The Tower of the Swallow

“At that moment sounded the howl of the fell beann’shie, the harbinger of imminent and violent death, and across the black sky galloped the Wild Hunt – a procession of fiery-eyed phantoms on skeleton horses, their tattered cloaks and standards fluttering behind them.”

The sixth book of The Witcher series, written by Andrzej Sapkowski and translated to English by David A. French, illustrates how the series has changed with each passing book: if at first, we had a collection of short stories that sarcastically played with fairy tales to discuss the importance of taking a stand in political matters, now we have a novel about violence and death that treats these subjects with shocking rawness.

Geralt of Rivia is still lost in his search for his young apprentice, but this is not his story. The protagonist in Tower of the Swallow is once again Ciri, who is working with a young group of thieves and taking a liking to one of its female members. Soon, however, tragedy strikes and she’s captured by a ruthless mercenary called Bonhart. Bonhart, with his heart of bone, is a sadistic man who takes pleasure in torturing Ciri both physically and psychologically.

He punches and kicks her, he drags her through muddy streets, undresses her in front of people, puts a collar on her neck, and makes her fight to the death with strangers for his pleasure. Pronouns mean a lot, and the mercenary uses them to dehumanize Ciri, showing his contempt for the little witcher by referring to her as something akin to a dog that can bite: “Please don’t touch,” he advises a man about Ciri, “Don’t feed it. Don’t tease it. I take no responsibility.”

Ciri’s narrative arc is about her relationship with death. She thinks she personifies the concept, bringing this ill fate to those near and dear to her: “I am death,” she warns an old man that helps her hide in an isolated cottage, “Everyone who encounters me dies.” Bonhart also personifies death, but its cold, raw side. The mercenary treats death as the ultimate dehumanizing event: after it, a person becomes just a pile of rotting flesh. This is the lesson he wants Ciri to learn when he displays to her the bodies of some of her friends and starts to mutilate them. She loved these people, but now their humanity is gone and what remains is just the flesh, which can be cut and torn apart with ease: “Then have a look, she-rat. That is death. That is how you die. Look, those are guts. That is blood. And that is shit. That’s what’s inside us all,” he explains to her.

Bonhart is more wicked and evil than any monster that has ever appeared in the Witcher books. Geralt’s profession seems a thing of the past and of little importance now: who cares about a striga or a banshee when a single man is capable of such cruelty? The series has always been moving in this direction, showing how the real danger lies in a cruel man, not in a vampire. The Tower of the Swallow displays this notion early on when a kid gets frightened by some dark riders that came in the night: “Mamma, are they demons? Is it the Wild Hunt? Phantoms from hell?” he asks, and the mother quickly replies, “Quiet, quiet, children. They are not demons, not devils… Worse than that. They are people.”

During her captivity, Ciri comes across people so sickening that they disgust even Bonhart. For example, they meet a noble couple that likes to hunt and kill children for sport: they look at Ciri as potential prey, but give up trying to buy her after seeing the look in the mercenary’s face. Violence is also depicted in a casual, banal way that frames it as an ever-present element in the lives of the common folk. Violence is a habit, as this passage about an unimportant secondary character – the son of a coffin-maker – illustrates: “He did no more than what a normal fellow does to his wife on returning home from the tavern on Saturday evening – just gave her a kicking, slapped her a few times, and nothing more.”  These are horrible people in a horrible world.

We are even denied celebration in moments that should have been cathartic. When Geralt’s group is saved in a certain battle scene, the narrator mentions how some innocent bystanders were killed in the process, mentioning the corpses of children that were hit by accident and died with their faces in the mud.

Ciri is deeply affected by this harsh environment. She hides inside herself, becomes sullen and aloof in a way to protect herself from even more damage. She believes that if she conceals or suppresses what is left of her humanity, Bonhart won’t be able to target it anymore. This is how she describes herself about the time she was under his control: “a wooden doll, insensitive and lifeless. I was somehow looking down from above at everything that was being done to that doll. So what if they were hitting me, so what if they were kicking me, putting a collar on me like a dog? For it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me at all.”

Ciri’s arc has her moving from being a pawn in the hands of death – being threatened directly by it or bringing it to her friends – to taking control of death, directing it to her enemies. When some soldiers look at her right before the climax and see death, they are marking this transformation, which is further reinforced by the appearance of the Wild Hunt some pages later. This scene with the soldier and most of the climax shift the narrative focus to her enemies precisely to heighten the impact of her transformation: instead of having a methodic explanation of her plans, we have frantic descriptions from the eyes of frightened people who make Ciri look like a supernatural warrior, much like the knights of Wild Hunt itself – even her horse is described as “spectral”.

The novel is not structured chronologically. It begins with Ciri being rescued by an old hermit, who lives isolated in a cottage in the middle of a bog. She then proceeds to tell her story to the old man, telling him all about her time with Bonhart. This means that from the get-go we already know she escapes the mercenary’s clutches: the question is how she did it and how the experience changed her personality. The big question is if her transformation into a fearsome warrior will darken her character and make her an agent of evil, or if she will be able to control her most revengeful impulses and retain the purity of a swallow – a symbol of hope that is often connected to her.

The narrative, however, keeps shifting between different points of view, like Geralt, Triss, Dijkstra, and dozens of others. The Tower of the Swallow tries to do this Guy Ritchie thing of having a character start explaining something and then cut to another one, who is in a different place at a different time, but is continuing the explanation as if the cut never happened. This works better in movies than in prose, as the cut in a movie is instantaneous, while here there’s a space, some markings showing the change of section in the chapter, and finally, the next lines of dialogue that will continue the explanation.

“‘Look at the map,’ the king repeated. ‘And I shall tell you what Emhyr var Emreis will do in the spring.’

*

‘They will begin an offensive on an unparalleled scale,’ announced Carthia van Canten, adjusting her golden curls in front of the looking glass.”

The main problem here is that to do this often, the narrative has to focus on the point of view of several irrelevant characters and stay with them until the end of their irrelevant scenes. These cuts make the exposition more interesting, but don’t hide it well: the dialogues are still composed of pure didactic explanations of actions, motivations, and details that we have no reason to care about. What’s the importance of the king or Carthia van Canten to the story told in the novel? Does it warrant the number of pages that are dedicated to them? Since the narrative keeps doing this, shifting between different PoVs and introducing more and more irrelevant side characters, Ciri’s story ends up losing momentum while the overall narrative becomes unfocused, sparse, and random.

Going back to Geralt for some chapters, the novel also doesn’t know what to do with him, making the witcher move from one place to another without accomplishing much. He fights some unimportant people and discovers very few things of note. He gets incredibly frustrated by this, but so do we. It’s with Geralt that we get some comic relief thanks to Dandelion’s sarcastic remarks or to a bizarre knight the witcher meets, a self-parody character that starts every sentence with “Pon my word” and rides a horse named Bucephalus.

At least the novel fixes the major structural problem that plagued its predecessors: The Tower of the Swallow finally has a clear beginning, middle, and end. That this has to be highlighted is already saying much, but it’s definitely an improvement from the past novels that seemed to end in the middle of the next one.

The Tower of the Swallow is a brutal fantasy novel that deals with violence and death and portrays a young girl who is being constantly subjected to these elements until she starts to embody them herself. However, it suffers from some bizarre structural problems – at this point, it wouldn’t be a novel in The Witcher series without them – that drag the story down with needless points of view and tiresome exposition.

August 06, 2021.