Customer Reviews

The Third God (The Stone Dance of the Chameleon)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Picking up from The Standing Dead, The Third God finds Aurum, now exiled, in in the Earthsky wreaking havoc and seeking to capture Osidian to return him to Osrakum where he will meet his fate. Osidian however intends returning to Osrakum to a very different destiny, a triumphant return to claim from his usurping brother what he sees as rightfully his. Carnelian now sees his only way forward is to aid his former lover Osidian in his battle, his hope is to avert any reprisals by the Chosen against his beloved Plainsmen. So it is, along with Fern, Poppy and Krow and an assorted army of Plainsmen, Marula and Sartlar that Osidian and Carnelian begin their struggle to return to Osrakum. In the face of overwhelming odds, and not without a few setbacks they slowly claim one victory after another; yet they have still not encountered the defending forces of Osrakum or Molochite's scheming. Nor do they know what role the Wise will play in the outworking of events.

Driven by dreams he does not always fully understand yet feels certain foretell that they will succeed, Carnelian fights alongside Osidian. Throughout Carnelian is torn between his hope of saving those he loves and serving as Osidian's ally and accomplice in his seemingly malicious and relentless carnage. Despite all that Osidian has done it is clear he still has some affection for him, but he struggles to avoid resuming the relationship they once enjoyed, despite Fern seeming ever more distant and cold toward him, any hope of the longed for intimacy with him seeming now lost. To add to his worries Carnelian fears what effects their assault may be having on his family in Osrakum.

Despite its length, The Third God never for one moment wanes in its attention grabbing narrative; from the drama of the battles to the intimacy of relationships, from the squalor and degradation of the slaughter to the the order and grandeur of Osrakum, the fascinating minutiae and intricacy of the plot always encouraging careful reading. There is certainly much sanguinary coagulation, along with assorted other bodily fluids and excretions, through which Carnelian and the others sometimes literally have to wade; in addition to the often graphic carnage and mutilation; but as we eventually learn some of the history of The Three Lands we gain some understanding. A remarkable epic that moves relentlessly forward, there are times when the story seems on the verge of falling into a clichéd delaying diversion, but it never does, on each occasion it surprises with a new twist that advances the plot.

The characters are appealing, including the precocious young Poppy, Fern and his torment resigning himself to what seems the inevitable; Osidian despite his ruthlessness it is hard not to feel something for; and Carnelian above all, his love and compassion and selflessness; and one has to keep remind oneself that these latter two are themselves still little more than youths. Set in this vividly described imaginary world of dragons and pre-historic creatures and vegetation, and rigidly divided peoples, intelligently written, this is a most captivating and rewarding story that builds to a very satisfying conclusion, I enjoyed every word of The Third God.

I wanted to love this book. When the package arrived in the mail, I was so excited, I probably spent a good 10 minutes examining the artwork on the cover alone, which is beautiful, by the way.
I had loved what happened in the later half of the first book, loved the entire second book, and expected...ultimately, too much from the third book.
Third God has two redeeming qualities: One, Pinto has a way with words. He is very prosaic, he uses words eloquently, paints pictures with them. Two, I was happy with what became of the characters, the way the story wrapped up. Nothing left me unsatisfied there.
So what went wrong? If it weren't for the strength of the two positive qualities listed above, I would give this book 3 stars. How do I put it? Okay, here:
It was SO. SLOW.
At times, just page after page after page of floating in a boat down a river and oh, look at the landscape.
Why is it that in this book, with the largest battles of all, the plot absolutely dragged so much? What was missing? Honestly, I can't put my finger on it. Maybe my expectations were high.

I started to recommend this series to a friend of mine...and after getting into the Third God, had to second guess that decision. So to anyone reading this on Amazon, I can only give a lukewarm recommendation of this series. But with that being said, this author is incredibly talented, the stuff reads almost like poetry. I will buy and read anything he publishes.

The only word I can come up with, unoriginal as it may be, is AWESOME! So often, I am left unsatisfied with that last book in a Fantasy series that started out so promisingly. How often have you adored the first book only to find your love affair waning as the next installments come your way? For me, it has been mostly the norm.
Not this time! When I first read The Chosen, I was blown away by the opulence and originality of this new world Pinto created. Absolutely stunning settings, extreme dualities and characters that are unforgetable. My brain had no trouble at all forming the pictures of Osrakum and the Earthsky. Fortunately by the time I started reading the series, The Standing Dead was already out and it was as good or even better. When The Third God took so long in coming, I thought...uh...oh...
But the wait was definitely worth it. All the important plot lines are resolved, the character growth continues and we have a satisfying conclusion.
Beware that this is definitely not a stand alone read. You must read the previous volumes to get the full breadth of this wonderful and original epic.
I hear that Ricardo Pinto is working on a new book and I can't wait to see what new world he is going to create for us next! Please, please, don't let us wait as long as we had to wait for The Third God.
The Stone Dance of the Chameleon is my favourite Fantasy series ever! I doubt that it will ever be anything else. I'm just sad it's over. But it will be reread countless times!

The third book of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy is one book that you will not put down when you start reading, I guarantee it. In this book, questions are answered, world-changing revelations twist your mind, carnage and destruction await. Haha. The journey that Osidian and Carnelian have started in book two The Standing Dead continues and along the way they bring with them changes to the world outside the walls of Osrakum, often in the form of utter chaos. Osidian acted with lust for vengeance and a determination to right a wrong against him. Carnelian reluctantly allied himself with Osidian with hope to save as many as possible from the inevitable destruction that lies in their march against the Masters. Tried as hard as he did, Carnelian could not help but watch the world and its ancient order become unravel until Osrakum itself collapsed under the onslaught of forces that he helped unleashed. The laws that governed the world are broken, secrets are revealed, and the real truth about the race of Chosen and their subjects came to light, but at too steep a price and too late. Still, at the end of the chaos, there is still hope of life and freedom under the sky for Carnelian and those he gave his entire self to save.
Ricardo Pinto is my new god. Many years ago I picked up the first book of the trilogy, The Chosen, I fell in love. It is very hard to find a book that just blow you away within the first few pages. Not even taking into account of the so original story, the writing alone was enough to capture me. I read until I couldn't see straight. With each word I walk along side Carnelian and Osidian and experience everything they go through so vividly that I thought I was in a dream. The second book, The Standing Dead, raised my level of addiction to a new height. I waited and waited for this book to be published but when it finally did, they did not have it in the U.S. Imagine my anguish. I ordered it overseas, and when it got here, I screamed in front of the mail box and scared the living crap out of my neighbor. This book, gives story-telling a whole new meaning. I couldn't put it down to do anything at all. Such a beautiful depiction of a world full of chaos and love ^^. Each word was chosen carefully to bring forth vivid images in your mind and make the imaginary world real. I would give a more substantial and easy to read review but I couldn't find words accurate enough to describe the ecstasy and joy that this book has given me. Everyone should pick up all three books, read it, then tie your families and friends down and read aloud to them until they agree to go out and buy the books! Take no prisoners! And Mr. Ricardo Pinto sir, if you're reading this, please continue to write your wonderful stories (I know it's hard but please please!!). I shall put the Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy on an altar and forever love it, not selling it like I did with my other books. ^^. It has been too long since I've love a book like this, it's rather funny.
So, as last words, buy this book! And the two books before it! You won't be disappointed!

The final volume in Pinto's trilogy is also by far the longest. If The Standing Dead could have dropped fifty pages without losing anything important, The Third God could easily wave goodbye to a hundred and still tell the same story. But would I have enjoyed it half so well? That's a difficult question to answer. In some ways, reading the book was like taking a long train ride. You enjoy watching the world go by outside your window so much that you don't want the journey to end, and yet you would also like to get where you're going faster than the train seems to be taking you.

Even so (paradoxically?), a few sections of the narrative seem rushed through. Why, for example, are Osidian's maneuvers in his final battle with his brother left vague when so much else is explained in endless detail? Perhaps, at this point in the novel, we are meant to see events simply as Carnelian sees them. But that doesn't strike me as an adequate answer. For Pinto, who seems to enjoy recounting long, dreadful journeys more than just about anything, has the good sense to resist portraying the final journey in the novel, even though Carnelian is very much a part of it.

Reflecting on the trilogy as a whole, endless detail seems its hallmark. How many times does Carnelian slog though sewage? I lost count. How many times does he throw up? Not even Sartre has given us so much nausea. And why must everything red look like blood? Every disjunction resemble a wound? Taken separately, the images are powerful. Taken together, they begin to cloy. It's like eating a whole box of chocolate-covered cherries. (One may be good; two is too many; a boxful, and I feel like Carnelian.)

Nevertheless, The Third God is clearly the most exciting book in the trilogy. Pinto has discovered peripeteia and the action of the narrative begins to do some wonderfully surprising things. This is indeed a grand finale. The sheer number of corpses makes World War I look liked a party game. And Carnelian's second romance is almost as thrilling as his first.

But the doctrinaire element in The Standing Dead is even stronger here, particularly in the closing chapters. I will not give away the great secret about the Chosen that Osidian discovers and communicates to Carnelian, and I will freely admit that it was a brilliant idea, since it led Pinto to write three brilliant novels. But in context it comes as one of those "oh, that's what it was all about" surprises, not as an inevitable discovery that a careful reader might have sensed was on the way and is therefore gratified to see revealed. It's like a bad mystery, in which the detective solves the crime by bringing up hitherto unknown facts.

Moreover, if there is a careful reader in this story, it can only be Osidian. After all, when he first meets Carnelian, he teaches him how to decipher the bead books of the Sapients, and we are told that he has been reading them himself for an extended time. So why did it take him so long to catch on? Isn't Osidian the smartest guy on the block? He's a master of military tactics. He knows how to use the sun to determine latitude. He nearly always grasps what everybody else is up to--including Carnelian--and forestalls them again and again. Carnelian may be our favorite good guy, but Osidian was first in his class at Harvard and won three gold medals in the Olympics.

Could it be that Osidian was simply too much for Pinto to handle? (I forgot to mention that, even without a mask, he is to dream for--especially after he gets a tan. Carnelian, in contrast, has pimply legs--hardly a turn-on that.) Pinto, I suspect, keeps him at a distance because, otherwise, he would overwhelm the narrative. Osidian's mind would be the mind we see things through because he sees more than anybody else. And he loves Carnelian. Despite everything, his love, albeit confused, is sincere. (And surely he deserves some credit for loving those legs.)

And so Pinto has no choice but to prevent us from having sympathy for Osidian, least he take over the novel and lead it where Pinto has no intention to having it go.

Which takes me to what I think is the truly serious question: Why does Osidian go wrong? When we meet him, he is more iconoclastic than Carnelian. He's the one who's above and beyond the rules. So why is he unable to avoid the trap of acting like one of the Chosen? Why, in fact, does he want to be the emperor? The answer seems to be that he cannot resist the drive to avenge himself on his brother--at least that's what I learned from the dust jacket--but nothing prepares us to imagine him a man who would be driven blindly by vengeance. He's too smart for that. And too sensitive.

So what's my reading? I would argue that he's done in by religion. The need for religious belief is the tragic flaw in Osidian's character, and that, not a vengeful nature, is what destroys him. Shocked by the trauma of his kidnapping, he lapses into belief in the supernatural and that explains his subsequent behavior. But is this the way Pinto himself conceives him? Yes, I want to think, for there is certainly plenty of evidence in the novel for Osidian's attraction to the supernatural. But is the business about the Black God simply an effect of the trauma or something more basic to his nature? I can't be sure, for, if the second had been Pinto's conception, why didn't he provide us with a hint of Osidian's weakness earlier on in the trilogy. Indeed, he might have made Osidian's religious nature one of the elements that attracted Carnelian to him in the first place--a kind of hidden knowledge that made him special. (And the fact that Carnelian himself has prophetic dreams suggests that he and Osidian may have something in common here.)

Maybe Pinto provided such hints and I missed them. (If I thought anyone would read this review, which is not so much a review as a reaction, I would reread the relevant chapters in The Chosen to confirm my opinion, but, since I don't, I won't--at least not this week.)

But I will maintain that Osidian is the most interesting character in the three novels and that he is a genuinely tragic figure, while Carnelian, sympathetic as he may be, never quite rises to the occasion. Certainly Pinto tries to make it happen. He even crucifies him (temporarily), and if that were not an obvious sign of his Christ-like nature, his penultimate act is an offering of his life so that others may live. And such behavior is clearly what the Sapients have in mind when they explain Carnelian's threat to the status quo--one of the few places in the three volumes where the narrative becomes downright silly. (A step further along this road to "seriousness" and our golden boy would be receiving an award from the Humane Society for his kindness to stray cats.)

Could it be Pinto's point that Carnelian is a Christ who refused to become a god because Osidian, in his madness, has shown him what a bad idea that can be? But if Carnelian is "the Green Child/ten thousand times reborn" referred to in the snippet of verse that opens The Chosen, then perhaps he had no choice in the matter. And could such a figure, like Wagner's Siegfried, ever escape the taint of foolishness?

Put baldly, I think that The Stone Dance of the Chameleon began with a simple idea that it outgrew as the novels evolved; and that this idea accounts for Pinto's inability to realize the figure of Osidian and the banality of the novels' closing pages. These are clearly problems. But that's why I liked The Third God. It poses problems without resolving them, and that is what literature is supposed to do. The book is an altogether worthy conclusion to Pinto's magnificent trilogy, which, faults included, stands as one of the great fantasy novels of our era, and that is no mean accomplishment. Some readers may find it too literate, too artfully stylized, but these qualities, far from accidental, reflect the central intent of the story, for the demands he makes on us are essential to Pinto's purposes. Readers who run away from the challenge are missing a remarkable experience.

I read The Chosen in 2000, and have waited for the rest of the trilogy ever since, sure that the writer of such an exotic book would create more beautiful work. If The Chosen seemed inspired by the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Standing Dead seemed to add in the genre of Islandia, a slow journey examining the traditions of tribal cultures. The Third God broke any mold I have seen in all my years of reading fantasy.

Ricardo Pinto's vision of the effects of repression is both horrifying and instructive. Scenes throughout all three books that seem descriptive or interesting (and sometimes puzzling) become damning when the mosaic is completely revealed. His characters are living out the consequences of both their own lives and four thousand years of repression. The opulence, rigidity and futility of the culture of the Masters stays in your mind long after the final page is turned. As does the dismantling of the nature-centered culture of the Plainsmen.

The author weaves together themes of love and loss, hatred, despair, anger, and the complex ways humans handle them. Underlying these are sophisticated understandings of social organization and control, and the rituals that mediate power relationships in society. I was reminded of the novels of Sheri Tepper, who regularly turns societies on other worlds inside out to give us a new look at our own society.

And it is beautifully written! I kept having to slow myself down from racing to the next major plot point so that I could relish the transitions, which contained so much texture and color.

This is a brilliant work on many levels. Far beyond the formulaic pop song-hooks of popular fantasy, The Stone Dance of the Chameleon is a symphony in three different movements. It's quite an achievement. Congratulations, Mr. Pinto!

I have followed The Stone Dance of the Chameleon series since the first book, The Chosen (The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, Book 1), and I have immensely enjoyed the quality of Pinto's writing. With The Third God, Pinto has created an extremely satisfying conclusion to his trilogy.

The Third God follows the conquest of the mythical kingdom of Osrakum by Osidian, a prince who was expelled from Osrakum and had his birthright as God Emperor stolen from him by his scheming family. His hesitant accomplice is Carnelian, his former lover who was also expelled from Osrakum some years earlier. The previous two books charted Carnelian's introduction to the hideously cruel and depraved, but also beautiful land of Osrakum, which is ruled by the caste known as the Chosen, or Masters, who are so elite that for a commoner to look upon their uncovered faces is punishable by death. Carnelian, himself Chosen, was raised outside of Osrakum by his exiled father, who hoped to protect Carnelian from the cruel intrigues of life in Osrakum.

Carnelian meets Osidian Nephron, whom we discover is to become the God Emperor. The two become lovers, but before Osidian's Apotheosis, he and Carnelian are captured and smuggled out of Osrakum, to face death in the barbarian lands beyond. They are rescued by the gentle and noble plainsmen who called themselves the Ochre. Carnelian falls in love with their way of life, but they are betrayed by Osidian as he builds his army to reconquer his kingdom. The Third God is essentially about Carnelian attempting to save his loved ones as his entire world begins to collapse around him.

The most remarkable aspect of this series is how incredibly fully realized Pinto has made the world of Osrakum. Its history, culture, languages, mythology, geography, science, and architecture are vividly described with a thoroughness to rival Tolkien's Middle Earth. It is filled with lifelike characters, epic battles, romance, intrigue, monsters, miracles, everything anyone could want from an epic fantasy of this scope. Fans of the series will love The Third God, and I highly recommend the series to anyone who is a fan of this genre.

The Third God is another titanic effort by Ricardo Pinto in this great trilogy. The strength of the story, characters and Mr. Pinto's narrative is as accomplished and satisfying as in the previous two books. The task of finishing this rich and complex trilogy was staggering. The Third God does so and more. Definitely worth reading.

This is one of the most beautiful, honest endings I have ever read in a fantasy book.

The world is simply stunning and the characters are amazing. Easily the most original world I have seen in many, many years.