The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

One a panel at a convention a while back, Patrick Nielsen Hayden talked about the difference between “plot” and “story.” I won’t try to give his denition here – this was a while ago and I don’t remember all the details – but instead give my approximation. Plot is the structured storyline, leading to a definition end, and often having a form that English teachers like to draw in class. Story is all the incidents that happen. Some very good novels – Don Quixote comes to mind – have very little plot but lots of story. Patrick Rothfuss’s first novel, The Name of the Wind, is likewise full of story, but with little structured plot.

The story is told as a story within a story. Kvothe, pronounced like “quothe,” somewhat of a legendary character (perhaps a hero, perhaps not), has retired and is now living in hiding as an innkeeper. Only he and his servant Bast know who he is. But he’s tracked down by a traveling scribe who wants to know his story. Kvothe promises to tell him his story over several days. The Name of the Wind (subtitled The Kingkiller Chronicles: Day One) comprises the first day of Kvothe’s storytelling.

Kvothe starts the story with his childhood. As a young boy, he had been part of a wandering group of entertainers. He had a tutor who taught him, among other things, artificing (essentially magic). His father is a singer. One day, when Kvothe comes home from wandering in the woods, he finds that his whole troupe has been slaughtered. The Chandrian, a fairy folk, have killed everyone, apparently because a song his father had been writing told of them. This event becomes the driving motivation in Kvothe’s life.

The young Kvothe finds his way to the nearest large city, where, homeless, he lives by his wits (and petty theft). Yet his aim is to make his way to the university, to get access to the great library, and learn more about the Chandrian. Eventually, he makes his way there, and using courage, bravado, and some keen thinking not only passes the entrance interview but convinces the faculty to charge him a negative tuition for the first term.

He becomes a very good student, though he makes enemies of some of the faculty – and of one of the rich kids on campus. But behind everything is his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. And he does get one more shot before this volume ends.

Weaved throughout the story is his romantic attraction for the beautiful, smart, but flighty Denna (though at times she calls herself several variants of this). He first encountered her on his carriage trip as he headed for university, but he finds her again several times later, and their stories become intertwined. They become close – or as close as she will allow anyone to get to her. There is more here, perhaps, to be told in the next book.

Also weaved throughout the story of Kvothe’s life is music. He learned early to play the lute, and when his parents died, he taught himself to do amazing things with it. His love of music is perhaps the only thing in his life that drives him as much as his desire to learn more about the Chandrian. His ability as a player and his public performances also are important at key elements at major points in the novel.

One strength of The Name of the Wind is that the magic feels real. It’s consistent and it has a cost. There is a low of conservation of energy at work: to heat something up by sympathetic magic requires heat to be drawn from somewhere else. An unwary artificer who tries to draw too much heat from himself rather than an external heat source can cause his body temperature to drop, perhaps fatally. Kvothe makes a mistake early on, and it nearly kills him. Contrast this, say, with the Harry Potter universe, where magic is everywhere, and is used for the most trivial things (e.g., washing dishes) with no real drain on the practitioners. Moreover, in the Potter universe, magic doesn’t seem to have a consistent, defined basis. Rowling invents new things as her plots require them. This makes for an interesting, inventive universe, but one that doesn’t quite feel real. Rothfuss’s universe does feel real, and the magic seems to be bound by a set of rules (and is not overused).

Likewise, the non-magical parts of Rothfuss’s world are well constructed. The city and its underbelly where Kvothe lives on the street are very real, as is the university. At school, students don’t just study artificing, but basic subjects one would expect in school. (By contrast, one wonders how Harry Potter and friends ever learn basic arithmetic, geography, etc. – or even how the muggle world works – when all they ever study are potions, defense against the dark arts, etc.) [A side note: Don’t let my nit-picking about a few things in the Potter universe lead you to believe I don’t like Rowling’s books. I do; all are fun, and a couple are major fantasy novels. But they are not without their flaws.]

The characters – especially Kvothe, who we learn a lot about – are well drawn also, though both Kvothe and Bast still have mysteries behind them that we’ll need to wait for later books to resolve. Kvothe seems very human and very (at risk of overusing this word) real – something that’s very important in a fantasy novel, where we need grounding in reality if we are going to accept the fantastic.

After finishing this review, I looked for other reviews of the novel. I found a number of positive ones, but one I particularly liked was in Strange Horizons by Hannah Storm-Martin (http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2007/06/the_name_of_the.shtml). She calls The Name of the Wind, the David Copperfield of fantasy. I thought that comparison summed up so much about the book that I borrow it here. There are many aspects about the plot, the characters, and even the style that are a bit Dickensian that I thought this a very apt observation. My earlier comment about “plot” vs. “story” also applies here. While some Dickens novels had plot, plot was often overwhelmed by story, and David Copperfield is a good example of that.

I look forward to the next installment, hoping that it can live up to the promise of the first.