Book Review: “The Thief”

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Published in 1996 by Greenwillow Books.

Summary

Gen is a thief famous for boasting to a man in a tavern that he could steal the King’s royal seal and then returning to show it off the next day—after which he was arrested and thrown into the King’s prison. Vowing to never take such risks again, Gen languishes in the dungeon waiting his opportunity to escape.

Eventually, he is pulled from his cell by the King’s Magus (a kind of foremost scholar and advisor) who sets Gen to the task of using his skills to steal an ancient artifact rumored to have properties which prolong the wearer’s life. Despite not even knowing, at the start of their relationship, what the Magus wants him to steal, from where, or from whom, Gen confidently assures the man he can steal anything.

The two of them set off on a long journey with the Magus’ two apprentices and a stoic guard. They travel along a backwards, untrafficked pathway through the mountains to the neighboring kingdom. Along the way the Magus instructs his two apprentices on the lore and history related to their quest. And Gen himself tells some of the legends about the gods, after he hotly rebukes the Magus for telling the stories wrong in the first place. According to Gen, his mother’s people knew the old stories first, and tell them best.

After such a long journey, it’s no surprise that their party grows to know each other better as they draw closer to their goal. At long last, they reach an old temple submerged under a river which is only accessible for four nights each year when the water is low. Gen enters three times and fails to locate the gift of the god until the very last moment. Though eventually successful in his quest, his life is forever changed by what he sees inside the temple, and he emerges to discover further mischief afoot within their party.

By the end of the tale, everything the reader thinks they know about these characters has been turned upside down. Nothing is at is seems.

Themes

This book has two layers—what the reader thinks is going on, and what is actually going on with the characters. Because of this careful weaving of fact with assumption, the story itself doesn’t delve much deeper than a surface-level telling. Though the story it tells is certainly entertaining, the closest it comes to having any theme is probably as relates to the character Gen’s lack of belief in the gods.

Imagery

As part of the deception of the plot—the reader’s assumption vs. facts—there is a lot of use of caricature to create an image is the reader’s mind. Gen is doing this consciously, as a means of fooling the rest of the party he’s traveling with, that they know who he is and what they can expect from him. I can’t get into it very much without spoiling key twists of the plot, but what I’m talking about are assumptions like ‘poor people don’t have manners’ or ‘thieves don’t have morals’ etc. Because of the double layers of story, I actually went back to the beginning and listened to the first half of the book (audiobook) a second time after I knew how it ended; that was a really fun experience, since the first few chapters take on a whole new meaning once you know their secrets.

Recommendation

To be perfectly honest, I was planning on this being my first critical review. But that changed once I pushed through and got to the ending. While I do have a couple of criticisms still, I don’t think the story is as lame as my first impression led me to believe. Allow me to explain—

I think what Megan Whalen Turner was trying to do with the double-layers of assumption vs. fact is really brilliant and difficult to pull off. I would say she succeeded marvelously, BUT only if the reader perseveres till the end. I almost did not. In fact, if I had not been listening to an audiobook which could be set at double speed, I doubt I would have spent the time slogging through the first seven chapters. Those chapters consist of travel and thinly-veiled info dumping and comprise 55% of the entire novel. Combine that with the fact that I did not like the main character, Gen, very much from the start, and you have a recipe for DNF (did not finish).

However, once I reached chapter eight things picked up and got very exciting. The characters began behaving according to their true natures, not my previous assumptions, which intrigued me. When the final chapter arrived it was as satisfying as those heist movies where the final montage reveals what everyone was actually doing during the movie and how the thieves get away with everything they wanted to steal like the pros they are.

I don’t know how the beginning could have been written in a more interesting way without changing the assumption vs. fact dynamic of the story. Perhaps the info-dumping could have been arranged more pleasantly as ‘legend’ epitaphs heading each chapter, somewhat like the history lessons at the heading of chapters in Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy. Regardless, the only thing that saved the book was that I went onto Goodreads and saw a bunch of reviews which said in effect ‘the first half is boring, skip to the middle’. That is my recommendation, with the addendum—you should read from chapter 1, then chapters 7 to the end, and then go back and read the whole thing over for ultimate enjoyment.

Is that even a recommendation? I’ll leave that up to you—