The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon Book 2)

 
#113
Title: The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon Book 2)
Author: D. J. MacHale
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Year: 2003
Genre: young adult, fantasy & science fiction
384 pages

The Lost City of Faar picks up with Bobby's second adventure thwarting the evil Saint Dane, whose goal is to destroy all worlds and all times. This time he journeys to the water world Chloral, where he teams up with a local named Spader and his Uncle Press. Together, they must identify the turning point Saint Dane will attempt to exploit and counter his attempt to throw this world into chaos.

The series' basic tasks, character roles, and terrain are similar to Diane Duane's Young Wizard series. A major difference is the presence of Courtney and Mark, witnesses who are generally removed from the action and only read about it post hoc in Bobby's journal. In The Merchant of Death, they were called upon to perform some important functions for Bobby. In the present volume, they must thwart their classmate Mitchell. Their role in the story is interesting but as-yet underused. I will hope for more involvement from them in the future.

This series has enough to offer that I've decided to keep going, but I have some misgivings about doing so. My concerns are about certain kinds of poor writing, not word choice or overuse of exposition, for example, but lack of internal consistency about the rules of the universe the author has constructed. I can live with the fact that MacHale is no stylist and that the only voice truly characterized is Bobby's. I can live with the idiocy of Mark and Courtney being frightened that Mitchell will betray them to the police and that the police would actually believe him. I can even live with the ferociously clunky ending of this volume, which has its own disturbing problems related to unreliable exposition (not unreliable narration, but actually telling the reader that events happen and then undoing them in a poorly rendered reveal). Rather, I'm talking about instances where an author undoes physics, not in a way that is consistent with the world s/he has constructed, but for authorial convenience or due to oversight. The Lost City of Faar offers several choice examples of both of these inconsistencies. If you're a person who didn't care that Niven's Ringworld rotated backward in the first edition, or about the order in which the spirits of dead people erupted from Voldemort's wand, you won't see what I'm talking about as a problem. If you have to call your friends when Homer Simpson's shirt is ripped in one shot and then suddenly not ripped in the next, heed my words: In order to enjoy the Pendragon series, you must suspend your annoyance. MacHale comes dangerously close to Funke's cavalier attitude in Inkheart and Inkspell, which can be paraphrased (to avoid spoilers) as "Gee! I don't know why that happened when it's never happened like that before and that's not how it's supposed to happen in the rules of this universe, but oh, well!" Travelers can use hypnotic powers of persuasion--except when they can't. Travelers can recognize Saint Dane in disguise--except when they can't. I will spare you my diatribe about "children's literature" that seems to be based on the assumption that children are idiots and that good crafting is not just as important as it is in adult fiction. I'm sure you can imagine how it goes.