[3825] The Iron Century - Chapter One, Part One

Obligatory doing this on a mobile and apologies for all the rot that falls from that sort of thing with also a note that this is not directed for RDR points in critique. Furthermore, a lot of my thoughts about this piece have already been expressed by u/unscientificmethod who even mentioned my doc comment about the word cucked. So, why write this reply, right?

First, I read a start of this story I don’t know how many iterations ago. IIRC correctly, it listed as historical romance low fantasy or something...and read completely differently. This version’s start of establishing these three characters read to me a whole lot stronger and was more engaging AND I really feel like you should hear that from some stranger with no investment at all in you or your piece. SO, as an internet stranger who has read two versions of this, this is a marked improvement.

Second, IIRC English is not your first language, but I could be completely off my rocker when it comes to that as my memory is not what it used to be...but, if I am correct, than this time around I did not notice it as much. However, most of my thoughts when reading did seem to go hyper-specific to certain word choices that read odd/stood out (and not in an interesting turn of a phrase kind of way, but a head scratching).

Third, from this I think is my biggest regret while reading that piece (if that is the correct way to put it). Staritzky should be speaking with a rhythmic flow. HECK, go all out and have his rhymes be in iambic pentameter. His lines suffered from lacking that punch of that natural ebb and flow of iambic feet. You want to go for him having flowery language and really kicking it a notch up—own it. To my ear, his lines read stylized, but not the Shakespearean fool you are going for yet. Make them rhyme and give them a distinct repeating beat. I think this will instantly elevate a lot of his dialogue. If need be, give them it’s own line in verse form. Let him own the page while addressing his audience.

I highlighted in the doc a few words (cuck, stoical) that read too modern/contemporary or off. These were sprinkled throughout the text, but could just be more of a ‘me as a reader.’ I love the word dolor, but automatically go with it into two directions, signs of inflammation (dolor, calor, rubor, tumor) or assume a state of suffering pain. So reading ‘their states of dolor’ reads with that bit of redundancy akin to an ATM machine where the mind knows that’s (automated telling machine) machine. Like stoical over stoic (funny enough inflammation makes me think ulcer versus ulceration, see any difference between the two besides a couple of syllables?), it reads adding extra just for the presence of extra as opposed to enriching the text.

With your particular style and what I see as this text at its highest state, word choice efficiency and fluidity must be on point.

It was an arithmetic easily produced, and it spelled a tragic end for the battle.

I don’t know if this is a mixed metaphor or what, but I froze on this sentence for far too long because of the style of the piece. Arithmetic is manipulation of numbers. Produce goes to product which is multiplication or more numbers. Spelled goes to the thing juxtaposed to arithmetic. It is reading and writing. So numbers numbers words. IDK just me.

Similarly shortly after that line, we get:

brimstone curtain

What is that? Brimstone specifically refers to sulfur. It’s just the older version of that word. Sulfur on a battlefield is gunpowder. I may have missed something, but nothing here read like there was a unit of musketeers protecting the queen. It’s so far all bowmen and pikes, infantry and cavalry. If this is supposed to be a pull toward “fire and brimstone” and concepts pertaining to say the devil/hell etc, I did not follow it that way due to the building of the scene.

I don’t know if these thoughts on the word choices are too much or too specific, but I feel like this version is getting to a point where the characterization and story were working for me so much better than the previous version that I was focusing on specifics.

Anyhow, I hope this helps as just an additional bit to add to what others have said. Sorry it’s not a full all out critique. My brain is scrambled reconstituted eggs and not a nice frittata with leeks, tomatoes, porcinis, and Gruyere.

Or in other words—well done improvement!

Since it doesn't seem that you have any objective questions with this piece then I will give my stream-of-conscience notes while reading:

First, "By dawn they fled" is a boring first line. Especially when you have such interesting language in the very next paragraph. "The sky was like a brimstone curtain" is such an amazing metaphor that I think it'd be worth working into a first line somehow.

"The metals of his suit, now spread across the scarred Earth", an interesting line, but suits of armor were such an expense that most medieval soldiers did not even wear armor in battle. Armor was often a luxury afforded to wealthy knights and for that reason I can't see why a soldier would abandon their armor. I would lamplight this by saying something to the effect of, 'to hasten his plight' or, 'to make himself unnoticed by the Iron Queen or her enemies.' If you'd really like to keep this line in.

"Ritske Pannifs" seems like an anime name. Maybe that's too harsh but that is my read.

In the next paragraph about the Queen, you write that she looks like a gargoyle. I think that that metaphor is sufficient enough. You don't need to add, 'whittled down by rain where she sat perched'. One thing that I dislike about your writing (though, don't take this to mean that I dislike your writing, it is much better than most) is that you tend to draw out metaphors, or generally write in a very verbose manner. It comes off as compensating.

Your fourth paragraph is very good. I would remove "inanimate scene, more fresco than life". This to me is too much, and again, sounds like a writer compensating. (This might be personal taste, it is a good line on its own)

The next paragraph, "While far from the first battle..." This paragraph is awful. Way too overbearing, how it breaks from the objective statement, "yet when the most important battle.." to the more casual "the timing couldn't be any worse", in the same sentence, and then finally the word cucked... absolutely amateur hour. I would stop reading here despite the fact that the rest of this work is actually decent to good.

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The paragraph after that starting with, "And while Staritzky had hopped.." The prose here is good. I can't deny that your prose has some very high highs. What I think this chapter is doing wrong, however, is it tends to over divulge on background matters that do nothing to add to the central drama. That central drama being: Oh fuck, my job is to boost morale but soldiers are leaving. That central drama is an EXTREMELY good premise that is being severely undervalued in order to fill the audience in on pointless backstory. If what you want is to fill us in on backstory then use a scribe, don't use a jester who clearly has a job to do.

To further illustrate my point the following paragraph literally counts out the soldiers. I can see why you think this adds tension, but it really doesn't. If you want the audience to be afraid than use anything besides concrete numbers. Use the sights, sounds, smell, and feel of observing an overwhelming force.

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"hoppity-hopped", please don't. This guy is smart, articulate, and mature, at least internally. I don't know why he would adopt such foolish language to his internal thoughts.

The bulk of your work in the middle is incredible. I would purchase an entire novel of this quality.

My joy stops briefly at, "could they make any push.." "Yes!".. please remove, "Yes!". The next line "briefly" is the perfect answer and much better than having both.

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I disagree with your assessment of what old soldiers would want. Though the language here is very good, I think that practically any man who still fought at old age would do so under principles like stoic attachment to honor, but not because they had a great value of life (unless it was the lives of others. If this is your intention then that's not what I'm getting).

I need to stop my critique here unless it never ends. The bulk of your work is exceptional. If you reply to my comment please send me some recommended reading from your inspirations. All in all I will say that it took some time in the beginning for me to truly enjoy your work. Whether that is just entry fee with your style or the fact of your work becoming more precise and less meandering I cannot say. It was very enjoyable though.

Edit: I now understand that you added, "pointless backstory" so that the japes of the jester would make sense. That said, maybe there's a better way to do it? Maybe not? I don't know, but take that critique with less stock.

It's not a style of literature that I go in for but thought this was really strong. The hard work and patience is evident on the page. Good luck with submissions.

Hey, thanks for sharing and congratulations on being close to done with your first novel! I'm going to concentrate mostly on the POV/narrative voice in this critique, since based on your framing comments that's the most distinctive element of this chapter and this section has to do the job of introducing your reader to the world that you've crafted. Also, I just don't think it's worthwhile offering line edits or proofreading when the novel is still in the draft stage. (But that's a personal belief and no shade to other approaches!) So with that in mind:

This chapter introduces some intriguing conceits and there are a couple of really nice moments in the text as written. Overall, though, I think you're doing too much here.

The concept is strong: I like the idea of one POV that the reader dips in and out of and that's very distinct from the rest of the rest of the novel in tone. I'm also a big proponent of the very baroque narrative style that you're trying on here (Mervyn Peake and China Miéville being two of my all-time greats; Nabokov is also a good touchstone for what you're going for, I think). What these authors all have in common is that they aren't just being baroque for the sake of it but deploying that style strategically to convey to the reader something important about their fictional world or their characters' orientation towards it or (ideally) both. So, with that in mind, what are the sine qua non of your world at this point? What does your reader absolutely need to know in order to orient themselves in the novel that will follow? What information is going to hook them and keep them coming back for more? And then, equally as important, what does your jester character want to reveal? What would he notice and find worthy of remark? Right now, it feels like you're giving me everything in these two circles and some other stuff besides. Limiting your field of narrative vision/description to the intersection of these two circles will make this chapter much more compelling, and the Fool will feel much more vital.

Parts that didn't work for me: There are a couple sections I think you need to substantially rework, trim, or cut all together:

• pages 4-6 are basically a detailed description of the battle, in addition to the Fool's commentary on the various failures and retreats of the infantry, etc. This feels like unnecessary detail and a distraction: why is the court fool a battle tactician? Obviously we know that he's more calculating and clever than he lets on--in the grand tradition of fools everywhere--but that doesn't mean that he ought to be so removed that he can comment with authority on everything. The narrative and the character are both strengthened if you allow him some blind spots and moments of confusion.

• The text of Staritzky's jokes to the infantry as written weren't working for me. We have these riffs on a very Shakespearean form of, basically, dick jokes, accompanied by Staritzky's inner monologue of "oh aren't these crude, this really isn't my best material, it's so plebeian." It might not seem that way, but this scene is really an iteration of telling-not-showing that is just never going to work, IMO. To a modern ear, which associates "Shakespeare" with "fancy," these jokes are just not going to read as unsophisticated. Crude, maybe. Beyond that, you can't make me believe that this audience can't tell a simile from a metaphor but also thinks that "this crown be water to your wrinkled stem" is the height of comedy and telling me that ipso facto requires me to suspend my disbelief. If you want to convey that Staritzky finds the comedy that he's doing demeaning or beneath him in some way, you might think about having him internally monologue his process--e.g. "Caper about from stump to stump, now waggle the marotte as though it's a drooping member, and finish with a punchline..."--and let his commentary make it clear that the comedy he's doing isn't satisfying.

Themes: There are two big themes that I pulled out from this section, along with notes about what was unclear and what did or didn't work for me.

Gold and Iron You establish tension between gold and iron as representative of two orientations towards the world, embodied in Claude-Louise as "Iron Queen." I love this as a world-building conceit. Two things that really worked for me with this binary. 1.) the section on pp 3-4 about how "Art was crude in this century." This section works because it gives us important information about the "Iron Queen" and the "Iron Century": it shows that "iron," in this case, is descriptive of an ideological orientation towards the world. Knowing this made me more intrigued about how deep the affiliation ran. On the next page, you describe the battlefield: "A bare and naked field, dead trees and rotten soil. The Iron consequence." Now I have questions: is the Fool describing a consequence of war? Or an ecological consequence (of mining for ore, perhaps?) 2.) because of this duality, the description of the sunrise as a "golden" sunrise on page 1 really hits in retrospect because I can read that as foreshadowing disaster. That said, that extremely effective piece of lexical world-building flew under the radar until my second or third time through because there was way too much going on in that initial descriptive section.

Also: I think you can be a lot clearer about Staritzky's orientation towards this iron attitude. We get a sense of his contempt as he's capering around for the soldiers, but it's not totally clear to me how much of this attitude is, for lack of a better word, classist. At the end of the chapter, he seems ready to murder his queen himself rather than let her be humiliated and everything that she's built crumble. I don't have enough of a sense of his character by that point in the narrative to understand why he feels so compelled. Regicide is the act of a fanatic or a zealot, a true believer in something. I don't know that Staritzky feels like a true believer in anything at this point: Overall I would describe him as deeply ambivalent about the Iron everything: there are places where he has compassion, where he seems contemptuous, and where he seems compelled. It's not always clear why and when he switches from one to another, and those three affects don't to me add up to someone who would be willing to murder his queen in order to keep her legend alive.

There is so much to like here, and I feel like the bad might just be more of a lack of understanding on my part, but I am a casual reader, so here it is.

At first glance, this definitely comes across as a heavy read. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I did feel a bit overwhelmed after paragraph three, and felt myself trying to gather what was really going on. The reserve camp, the queen, the deserter; all these set the scene nicely. I was lost with the talk of the cuckold and who that might be, and throwing Strenger's name in at this point made it all the more confusing. The same goes for the Queen's full name coming in here, because now it seems like there could be 2 different queens in question.

Then, I start to feel some traction.

Even though Staritzky's verbiage is pseudo-Shakespearian, it's not too hard to follow and gets me into the times. I love this character being the opening POV, by the way. It is refreshing to see a different perspective from what could otherwise be a ho-hum war scene. I'm glad you have him popping in every so often throughout the rest of the book!

One thing that you may want to consider: I don't know what a coxcomb or a marotte is, and maybe I'm in the minority, but I had to look the marotte up. I gathered eventually that a coxcomb was probably that staple jester hat because you mentioned the bells, but it wasn't apparent soon enough to avoid all confusion. The marotte, I had no idea, and the context clues weren't enough for this reader to gather his bearings.

You mention iron quite a bit in this, and it's apparent that there is some symbolic relevance for the Queen's people and their homeland, but maybe thin it out when it's not necessary. Page 6, second paragraph is a prime example. I like the allusions, but maybe there are a bit too many.

Pages 7-12 are great and start to tie in some of that sub-plot about the cuckolding and all that. Could this find its way in earlier? Even the full description of the queen I could go for a bit sooner.

I loved all the conversation between Pannifs and the Queen, and Staritzky's back and forth with her near the end of the chapter. These are great. I like the use of italics throughout, and they might work well as a differentiator for Staritsky's imagination, too (specifically when he's imagining the battlefield).

I'd also love to see that quick moment where Staritsky trips the traitor play out more. Everything else is so detailed, but this fantastic gesture by a character we're still learning about plays out in a line or two. Give me more Staritsky!

All-in-all, I started with a read that I was rather unsure about, and it quickly grew into a story that would have me turning the page to chapter 2. Really, it's just about reforming those couple paragraphs at end of pg 1 and beginning of pg 2 for me. I'm interested to see who the main POV is, too. Hope this helps on any level, and thanks for the great read.