Magician’s End (The Chaoswar Saga #3)

A trudging finale to the Riftwar books, that I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

Despite my having read literally all the rest of Feist’s books set in this universe, and having generally enjoyed them despite the increasing repetition in recent volumes… I still couldn’t quite make it to the 100 page mark that I allow even for a book I’m disliking.

The plot is jarringly disjoint. The settings are either given short shrift or are generic as if generated by an automated AD&D description generator. The characters are flat, the dialogue is atrocious, and the Feist’s thing with recycling character names and lineages has grown threadbare to the point it’s worn through. “I’m named the same thing as character from 3 series ago, but I’m the second cousin twice removed of the count of the king of the other city but not in the line of ascent, I’m my own person!”

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the author had passed and this book had been assembled from his discarded drafts, with the dialogue subbed out to a middle-school English class.

I’m somewhat surprised at the high review rating here, I suspect it’s just respect for the author’s final work in this series? The quality of his work has been on the decline, and I suppose that makes this painful trudge a fitting ending. Even as a fan, this isn’t worth your time. Not Recommended.

It’s astonishing that someone could write such a beautifully realized fantasy novel and touch on such themes as: what is life and death? Who are the gods? And why is there a universe to begin with? There is much thoughtful wisdom here and amazingly it is all woven naturally and seamlessly into a great adventure in a world with depth and fully realized characters who always seem vivid and real. Raymond Feist is an artist with words. Very quickly you find yourself drawn in through and beyond the sentences you see… and deep into the world he has created. If you haven’t read Mr. Feist’s other books do yourself a favor and begin at the beginning with Magician: Apprentice and prepare yourself for a unique and spellbinding experience.

I enjoyed Magician’s End, and, unlike many books, it left me with a lingering melancholy, and satisfaction born from saying goodbye to a series that has been with me for most of my life. It is absolutely, obviously worth purchasing and reading if you have been following the series. However I am going to try to avoid the nostalgia trap that a lot of the 5-star reviews are falling into and give the book a modest, critical review.

First a thought to editing, which has been a problem in the last few books of the series. There are portions of the book where the author seems to repeat himself, saying much the same thing again in a few paragraphs as though for the first time. Now I can’t be sure that this is not intentional repetition, but either way it seems like the book would have benefited from a tighter editing process.

As with the books immediately preceding it, Magician’s End is essentially two different stories that don’t touch each other closely enough. While the political B-plot is highly predictable, and it could be argued that the new generation of conDoin characters are a bit shallow and repetitive, it does add something worthwhile to the final chapters of the book. Magician’s End does mirror Magician in many respects, and in that regard the new conDoins do their job, remind you of the conDoins who came before, and allow you to imagine what the Kingdom’s future might be.

Now I reach two problems with this part of the story. One – While I do feel that the end of the political B-plot was a worthwhile addition to a story intended to bookend the original Magician, the process of getting there, the civil war story, is not compelling. The battles themselves are relatively petty and you could be forgiven for skimming them. The civil war never really escalates to the point where you take it seriously. It seems like a story told not for its own sake, but to serve as a diversion to break up the waiting, dialogue, and whimsical contemplations on the nature of the universe found in Pug and co’s story with a bit of action. Two – this borderline-interesting diversion dominates the early- and mid-book, devouring page after page that might otherwise have been spent enriching Pug’s final adventure. While I did enjoy elements of the political story, it just isn’t relevant enough to what happens in the rest of the book, or interesting enough to stand on its own merits. This should have been a different book, written for its own sake, instead of cluttering up Pug’s last hoorah.

The primary plot, the activities of our spell-casting adventures trying to save the world, suffers from the fact that it only reclaims its ownership of the narrative towards the end of the book. Much of it is comprised of contemplations and speculations on the nature of the universe. Which is fine; you expect that from Feist, particularly in his last novel. Still I can’t say that it worked well for me. You could make a passable drinking game out of taking a swig every time Feist describes someone “grinning”, wider and wider, at some new abstract metaphysical hypothesis while the fate of the universe hangs in the balance. Part of the book feels more like a wacky philosphy club’s field trip than what you would expect in such direly serious circumstances. I don’t really begrudge Feist his pages spent talking about how the universe works, though I do find it to be a touch too close to being purposeless whimsy at times, but the book would have benefited from Pug and company actually doing more prior to the last few chapters. And for all the time spent discussing the nature of the universe, many of the questions that I’ve been carrying through the series were dismissed with repeated assertions that “we can never know X” or “we may never understand Y”. So in effect the narrative answers many of the small questions that I never cared about, while answering relatively few of the big ones that I did. Should I ever reread the series start to finish, I can tell that continuity is going to be an issue.

One of the things that works well in the book is that the author does contrive an excuse to briefly bring back certain characters from earlier in the series. Unfortunately, we only get a few instances of this. If not for the massive diversion of the political plot, this could have been much better exploited to encounter many more important characters from the history of the series, both for the nostalgic value and for the very practical purpose of helping to piece together a sense of continuity between all the different whack-a-mole incarnations of “the Enemy” and the great cosmological conflict that we’ve encountered in the series.

My final critique is perhaps as much a critique of the series as with Magician’s End, though it does apply to this book. Feist has become a bit of a tease, when it comes to destruction and upheaval. For many books now, he has set up very compelling story points, usually in the last chapters of his books. Whether it is demon legions or Keshian invasions or an awakening Draken-Korin, Feist has always been good at ending a book with the suggestion that the events of the *next* book will blow you away, but when that story arrives, it is an anticlimax. Feist introduces massive ideas with potentially world-shattering consequences, but they get resolved too cleanly and too neatly by his team of magical protagonists, with the world at large often not noticing. Magician’s End is really the ultimate example of this. The ultimate conclusion to the ultimate battle with the ultimate threat is contained, even literally, to an isolated bubble. The political plot plays out, with its characters barely being affected by the conflict that the series has been building to for decades. Again, the fact that two fairly unrelated stories had to coexist here leaves precious little room for climactic events. Feist seems to have run out of space, and shoehorned in a sort of whimsical last-minute cataclysm at the end, as if to mitigate the fact that the great conflict never really reached climax and spilled out into the world, but it is a poor substitute.

The book does do many things right, however. Feist gives you a very satisfying few chapters at the end to say goodbye to his characters, his kingdom, and his world. It is probably a shameless exploitation of the reader’s sense of nostalgia, but it works well. There is also some genuinely beautiful writing to be found; some of the best, I think, pertaining to Tomas. While, yes, there are a lot of things that could have been improved, and the contents of this book would have been better delivered in multiple, more focused volumes, Magician’s End achieves what it meant to achieve. For all the criticisms I might have, Feist has achieved something tremendous in his years as an author, and if not every book measured up to his best work, that is an acceptable price to pay for the speed and regularity with which he produced new installments. If you have followed Feist’s work, Magician’s End is certainly a worthwhile read.

I started reading Feist when a friend lent me the Wurts and Feist trilogy

The Complete Empire Trilogy: Daughter of the Empire, Mistress of the Empire, Servant of the Empire

at school twenty years ago (he has never returned to being as entertaining as those). I think the only reason I keep on reading them is habit as the quality has gone off a cliff over time. The grammatical errors in his books are embarrassing, but his last work (

A Crown Imperiled (Chaoswar Saga)

) even had the wrong characters doing the wrong things.

This final volume was less awful: the characters were right and, apart from repeated failures on tenses, the grammar was better; the constant thanks to editors in his books has often seemed ironic. I enjoyed the sense of drama and confrontation and having grown up with Pug was touched by his ending.

I was unimpressed by Feist’s foray into metaphysics: the importance of the One felt like half-baked Pythagorean or Neo-Platonic numerology and lacked any real meaning. I was happy in

The Complete Riftwar Saga Trilogy: Magician, Silverthorn, A Darkness at Sethanon

when we fought the Enemy/Valheru and their minions, I accepted their turning out to be a tool of Nalor, I was horrified by the angelic army of A Crown Imperiled, but to now be given yet another level was bizarre.

The sense of closure and of things coming full circle was managed with all the subtlety of a blunderbuss: “my friends call me Pug” oh Lordy Lordy Lordy

Perhaps the truth is I should have stopped after the fabulous first series (Magician, Silverthorn, Sethanon) and never allowed my adult self to continue this.

Story is mostly what you’d expect from Feist. I do feel he has lost his way a little with his later books. His early stuff like Farie Tale is simply superb and I’m a big fan of this series, but he does seem to be struggling for ideas a little. Still one of the better fantasy authors though, in my view, especially after the loss of David Gemmell.

The story probably just about deserves five stars, but I’ve given it a four as the pages were a little faded so marginally at the lower end of the “very good” condition that was stated. Bit of a bargain in any case.

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