The worst book we’ve ever (tried to) read.

The Ill-Made Mute, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton (2002) E

Date read: 4.23.05
Read from: Borrowed from Kakaner
Reviewer: Emera

To celebrate our 50th posted review, Kakaner requested that I post one of my oldest reviews, which is of the worst book that both of us have more or less read. “More or less” meaning that Kakaner couldn’t finish it, and I only finished it in the loose sense of having turned every page in the book, with at most a 75% probability of actually having read the material on each page word-for-word.

Hoo boy. Where to begin.

Once upon a time, new books were very very precious to Kakaner because she wasn’t allowed to buy any, and was not yet empowered by the wonders of an independent income. Then came the glorious day when Kakaner was allowed, for the very first time, to buy one book. One book! Hands trembling with the fevered anticipation of a junkie about to score, she turned to me for recommendations. I offhandedly suggested Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s The Ill-Made Mute, a fantasy novel that I’d heard of here and there, about a mysteriously mute and disfigured waif who must make her way through a faerie-riddled landscape of phantoms and flying ships. Sounds fun, right? Strange worlds! Colorful reimaginings of Celtic mythology! “Netted with golden prose”[™ cover blurb]! And so, alas, Kakaner plunged ahead, unaware of the outrageous injustice I had committed in encouraging her to squander her first purchase thusly.

Now, bear in mind that I’ve read a fair number of prosaically bad books, from The Da Vinci Code to any number of mass-produced YA series about princesses with jewel-themed names or suburban kids who discover magical kung-fu powers that enable them to battle insidious Aliens in Disguise*. I have even sampled from the pages of that dainty of dainties, Twilight. However, I still have yet to encounter anything quite so self-indulgently, toe-curlingly, consummately, orgiastically bad as The Ill-Made Mute, a book that exists to define “fascinatingly horrible.”

I suspect that Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s imagination is the type that in years past might have made her the progenitor of convoluted, multiple-thousand-page epics nurtured in secrecy over the course of decades. Here, it treats us to occasional gems of beautiful, unique concepts: messenger horses shod with a gravity-defying metal called sildron; “shang unstorms,” magical storms that summon endlessly looping projections of violent acts and memories in a haunted forest.

As for the rest – “thesaurus abuse” doesn’t even begin to cover it. What begin as lyrical, delicate passages descend into ridiculous and overwrought descriptions – often spanning multiple pages – of stable equipment, mercantile goods, bridal parties, the entire inventory of an inn’s drinking vessels… Unfortunately for Dart-Thornton, the ability flip to random pages in encyclopedias and thesauri and combine the two does not an author make. Candles don’t just drip in The Ill-Made Mute; they drip in “turgid formations.” Insects aren’t just crushed; they’re reduced to “a random design of smashed cephalothoraxes and carapaces…like pressed orchids.” Gauntlets, best of all, are compared to “waiting armadillos.” (Armadillos? In the middle of faux-Celticana? That also goes for the randomly mentioned platypuses and lorikeets. Okay, we get it, you’re an Australian author trying to make your book Unique. Well, you’ve succeeded beyond your wildest beliefs.)

As for the storyline, I would venture to say that had about 1/5th of the accompanying clutter been stripped away, it would have made a passable novel. As it is, the intruding descriptions of wedding gowns and random meals make the narrative difficult to follow and impossible to care about. Even better, this novel-cum-furniture-catalogue is populated by a cast so two-dimensional they’d give a trapezoid a run for its money. Imrhien, our adorably beleaguered and passive heroine, has little to no personality beyond constantly moping over her hideousness and unlovability. Thorn, her Manly McMasculine love interest whose teeth and other points of perfection are as lovingly catalogued as those of a prize Thoroughbred, has only one flaw: he can’t tolerate cripples. But of course, oh-so-mysteriously and conveniently, Imrhien doesn’t count. Sianadh, Imrhien’s sidekick, serves the twin purposes of comic relief (e.g. endlessly detailing faerie tricks, only to fall into a temple-throbbingly obvious trap on the following page) and fount of useless historical knowledge. At one point, he spews several uninterrupted pages of historical background which, I can safely report, I was able to skip without losing any understanding of the rest of the novel.

Giantspoilershocker: Imrhien finds out at the end of the book that she is… actually beautiful. I didn’t see it coming.

Oh yeah, and she’s blonde, too. In a land of dark-haired people.

In retrospect, there’s something weirdly sad and desperate about The Ill-Made Mute, or at least I feel that way after trying to imagine something about the mind behind it. I can’t help imagining that someone strapped Dart-Thornton into a sensory deprivation chamber for the first fifteen years of her life, and she’s been trying to make up for it with her novels ever since.

There’s another really awesomely bad simile involving Thorn’s eyes and salmon swimming upstream that I’d love to quote exactly, but unfortunately, I have no reference copy, Kakaner’s having been thrown out at the end of the year when she couldn’t be bothered to clean it out of her locker. When we realized this had happened, I think we were both momentarily, instinctively horrified by the idea of throwing out a book, but a moment later, somehow we couldn’t really bring ourselves to care.

* Both of these are real series – kudos if you can name either one of them.

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Cecilia Dart-Thornton