Terry Goodkind, ‘Soul of the Fire’ (‘The Sword of Truth: 5’ [1999])

Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth was one of the better-selling Fantasy series of the 1990s and 2000s: twenty-one lengthy novels in which the improbably omnicompetent, handsome and upstanding forest ranger Richard Cypher, wielding the magic sword of the series’ title, fights the evil tyrant Darken Rahl to prevent him and his evil minions from taking over the world. Richard is in love with the beautiful female magician Kahlan Amnell, and she with him, but a magic curse means men who have sex with Kahlan die immediately, so the two lovers cannot be together.

I read the first volume, Wizard’s First Rule (1994) soon after it came out, and it did not make me want to read the subsequent instalments—a stew of Fantasy clichés rendered into dreary, flabby prose: a quest, monsters, wizards, fights, this and that, plus the element that Goodkind adds, to make his book stand-out from the rest of the Fat Fantasy crowd: a great deal of sexualised torture and violence. Partway on his quest Richard is captured by a wicked ‘Mord-Sith’ called Denna. She is a sexual sadist and tortures him for what felt like hundreds and hundreds of pages all described in painstaking and indeed painsgiving detail. Months of story-time is given over to it. The torture is designed to break Richard. Richard is unbroken. Later in the story another Mord-Sith tries to rape Kahlan. She overcomes him with her magic, then cuts off his testicles and makes him eat them.

We might call this ‘grimdark’, but that’s not really the flavour of the novel: the world of the text is otherwise entirely derivative of lighter, more brightly-coloured prior Fantasy writing, Richard and Kahlan are utterly upstanding, righteous, uncynical; ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are distinct, exteriorised qualities in this world: there’s none of grimdark’s moral grey areas, none of its realpolitik, or moral pragmatism. The violence in this novel is its own thing, the novel’s kink, the fetish of a writer at once excited and revolted by the sadistic drives he believes to be universals. Goodkind’s hard right-wing political views, his Ayn Rand-inspired beliefs, directly inform the novel: the titular ‘Wizard's First Rule’ (each volume has a different one) is ‘people are stupid’. That's not a summary: it's a verbatim quote of the First Rule. This contempt for humanity, a Randian disdain for the vulgar herd, the mass, the ordinary folk—you and me, that is—licences the intimately-described horrors the novelist inflicts upon the ‘people’, and therefore the ‘good’ violence of men like Richard that counters it.

Anyway: writing a Short History of Fantasy, as I am, I’m going to have to at least mention Goodkind: he sold millions and accrued a huge fanbase. But I’ll be honest, I have neither the time nor the inclination to read each of the twenty-one chunky volumes in turn. So I figured, having read the first, I’d read one from the middle of the series and another from the end, to get at least a sense of how things develop. Since I happen to have vol 5 to hand (I can’t remember when or why I bought it: from Oxfam, according to the price sticker on the cover) I read that.

So where are we? Evil still threatens the three kingdoms of Goodkindlandia, or whatever the realm of these novels is called. But the magical barrier preventing Richard and Kahlan from getting jiggy with it has been overcome, for the novel opens with them newly married and honeymooning in the village of the mud-people (‘his breathing quickened as he clutched her in his powerful arms. She slid her hands across the sweat-slick muscles of his broad shoulders to run her fingers through the thick tangle of his hair as she moaned against his mouth’ etc etc). There’s some business with an evil chicken—a ‘chicken that is not a chicken’ because it is possessed by ‘the chimes’, souls from the realm of the evil dead—and then more questing-about and fighting, building up to a lovingly-described violent massacre of an entire country by the Evil. But what struck me, as I worked through, was not the violence, or the padding, or the weird ungainly structure of the whole. What struck me was the hair. This novel is always mentioning hair, always having its characters playing with their hair or tossing it back or ‘raking’ their fingers through it. It is extremely repetitive, right down to the specific phrasing used. Here’s Richard, our Randian hero:

[19] ‘He took a purging breath as he wiped back his wet hair.’

[48] ‘“The chimes are from the world of the dead,” Richard muttered as he raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[63] ‘Richard paused, combing his fingers back through his thick hair.’

[96] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[110] ‘He wiped hair off his forehead as he peered up.’

[237] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[260] ‘Richard raked back his hair.’

[481] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

[511] ‘Richard swiped his hair back from his forehead.’

[563] ‘Richard wiped his wet hair back from his forehead.’

[596] ‘Richard ran his fingers back into his hair.’

[615] ‘Richard pushed his fingers back into his hair.’

[635] ‘Richard raked his fingers back through his hair.’

It’s extraordinarily lazy writing, quite apart from being cumulatively just immensely irritating: just leave your sodding hair alone, you berk. Kahlan’s long hair always seems to be wet, for some reason:

[6] ‘Kahlan tossed her cloak around her shoulders and then pulled the tangle of her long hair out from under the collar.’

[21] ‘Kahlan dropped to her knees beside Richard, pushing her wet hair back out of her eyes.’

[24] ‘Kahlan gathered her hair in one hand to keep the gusts from whipping it against her face.’

[26] ‘Wind whipped Kahlan’s hair across her face.’

[66] ‘Kahlan hooked a strand of damp hair behind her ear.’

[69] ‘Kahlan wiped wet hair from her face.’

[76] ‘Kahlan … pulled back wet strands of hair.’

[87] ‘Kahlan wiped her hair from her eyes.’

[231] ‘Kahlan pushed her damp hair back over her shoulder.’

[243] ‘Kahlan wound a long lock of damp hair on a finger as she turned her mind to the question … “Right.” Kahlan let the hair go and held up the finger.’

[247] ‘In frustration, Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair.’

[255] ‘Sighing in frustration, Kahlan pushed her long hair back over her shoulder.’

[296] ‘Wearily, Kahlan gripped a handful of her long hair hanging down over her shoulder.’

[482] ‘Kahlan ran her fingers back into her hair, seeming unable to express her reservations and frustrations.’

It’s more than a writerly tic; it’s a kink: ‘sitting close to Kahlan, seeing the lamplight reflect in her green eyes, off her hair, seeing the way her thick tresses nestled in the curve of her neck, [Richard] was beginning to think about weeks before, in the spirit house — the last time he had made love to her: remembering her lush naked body. It was an impossible mental image to forget’ [474]. The last sentence there is ambiguous between: ‘it was a mental image that was impossible to forget’ and ‘it was an impossible mental image, and ought to be forgotten’. Goodkind presumably means the former, but I like the implications of the latter. Lush naked body indeed. 

It's not just Richard and Kahlan: it’s all the characters: ‘Tess, my darling. Your hair looks grand”’ [141]; ‘“Tess, darling, your hair is growing beautifully”’ [146]; ‘“Ah, my dear Teresa, have I yet told you that you look especially divine this evening. And your hair is wondrous.” Teresa fussed with the glittering sequins tied in her hair, aware of envious eyes watching her’ [190].

‘Franca wore her black, nearly shoulder length hair loose, yet it swept back somewhat from her face, as if it had been frozen stiff by an icy wind’ [218]

Magic? Hairspray? That scene from There’s Something About Mary? We may never know.

‘In the dim light, Zedd peered with one eye at his grandson. “But,” he whispered, “were the magic of the gambit moth to fail, for all we know it could very well begin a cascade of events that would result in the end of life as we know it.”’ [48]

The novel does not disclose to us the specific hair-do of the Magic Gambit Moth, which I daresay is a mercy.