Pastry Worship
Nights 624-648
For the next couple weeks or so, we’re in a war story. It has been very violent and fast-paced so far, almost to a fault. Some of the villains appear and are dispatched so quickly that it has been hard to get invested in them.
It’s a shame: the premise is pretty good. An evil king is worried that his brother will overthrow him, so he tries to have him killed. The brother grows up to be an amazing warrior and must fight his way through his foster family, giants, and others in order to defeat his father. He has a secret weapon: Islam. It is so powerful that he has used it to convert the evil giants and others in his path, amassing an army of former adversaries. The story takes place in some indeterminate Old Testament time period. Babel still exists as a geographic unit (p. 676, Night 636), and a “black giant” who becomes our hero’s ally is traced to Noah’s son Ham (I think this is an old racist trope, that black people were the race of Ham).
I struggled to keep track of everyone. I wrote up a family tree and notes on character names, and I still found myself forgetting who some of the characters were. Many of them got killed off so fast that it didn’t matter. It sounds exciting, but I found the battles bland. They were described as big without actually seeming big: “How many heads were severed and throats cut; how many hands and spines were slashed through; how many knees and sinews were crushed; and how many men, old and young alike, were slaughtered!” (p. 686, Night 641). It’s too bad, I had high hopes when the hero’s weapons were described, “a steel mace . . . on which ten rings clashed like thunder when it was brandished, together with a jeweled sword made from a thunderbolt.” (p. 658, Night 628).
Still, there are some charming moments. Maybe the best is the story of the Islam convert who had previously worshiped a pastry: “I worship a date pastry made with butter and honey . . . Sometimes I eat it and then I make another.” (p. 689, Night 642). A dig at the Eucharist? Maybe.