Clouds End

3 stars, Metaphorosis Reviews

Summary
On Clouds End, an island at the edge of the Mist, there's information that a threat is coming, and a group of young folk sets out to warn other islands, only to find even more danger everywhere they go.

Review
It's no surprise that I'm a fan of metaphor. Metaphors, well deployed, can bring another level to prose, and one reason I like Sean Stewart is because he uses metaphor so effectively. In Clouds End (which is everywhere sans apostrophe), Stewart seems to set out to make the most of his metaphors. Unfortunately, they escape his grasp immediately and irretrievably.

Stewart uses metaphor in two ways here: First, as a central metaphor, which is broadly sea and sailing based, with a lot of knot references. This works, but is often fairly clunky. I'm sure Stewart knows more about sailing than I do, but the references don't come across as either natural or expert. Second, Stewart uses metaphor and imagery as ornamentation, and here's where they escape him – the prose is so rich that it's very difficult to tell what's actually happening. It's a world where metaphor is part of life via the inchoate Mist, where everything is possible and legends come to life. But most of the story happens outside the Mist, in the ‘real' world, and even there it can be a struggle to hang on to more than just the broad outlines of the plot, especially because Stewart seems to abandon so many of its metaphors mid-stream.

The result is a muddle. Interesting world, engaging characters (though the most interesting are not well enough developed), vague and skeletal plot. It's hard to really like as a story overall. It's not entirely helped by an (effectively) epilogue that bluntly says that the big Story is over, and now it's down to daily life – except it's not, quite. I wish Stewart had really committed to that idea rather than raising it and then dropping it for highlights mixed with shards of epic.

I think Stewart is a talented author, but in this book, he doesn't really pull off what he's aiming for. It's a story that's hard to hold on to even while reading it, and, because it's so ill-formed, doesn't stay with you for long.