Charlotte Kersten

It is no misfortune if you do not know where you are going; it is far worse when there is no longer anywhere to go. He who stands on the path of experience cannot step away from it, even when it has come to its end. For the path is without end.”

Year published: 2012

Category: Adult fantasy

Summary:  Reaching far beyond sword and sorcery, The Scar is a story of two people torn by disaster, their descent into despair, and their reemergence through love and courage. Sergey and Marina Dyachenko mix dramatic scenes with romance, action and wit, in a style both direct and lyrical. Written with a sure artistic hand, The Scar is the story of a man driven by his own feverish demons to find redemption and the woman who just might save him.

Egert is a brash, confident member of the elite guards and an egotistical philanderer. But after he kills an innocent student in a duel, a mysterious man known as “The Wanderer” challenges Egert and slashes his face with his sword, leaving Egert with a scar that comes to symbolize his cowardice. Unable to end his suffering by his own hand, Egert embarks on an odyssey to undo the curse and the horrible damage he has caused, which can only be repaired by a painful journey down a long and harrowing path.

My thoughts: The more I think about this book, the less convinced I am that it worked for me. This is one of those cases where an objectively well-crafted book simply didn’t work for me because of my individual opinions and tastes as a reader.

My first problem is that the themes of reconciliation and punishment present here do not feel very satisfying or convincing to me. Egert starts the book by committing an unjust, cruel murder, and he is cursed to suffer extraordinarily because of it. While the idea of the curse is definitely to try to teach Egert a lesson, I don’t actually feel like he does a satisfactory amount of learning or unlearning over the course of the story. To be clear, I do absolutely belive that redemption and growth are possible for the perpetrators of terrible crimes and that it is possible for the loved ones of murder victims to reconcile with the perpetrators. But I think that these processes must involve an absolutely extraordinary amount of honesty, vulnerability, insight and commitment to growth and change that are simply never present in Egert’s character development or his relationships with Toria and her father. This is especially true in Toria’s case as she ends up in love with him, and it is especially unconvincing to me because Egert actually frees himself of the curse by going on a massive killing spree at the end of the book.

I’m also frustrated by what an incredible exploration of toxic masculinity this could have been, and how it instead ended up sticking to a very old-fashioned notion of chivalry as the masculine ideal. The authors could totally have leaned into how Egert starts out the story with an inflated ego because of his prowess for senseless violence, sexual conquests and cruelty to those less powerful than him. His curse even makes it clear that these ideals are hollow and toxic and meaningless – that a person who uses his power so cruelly is really a coward at heart; that if you have to rely on bullying others to feel powerful, your power doesn’t really mean all that much.

The problem is that Egert is “unmanned” with his curse of cowardice and then frees himself of the curse and reclaims his masculinity by saving his helpless love interest Toria through a bloodbath of slaughter. My reading of this is that Egert is freed and vindicated when he learns to be chivalrous, which is a frustrating choice even for a book written before 2000. Any reading of this book as being about unhealthy standards of masculinity is somewhat crushed by that conclusion – at least if you see benevolent sexism as a bad thing! There are also littler things like how a woman’s horrific gang rape exists in the story for the sole purpose of showing how unmanly Egert is, or this line about how Toria looks “more feminine” once she falls in love. I’m still scratching my head over that one.

This is a story about character development far more than it is about external plot, but the external plot is still fairly unremarkable to me. I never really understood what Lash actually was, and all the lore surrounding the Third Power and the Amulet felt very awkwardly implemented. That being said, I did think that the writing of Egert’s psychological torment was very powerful, and it was enjoyable to see him gradually grow braver and start to develop real relationships. The writing itself was also lovely. In sum, though, I ended the book largely unconvinced and frustrated by wasted potential.