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After a pretty average
opening, a below par second installment, it would be nice to report that the
final part of the Unseen trilogy pulls things round and goes out on a
high.
Unfortunately, the truth is
very different. Not only do Holder and Mariotte not manage to pull the
trilogy round, but they've served up what is undoubtedly the worst entry
into either the Buffy or Angel novels range.
There are problems with
almost everything in Long Way Home, especially the plot and the
characterisation.
As with the first two
books, Holder and Mariotte throw almost every regular and recurring
character still standing at the end of the 1999-2000 seasons, presumably in
the belief that this somehow makes for an epic story.
It doesn't, at least in
this case. In one sense, there's far too much going on, or at least
far too many different storylines, as we flit from one set of characters to
another. However, the authors' main crime is that none of these
strands are interesting, and I found my interest badly flagging with at
least half the novel still to go.
The numerous and lengthy
fight scenes don't help on this score either. You would expect that a
pair of experienced writers would have realised that these don't really work
on paper, yet Long Way Home follows the first two parts of the
trilogy by being simply packed with them. It might have provided
Holder and Mariotte with a handy way of reaching their allotted page count,
but it makes for very tedious reading, as do the scenes involving dragons
and suchlike.
Yet in another sense,
there's not enough going on. Too many characters seem to have been
included simply because it's a crossover novel rather than because the
authors came up with anything for them to actually do - Tara and
Willow mentally hold hands across California while the latter continues her
rise into SuperWitch, Xander and Anya bicker a lot, Giles does virtually
nothing and the less said about the Spike storyline, the better.
Whilst some of this may be
in keeping with the show, it's not particularly interesting, and even the
late arrival of Faith doesn't provide the last half of the novel with the
added impetus that it might have done.
In part this was because
the authors don't appear to particular like the character, but it's mostly
because she was pretty much surplus to requirements. The narrative
gives us a reason why she's needed, but it just seemed like an excuse to
give Gunn and Riley something to do.
If anything, the novel's
original characters are even worse. There's plenty of description
about what people are wearing, but none of them make any real impact on the
reader.
As a trilogy, perhaps Unseen
was doomed to failure, with too many characters to include in the storyline,
but even so Holder and Mariotte could, and should, have done a lot better
than this.
For anyone who's bought the
first two novels, this is a disappointing and boring end to a pretty
uninteresting saga, while those who haven't bought the earlier books would
be well advised to steer well clear of all three.
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