When I first started reading this book – which I’ve had in my possession for a few years – I thought it was pretty good – not spectacularly well written, but journeyman-like. Then I kept reading, and it got worse and worse, and worse.
Taliesin is the first book of the Pendragon Cycle, a re-telling of the Matter of Britain – although Arthur apparently doesn’t turn up until the third book. Taliesin (pronounced tal-i-ESS-in), the historical figure, was a renowned Dark Age Welsh bard, some of whose supposed works survive in The Book of Taliesin.
The story of this volume is Y-shaped – two plot threads slowly come together about halfway through. One concerns Charis, an Atlantean princess and her escape from the doomed continent. The other is about Elphin, a young Celtic lord who discovers the baby Taliesin wrapped n leather in a weir. The whole book constitutes the story of Taliesin’s life.
As I said, it started off promisingly. Actually, I always found Charis to be quite uninteresting – she was little more than a mopey teenager. Elphin, I found much more sympathetic – as an unlucky youth, his discovery of the apparently magical baby and his marriage to a similarly ill-starred woman, turns his life around, and I actually found it quite moving. As soon as Taliesin becomes a man, however, the now Lord Elphin pretty much drops out of the narrative.
The more I read of this book, the more its flaws became apparent. The characters are quite two-dimensional – Charis is a starts off as a mopey teenager, and turns into a mopey adult with mad ninja skills from her years as a bull-dancer; Elphin is essentially the perfect man – there is absolutely no evidence for his lack of luck apart from what the narrative tells you; a minor character, Morgian, Charis’s half-sister, is evil-for no better reason than that’s what the plot requires.
It’s also full of clichés. When Charis realises Atlantis is doomed, no one believes her – of course. When Morgian intercepts messages between Charis and Taliesin and substitutes her own, no one thinks to double check. When Princess Charis and Prince Taliesin decide to marry, their previously chummy fathers can’t handle it.
Worse than all this and the various extremely convenient reversals and turns of the plot, is the writing – it’s always the writing. It reads like it was never edited. These days, books don’t get effectively edited because publishing margins are so tight and editors are over-worked – Taliesin was published twenty-five years ago, though. The descriptions are adjective-laden – and they’re always the obvious adjectives. And the book, while not being a massive doorstop of a tome, is still too long; it’s full of passages – whole chapters – that don’t advance the plot and just aren’t interesting. Here’s one low point of the text:
The hours passed one after another as the sun made its slow way through the dull, cloud-draped sky. Charis remembered nothing about the rest of the journey, except the deepest deadliest pain she had ever known and the darkest, emptiest, silence that received her heart’s anguished cries. She moved as in a dream, achingly slow, burdened with the most enormous weight of mind-numbing grief.
There’s really not much more to say about this book after that.
Captain Maybe 
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