I was about six hundred pages into this book - roughly 75% - when I looked again at the back of the book and noticed the word that I so horribly feared: TRILOGY.

I like Tad Williams. I think he's a lot of fun, and creates fascinating worlds that are well-built, deeply historical and full of complicated characters. But his stories are so. Damn. Long. They require a huge investment of time and energy, and by the end of this book I was mentally editing out passages that could have made it a lot shorter. This book is the reason why I've only read two books so far this month.

Like his Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series, this is an Epic Fantasy, spreading across half a world. The formerly great kingdom of Southmarch is at the northern edge of the world (there's an explanation for that at the beginning), the first target for the very angry armies of the Twilight People, long-term target for the Autarch, a southern god-king who is intent on spreading his rule to the north. King Olin of Southmarch is a prisoner, being held for an exorbitant ransom, which much be met by his children, who are all teenagers. At least, those children who manage to not die, get crippled or go crazy.

Here's the thing: the whole story of Southmarch is enough for a book, facing the invasion of the Faerie army. But no, Tad doesn't want things to be that simple. We have one of the thousand queens of the Autarch trying to escape her matrimonial prison, a Funderling (kind of like a Dwarf, but without all the martial aspects) who gets pulled into the plots of the shadowy folk, unfulfilled romances, demon servants, magic mirrors, underground labyrinths.... There's just too damn much going on here.

His previous mega-trilogies, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and Otherland were long and sweeping, but held together tightly. There may have been dozens of seemingly unconnected characters, but they got connected right quick, and the overall story had an arc you could latch onto for a fun ride. This one is, after 800-someodd pages, still four different stories with minimal connectivity between the major characters. Who are, by and large, not very interesting. They're kind of archetypal end-times high fantasy characters: the princess who wishes she could get as much respect as a man, the prince who goes mad with jealousy and bitterness, the court physician looking into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, the valiant guard captain in love with the princess, the insane god-king and his innocent young "wife" who is very surprised to find out that being married to the absolute ruler of the land isn't quite as much fun as she would have thought.

Tad has done better than this, and hopefully can pull himself together in the future. I'm not sure I'll be following this particular trilogy to the end....