Regina's Song (Hardcover)

The plot is much darker than the usual Eddings fare - and their style rises to meet it. If they fall down at all, it is in the conversation pieces between the main characters. As ever it is beautifully written, but reminded me more and more of Polgara and Garion and didn't sit well with the tone and nature of this novel.

I enjoyed the novel - well written, sometimes tense and extremely dark, the Eddings' have shown that they are capable of writing outside their "formula", but it didn't work for me in the same way that The Losers did.

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If you intend to read this book or just hate it when you get too much info on a book you want to read, then stop reading this review here!

I've read some of Edding's fantasy work before and I've found him to be a somewhat immature or underdeveloped copy of Tolkien. However I didn't put much stress on that before since I can appreciate that Tolkien is a master in his genre.

This story, however, made me realize that immaturity was not just a mishap or the result of comparing an average author to a genius. It's something inherent in Edding's writing style. All characters are children in this story. Their jokes are childish and tiresome to read. The main character are not able to handle his feelings for the female lead, and whenever there is even the most remote possibility of an emotional exchange between the two or between the narrator and any woman, the narrator cowardly cuts and jumps to the next day.

At first I thought the narrator was some kind of psychopath, and that something was going on behind the scenes, now, I think it was Mrs. Eddings that would yell "unfaithful" each time her husband got even near anything even remotely sexual with any of the women, unless she, Mrs. Eddings, wrote the damn thing herself.

The big problem is that the story-telling also has a very immature or childish element to it. We get to know who the murderer is on the backside of the book (at least the pocket). And then we get to spend the first 100 pages thinking that this is a book about how to handle the problem that someone close to you is a serial killer... but no, after about 100 pages we realize this will not be the case, the book is really a who-done-it... so we assume there will be a surprising twist making our initial assumption of who is guilty to be wrong. Reaching the end of the book we will, amazed and just a little bit more pissed than average, realize this is not so. We've known who the guilty is from the start, we've never been given any real reason to doubt this initial assumption and in the end we've gained absolutely NOTHING from reading this crap.

Finally I'd like to point out a number of questionable facts. There exists not one single person in the whole of Sweden with the surname Erdlund... however there are plenty of people with the name Edlund... A cop like Bob would probably not be able to keep his job for long, if he goes on ratting about the internals of serial murder cases. And no, it is not a custom for psychiatric professionals to start delegating the work on other people, if there is any profession where ethics are at core it is in psychiatry and going behind the back of a client like the doctor in this book does is not just unethical, it is a catastrophe if the client ever finds out. After all, how are you supposed to build a relationship of mutual trust if one party for sure cannot be trusted?

But the worst misunderstanding of reality must still be Edding's ideas about twins. If you are a twin don't read this book the risk is major that you will put Mr. and Mrs. Eddings on the top of your death list. I am not a twin, and I don't have any twin friends or relatives but I can still appreciate that someone that has an identical twin actually will want to be seen as a PERSON, not just a HALF of a person. I've read blogs and articles by twin's and a number of them kills the myth that twins like to play identity games switching identity with each others, why? Because they want to be seen as a person, a unique person, not just some kind of collective hive mind.

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Secondly the male/female dynamic is, as always in their books, simplistic. The women of the household do all the cooking and even wait on the men, serving the narrator up coffee whenever he walks in the room. The men do all the handy work like laying floors and painting. I like cooking, I admit, but I also like doing things like building shelves and I do have problems with the typical stereotypes that the authors use - they could get away with it in their fantasy novels in a medieval-type society - but this is supposed to be modern day and it just doesn't ring true.

My final gripe is to do with the supernatural elements shoehorned into the novel's resolution. They really felt out of place. While I like reading and writing speculative fiction, this book doesn't really belong in that genre and it felt very much that they introduced those elements merely to pull themselves into familiar ground. It's unfortunate because the book would have been better without.

While many of the other aspects of the book (the handling of the doctor/patient relationship and the behaviour of the police officers as two examples) may be unrealistic, they don't mar the story. This could have been an interesting exploration into the mind and relationships of a very disturbed individual. The potential was there. However in the end I felt let down, cheated out of the resolution that the book deserved. The Eddings, sad to say, just can't do emotional depth, or at least they can't do it well.

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