Every month, our literary critic puts a work through a kaleidoscope, collecting the images it projects and reconstructing their diffractions. Even if the flashes of genius turn out to be shards of glass.
As a tribute to Maïté, who recently passed away, I'd like to pay tribute to a great big stew: Fourth Wing. In this first volume of the The Empyrean (coming out next month in paperback), we're locked up at Basgiath, the military academy where Navarre's elite are trained. Violet Sorrengail, the General's frail daughter, was supposed to become a scribe - but her mother decided otherwise: she's off to the dragon section, where the slightest weakness is worth a quick death.
Despite her brittle bones and a host of enemies, Violet survives by dint of intelligence, sarcasm and suicidal decisions. But beneath the brutal training and power struggles, secrets are rumbling. The real enemy may not be who you think, and the war is just a facade. Violet will have to choose: obey the established order or blow things up. So much for the setting and the stakes, which, let's face it, sound quite seductive. But a nightclub seduction: as soon as the lights come up, all attraction fades away. All that's left is a vague memory of dignity.
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I bought the book thinking I was going to really love it, that it would bring back fond memories of’Eragon, that it would look a bit like The Mirror-Pass. But I had never read romantasy (contraction of romance and fantasy). And therein lies the problem: I quickly realized that a romantasy is a novel written with a pen dipped in cyprine. Every time a male character arrives, his muscular torso, protruding jaw and big biceps are described: I didn't know if I was reading or not. Fourth Wing or the script for an episode of Johnny Bravo.
Nothing goes right in this novel, everything is ridiculously clichéd and revolves only around Violet's forbidden attraction to Xaden Riorson, the bad boy dark and tortured (but that's my fault, it's obviously the principle of a romance), the world-building fantasy is totally neglected, and the political intrigue I was promised was reduced to a presidential debate on «Touche pas à mon poste!».
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But then, the highlight of the show is the famous smut (erotic stories and descriptions), with sex scenes written in their entirety using subtitles from AD Laurent's porn videos. Special mention should be made of the scene in which the hero is shown rubbing his partner's clitoris. So much so that I found myself in front of Koh-Lanta, watching the adventurers try to build a fire.
And apart from all that, the writing itself is a real catastrophe, sounding like the confessions of a social networking cryptotrader. Rebecca Yarros writes like you talk, without restraint or care, and the result is dialogue akin to bad dubbing of telenovela.
Why this novel is such a phenomenal success in France and elsewhere remains an absolute mystery to me. The author promises us on the book jacket that «Fourth Wing will make your heart beat from beginning to end». Our pacemaker to the limit... If there is such a thing as a Pulitzer Prize, Fourth Wing is the winner of the Pfizer Prize: this novel is a vaccine against literature.
Quentin Perissinotto is a literary critic for Regard Libre.
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Rebecca Yarros
The Empyrean, Volume 1: Fourth Wing
Ed. Hugo Roman
February 2024
400 pages
French 
German 
English