Review: The Part About the Dragon was (Mostly) True

The Part About the Dragon was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A step up - not a big step, but a step - from the usual attempts at "funny" fantasy. Most of these books rely on bad puns, silly names, the highlighting of tired genre tropes, toilet humour, the characters being too stupid to live, and anachronistic references to our world - and all of those things are here, for sure. But what a lot of attempts at fantasy humour fail to deliver is a story that works by itself apart from the comedy, even if the comedy falls flat, and this book does manage to give us that. The characters start out an inch deep and end up maybe two or three inches deep, and the premise - the gap between the PR put out by a bard about an adventuring party's campaign and the reality - goes some way to pull the whole thing together and make it something other than a series of pratfalls and stupid insults.

Oh, the insults. One of the things that didn't work so well for me was one particular form of joke that was used a lot: One character insults another by comparing them to something in their world. The narrator then goes into an often rambling, self-interrupting parenthesis with, typically, one or two additional embedded parentheses, explaining what that thing is and why it's insulting to be compared to one.

It's a pretty widely understood principle of humour that if you have to explain the joke, it's not funny. I think this joke pattern may have been inspired by the Guide entries in the Hitchhiker's Guide books (there's a digression on a very small unit of currency that reminded me of Flainian pobble beads), but the author is no Douglas Adams, and the explanations lack the self-contained charm, clever worldbuilding, and ridiculous humour of the Guide. They're repetitive and not especially imaginative, and, like the bard narrator's self-praise, wear thin, becoming irritating rather than amusing.

I was amused, though, often enough that I debated between three and a low four stars. I'm starting to mark more harshly, though, and really it's a three-star book (most similar books being, for me, two stars). Enjoyable enough as a distraction, and a good palate-cleanser after a very serious epic fantasy, but it stretched its material out too much, repeated the same not-funny joke too often, and (despite the author's BA in English) included several homonym errors - one of them being horde/hoard, which is particularly bad when you're talking about a dragon.

View all my reviews