hates and envies them. He tortures them into making "confessions" of evil deeds and then kills them. All women walk in fear of him and his witch hunters.

But above all this is the story of the young witch, Ari, the young maiden witch, who has recently lost her mother and her grandmother, and now stuggles to carry on the rites to protect the land alone. She encounters the growing hostility of the townspeople. She must choose between her new careless fae lover, Lucien, who is just learning the meaning of love, and a young man who truly loves her selflessly, and wishes to take her to safety. Unknowingly, she also has the clues as to what exactly the pillars of the world are, but the witchhunters are coming and she may not survive to pass this crucial information on.

This is a good story, with a wonderful cast of characters like those that I have become used to seeing in Ms. Bishop's stories. While not quite as good as the Black Jewels Trilogy, it is still well worth reading.

I loved Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy so much. But it took me a long time to pick up this book, because it just didn't sound terribly appealing.

And it wasn't appealing in the least. The one character I did like was portrayed as a cold, possessive jerk by the end of the book. The mysterious Lucien is shunted aside for the "sweet" Neall who has about as much depth as a puddle. And Ari, as a heroine, is a joke. There was nothing to like about her at all.

The Fae storyline was tragically typical. They're arrogant and uncaring, so now their world is disappearing. Can't we have some Fae that aren't high and mighty? The only thing truly interesting about them was their positions which coincided with gods of ancient Greek and Roman myth, and their ability to turn into an animal representative of that.

Anne Bishop is a great writer, but you couldn't tell by reading this book. It had none of the dark, edgy feeling of her first novels and feels like a cop out, as well as a whack over the head with strong feminist beliefs and the Wiccan religion.

This book came reccommended to me, so I was extremely disappointed when I read it. It's a VERY thin ficionalization of a romanticized version of the witch hunts that you can pull up on half-a-dozen poorly-researched websites. She uses preexisting mythologies - principally Celtic, Greek, and Christian - but mixes and matches them in shudder-inducing ways.

It was SO predictable that it was barely worth reading past the first chapter (and yet I, dear reader, forced myself to slog because I'm one of those who hate not finishing what I start). The plot is predictable (and there are too many of them, initially, among which she jumps), the pacing is deadly slow, and the characters are little more than puppets on sticks. She never once steps out of the predictability, and the world is not nearly good enough to make this acceptable. In fact, the world is so God-awful that it was rough to get through a chapter at a time.

The writing is competent and mechanically acceptable. But that doesn't help at all when the characters are interesting and the world is entirely unbelievable.

Honestly, I wanted to fling the book across the room. It was a waste of my reading time and of some poor tree. Find a 14-year-old's emotional website about the witchhunts and read that: it's about the same effect, except the website will probably be more entertaining.

This story about the fae is well thought out and put together. It shows the forgetfulness and self-centeredness of the Fae beautifully. The only problem with it is that it has a slow beginning, and takes too long to capture the readers interest as we wait for the storyline to build. The characters don't have the wonderful dialogue that we find in the Jewels trilogy, or in The Invisible Ring. Followers that are fond of the Jewels trilogy will enjoy the read, but inevitably be disappointed that it falls short of Bishop's previous writing. Where I constantly read and re-read her other works (on my second copies, as the first ones have fallen apart), I will happily avoid adding this to my collection.

The Veil that separates by a road the land of Tir Alainn from the human plane is vanishing in spots and none of the Fae knows why. When the road finally vanishes, the Fae clan lands near it disappear too because they are anchored to the place. It is imperative to not only learn why this is happening but also find a way to stop it before all of Tir Alainn disappears.

Ari the witch lives among the humans, but her lover is Lucian the Lightbringer. He gives her jewels when she craves his love. Lucien, like the rest of the Fae, believes mortals are beneath them and would never consider a permanent relationship with an inferior being. There is someone else who will do anything to keep Ari safe especially since the witch hunters are coming for her. It is imperative that Ari live since she is connected to Tir Alainn though she knows it not.

THE PILLARS OF THE WORLD is a stand-alone fantasy novel that reads like a beautiful ballad involving two humans who believe love is the ultimate magical force in the universe. Anne Bishop is very descriptive with a visual narrative that provides the reader a panoramic view of Tir Alainn that only a real visitor could have written based on first hand observation. Fans of romance and fantasy will delight in this engaging tale.

Harriet Klausner

Its not so much that The Pillar's of the World is a bad book, its just that those of us who have read the Black Jewel's trilogy know Anne Bishop is capable of so much more. It is a perfectly fun fluff story of a young witch with a great deal of heart and a decent villan, and the ending is not crystal clear in the first 15 pages. But from Bishop this is a disapointment. I agree with a reader that she seems to have used up the Black Jewel's world, but maybe she should put off writing for a while until she has another vivid and enchanting place to take us to.

Compared to some of the fantasy I've been reading lately, THE PILLARS OF THE WORLD, while a fun distraction from your everyday life, reads like a very green writer's first attempt.

The basic plot is a redux of the burning times: witches and suspected witches quickly disappearing as power-hungry male inquisitors systematically find and destroy them for gold and revenge. Of course, it's set in a different world, and it turns out that the disappearance of the witches is connected with the disappearance of a hidden world (shades of Avalon?) inhabited by semi-divine beings called the Fae, all of whom bear striking resemblances to old Greek and Celtic dieties. This is all fine, and in fact it's all interesting, but the fact remains that it's been done before, and done better.

THE PILLARS OF THE WORLD doesn't grab you and hold on tight, doesn't pack any sort of emotional punch, doesn't push you to the edge of your seat even once. Its characters are mildly interesting -- particularly Morag, who is the mistress of Death and one of the Fae -- but its story is predictable and ultimately it's not what I expected from the celebrated Anne Bishop. It's worth a read, but for a really powerful (historical) fantasy experience, I'd recommend Juliet Marillier's Sevenwaters Trilogy, and anything by Guy Gavriel Kay. Kate Forsyth's Witches of Eileanan series is also fun, not so predictable, and very well written.

That could be my refrain for all the books by Anne Bishop. On one hand she writes very well, with solid characterization and world building, and on the other hand there has been something that drove me batty in every single one of her books. While the specific things that drove me batty varied, they were all variations on a theme - she takes elements from history or mythology and then almost uses them. In the Jewels books I spent the entire time thinking "Is she trying to be subtle? Trying to refer to the achetype that goes with this name? Making some other point?." In this book, I instead kept flashing back to a paper I wrote years ago on the historical persecution of witches. So much of the content of this book was straight out of that research that I spent the entire book thinking "Am I going to be the only person who recognizes all of the historical references?" and "What little factoid is she going to use next?" I'll keep reading her books, because I really like the character interaction, but I'll also continue to hope, which each new book, for one which I can enjoy without distractions. One which completely fails to make me want to smack someone upside the head.

Ms. Bishop has created an interesting society where Old Places in each community are the sites of magic and where the witches (women connected to the earth and elements, not the Wicked Witch of the West type) live, a land of the Fae which connects to the human world through roads that pass through the Veil. Of course there is a problem in this paradise - there roads are disappearing and the Clans of the Fae near those roads are vanishing without reason. Trouble is also coming for the witches in the form of misogynistic, witch-hating man who calls himself the Witch's Hammer and who, with his group of Inquisitors, is dedicated to eradicating witches from the land.

The story centers around Ari, a young witch whose mother and grandmother recently died, and who is slowly being shunned by her community. And that's the problem with this story. Ari is rather a dull character. She is mainly concerned with home, hearth, and the land. She's unworldly and lonely, yet she is the lust object of a Baron's son, the love object a kind mortal man, and the object of desire of a lord of the Fae, and it just doesn't make any sense. The storyline, as it swirls around her and what is happening in the society, is interesting, but I never really felt any connection to the characters, except to Morag the Gatherer (of souls). She seemed to be the most developed of them all, probably because she was proactive.

The book was enjoyable and readable but you could tell in advance the way things were going to work out. There were no real surprises. It was a pleasant way to spend a few hours, but don't expect it to change your existence.