Reading The Sword of Truth so you don't have to

For this section, we're mostly going to be dealing with abject tedium, with an occasional punctuation of vile repulsiveness. Doesn't that sound fun? (Hint: the answer to that is "no".)

Chase and Rachel go to the Mud People village. They don't speak the Mud People language, so hijinks ensue. But Siddin (that's the boy Darken Rahl kidnapped for his BFF to rape, if you recall) recognised them, so it all turned out OK. the communicate via pictures and Chas learns what happened to Richard and Kahlan. It's all very boring.

Zedd goes to visit Adie. They have a long conversation, mostly about Adie's life story. It's very boring. Blah blah wizard's Second Rule, blah blah Stone of Tears, blah blah Keeper, blah blah when I was young I saved someone's life with magic so as a punishment I was forced to be bald for years, blah blah Blood of the Fold.

The Blood of the Fold, we learn, are a sort of paramilitary organisation dedicated to fighting people who serve the Keeper by doing evil things like magic. Except, not really. They're actually a bunch of thugs. When she was young, they blinded her (she now sees by magic) and killed her husband. So she tortured their leader for several months. Until he reveals that that was all part of the plan. He actually was a servant of the Keeper (a "baneling") and the plan all along was to make Adie do evil stuff to draw her towards the Keeper.

Zedd, of course, reassures her that the torture was OK, and that didn't make her evil. Because that's just the kind of guy he is.

Adie also explains that the reason she lived in the pass by the Boundary was that she thought that living next door to hell might be a good way for her to get back in touch with her dead husband. She doesn't word it quite like that, but that's the gist.

They talk a bit about the Stone of Tears, and a bit about some magic demon bones. We also get another mention of his wonderful wizard's rock, and how it can be used to summon the spirits of the dead. And have I mentioned how incredibly boring it all is yet?

Some of the magic demon bones come to life and attack them, which is a slight improvement, at least. Sadly, they don't die.

(Random quote from Zedd's section:

Haff had the biggest ears Zedd had ever seen. How a man with ears the like of those had ever found a wife was a wonder.

This has approximately nothing to do with anything, but I thought it was sufficiently ridiculous that it needed quoting. Everyone knows how highly women rank ear size in judging someone's worth as a potential husband, right?)

Meanwhile, Richard and Verna continue their journey. Verna saves Richard's life by killing a woman who was about to kill him. Richard berates her for this completely unnecessary killing. Because we all know he'd never kill anyone, right? In fact, he's so mad at her, that he nearly kills her. Yep. Satire is still dead.

Richard goes off to bury the body, and is attacked by a gar. These are a type of monster that show up quite regularly, and seem to be Goodkind's go-to generic foe. They're vaguely humanoid, but bigger than a person, and have wings and a tail. They also have a weird hunting mechanism where they have a swarm of flies ("blood flies") that go out to find prey, biting it to draw blood, which the gar senses. Then when the gar makes the kill, the flies get a tiny portion. It's actually a kinda neat example of mutualism, and is one part of these books that doesn't suck.

Anyway, on this occasion, Richard kills a gar that attacks him, and then realises that it had a little baby gar. The baby gar kinda imprints on him, and he has to shoo it away. Another two gars appear and look like they might eat the baby, so he feeds them the body of the woman he was going to bury instead, and then uses the distraction to get the baby off his trail. Naturally, this wouldn't be complete without overwrought deliberation on how awful it was for a dead body to be eaten by gars.

Another ghastly thought came to him : who was he to judge – he had eaten human flesh. Why was that any different? Was he any better?

No, Richard. No you aren't. In fact, you're considerably worse.

Verna also tells Richard of their destination. They are going to somewhere in the Old World. You see, Westland, the Midlands, and D'hara aren't the whole world, nor even the whole of the continent. Collectively, they comprise the New World, and are connected by a stretch of unpassable desert to the Old World. Many years ago, there was a big war between wizards, and they put up lots of magical towers that would prevent anyone from crossing. Except by the powers of applied phlebotinum people who have the gift are able to cross, but only twice. In this case, a wizard really did do it.

New character time! Her name is Cyrilla, she's Kahlan's half sister, and she's queen of a place called Galea. Oh yes, and she's also an idiot. Just like everyone else in this world.

The half-sister thing bears a little explanation. As you know, Bob, Confessors can choose any man they want to be their mate. Kahlan's mother, it turned out, chose the King of Galea. Of course Kahlan's rank as Confessor is far more important than any of this stuff about "king" or "princess", so the whole thing is basically nothing more than a quirk of genetics.

She's introduced via a flashback, in which someone tries to assassinate her. Kahlan stops the assassination by touching the assassin, and they start trying to figure out who ordered it. Giller (remember him?) says that they have reason to believe that there's some magic spell on the assassin that will kill him if they ask him directly who ordered the assassination. As such, Cyrilla insists that they must immediately and directly ask that very question. They do. He dies. I said she was an idiot. They suspect that he was from the neighbouring kingdom of Kelton, but have no proof.

Back in the present, Galea has been invaded by Kelton. Cyrilla travels to Aydindril, the seat of the Midlands Council, except that when she gets there, she finds that the council is now controlled by Prince Fyren of Kelton. Ooops. Fyren then gives a sexist rant:

I tried to make it easy for you, Cyrilla, because you're a woman. Drefan's knife would have been quick. You would have suffered little that way. I would never have allowed a man in your place such mercy. But you wouldn't have it the easy way. You allowed the Mother Confessor to interfere. You allowed another woman to infringe on the dominion of men!

It isn't actually stated, but I'm going to assume that he was twirling his moustache and stroking a white cat as he said this.

He then throws her into a dungeon with at least half a dozen convicted rapists and murderers. They gang rape her. This is a. entirely predictable and b. utterly repulsive. Look, we get it, OK. These men are evil, and evil men like rape. Now can you give it a break already?

Clearly, the answer is no, because it's only 4 pages later that we get hints of the next rapes.

Kahlan, together with Mud People Chandalen, Prindin, and Tossidin, is on her way to Aydindril, and along the way, she goes past a Galean city, Ebinissia.

She had intended to skirt Ebinissia, but for the last two days they had been coming across the frozen corpses of women. Never any men, only women, from young to old, children to grandmothers. Most were half naked, some without clothes at all. And in the dead of winter. While most had been alone, a few were together, huddled in frozen death, too exhausted, or too frightened, or too disoriented to have sought shelter. They had run from Ebinissia not in disorderly haste, but in panic, choosing to freeze to death rather than remain.

If you can manage to get past the horrible prose, it's not difficult to figure out what had happened.

And so, they go on into the city, and sure enough, they find nobody alive. There's just a city full of corpses, with most of the women showing signs of having been raped, and most of the men having died in battle. Kahlan figures out that it must have been the Keltons who slaughtered the whole city. How?

All the dead were defenders; none were the corpses of attackers. Kahlan knew that some believed leaving the dead where they fell in defeating an enemy augured ill luck in future battles, and further, that it abandoned their spirits to retribution by the spirits of those defeated. Likewise, they believed that if they left their dead at the site of a defeat, the spirits of their fallen comrades would live on to plague their enemies. Whoever had done this must have believed such, and dragged their own dead away from the bodies of those they had vanquished. Kahlan knew of several people who believed that the act of dying in battle could bring about such thaumaturgy. One nation, above all, sat at the head of her roster.

Well, yes, I suppose it could be that, or it could just be that soldiers wanted to bury the bodies of their dead friends but weren't concerned with the bodies of their enemies. Or maybe their commander decided that leaving uniformed corpses behind would let people identify them as the perpetrators. But no. That sort of idea is just ridiculous.

I could also tell you some of the details of exactly how we know that the women had been raped, but frankly, you're better off not knowing.

I had some trouble deciding how many counts of rape to add to the tally for this one, since the actual number is probably well into the thousands. In the end, I chose three, since that's how many named characters were raped, three girls, one as young as 14, who Kahlan just happened to have known.

All the while that they're exploring the city and finding lots of evidence of gruesome rape and torture, they're also coming across lots of things that Chandalen doesn't understand, so we get the utterly incongruous juxtaposition of the rape with the also-offensive act of Kahlan teaching the noble savages about civilisation. It's all very anthropology 101 stuff about how agriculture can lead to increased food production compared to hunting and gathering, allowing for specialists to be supported, allowing for trades and currencies and so on. Unsurprisingly, Kahlan is a particularly awful teacher. One of her examples of specialisation:

You see, Chandalen? Women's specialty is to bring forth life, and men's specialty is to take it away.

Good job on the sexism. Especially how it's coming from a heroine now and not an evil man like before. We couldn't have people reading this and thinking sexism was bad now, could we?

We also have the inevitable scene where Chandalen is astonished that other people find gold valuable. The Mud People have vast amounts of it on their land, but they have no use for such a soft and useless metal.

Finally, we get some delightful genocide justification. Chandalen explains that in his grandfather's time, there was another tribe, called the Jocopo who attacked the Mud People and raped some of their women. So, the Mud People went out and committed genocide, wiping out the Jocopo entirely. Not just those who had attacked them or raped them, but the entire civilisation, including their children. Kahlan reacts to this:

I understand, Chandalen. Your people did the only thing they could. Your grandfather did what was necessary to protect his people. My father also taught me, "If war is brought to you, then let there be war like your enemy has never imagined in his most frightening nightmares. anything less, and you hand victory to your foe."

Kahlan Amnell, ladies and gentlemen. Our heroine, and supporter of genocide.

The monster that we closed with last time wasn't the demon chicken. That's not for another three books (I bet you all can't wait). Instead, it was another screeling. Richard and Kahlan kill it when he hits it with his sword at exactly the same time she shoots lightning at it. Wait, Kahlan can shoot lightning now? Apparently so. It's part of her magic Pon Farr powers, and probably something to do with the Dark Side of the Force Subtractive Magic.

While they're fighting it, Richard gets angry that Kahlan won't hide away and let him deal with the scary monster like a manly man should. He tells her:

"If we get out of this alive, I'm going to put you over my knee."

And just in case there was any doubt that maybe this was playful banter or something, I should point out that immediately before saying this he had been speaking in a "tone of rage" and there was nothing to indicate that this had changed.

So, naturally, Kahlan told him to fuck off and stop being such a chauvinistic prick, because she had no desire to be in an abusive relationship. Oh wait, no. She told him that she'd let him. Well, they're almost the same thing, right?

Once they've killed it, Kahlan sings a song about screelings, oh boy. If you think that Goodkind's prose is bad then... well, you're right. It is. It's terrible. But his poetry/song writing somehow manages to be even worse.

The screelings are loose and the Keeper may win.
His assassins have come to rip off your skin.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to run.
The screelings will get you and laugh like it's fun.

And then that carries on for another 4 verses, all of which are equally inspired.

The Keeper here is the Keeper of the Underworld, or in other words, this story's term for the devil. At the end of the song, it makes another reference to "the pebble in the pond" just so we know that it's important.

The next day, Richard goes off to shoot arrows with Savidlin and some of the other Mud People hunters. Meanwhile, Kahlan stays at home with Weselan, where they talk about dresses and then do some cooking. I'd comment on the revolting sexism, but honestly, this crap pretty much lampoons itself.

While the men are out shooting arrows, Richard manages all sorts of tricks. For starters, he repeatedly shoots one arrow into a target and then uses his next arrow to split the shaft of the first one. then, because that wasn't impressive enough, he also shoots his arrow so it hits an arrow that someone has shot at him, causing it to split in two, with the two halves going either side of him. Then, for a finale, when someone fires another arrow at him, he just catches it out of the air.

All the while, the headache that Richard has been having has been getting worse and worse, sometimes even being bad enough to make him pass out. However, when he does all the tricks with the arrows, his headache completely vanishes. As if by magic, one might say.

We also learn more about the mysterious nuns who like imprisoning prophets. They are called the Sisters of the Light. Well, most of them are. Some of them are called the Sisters of the Dark. Instead of being nuns who worship the Creator, and keep people imprisoned, they're a secret group of evil nuns who worship the Keeper, infiltrated within the Sisters of the Light, who don't know they exist. Wait, did I say evil? I meant eeeeeeeeeeevil. But more of them later.

Three Sisters of the Light (or possibly Dark!) come to find Richard. They confirm what Richard and Kahlan have begun to suspect: Richard has the gift. And when I say that they were starting to suspect it, I actually mean that they'd already been told as much on at least three different occasions (by Zedd, Darken Rahl, and Scarlet) but Richard was refusing to believe it. Because he's the Seeker of Truth and it's important to him to find the truth even when he doesn't like it. Obviously.

The Sisters explain to Richard that the headaches he's having are a result of his newly awakened magic, and that if he can't control them, they will kill. They say that they teach wizards how to control their magic, and they offer to put him in a magic collar, called a Rada'Han, and then take him to the Palace of the Prophets in Tanimura to train him.

Yes, you did read that right. A group of ambiguously evil nuns just offered to put Richard in a magic collar that would stop him dying from his magic headaches.

As an aside, having a Palace of the Prophets in a place called Tanimura when we already have a People's Palace and a Tamarang is pretty bad writing. You shouldn't give your places (or characters) names that are similar enough to be confusing to readers unless you have a really good reason. Of course, bad writing is exactly what we've come to expect at this point.

There are three Sisters who have come for Richard, and they explain that that number is because there are three purposes for the Rada'Han. Each sister will explain one of the reasons to him, and then offer him a chance to take the collar or refuse it. If he refuses after all three offers, he won't be given another chance. No, this makes no sense to me either.

Sister Grace makes him the first offer, explaining that the first purpose of the Rada'Han is to control the headaches and help him learn magic. Richard refuses, because he says he would rather die than wear a collar again after what happened with Denna. After he refuses, Sister Grace kills herself.

Neither Richard nor Kahlan trust the Sisters of the Light. In Kahlan's case, it's because she once heard a wizard talk about them and he seemed afraid of them. In Richard's case, it's because they give him a magic sense of foreboding. After talking things through, they realise that they should talk to Zedd.

Now, If I were dying of magic headaches, and my only options were to let some people I'd never met before but had reason to distrust put a collar on me, or go seek advice from my oldest and closest friend, I know which one I'd take. In fact, I'd take it really fucking quickly. In fact, I'd use the magic dragon tooth that a friendly dragon had given me just recently, and ask her to fly me immediately to find my old friend. Given that this would be the sensible option, you can rest assured that it wasn't the one Richard took. Instead, he decides that the best bet is to stick around in the Mud People village for a week so they could prepare a proper wedding feast, then get married, and only then would he go and find Zedd. You know, if he hadn't already died.

While they're waiting, Shota shows up and wants to speak to Richard to do a little exposition. Zedd's on the other side of the country, see, and someone had to take over the exposition duties. She explains how if Richard and Kahlan have a child, it will be a male Confessor and it will also have the gift, and as a result it would be terrible and evil and all those bad things. She also explains the part about how what Richard did in the last book actually screwed the world up worse than letting Darken Rahl win would have done, and how Richard is now the only person in the world who can stop the Keeper. Finally, she tells Richard the part about Darken Rahl being his father. His response:

"No. That's not true. It just isn't possible."

Somehow, I feel as if I've heard that before somewhere. I can't imagine where.

After this, Richard gets a bright idea. He reasons that since they're fighting the Keeper of the Underworld and nobody alive knows about him, he should ask someone dead instead. And so, he asks the Mud People to call another gathering to summon their ancestor spirits. When he does, a dead owl drops out of the sky and hits him, which apparently is a bad omen, and means something will go terribly wrong if he goes ahead with his plan. He goes ahead with his plan.

How it will turn out, though, will have to wait for next time, because now we're going to go and pay a visit to the Sisters of the Dark. But before we go, one last quote from Richard from this section:

"If I had the power, I would bring Darken Rahl back to life so I could kill him again."

Killing is fun, kids!

Anyway. The Sisters of the Dark. Our point of view character for this section doesn't actually get a name. You see, when Sisters of the Dark talk to each other, they never use their names, in case someone overhears. So I'm just going to refer to her as Evil NuN of Uncertain Identity, or Ennui for short.

As we join her, Ennui is writing a report trying to cover up for a death. We aren't actually told the cause of death, but it was clearly down to something evil, and not the training accident she claims in her report. She then wanders around a bit plotting evil and worshipping the Keeper, when she comes across a novice called Pasha, who is likely to be made a full Sister of the Light soon, and is also likely to be the Sister who trains Richard.

Pasha is, apparently, a very attractive woman, so Ennui talks to her about how she must not be modest, because the creator endowed her with great beauty, and so clearly He meant for her to use this beauty. Now, I wouldn't normally object to this message; there is certainly no shame in being beautiful or in being sexually active. Of course, in this context, the intended message is "oh no, the evil person is convincing pure and innocent Pasha to become a slut! How terrible!" Score one for team evil, I say.

With that done, Ennui goes to find two wizards and best friends, Sam and Neville, who have newly completed their training. (If you're imagining Gamgee and Longbottom having adventures together at this point, you aren't the only one. I am sure that would be immeasurably better than what we actually get.) First, she orders them both to strip naked. Then, she uses the Rada'Han to inflict terrible pain on them. (Yes, it's another magic torture collar. I'd dwell more on this but I doubt anyone is actually surprised.) She then decrees that one of the two will take an oath to serve the Keeper, and then kill the other one.

Sam refuses to take the oath, but Neville agrees. Ennui explains the he must first take the oath to serve the Keeper, then he must skin his best friend alive, then he must go and rape Pasha. See, I told you these Sisters of the Dark were eeeeeeeeeevil and not just evil. To be more specific, he has to skin Sam alive, because that way his magic power can be bled off and stored in a crystal. And then for Pasha, he is to go and tell her that he was praying and had a vision from the Creator saying that he was to help her learn to use her body as He had intended it. Yeah. Making someone have sex with you but lying to and manipulating them is going on the rape counter, as the first for this book. I doubt it will be the last.

So. Wizard's First Rule, huh? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? I certainly hope not, because I hardly enjoyed it at all. I don't think I could cope if I thought my writing was equally as "entertaining". Anyway, the point is, we now have the best book of the series out of the way, and everything is downhill from here on in. What a joyous thought.

Before that, I just want to wrap up a few things and solicit a bit of feedback. First off, statistics!

Number of instances of characters' genitals being mutilated or removed, or a threat made to do so: 3
Number of instances of cannibalism: 3
Number of instances of consumption of human genitalia: 2
Number of extremely and needlessly dangerous magical objects: 3
Number of people who wanted to have sex with Richard: 3
Number of objectivists rants: 1 (that I can recall)
Number of times Richard did something earth-shatteringly stupid: too many to count
Number of times Richard did something morally abhorrent: do numbers go that high?
Number of times I wanted to slam my head into a brick wall rather than carry on reading: what comes after infinity again?

I'm going to continue tracking these throughout the series, to see how ridiculously high they get. Does anyone else have any other things that you think I should track? I'm open to suggestions, so long as you don't suggest something like "horrible passages of purple prose" which I'd never be able to keep track of.

Along the same lines, does anyone have any sort of general suggestions or feedback? Anything that you want to see more of or less of, anything that you think I ought to change or add, that sort of thing?

As I write this, there are 66 people subscribing to this blog, which I'm pretty pleased with. When I wrote the first entry, there was only me. If we keep growing by a factor of 66 each book, then I'll have the entire population of the Earth reading before I'm halfway through the series, and my path to global domination will be clear. If you enjoy what I'm writing and want to help me grow, please do help spread the world. I love having readers, and I love comments and feedback. They make the reading process slightly less painful. Slightly.

And now some fun and games for my amusement. First, a poll.



And finally, I'd like to invite you all (or at least, those of you who are fortunate enough not to have read the series for yourself) to speculate on what might happen during the second book. Feel free to make your predictions as general or as specific as you like, and as serious or silly as you like. I'm just interested in seeing what you come up with.

Thank you for reading. Onwards we go, to Stone of Tears

[Trigger warning: Rape, torture, child abuse]

I'm sorry for the tardiness with this update. My good intentions for regular updates were scuppered by a combination of Christmas, toothache, and this section being really, really terrible. Still, onwards!

Last time around, I finished with Richard facing off against a Mord-Sith, leaving you all in great suspense, I'm sure. Now, you all get to learn what a Mord-Sith is. Don't you feel lucky?

A Mord-Sith is, essentially, an evil magic dominatrix.

They have the ability to capture someone else's magic, control it, and use it against them. So in Richard's case, the magic of his sword is captured, and he feels the pain he got from killing people with it whenever he gets angry. They also carry a magic pain rod called an Agiel, which can cause unbearable pain with a touch, as well as having an accoutrement of various BDSM props like collars, chains, harnesses, and restraints, most of which also to have extra pain-causing magic.

The Mord-Sith who Richard faces is called Denna, and she easily manages to capture him, because he's a Westlander and doesn't know not to use his magic sword against her. The silly, silly man.

Let's turn things over to Denna for some more on the Mord-Sith, in the words of one of their own:

"You see, a Mord-Sith always wears red when she's to train someone. That's so your blood won't show so much. I have a wonderful feeling I'm going to have a lot of your blood on me before I have you trained."

To be precise, this is red leather we're taking about here. It just wouldn't be cliched enough otherwise.

She refers to Richard as "my pet" and she insists that she calls him either "Mistress" or "Mistress Denna". And she isn't happy when he forgets. She backhands him in the face with an armoured glove, and then has this to say:

"You forgot the appellation, my pet. I told you before; you are to address me as Mistress, or as Mistress Denna. You are lucky to have me as your trainer; most Mord-Sith are not as lenient as I. They would have used the Agiel at the first offense. But I have a soft spot in my heart for good-looking men, and besides, even though the glove isn't a very effective punishment, I must admit I rather favor using it. I like to feel the contact. The Agiel is exhilarating, but there is no substitute for using your own hands to feel what you're doing."

I would point out all the things that are wrong with that passage, but I honestly don't even know where to start.

With her in control of his magic, he feels horrendous pain whenever he gets angry, which I have to admit can't help when you're being tortured. Vicious circle and all that. So he has to will himself to stop being angry, which he does by thinking of trees. As you do. Denna somehow magically knows that this is what he's thinking about though, and she doesn't like it. No, she wants him to control his anger by thinking about something he likes about her:

"'Just remember, something pleasant about me.' She took his hands and gazed into his eyes as she pressed his hands to her breasts. 'I find most men seem to focus their pleasant thoughts here.'"

In the real world, torture is generally reckoned to be a highly ineffective way of extracting information. Obviously, what real world torturers have been doing wrong is not also being raging nymphomaniacs.

Richard, however, ignores her and instead decides that her hair is pretty.

The majority of the next few chapters is then spent with detailed descriptions of Denna either torturing or raping Richard, or sometimes both at the same time. For instance, the time they kiss with the Agiel held between their teeth. And the bit where it was implied that the Agiel would be used as a sex toy. There's a whole lot of really truly dreadful parts that I could quote here, but the thought of having to read them again and then type them out is just too much. Let's just say that Richard is horribly tortured and is in dreadful pain. For once, I empathise with him.

Along the way, Denna also lets Princess violet use the Agiel to torture him, but he somehow manages to break free and kick her, breaking her jaw and making her bite off her own tongue.

Then there's another Mord-Sith, Constance, who helps to torture Richard but doesn't try to have sex with him. Because she hates men, see. Only women who hate men wouldn't want to have sex with Richard. In fact, she hates men so much that at one point she grabs him "between his legs" and threatens to "alter [his] anatomy" in a way he won't like. This is the second time in the book someone has threatened a penectomy. Maybe I should start keeping a running total of that along with the cannibalism total.

We also learn more about the Mord-Sith, and how they are trained from when they are young girls. To be precise, only the sweetest and most compassionate of young girls are selected to be Mord-Sith. I'd tell you why this is, except I'm not sure it was ever mentioned, and I don't want to go back to check because that would mean reading more of this bilge. Then they are tortured until they are broken and will do whatever their torturer asks of them. Then they must sit and watch while their mother is tortured to death. Then they are forced to torture their own father to death. Please feel free to make up your own snarky commentary about how unutterably ridiculous this is. Or just sob in the corner, that works too. (I chose option b.)

When he learns this, Richard develops a bad case of Stockholm syndrome and starts feeling sorry for Denna. This is only exacerbated when Constance narks on Denna to Darken Rahl for not torturing Richard hard enough. As a punishment, Darken Rahl gives her a stern talking to, a written warning, and docks her pay by half for the week. Oh wait, no. He tortures her gruesomely. I always get those two things mixed up.

Along the way Richard is also taken to the People's Palace, the seat of government of D'hara. Here he learns that everyone in D'hara must say their devotion, several times a day, at set times, while kneeling with forehead to the floor, repeating over and over:

"Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. In your light we thrive. In your mercy we are sheltered. In your wisdom we are humbled. We live only to serve. Our lives are yours."

If I were feeling charitable towards the author, I might not assume that this was a deliberate parody of the Salah (Islamic ritual prayer). However, I'm not feeling charitable, so that's what it looks like to me. So we're now facing Nazi, Communist Muslims.

Finally, after Richard is completely broken, utterly devoted to Denna, and willing to do whatever she says, he is taken before Darken Rahl to answer some questions. Rahl wants to know all about the Book of Counted Shadows, the magic book that Richard memorised which contains instructions on how to tell which Box of Orden is which. Richard starts to recite the book, up until he gets to a part that mentions Confessors, which all of a sudden reminds him of Kahlan. The power of twue wuv again snaps him out of things and he is no longer broken. You see, when he first started being tortured, he partitioned his mind. His dignity and self respect were put away in a little ball at the back of his mind, then he let the rest of himself be broken and... blah blah etc. Rahl is very impressed by this, of course.

Richard and Darken Rahl then proceed to have a little chat, during which Rahl makes a concerted effort to ignore as many ites as possible from the evil overlord list. Plus some stuff that didn't even make it onto the list because it's too stupid even for your average stupid evil overlord. First, he tells Richard that George Cypher is not actually his real father (*gasp*), then he says that someone has betrayed Richard's group so he will soon have the final Box of Orden (*shock*), and then he reveals that he already knows which is the Box that will kill him (leaving only the omnipotence box and the destroy the world box), and that because of that, he's confident that Richard will tell him which the right box is.

Then, he lets Richard go. He's so confident that there's nothing Richard can do to spoil his plan, that he figures there's no point in holding him hostage. He'll just let him go about his business, then he's sure he'll come back on his own in a week to tell him which box to open. That's item 11 on the list! He does however cast a spell on Richard to make sure everyone who sees him will perceive him as an enemy, but even so. Then, just to make matters worse, he also lets Richard have a horse. Then as his piece de resistance, he also gives Richards hints about how he can kill Denna by using a type of magic he wasn't familiar with.

Honestly, what sort of Evil Overlord teaches the hero the magic that he can use to kill his own loyal lieutenant? The answer: a deeply, deeply stupid one.

So, Richard goes back to find Denna, and he kills her with the power of love. No, really. See, the Sword of Truth's magic has two sides to it. There is the anger, which we know already, and then there is also a side of the magic which pertains to love an compassion. We didn't know about this side because no seeker had ever managed to use it before, but Richard is Special, so he figures it out, as is foretold in prophecy. And since he hadn't used that magic before, Denna didn't have control of it, so he was free to use it as he wished.

There then follows a very "touching" scene in which Richard and Denna talk about how he's going to kill her, and how she's very grateful for it, and she's stripped naked in preparation for him killing her, and she helps him out by positioning the sword over her heart, and he calls her "my love" and they kiss as he kills her and OH MY GOD WHAT AM I READING?

She also gives him her Agiel, which he gladly takes, as a memento of his time being raped and tortured.

As he is leaving, he runs into Constance, and then forgives her too, because that's what heroes do kills her in cold blood and with a sneer, because that's what Richard does. Forgiveness is for losers. (Serious moment! I'm not saying that it's automatically right to forgive someone who tortures you. I am saying that murdering them when you don't have to and having no second thoughts or remorse over it and sneering at them as you do so is not something that's particularly heroic.)

As he is leaving, he is racked with doubt over who has betrayed him. Because Darken Rahl is so trustworthy, of course. Now, I don't actually remember who it was from when I first read this, but personally, my money is on his brother, the politician who banned fire right at the beginning of the book. I don't know about you but I find that just a little suspicious.

Anyway, his doubts are quashed when he talks to a D'haran guard who tells him not to take a certain path because that's where Darken Rahl keeps his dragon (not interrogating your prisoners near your inner sanctum is #10 on the evil overlord list). Obviously, the only choice for Richard is to go and borrow the dragon for a little while. And the only choice for me is to go and bleach my brain.

Never let it be said that I'm not willing to give credit when it's due. There was actually a sequence in these chapters that I quite liked. Fortunately/unfortunately (delete to taste), that's only one bit, and there's plenty of vile horribleness here too. Let's start with the good bit though, shall we?

Here, we go to the city of Tamarang, where we meet Queen Milena, her young daughter Princess Violet, the court wizard Giller, and Violet's playmate, Rachel. Queen Milena is a fairly standard archetypal wicked queen. Her daughter is an equally archetypal spoiled brat princess. Neither of them are interesting characters. There are a couple of noteworthy points here, though. The first is that Milena is currently in possession of the third Box of Orden (the only one Darken Rahl currently doesn't have). As we join them, she is planning to give the box to Rahl in exchange for some sort of power within his new world order. The second is that the Midlands is something of a confederacy, comprising various kingdoms, tribes and republics which are only loosely affiliated. This is to say, while Milena is a queen, she only rules over a small area of the Midlands.

This was not the interesting bit or the good bit. The good bit involves Giller and Rachel. Giller is one of only two wizards left alive in the Midlands (the other being Zedd), since he abandoned his duties and sold his services to Queen Milena instead. However, now he's seen what's going on and that Darken Rahl plans to use the Boxes of Orden, he's repented and changed his ways, and is now working from within to try to undermine the queen, steal her Box of Orden, and take it away before Rahl can get his hands on it. I admit that I'm a sucker for a redemption storyline.

Then there is Rachel, who is nominally Princess Violet's playmate, but in reality is more like her punching bag. Her age isn't stated, that I recall, but she comes across to me as about 8 or 9. Her role in the royal household is basically to always be around when the princess wants to bully someone, which she does by, for instance, making her sleep in a box, cutting her hair to be crooked and ugly, randomly slapping her in the face for no reason, and forcing her to spend the night out in the forest.

Giller notices that because she's the lowest rung on the social ladder, nobody ever pays any attention to her, nor barely even sees that she's there, and realises that she would be the perfect person to smuggle the Box of Orden out of the castle. As such, he befriends her, and tasks her with doing just that, replacing the real box with a fake, and hiding the real box inside a loaf of bread for her to run away with. One line I particularly liked was this one, of Giller explaining things to Rachel:

"That is why you will be safe. Everybody thinks you are a nobody. But that isn't true. You are the most important person in the world, but you can trick them because they don't know."

Anyway, enough the good, now onto the bad. Oh boy.

For instance, we learn that Darken Rahl is actually Stalin, and that in his alliance with Tamarang, he is forcing communist ideals upon them. A farmer and good free market capitalist complains about this to Queen Milena:

"Isn't it odd that the people who tell me how we are all to be the same under the alliance with Darken Rahl and do no work other than to divide up the fruit of my labors, are all well fed, and warm, and have fine clothes on their backs. But my family goes hungry and cold."

Or:

"Odd, isn't it, now that all the farmers, the workers in town, are all working for the common good, that there isn't enough good to go around, like there used to be, or enough food."

Naturally, he is sent to Siberia beheaded for his insolence.

Of course, Rahl isn't only Stalin. Oh no.

See, the people of D'hara are all blonde-haired and blue-eyed. And Rahl himself is a vegetarian ("I don't approve of butchering helpless animals and then consuming their flesh" he says). Well, mostly a vegetarian. He will eat human flesh when he has to, as part of his evil hell rituals, but he doesn't enjoy it. He'd much rather be eating turnips. Let's see: evil dictator, people with blonde hair and blue eyes, vegetarian... that seems familiar somehow. Now where have I heard all that before? Oh right! Hitler! Darken Rahl is Hitler! And Stalin! Darken Rahl is Hitler and Stalin. I can only assume that these oh-so-subtle allusions are there just to help us realise that he's evil, in case we hadn't realised from the rape, murder, child abuse, and dark rituals.

Meanwhile, Richard and Kahlan are going to visit Shota. On their way, they meet a strange man who says to them, "My old friend, the wizard, sent me looking for you." Naturally, this makes Richard trust him implicitly, because the old wizard must be Zedd, and any friend of Zedd's must be a good person, right? While you facepalm at the stupidity, I'd like to remind you that this is the Seeker of Truth, supremely gifted in telling what is true from what is not. If you want to take a moment to sob over this then that's OK. I'll wait.

Amazingly, the man actually turns out to be some sort of monster who was only pretending to know Zedd (*gasp!*) and while Richard does manage to figure this out eventually and make his escape, the distraction allows Shota to capture Kahlan.

Fortunately for Richard, he quickly meets Shota's companion (which I keep reading in the Firefly sense of the word and then bleaching my brain), Samuel. Samuel is a former Seeker, except he was corrupted by the Sword of Truth, and he is now Gollum. Corrupted appearance, obsession with the magical item, it's all there. We also learn that the same thing will happen to Richard in time, and that Zedd knew this butchose not to tell him, because he's a real winner.

Samuel takes Richard to Shota, who turns out not to be evil after all. She's not exactly a paragon of shiny goodness either, but she's not evil. She tells them that Queen Milena has the last Box of Orden, on the very sensible basis that if Darken Rahl gains complete power over the world, he'll kill her too. She also prophesises two things to Richard. The first is that Zedd will some day attempt to use wizard's fire on Richard, and the second is that Kahlan will use her power on Richard.

This sends Kahlan into a depressive funk, because she's distraught that she might use her powers on her twue wuv, so she decides that she'd be better of dying instead. She asks Shota to kill her, but she won't because she promised Richard she wouldn't. Then she asks Richard, who won't because of the whole twue wuv thing. So then she tries to kill herself, but Richard stops her.

They leave Shota and head to Tamarang, except Kahlan keeps trying to kill herself over the next few days, and is only prevented from doing so by Richard keeping a constant vigilant eye on her. Eventually, though, he loses his temper, calls her a traitor, and tells her to go away and let some gars (a type of monster) kill her, because she might botch it if she just tried to kill herself with a knife (down not across, Kahlan). So, she leaves him and he "cried as he had never cried".

The next morning, she's back and apologising to him for being so stupid. Which is a relief, as I'd have hated for there to be any real sort of build up of tension or anything like that. She also decides that it's time to finally tell her about her magic powers.

She is a confessor, which means she has an innate magic which is a part of her and she couldn't get rid of it even if she wanted to. She can unleash the power by touching someone, and then exercising an act of will. Or, to be more precise, it is an act of will to hold in the power, which confessors are taught to do automatically at all times, and to unleash the power, they merely have to stop willing it so.

Ah, but what exactly is the power? To quote Kahlan, it is "the power of love". Once touched, a person will lose all sense of self and become completely devoted to the confessor in all ways, doing everything the confessor asks. This is permanent and irreversible. It will work on everyone human, with the single exception of Darken Rahl, who is protected by narrative necessity the magic of Orden. It is so powerful that one time, a man who she had touched asked Kahlan what she wished and, when she told him she wanted him to die, he dropped dead on the spot.

We also learn about the status of the confessors in the Midlands. They are used as part of the criminal justice system. If someone is condemned to death, they will be touched by a confessor, who will order them to tell the truth about what happened. Since they are incapable of lying to the confessor, they will confess if guilty (hence the name), and if they aren't guilty, then by saying as much, they'll let everyone know that the true criminal has gone free. As the ultimate arbiters of truth, confessors are, like seekers, above the law, and rank higher than even a queen.

In the Midlands, a woman's social status is reflected in the length of her hair. A commoner may only have short hair, nobles longer, a queen longer still, and a confessor longest of all. Having hair longer than your status allows is a serious crime, which is punishable by loss of status. Exactly how they punish people who have no status to lose in the first place, is not specified, so feel free to make something up for yourself. For some reason, I keep thinking it should involve frogs. Maybe this just isn't silly enough for this world, though.

Anyway, one result of this is that confessors are always instantly recognisable by their long hair. Many of them resent this and want to lead normal lives, which leads onto a second part of a confessor's magic. A confessor may not cut her own hair, and will experience excruciating pain if she ever tries. Yes, you did just read that right. They are magic women who cannot cut their own hair. And apparently they've never heard of hats.

While you're trying to get your head around that, I'll turn it into a quick one-two punch by telling you another thing about confessors. Whenever they orgasm, they lose control of themselves and release their power into whomever they're having sex with, whether they want to or not. So, no sex for confessors except with mindless zombies who are utterly devoted to them.

Of course, this would mean that they'd be perfectly free to have crap sex of the "lie back and think of the Midlands" variety, which I presume is common given the general attitude towards women in the book, but this isn't even touched on. We certainly can't be having accurate or nuanced portrayals of female sexuality now, can we?

You'll also notice that I've only referred to female confessors. This is not because male confessors can't exist. Oh no. Any child born to a confessor will also be a confessor, regardless of gender. Male confessors, however, are dangerous, because they are corrupted by the power and use it for their own personal gain (for rape, mostly) because men are like that, see. According to Kahlan "for some reason, it takes the unique compassion of a woman to handle the power, to be free from its corrupting influence." Please excuse me while I go and throw up.

So, whenever a male confessor is born, his mother will order his father (who will do anything she says) to strangle him immediately, because he might turn out to be evil if he grows up. Of course, the wizards who created the confessors in the first place had the foresight to add anti-haircutting charms to the magic, but didn't have the foresight to stop this murdering of babies. And now I need to go and throw up again.

As they carry on to Tamarang, Richard and Kahlan just so happen to run into Rachel, running in the opposite direction. Hurrah, what a stroke of luck for them to have found the last Box of Orden with so little effort! Unfortunately, they don't know she has the box, an she runs off again, because she's scared of Kahlan's long hair (having been abused by the long-haired Princess Violet). Shucks. They contemplate going after her, but they decide that going to find the Box of Orden to stop Darken Rahl is more important. Shucks again.

They are just talking about Zedd, when this happens:

"As if bidden by her words, the old man, white hair in disarray, strode into the circle of light, stopping on the other side of the fire, hands on his hips, his robes looking a little tattered."

Yes. "As if bidden by her words". Sorry, but hanging a lampshade on that doesn't make it any less cheesy. Nor does it forgive the abuse of the humble comma.

They then catch up with Zedd, explaining their adventures with the Mud People and with Shota. Throughout their tale, Zedd is mostly reduced to saying "What!" a whole lot, which is actually a good way of making him a more sympathetic character, since that mirrors my thoughts pretty closely.

Zedd also reveals the eponymous Wizard's First Rule to them during this conversation, and it is thus:

"People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want it to be true or because they are afraid it might be true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

He further reveals that this is the first rule because it's the most important, and that it was the reason why ancient wizards created confessors and seekers, to help find the truth.

Of course, we have this rule in the real world as well, where it's called "confirmation bias". For example, Terry Goodkind believes that he has written an epic masterpiece which insightfully comments upon the human condition, and so he will see evidence that supports his theory and ignore evidence that contradicts it. Wizard's First Rule. People are stupid.

[Trigger warning for rape and child abuse.]

I scarcely even know where to begin with this section. For the first time in the novel, we cut away from Richard and Kahlan, and get to spend some time with Darken Rahl. We also briefly drop in on Zedd and Adie, and I think that's a good starting point.

Previously, Zedd had been knocked unconscious in a fight with some monsters from the boundary and was seemingly in a coma. Instead of commenting on the delicious irony of this, given he'd been the idiot who summoned the boundaries in the first place, Richard decided to leave him with Adie so she can care for him as he recovers. As such, Zedd awakens in the company of a woman he's never met before.

His first words upon waking are "Who are you?" which are reasonable. His next sentence is "How many meals have I missed?" He does like his food does Zedd. His next sentence, to my horror, was "You are a fine-looking woman" which was quickly followed by taking Adie's hand and kissing it. Creepy little sod. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate people who are up front with their feelings, but if anyone said to that as their third sentence after meeting me (and before anything like "thank you for helping to save my life") I'd probably want to kick him in the nads.

It gets worse, though. Within a few minutes, he's suggesting that they use his wizard's rock together. And of course, as everyone knows, wizard's rocks are far better naked. Yes, folks, Zedd is coming onto a woman he only met a few minutes ago and suggesting that they get naked together. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

My general opinion that Zedd is a real winner is furthered in one of the sections with Darken Rahl. See, in the war that led up to the boundaries being put up, Zedd killed Panis Rahl, Darken's father, with wizard's fire. (Seemingly everything wizardly has to carry an appropriate name in this world.) This is fair enough, since Panis Rahl was by all accounts a complete dick. However, at the time that he killed him, Panis Rahl was apparently standing next to his son, Darken, who was only a young boy at the time. The wizard's fire splashed over to him causing him excruciating pain and scarring him for life. Again, Zedd shows no sign of having any remorse for this act, even though it seems to have contributed to turning Darken Rahl into a vicious and sadistic sociopath.

The scar that Darken Rahl carries, by the way, is described thus:

"His skin was smooth and taut over his well-proportioned muscles, except on his upper left thigh, across part of his hip and abdomen, and the left side of his erect sex. That was where the scar was; where the flames sent by the old wizard had tasted him: the flames of the wizard's fire that had consumed his father as he stood at his right side; flames that had licked him also, giving him the pain of the wizard's fire."

There is oh so much that I could criticise with this paragraph, but I will stick to one thing:

Sex.

Nobody uses the word "sex" in this way. Nobody. Ever. Except for bad authors. Here, have some alternatives:

Penis. Cock. Dick. Prick. Todger. Tackle. Nob. Wang. Schlong. Boner. Shaft. Dong.

Look, I could go on, but there's no need to. Just say dick and you won't look like such a dick, OK?

The sections with Darken Rahl are mainly there to demonstrate to us just how very very evil he is. To start with, we see how he treats the people who tend to his father's crypt. For starters, they have their tongues cut out so they can't speak ill of the dead. Then they're held to impossibly high standards. Fresh roses must be kept around the crypt at all times, but if ever a single rose petal falls to the ground when Darken Rahl is visiting, he will have whoever is responsible executed. Even so, he worries that maybe he's being too lenient on them by allowing them to have a swift execution rather than a slow and painful death.

Now, I don't know about you, but this doesn't make me think the man is evil. This makes me think that the man is insane. Literally. If he existed in the real world, I would seriously doubt his capacity to stand trial, because he is quite clearly delusional and in need of a whole team of therapists and psychiatrists.

This is not the limit of his evil, though. He is also a sexist pig:

"Darken Rahl, as had his father before him, considered women merely vessels for the man's seed, the dirt it grew in, unworthy of higher recognition."

Of course, given some of the other sexism we have seen and will see, maybe this is meant to be his redeeming feature. Who knows?

We are also introduced to Rahl's closest friend and confidante, Deminn Nass. Just in case we are in any doubt that he is also evil, we quickly learn that he enjoys raping young boys and watching them squirm. In one particular case, though, Darken Rahl forbids him from raping a specific boy. No, he has a need for the boy which requires he be completely innocent. He needs to brainwash him into hating his family and becoming completely loyal to his captor, at which point he will murder him by force-feeding him molten lead and then using the body as part of a dark ritual that would allow him to travel the underworld.

It's as if he's been reading "Evil Villainy For Dummies" and keeping a checklist of evil things he can do to be evilly evil and then trying to do as many of them as possible in one go. I presume he tried to grow a moustache for twirling but it didn't take. Maybe that's why he's so angry?

Now, back to Richard and Kahlan. As we join them for this section, they're part of the way through a pass through the boundary. Before long, something from the boundary starts to get into Richard's head, convincing him that he just needs to step through to the underworld and he'll find peace. He's just about to do so when he thinks of Kahlan and, of course, snaps out of it instantly. Twue wuv to the rescue once again.

In the process, the two of them get separated, so he starts to follow her footprints. While doing so, he notices a second pair of footprints which are "nearly three times as large as hers". This seemed a little ridiculous to me, so I decided to do the maths. Let us start by assuming that the footprints belong to a very large man. The world's largest feet are 38cm long, so let's go with that. Let's also be generous and assume that "nearly three" here actually means that they're two and a half times the size of Kahlan's. That would make Kahlan's feet, at most, 15cm long. That's around about a child's size 7 in the UK or the USA or about a European size 25. From this, I conclude that one of the following must be true:

1. Kahlan has a strange growth disorder that only effects her feet.
2. Kahlan's culture practices feet binding.
3. The other man was wearing comedy oversized clown shoes.

Personally, I'm choosing to believe option 3.

[Edit: It was pointed out to me in comments that a fourth option is that he meant 3 times the area, not three times the length, which would be much more plausible.]

As well as being a clown, the man turns out to be an assassin, and when Richard catches up to them, he's trying to kill her. Naturally, he takes out the Sword of Truth and kills the man, giving us a first chance to witness the consequences of killing with its magic.

"The pain whited his vision out. He was blind. Fire burned through every muscle, bone, and organ of his body, consuming him, taking his breath from his lungs, choking him in convulsing agony. He fell to his side on the ground, his knees pulled up to his chest, his screams coming at last in pain now as he had screamed in rage before. Richard felt his life being drawn from him. Through the anguish and hurt, he knew that if this went on he wasn't going to be able to retain his sanity, or worse, his life. The power of the magic was crushing him. He could never have imagined that this level of pain existed; now he couldn't imagine it ever leaving. He felt it stripping his sanity from him. In his mind, he begged for death. If something didn't change, and quick, he would have it, one way or another.

"In the fog of agony, a realization came to him; he recognised the pain. It was the same as the anger. It coursed through him the same way as the anger from the sword. He knew that feeling well enough; it was the magic. Once he recognized it as the magic, he urgently tried to take control of it, the way he had learned to control the anger. This time, he knew he must win control, or die. He reasoned with himself, came to comprehend the need of what he had done, horrible as it was. The man had sentenced himself to death with his own intent to kill."

Of course. Why didn't I realise it was that simple? To use a magic sword, all you need to do is have a morality which has absolutely no shades of grey! An absence of anything resembling mercy and a contempt for due process help as well, apparently.

We are also told, at this point, that the first time he killed with the sword was special. Any subsequent times, he'll be protected by his anger, but for the first time, he had to be subjected to this pain. The sword "tests with the pain, to see who will be the master, who the ruled." I'm not sure what this means, beyond the author wanting to include this scene once but then not having to be tied down by it.

Regardless, they carry on through the pass in the boundary, and make it through to the Midlands. Here they meet the Mud People, who are portrayed as exoticised noble savages. They are called the Mud People because they smear mud over their faces and bodies (the parts not covered in animal skins, anyway) and slick back their hair with it. They also greet each other by either slapping or punching in the face, as a show of respect for the other's strength.

Richard and Kahlan are welcomed as guests, and they ask the Mud People to call a gathering and summon forth their ancestor spirits to tell them where to find one of the Boxes of Orden, to stop it falling into Darken Rahl's hands. They initially refuse because they can't call such a gathering for an outsider, so Richard hatches a cunning plan. He decides that he'll teach them how to make clay roof tiles and that that will make them so grateful that they will make him a Mud Person and then be able to call a gathering for them.

Sadly for him, his plan doesn't work so well. After teaching them to make roof tiles, the Mud People elders are actually pretty pissed off at him. He thinks that his fancy knowledge makes him better than them, they say. He was only teaching them out of self-interest, they say. Why, they even say that the only reason he wanted them to name him a Mud Person was so they could call a gathering for him! How scandalous is that? Accusing him of doing something that he actually did? I don't know!

Naturally, richard goes ballistic at this, stating that he would not mourn the death of the elders who ruled against him when Darken Rahl killed the whole village, because they were fools and deserved to die. Nice bloke is that Richard.

Meanwhile, we've also been learning some of Kahlan's secrets, even though Richard remains ignorant of them. She's something called a Confessor. It's not clear exactly what these are, but they are both respected and feared. They have some sort of power which they can unleash merely by touching people. The exact nature of this power is hinted at, but never stated outright. We also learn:

"Women in the Midlands tended not to like Confessors. They saw them as a menace who could take their men, and a threat to their lifestyle; women were not supposed to be independent."

Maybe I was wrong to dismiss the foot binding theory so easily.

It took precisely one sentence of reading before I started to doubt my decision to re-read and review the Sword of Truth series. The first sentence of the first book is "It was an odd-looking vine." This is not what I consider to be an auspicious beginning.

After composing myself, I carried on, only to find that things went from bad to worse. The first paragraph, in full:

"It was an odd-looking vine. Dusky variegated leaves hunkered against a stem that wound in a stranglehold around the smooth trunk of a balsam fir. Sap drooled down the wounded bark, and dry limbs slumped, making it look as if the tree were trying to voice a moan into the cool, damp morning air. Pods stuck out from the vine here and there along its length, almost seeming to look warily about for witnesses."

I don't know where writers get the idea that this sort of thing makes for effective writing, but I wish they'd stop it. I have seen a lot of trees in my life, and none of them have ever looked to me as if they were moaning. Of course, I've never seen a tree being strangled by a magic vine, so what do I know?

Mercifully, the prose becomes somewhat less purple after the first paragraph, because I don't think I could force myself to wade through 11 pages of that, let alone 11 books.

The book's first ten chapters are mostly filled with what could be called either "world building" or "exposition" depending on how charitable you're feeling. Exposition it is, then. Our main point-of-view character is a man called Richard Cypher, and to start off with, he knows next to nothing about magic or the world at large, so we learn along with him.

The plot can be summarised thus: a humble woodsman (Richard) meets a beautiful woman (Kahlan Amnell) from a strange distant land, saves her life, and befriends her. The woman reveals that the world is in terrible danger at the hands of an evil tyrant (Darken Rahl), and she has been tasked with finding a great and powerful wizard. Only the wizard can appoint the right person to wield the magic sword, and only this person can stop the evil tyrant. So, the humble woodsman takes the beautiful woman to meet his friend, the wise and mysterious old man (Zedd) who has always been his mentor, hoping that he might know where to find the wizard.

Given that you're capable of reading this, I'm going to assume that you have an IQ higher than 6, and as such that you're capable of figuring out that the mysterious old man is actually the wizard, and the humble woodsman is the recipient of the magic sword. So far, so formulaic.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with telling the same story that everyone else has been telling for countless years, so long as you tell it well. The question is, does Goodkind tell the story well? The answer is "ahahahahahahahaha! *wheeze* *gasp* stop it, you're killing me!"

For instance, at the end of the scene where Zedd is revealed to be the wizard, we are treated to the following:

Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander, the great and honorable wizard, stood alone on the wizard's rock his father had given him, and stared out into the night, thinking wizard's thoughts."

Also, he's a wizard. Just in case that wasn't clear. PS, no, really, a wizard!

Or how about this time, when Richard gets angry:

"The same? Have you lost your mind? How could you think we are the same in any way! He craves power! He would chance destroying the world to get it! I don't want power, I just want to be left alone! He murdered my father! He ripped his guts out! He's trying to kill us all! How can you say we are alike? You make it sound like he isn't even dangerous!"

Exclamation! Marks! Are! Fun! I'm trying to imagine an actual person exclaiming that much, and all I'm getting is either a petulant 7 year old, or a person with short-term memory loss who can't remember what they've just said. What I'm not getting is a mighty hero who's about to save the world.

There's also a low-level pervasive sexist background to the whole thing, like the time Zedd says "is it simply your intention to demean me by calling me a woman?" or the way that Kahlan's physical appearance is described in great (and purple: "Her eyebrows had the graceful arch of a raptor's wings in flight.") detail, which isn't the case for the male characters. Please excuse me while I go find some place to vomit.

Or the bit where Richard's brother Michael, a politician, launches a campaign against a nebulous evil that would put the real-world war on terror to shame. No, Michael is eager to crack down on fire, because fire is evil and bad and wrong and can kill people. Or something. It makes no sense to me, but the people in the audience he was addressing lapped it up and didn't heckle him with "what are you smoking, you numpty?" as would only seem natural to me.

Then there's the problem with one of the core concepts that will remain present throughout the series. The position which Zedd appoints Richard to is that of "Seeker of Truth" (Seeker for short), and the magic sword he's given is the "Sword of Truth". The title of Seeker of Truth is a literal one; it implies that the person in question is always looking for the truth. The Seeker is someone who always wants to get to the bottom of a situation and won't stop searching and asking questions until they've found the answer.

We have these things in the real world too, only here we call them "scientists" or, occasionally, "philosophers". While not everyone thinks like this, it's certainly not a rare trait by any means, and yet, for some reason, we're meant to believe that Richard's desire to always know the truth of things makes him special.

This is made even worse when he says things like "Think of the solution, not the problem." as a demonstration of his problem solving technique. I can only presume that he'll shortly be telling us that his biggest flaw is that he's too hard on himself.

There is also a section where Darken Rahl sends an angry mob, complete with pitchforks, to attack Richard, Kahlan, and Zedd. After the attack fails, Richard concludes that Darken Rahl must have known it would fail, and that it therefore must have been designed to lull them into complacency by making them think that Rahl was incompetent, allowing him to launch another attack on them shortly thereafter. As such, they quickly leave Zedd's house, and are able to watch it be destroyed by a fireball from a distance.

I barely even know where to start with this. For one, Darken Rahl is an idiot. No attack at all would have worked better to increase complacency than an attack that was too weak to succeed. For two, you can keep on second guessing like that all night, and get nothing from it but a collection of increasingly convoluted logic. ("So I clearly cannot choose the glass in front you!")

Mostly, though, this is just lazy, lazy writing. I know that it's lazy writing, because I've done exactly the same thing myself when I was too lazy to figure things out properly in a story I was writing. Don't want to actually figure something out for yourself? No problem! Just have your character arrive at the answer by an amazing leap of intuition, and then pretend that it was the only possible explanation all along. Not only does that save you having to present the actual evidence that an intelligent reader might pick up on, but it also makes your character seem smart! Hurrah!

Except it doesn't. It makes your character seem lucky. And given that the character's main defining trait is meant to be that he always seeks the truth, having him jump to conclusions and then get lucky with them just doesn't work. (Unless your name is Arthur Conan Doyle, but shh.)

I'd also like to take a quick look at the nature of the great evil which Darken Rahl is threatening to wield. There is a set of ancient and powerful magic artifacts called the Boxes of Orden. If anyone has possession of all three of the boxes, they may choose to open one. If they open one box, they will die. If they open the second box, they will gain untold power and be able to bend reality with their will alone. If, however, they open the third box, they will destroy the world. The only way to know which box is which is through a set of instructions in a book, "The Book of Counted Shadows". As luck would have it, when Richard was a boy, his father made him memorise the entirety of this book, and then burn the only existing copy. Very convenient.

I'd like you to just take a moment to try to imagine what sort of person could possibly create a magic item of this type? What sort of person thinks, "I know, I'll create a magic box that can make someone omnipotent, but to use it they'll have to solve a puzzle, and if they get the puzzle wrong, it will destroy the whole of creation"? My best working theory is that it must have been a sociopath with a particularly warped sense of humour.

Finally, I'd like to look at the Sword of Truth itself. It's fairly standard, as far as magic swords go. It can cut through anything almost effortlessly, but will only work if the person wielding it believes that the person or thing being cut is evil and deserves to be cut. Otherwise, it will come to an abrupt stop just before the strike lands. finally, whenever you kill with the sword, you will be forced to suffer the knowledge of all your own shortcomings, and also the knowledge of all that was good in the thing that you just killed. The only way to assuage this suffering is with righteous anger, and this anger is necessary, because otherwise the guilt can be crippling, even if you're only killing something like a tree.

A fairly long section is dedicated to explaining this in detail, and I mention it not because I think it's inherently wrong, but because I'm curious how long it will take before this is directly contradicted.