I kept hearing raving reviews of "The Name of the Wind". I started reading it and got a couple of chapters in and had no interest in continuing. I mentioned this to my brother and he told me that I had to keep going. So I figured I'd read a bit more and see if there was anything to the book. I just finished it on Saturday and I have to say it is easily one of the best books I have ever read. But, if I had just read the first pages of the book I never would have been hooked.
I felt pretty much the same way when reading it. "The Name of the Wind" is rather unusual as a novel because those first chapters are pretty fundamentally different than the rest of the novel. Not just in terms of plot, but I think also the general tone and style. I don't actually have a count, but I think it's a good 50-100 pages before the novel falls into its rhythm. It's not that the beginning is bad (in my opinion, obviously) it's just that there's a lot to set up and he does so without using a bunch of exposition.
That's really interesting. The first few pages come pretty close to poetry in my opinion.
For me its those interludes that raise TNOTW into a class above the normal Harry Potter Copycat Formula that is so popular now.
I never even considered the possibility that, those bits would be putting people off. It's pretty clear that its those sections were Patrick Ruthfuss strives for perfection, that is taking so long to complete the series. He can churn out pages, once he gets "into the rythm" of more common storytelling.
I should add that I like the other interludes, and now when I re-read that first part I enjoy it. It's just the initial reading of the set up, introducing Chronicler, the stuff with the scrael, etc. I didn't know where Ruthfuss was taking this.
"And, well, I thought. If I have to carry the damn thing, I might as well read it. So I started reading, and there, on page four—of a book that started on page three, mind you, were five bowls of stew."
Absolutely agree and notice a slight pattern with fantasy novels starting with overdone "spooky monster in the woods" setting before getting into anything interesting (like characters and plot). The opening to Game of Thrones is the same. I have to imagine it's their editors asking for something more generically sell-able.
I think it's something different in A Game of Thrones, and it was a deliberate decision of the author. I imagine him going "you see, this opens like the typical fantasy novel, there's some dudes who are likely the heroes or related to them, and there's some monster, and this novel is going to be about them"... and then BAM! -- all those tropes are subverted. The novel is largely about something else, and these were not only not the heroes, but they weren't even important characters!
I think opening "prologue" scenes like this are mostly about priming the audience's expectations. Movies do this too; the story of The Matrix begins with Neo working as a corporate drone, but the opening scene is an action sequence with Trinity getting chased by a police as a promise of things to come. There's value in letting the audience know what kind of story they're in for, especially if you're planning on taking awhile to get there.
Notably, these kinds of scenes aren't there to sell the audience a false bill of goods. Quite the opposite, in fact: the first few chapters of a story aren't always representative of the whole, hence the addition of a prologue to give the audience a sense of what's to come in later chapters.
As an example of what can happen when an author doesn't do this, Dan Wells' I Am Not A Serial Killer is about a teenager who works in a mortuary and investigates a series of brutal deaths around his town, and discovers that the killer is actually a millennia-old monster. The supernatural reveal doesn't happen until halfway through the book, and if you go on Amazon and sort by 1-star reviews, you'll find a lot of them come from people who thought they were reading a crime story and then got upset when they discovered they were reading a paranormal YA novel. When it came time to publish Wells' next book, his publisher told him, "This time, we're putting the monster on the cover of the book."
