Review of House of Noth
Wortmann has a rare power of imagination and a depth of linguistic knowledge which I felt throughout the entire story. He uses a lot of word-plays and association available within that linguistic space to establish anchor points for the plot and characters. Many of his scenes are incredibly vivid and the world-building is quite impressive – even if much of it is perceptibly inspired by Middle Earth. There are moments when genuine emotion registers in the characters.
Wortmann has strong convictions about human nature, and those convictions shape the characters of Noth to the point that many of the characters eventually become implausible. The novel is a plea for a certain ideal of masculinity and domesticity. A thread running through the entire book is the non-problematized identification of wives with the “home” of the men, and deviation from this marital bliss invariably precludes disaster. The men are for the most part virtuous in a certain pre-industrial sense. They perform honest work, look after the needs of their community and only ever fight for a just cause. There are no drunkards or adulterers or gamblers or envious, scheming thieves amid the Roots of Day, no one beats their wives or children, nobody expresses dissatisfaction with their lot in life, nobody works malevolently within their communities, there is not much in the way of gossip. Everybody knows each other and behaves in the way that Herrnhut expects them to. No one looks at Gaba the Southerner (with dark skin) as exotic, alien, inferior or a threat, and Gaba betrays no hint of somehow not fitting in with the culture of the realm. There is a decided absence of sexual deviance, and even rebellious characters like Ysrith or Svaen find their own grace in punishment once again in their home. In this regard, the idealized world of Noth lacks the subtlety of Tolkien’s Shire, where Bilbo Baggins’ extended family schemes to acquire his spoons and the evil which breaks upon them is rooted in the evil hiding in their midst. In Noth I can feel a desire to return back to an agrarian, village society in this work, in which simple people do honest work and fear God. But don’t forget that the Ten Commandments were given to precisely such people, and not without reason! Of course, I can feel the Tower of Babel with the building of the village hall and I recognize the Prodigal Son in Svaen and Ysrith. But I am still missing the deuteronomistic pessimism concerning human nature such as with Achan’s theft or Gideon’s lapse into paganism or with the Kings of Israel and Judah which is then applied to the humanity in this book. Noth has strong impulses of Germanic Treue which is neither problematized nor weakened by separation and life.
Wortmann’s love of English, German and language in general makes every sentence interesting to read, but the usage significantly raises the barrier for reading comprehension. Most of the text is English written with today’s orthography (and there are still a number of typos present in the text: p. 75 “bear” instead of “bare”, p. 126 “:” instead of “.” in the last line, ), but it is highly alliterative and employs a vocabulary highly favoring old German roots, occasionally replacing English words with German ones and generally over relying on simile. The linguistic intensity increases when there is dialogue, and it is here especially where the author exhibits an impressive knowledge of English and German. An English reminiscent of King James is used for formal dialogue, a Nordic-inspired language is used occasionally as a love language for couples, and let’s not forget the lunar and dwarven languages which are not nearly as well developed nor explained. The characters love to banter with each other, they pivot the direction of conversations when imagery or puns allow for it and palpably flee a world of sober objectivity, even when the situation would demand it of them. Rarely do they speak like normal people often do – with disinterest, exhaustion, stupidity, frustration or distraction. It is here that you can really feel how fully Wortmann lives in this world, and that he holds his characters to his own standard. It was hard for me to enter into that world, and I have pretty good language competency.
As I mentioned in the introduction, the book has incredibly vivid scenes and settings which really do jump off of the page and into the imagination of the reader. Wortmann has a real gift for describing scenery. Unfortunately, these scenes rarely render a satisfying plot development out of their own material. Wortmann’s preferred way of telling the story is to paint quite artfully a landscape and then intrude upon it “suddenly” with an element foreign to the scene. I really recommend that you read Aristotle’s Poetics for a better understanding of this because he talks about precisely this practice as being the reason for why dramatic works end up feeling disjointed and incoherent.
And that leads me to my final point of contention: the plot, or rather, the plots. There are too many of them and too many characters for a work of this length, and those characters have names which are hard to keep straight. If we consider The Hobbit for a moment, we have Gandalf, Bilbo, Smaug and the dwarves as major characters. Only two or three of the dwarves are significant to the plot and the rest are paired with rhyming names and basically serve as comedic relief. So basically we have seven main characters. In the context of The Hobbit, the rest of the characters are relatively minor and share a common characteristic: they are described from the point of view of an old man who is telling a story to children, and that is what governs how Tolkien fleshes out personalities and selects details to share to the reader of The Hobbit. This is where Tolkien is a master story teller in a way Wortmann is not yet. The scenes are arranged linearly, they are told from a narrative perspective which strongly skews toward Bilbo’s perspective, and they very elegantly manage to make plausible over and over again that there is a much greater world hiding behind this one, but its total complexity is only conveyed in ways that are necessary to The Hobbit’s plot. Why does Gandalf actually know Beorn the Bear Man, Elrond and the Eagles, why is there bad blood between the dwarves and the elves, why does Thorin act with such a chip on his shoulder? Why is such attention devoted to Gollum and the ring? These matters will be unpacked in The Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion, but those works are intended for mature audiences and not children. They also collectively comprise several times the number of pages as does The Hobbit – or The House of Noth. And readers of those later works are already invested into the story because of how it has been told to them by Bilbo.
Noth reads a bit like The Hobbit for the first 100 pages or so, but then it tries to perform at the level of The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the remainder of the text. It starts off with a relatively manageable number of characters: Gaba, Authaen, Carbeth, Huthram, the Ibex, Folgnuin, Winglin, the Grons and the Shepherds. However, we have a lot of attention given to minor characters such as the Watchers. Authaen is the best described character here, as he should be as the book is ultimately about him. The first part of the book culminates in the battle between Gaba and the Ibex which ultimately serves as the springboard into the rest of the story. Authaen becomes disenfranchised from his community by the shepherds and his fate is bound to Gaba. In this way he becomes the Chosen One of the story – if only because of his cosmic origins, which play a role in his harrowing of the dwarven hell at the end of the book. They stumble upon the Unthing and perturb the plot through its presence and encounter Noth in his transient house.
After the 120 page mark, the book introduces us to a substantial set of new characters which take the complexity to a whole new level and constitute a real challenge for the reader to keep track of everything: Lion Pen Tooth, the Forge-Bear, the King, Svaen, Ysrith (at least she gets a lot more attention together with Carbeth), the Dwarf King and the battle at Glimwaeth, which is easy to discern as a sort of Battle of Five Armies/Minas Tirith/Helm’s Deep. Wortmann also confronts the reader with a lot of minor characters with names which are demanding enough to be confusing but then quickly disappear as the story continues (Ulvin and Gildolf, the red lady, Jithron, etc.). The reader has to confront the plot element of Bear Blood and must wrap their heads around how Ysrith is the cause of Authaen’s loss, all while processing several minor scenes which are peppered throughout the work. Wrapped into all of this is another encounter between Authaen and Noth which confirms that Authaen is an adoptionist version of Christ. He descends to harrow hell, Svaen is rehabilitated as King to replace his dead father, Ysrith and Carbeth are both humbled and brought together and the River People get a land claim to settle in peace. At the end, we have a scene of Folgnuin in the House of Noth and the resolution to her tragic death.
And that’s not everything packed in the novel, but I think it is enough to get an idea of just how dense this book is. Noth presents its readers with an enormous challenge and in some places still reads like a half-baked work. The thing is, I can tell that in Wortmann’s mind it is not. The milestones of well-woven plot-lines are discernible and the main story arc of Authaen does have considerable coherency to it. The work does skew toward him in the end, even if I am not entirely convinced by the effect of the rune-carving into his hand – but that accomplishes the Christological self-immolation sacrifice conquest motif rather nicely. The petty Tower of Babel story which helps to launch the story of the River People is resolved by them living rightfully in a land of their own. The return of the Watchers at the end of the story is a nice little touch, and the author composed the last scenes with clear echoes of the first ones.
As someone who has read the book three times and has repeated several passages in addition to that, I can say that it is a much harder read than The Hobbit or many other successful books of this length and that 99% of today’s readers will not demonstrate the commitment to this book that I did in order to tease out its intrinsic value (which is undeniably there and ultimately only obfuscated by a lack of narrative discipline).
Review by Samuel Brandt
Philip Wortmann