The Keep (Adversary Cycle)
by F. Paul Wilson
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Book Summary Information
Author: F. Paul WilsonEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-08-01
ISBN: 0765357054
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Tor Books
Book Reviews of The Keep (Adversary Cycle)
Book Review: ALIASES
Summary: 3 Stars
Having seen the film of The Keep first, I came to the book with assurances ringing in my ears that it would be better. At a pinch, I'll agree. The film starts brilliantly and deteriorates about half way through; the book starts very well if not quite so brilliantly and stays good for nearly three quarters of its length, but when the rot sets in it's pretty disastrous rot in my own opinion.
Two aspects of the book stay good consistently. One is the quality of the writing, which is literate, fluent, clear and pitched at the right tone for a narrative of this kind. The other is the characterisation, and I would extend that category even to the fiend inhabiting the keep. This being was not handled well in the film, but here in the book I rather took to him, monstrous foe of mankind though he is. He has real individuality and with a couple of exceptions real consistency, and he conducts some rather intelligent dialogues with the professor who had been summoned to identify him to the nazis. Where he is not quite convincing here is in the strange, and so far as I can see completely unnecessary, little fibs that he tells the professor. Wilson does offer an explanation of why the monster pretends to be afraid of the crucifix when he is really not afraid. I find this explanation somewhat unconvincing, but it's still some kind of an explanation. However why he should bother to lie to the professor about his relationship to Vlad the Impaler, or about who built the keep, escapes me. Above all, what does he stand to gain by telling the professor that his name is Molasar when it is actually Rasalom? If the aim was deception it would not take much of a professor to see through it, and he might have tried a bit harder. This, it seems to me, points up one of the aspects in which both book and film are unsatisfactory, although in opposite ways. The film left too many things unexplained, not really creating a suitable air of mystery but just leaving threads dangling. The book is overly concerned with explanations, letting the tension out of the story because they are rather patchy and prosaic.
I mean - if Molasar/Rasalom is unimaginably old how can he have had a grandfather from Hungary? This might be another of his pointless taradiddles, but I can't help feeling that the author and his proofreaders failed to spot this inconsistency. Again, if his adversary (of whom more in a moment) is equally prehistoric how does he manage to retrieve his magic sword-blade and his stash of antique coinage so readily? They seem to be in concealment shallow enough for random picknickers or even a dog burying a bone to have turned them up accidentally. It all focused my attention on the adversary in question, and the story started to disintegrate from there on. First of all he is a being of untold antiquity from some First Age of Man and his name is Glaeken. However for modern purposes he chooses to call himself Glenn, and Wilson ought to know that if you want some such transcendental being with preternatural powers and a mission aeons-old to be taken seriously you should not call him Glenn, Derek, Terry, Darren or Wayne. What was wrong with, say, Nekealg?
It all starts to go to pot from here on. A 'love-interest' is introduced between Glenn and the professor's daughter. The latter had had a convincing role, integrated with the plot generally, up until now, but we are suddenly introduced to her specially alluring physical attributes as being parthenos admes, virgo intacta, at age 31. My own experience of women in this category is small and mainly unfavourable, but even leaving that aside the sense of this depiction is just titillation, if you will forgive the expression. The rest of the plot, which in the earlier chapters had been distinguished by a real atmosphere of morbid tension, descends into reach-me-down situations. Deathless survivors and some supposed First Age are commonplaces, such as McLeod. Goodies and baddies with transcendental Powers battling for the future of humankind were the stuff of my son's reading-matter at age 7 and probably dominate many computer games a quarter of a century on.
The setting in nazi-occupied Romania is brilliantly effective, but I should not bother looking for anything so literary and upmarket as allegories in this story. The nazis and WWII are simply a backdrop, although an inspired one. The setting in the keep has Lovecraftian overtones (e.g. The Shunned House), and there are references to his old favourites the Book of Eibon and De Vermis Mysteriis, but Molasar/Rasalom reminds me mainly of Tolkien's Sauron with his mission to 'in the darkness bind them'. This is where the story has gone wrong. The start was superb - atmospheric, tense, grim and magnetic, and the narration was kept going very skilfully through situations that in the hands of a lesser storyteller might have become repetitious, until Glenn drops in with his tools of different varieties. It then becomes fairly standard beings-with-powers fare with bodice-ripper sequences thrown in to attract a wider readership, all with a second-hand feel to it after that fine and original start, and with a final epilogue that is quite the most horrific thing in the book, albeit not intentionally so.
It's enjoyable, I don't deny. I wonder what the talented Dr Wilson could really produce if he felt like raising his game although doubtless lowering his royalties in the process.
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