The Third God (The Stone Dance of the Chameleon) Hardcover – April 21, 2009

The Stone Dance of the Chameleon trilogy is a captivating yarn. The story takes place in a utopian world in which authority is given to The Chosen, those with supposed divine blood. And The Chosen thus create a complex political balance to maintain their desired utopian existence. The main political players are the God Emperor, The Wise and The Masters; all of which reside in the hidden city of Osrakum. The plainsmen, considered barbarians, reside far removed from the walls of Osrakum scattered into tribes throughout the vast surrounding land, named The Greenland. The Chosen oppress the plainsmen through strict rule and punishment. Chosen individuals wear elaborate masks to conceal their divine countenance; for a plainsmen (or any un-chosen) to look upon the face of The Chosen results in immediate blinding. Mutilation, torture and death are oft used by The Chosen to enforce the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. Themes of punishment and overt pain run throughout the Stone Dance of the Chameleon.

Carnelian is the protagonist of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon. Carnelian is a Master thus meaning he's Chosen. Carnelian's blood has a high taint making him (and his role in politics) of great importance. The Chosen are cruel. There is very little compassion among The Chosen, save for Carnelian. Carnelian is compassion personified.

The reader is introduced to Carnelian in the first book titled "The Chosen". Carnelian is exiled with his father, Suth Carnelian. Suth is sought out by three Masters - Aurum, Jasper, and Imago - to return to Osrakum to participate in the election of a new God Emperor. And thus Carnelian begins to learn of the cruel nature of politics and the unquestionably harsh cannon of the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. Once in Osrakum, Carnelian falls in love with a brilliant young man named Osidian. The book ends with the election gone awry, resulting in Carnelian and Osidian forcibly removed from Osrakum to the barbarian lands.

The second book "The Standing Dead" chronicles Carnelian and Osidian among the Ochre plainsmen tribe and Osidian's machinations for return to Osrakum. Plainsmen are considered barbarians; however, the reader quickly learns that they are of sophistication. What plainsmen lack in Chosen complexity they make up with compassion and understanding. It is here that Carnelian witnesses the blight that is The Chosen and thus doffs his Chosen birth and adopts a Ochre plainsmen lifestyle. The readers is also made aware of Osidian's superior political intellect, tactical military mind and resolve to ultimately have what he considers to be his. Osidian's actions ultimately lead Carnelian to fall out of love with him, and to fall in love with a Ochre plainsman named Fern. The book concludes with Osidian manipulating Carnelian and Fern, and forcing all of the plainsmen tribes in laying seize to Osrakum.

The third book "The Third God" recounts Osidian's war with Osrakum and his ultimate rise to God Emperor. Facts are made aware that redefine The Chosen world and Carnelian's actions lead to the ultimate dissemination of the Law-that-must-be-obeyed, resulting in a rebirth of sorts (I won't give specifics away).

The story is captivating. But Ricardo Pinto's presentation could have used refinement. This was Pinto's first professional attempt at writing and it shows throughout the trilogy's progression. The first book is difficult, painful to get through. First half of "The Chosen" is driven by geography. Pinto goes through great length to describe Carnelian's journey from exile to Osrakum to the point that my eyes glazed over at excessive landscape descriptions. Then, it is as if Pinto realizes his error and switches to character driven plot at the second half of "The Chosen". Pinto continues this momentum throughout the second book and then somehow stumbles in his third volume. Pinto's mastery of the English language and stylized pros are unfortunately interrupted by unneeded verbiage. Pinto's "The Third God" is the longest of the three novels but in truth the book could have dropped approximately one-hundred to one-hundred and fifty pages and still maintained the thrust of the story.

Verbosity aside, Pinto did deliver a fantastic conclusion to a truly original story. The final chapters were just beautiful. Definitely worth the journey. I would expand more on the story but I don't want to give away too much. In closing, The Stone Dance of Chameleon is a refreshing fantasy piece. But I suspect many a reader lacks the resolve to make it through the first novel and the perseverance to navigate the third novel to the trilogy's resplendent conclusion.

Post Script: I very much appreciated that Pinto wrote a fantasy involving a gay protagonist (Carnelian) and his love triangle. As a gay man, I can say that Carnelian's romantic emotions and actions felt authentic. I found it fascinating that homosexuality wasn't an issue in The Stone Dance of the Chameleon universe.

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 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.