The War of the Flowers
By Tad Williams

Reviewed by Megan Powell

The War of the Flowers opens with a fairly normal night in the life of Theo Vilmos. Maturity is not Theo's strong suit: he's still playing with garage bands, still working a dead-end job, just generally floating through life wasting potential left and right. His girlfriend Cat is pregnant, and Theo is now determined to start being the grown up. Over the course of a hundred pages, Williams begins taking Theo's life apart with a series of (apparently and, in some cases, actually) mundane tragedies. Theo learns more about various members of his family, including an eccentric great-uncle whose unpublished fantasy book comes to seem increasingly plausible--especially after a sprite drags Theo into Faerie to save him from a vicious otherworldly hunter.

Faerie is best described as a differently industrialized realm. The power supply is an important everyday concern, as are politics: Faerie's history includes bloody conflicts, and the titular war is a clash between ruling families. Faerie geography is changeable in ways that are understood by residents but difficult to explain to outsiders. A variety of faerie types co-exist (often uneasily) in a stratified society, but biology can be as problematic as geography. The line between faerie and mortal is blurry, and cosmetic surgery can lower some social barriers between faerie types.

Theo provides the point of view for most of the book, though Williams sometimes uses other characters. These sections don't provide much additional insight into the other characters, but are mainly used to keep the audience informed about actions happening in different locations. At certain points characters sit down to tell tales filled with useful backstory, and this first person narration does give readers a glimpse into characters' personality and motivations. It also allows Williams to make infodumps more palatable, restrict his story to a narrow window of time, and reemphasize ongoing references to the goblin stories of Faerie.

As the overt fantasy content increases, the book actually flattens out. Theo spends a lot of time walking around declaring that he doesn't understand Faerie. It is easy to sympathize with this reaction, but after a while it wears thin; Theo reverts to a stock character. It's much more interesting to watch him begin the process of understanding Faerie, and the climax of the book hinges on that understanding, as well as Theo's heritage. There are fortunately scenes where Williams personalizes Theo's experience (as in a jam session with goblins, or sentimental attachment to a leather jacket).

These moments are richer than parades of creatures from folktales or brief glimpses into ruling houses. The story might have been better served by a tighter focus on characters, even at the price of peripheral details. The book is readable, and several sections are completely engrossing, but at times it feels like The War of the Flowers is either a single bloated novel or a severely truncated trilogy.