The Buried Pyramid, Jane Lindskold
Mar. 27th, 2005 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienI found this book rather annoying, for spoiler-laden reasons.
For the first four hundred or so pages, this is an amusing enough, though only mildly exciting, romp through Hollywood-Egypt, complete with a legendary lost tomb and a sinister Bedouin cult to guard it, unlikely puzzle-locks, camels, and a cute monkey. There are also mysterious messages in crude substitution ciphers (with extra added clues to make sure our heroes can solve them), a feisty young American heroine, and an almost completely pointless interlude involving a missing jewel-box that turns out to have fallen down the back of the bed, apparently designed to drive home yet again the amateur-detective skills of one of the characters. Oh, and a cute kitten. What are notably absent are any actual fantasy elements, other than an old legend that seems to have some basis in fact.
Then, a hundred pages from the end, the characters turn a corner in an underground tomb complex and find themselves in a live-action Book of the Dead, where they meet a variety of Egyptian gods who turn out to be remarkably reasonable people. I'm sorry, but that kind of buildup buys you a couple of walking dead and a flood of creepy-crawlies, maybe an artefact that might actually do something, but not a boat-ride with Ra and an interview with Osiris. The turn the story takes seems to me to be a serious breach of the reader-contract, or what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky would call a violation of mode. The characters mostly take it with commendable aplomb, but it's still too much. What's more, the sinister Bedouin just drop out of the story unresolved, and no-one ever explains why Ra happens to need a fill-in crew that night.
For the first four hundred or so pages, this is an amusing enough, though only mildly exciting, romp through Hollywood-Egypt, complete with a legendary lost tomb and a sinister Bedouin cult to guard it, unlikely puzzle-locks, camels, and a cute monkey. There are also mysterious messages in crude substitution ciphers (with extra added clues to make sure our heroes can solve them), a feisty young American heroine, and an almost completely pointless interlude involving a missing jewel-box that turns out to have fallen down the back of the bed, apparently designed to drive home yet again the amateur-detective skills of one of the characters. Oh, and a cute kitten. What are notably absent are any actual fantasy elements, other than an old legend that seems to have some basis in fact.
Then, a hundred pages from the end, the characters turn a corner in an underground tomb complex and find themselves in a live-action Book of the Dead, where they meet a variety of Egyptian gods who turn out to be remarkably reasonable people. I'm sorry, but that kind of buildup buys you a couple of walking dead and a flood of creepy-crawlies, maybe an artefact that might actually do something, but not a boat-ride with Ra and an interview with Osiris. The turn the story takes seems to me to be a serious breach of the reader-contract, or what
papersky would call a violation of mode. The characters mostly take it with commendable aplomb, but it's still too much. What's more, the sinister Bedouin just drop out of the story unresolved, and no-one ever explains why Ra happens to need a fill-in crew that night.