Let’s talk about expectations.
As a longtime follower of Hafsah Faizal, I was initially excited for the release of We Hunt the Flame. But by the time it was due to release, my long-standing interest in YA had waned. I was resoundingly tired of it. So I went into this with a sort of resignation, which was the same way I approached most YA reads in 2019. Having said that, I made an effort not to let my personal reader fatigue colour my opinion of this book. After all, it’s not up to Hafsah Faizal to reignite my passion for the genre.
I also made the careful choice to listen to this on audiobook, rather than buy a physical copy. The data I’ve gathered suggests that I am more likely to DNF physical copies than audiobooks; if I can clean my bathroom, argue with the TV licensing people, or rub lotion on my nasty ass goat feet while I read, I’m less likely to decide I don’t have time to slog through a story I’m not enjoying. There’s nothing I love more than multitasking, so I listened to this book mostly while I fucked about with the Olympus Mons of laundry piling up on my bedroom floor. And I firmly believe that if I had not opted for the audiobook, this would have been a DNF.
Now that you’re all sufficiently bored with the minutiae of my uneventful life, let’s dig in.
Let’s talk about opposites.
Compelling narratives in literature are all about conflict. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. But the lack of conflict is exactly the problem with We Hunt The Flame.
“Lack of conflict?” you might say. “There’s plenty of conflict! They have to travel across a vast evil desert and fight Stunt Demon #8 and #9 in order to reach the MacGuffin and save the world™!”
That’s all well and good, but what I’m talking about is meaningful conflict, i.e. conflict that resonates with a more general human experience. That is, conflict in relationships. That is, opposites attracting. In Sabaa Tahir’s An Ember in the Ashes, we can’t necessarily relate to infiltrating an army base as a fake slave, but we can relate to Laia’s feelings of hopelessness as she crumbles under pressure. Similarly, in We Hunt the Flame, we can’t necessarily relate to being trapped in a magical desert as we hunt for an object that could save the world from annihilation, but we should be able to understand the emotional conflict between Zafira and Nasir—two people from diametrically opposed lifestyles forced to work together for the greater good.
When we first meet Zafira, she is a huntress who braves a magical forest to feed her supposedly starving people (who still somehow manage to afford brightly dyed clothing and a full spread of food for a wedding feast), while Nasir is a prince forced to act as an assassin by his abusive father, the sultan. The problem is that their ideologies quickly converge, and they fuse into the same person: a bitter teenager compelled to grow up too quickly, each with a smart-talking friend and a jaded outlook that doesn’t stop them from earnestly risking their lives for the greater good. The only challenge of ideology between Zafira and Nasir is a brief mention of his vocation, which leads to one of my favourite dialogue exchanges ever:
Zafira: “I don’t go around murdering people on a whim.”
Nasir: “Neither do I. Hashashins don’t hold up the brutality of murder. We are poets of the kill. Working from the shadows.”
🙂
This exchange is nothing if not funny, but it doesn’t mean anything because Zafira and Nasir are basically different-gendered versions of the same person. This could allow for some kind of “kindred spirits” connection, but they are clearly earmarked from the beginning for a romance, so there’s no tension or doubt to fuel the reader’s interest. Of course they’re going to fall in love. Of course Zafira’s hatred of the monarchy and Nasir’s lack of understanding of anything beyond himself won’t complicate it. The narrative purposely removes every obstacle standing in the way of these lovers, including any conflicting elements of character, because an easy romance is…well, easy. We can’t have any difficult questions or ideological rifts standing in the way of our obligatory YA smoochfest.
On the subject of the narrative, let’s talk about framing.
Narrative framing is the crucial difference between complexity and simplicity, and Nasir is a perfect example of terrible narrative framing. Nasir’s background wants to be complex and heartbreaking: he is the son of an autocratic sultan, forced to be his father’s right hand blade, cutting down any dissidents who dare threaten the sultan’s power over the caliphates of Arawiya. Poor Nasir! Except I found it impossible to sympathise with him: not only is his narration excessively morose and melodramatic, but it’s soured by some seriously questionable actions on his part. This might be fine if the narrative framed Nasir as a grey character with a dubious morality, but it doesn’t. It frames him as a poor misunderstood boy with love to give but no one to give it to.
An example is Kulsum, a servant with whom Nasir is having an affair at the beginning of the book. Kulsum’s backstory is that, when the sultan discovered her affair with Nasir, he cut out her tongue. Kulsum, not Nasir, is the one who suffered the most from a relationship built on a power imbalance. Later, Kulsum betrays Nasir by spying on him, and his “friend” Altair viciously mocks him for it. This is Nasir’s reaction: “Kulsum was the one who had pulled him out of that endless despair…Nasir knew that finding a person he could love, who could love him, was near impossible. He knew, yet he had been too blinded by mere affection to see clearly. Fabricated affection.”
Oh, poor Nasir! So sad that the girl who was maimed as a direct result of his actions wasn’t willing to throw away her life for the sake of his feelings.
After all of this, Nasir is then rewarded for his ignorance by Zafira falling in love with him without ever ideologically challenging him. Nasir being welcomed into the fold of this found family comes off the back of him throwing people up against walls, lying about the circumstances surrounding Deen’s death to present himself as a martyr to the reader (this sequence accomplished nothing other than to get rid of Deen as a spare part) and calling Kifah (another spare part with absolutely nothing to do with anything) “woman” when he’s angry with her.
But Nasir’s character is also hampered by his passivity. Things happen to him and he reacts to them, and at no point do his actions ever drive the plot. In fact, he could have been backspaced from the book and the story would have remained more or less intact. I suspect the passiveness was borne of a desire not to make Nasir unlikable, and not to risk having to deal with any conflict between him and Zafira, or indeed ask any difficult questions about the nature of dictatorship. This book feels oddly hesitant; it is afraid to humanise its villains, even though dehumanising our enemies is always extremely fucking dangerous, no matter how detestable we may believe them to be. And because it refuses to dig into the politics of its world, we are left with no idea how this system operates and where Nasir really stands within it (or indeed how he benefits from it). There’s a great video
Of course, all of this transpires in the midst of an endless, fucking endless desert, and a trickling plot that is paced in such a way as to lull the reader to sleep, then give them whiplash. On that note, let’s talk about pacing.
Now. In planning this review, I searched around for texts that nail slow pacing as a tool for building tension. But the example I want to use might be…jarring. Just hear me out.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining (I can already hear the collective inhale. I said hear me out) is a masterclass in using every available tool to make slow pacing work for a story. Yes, it’s told in a different medium, but the screenplay itself works for the same reasons. For the purposes of this critique, I’m going to treat it as an original work and not as an adaptation of a book, mostly because as an allegory the movie deals with very different themes. And yes, I am aware that Stephen King hated the movie, but I’m inclined to believe he still sleeps well on his pile of money.
The Shining (1980) is discussed in a variety of thematic contexts, but my interpretation of it was as a detailed examination of an abusive marriage. It has all the staples: isolation; alcoholism; infantilisation of a wife; a husband jealously competing with his child for the affections of his wife; a husband prioritising his “work” over his family, and that “work” not being work at all, but merely an excuse to inflate his own ego; and a husband declining to cheat only because it will give his wife ammunition to divorce him (in this context, the lady in the bathtub is not a gross ghost but merely a projection of Jack’s indecisiveness. When he realises that cheating will get him into trouble, she suddenly becomes grotesque to him). Jack’s connection with Delbert Grady is notable in that Grady rationalises the murders of his own family as an unavoidable consequence of their “wilful” nature—in this way, he is an abuser shifting the blame to his victims. The film starts with Wendy discussing an incident in which Jack drunkenly injured his own son Danny, which Wendy, as a subjugated wife, then makes excuses for. Danny’s “shining” represents the power of foresight and intuition afforded to children who grow up in abusive households and who are conditioned to recognise the signs of a parent poised to inflict harm.
This is not intended as a broad stroke appraisal of Kubrick’s work; 2001: A Space Odyssey was unbearable for me, and so was his treatment of Shelley Duvall during the filming of The Shining. But it’s undeniable that The Shining uses its slow pacing to masterfully build up tension to the point where it feels like the rattling lid of a boiling pot—if you open it up, it will scald you, but you can hear it click-click-clicking in your periphery as a constant reminder.
Every scene in The Shining, no matter how slow or quiet, serves more than one character or plot related purpose. This multitasking narrative is exactly why the movie works: it keeps its multiple threads taut, and every scene imparts several significant pieces of information that keep the viewer engaged. An example of this is the scene where Jack interviews with the owner of the Overlook hotel. We learn in this scene that the hotel will be unoccupied over the winter; that the previous caretaker killed his family; and that there is something underneath Jack’s calm, ordinary demeanour. The story of the previous caretaker throbs, not only because of what we already know about Jack, but because of his forced mildness, his overblown interest in the hotel, and the way he slumps in his chair as if he already belongs there.
Another example is the hedge maze scene. We see Wendy and Danny enter the hedge maze outside, and Jack staying indoors behind a glass window, separating the family into two camps: Jack in the past, and Wendy with Danny, their family’s future. We see Wendy and Danny struggle to escape from the maze, which we know will be a point of conflict later. We see Jack standing over a small model of the maze, which positions him as a vengeful godlike figure, looming over his wife and child and throwing them into his all-encompassing shadow. He controls the hotel, as he controls them, and the maze they are escaping from is his toxic influence.
We Hunt the Flame is slow, and it feels slow, because it fails to employ the same tools as The Shining: scenes like the trip to the ice cream parlour, Zafira saying goodbye to Yasmine (a terrible waste of a potential f/f romance), Nasir and Altair getting tangled up with the Dandan, Benyamin reeling off the boring story of his past, don’t achieve anything other than what they say on the tin. They hone in on one character, or one small plot point, and moon over it while everything else is dumped at the wayside. This is also the reason why, after so much wandering in the desert, I had forgotten where we were going and what we were looking for, and who the hell the lion of the night was. It’s because these threads are left slack for most of the story, then clumsily yanked on toward the end of the book. The narrative crawls along, stacking one block at a time, and then expects the reader to be excited about something that was briefly touched on once at the very beginning of the book.
Some threads are also completely dropped, namely the Arz and the danger surrounding Sharr. Our characters build these regions up to be inescapable prisons of death, but they traverse them with ease and without the appropriate equipment for survival in harsh climates. The Arz is the most problematic, in that Zafira’s unique and genuinely interesting magical aptitude for direction is built upon the threat of the Arz. However, the Arz is conveniently magically removed before she and Deen are due to cross it to reach Sharr. Why include the Arz at all if it has no bearing whatsoever on the plot?
Continued below:
As a longtime follower of Hafsah Faizal, I was initially excited for the acquittance ofBut by the time it was due to release, my long-standing pastime in YA had waned. I was resoundingly tired of it. so I went into this with a kind of resignation, which was the same way I approached most YA reads in 2019. Having said that, I made an feat not to let my personal reviewer fatigue tinge my opinion of this record. After all, it ’ s not up to Hafsah Faizal to reignite my mania for the genre.I besides made the careful choice to listen to this on audiobook, preferably than buy a physical copy. The datum I ’ ve gathered suggests that I am more likely to DNF physical copies than audiobooks ; if I can clean my toilet, argue with the television license people, or rub lotion on my filthy ass capricorn feet while I read, I ’ megabyte less likely to decide I don ’ t have time to slog through a history I ’ molarity not enjoying. There ’ mho nothing I love more than multitasking, so I listened to this book by and large while I fucked about with the Olympus Mons of laundry piling up on my bedroom floor. And I hard believe that if I had not opted for the audiobook, this would have been a DNF.Now that you ’ re all sufficiently bored with the minutia of my uneventful life, let ’ s shot in.Compelling narratives in literature are all about conflict. Without conflict, you don ’ t have a narrative. But the lack of battle is precisely the problem with “ Lack of conflict ? ” you might say. “ There ’ s batch of conflict ! They have to travel across a huge evil desert and battle Stunt Demon # 8 and # 9 in decree to reach the MacGuffin and save the world™ ! ” That ’ s all well and good, but what I ’ megabyte talking about isconflict, i.e. conflict that resonates with a more cosmopolitan human experience. That is, conflict in relationships. That is, opposites attracting. In Sabaa Tahir ’ second, we can ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate inevitably relate to infiltrating an army establish as a juke slave, but we can relate to Laia ’ s feelings of hopelessness as she crumbles under imperativeness. similarly, in, we can ’ metric ton necessarily relate to being trapped in a charming abandon as we hunt for an object that could save the world from annihilation, but we should be able to understand the emotional battle between Zafira and Nasir—two people from diametrically opposed lifestyles forced to work together for the greater good.When we first meet Zafira, she is a huntress who braves a charming forest to feed her purportedly starvation people ( who calm somehow manage to afford brilliantly dyed clothing and a full dispersed of food for a marry feast ), while Nasir is a prince forced to act as an assassin by his abusive don, the sultan. The trouble is that their ideologies quickly converge, and they fuse into the same person : a bitter adolescent compelled to grow up besides quickly, each with a smart-talking ally and a tire lookout that doesn ’ metric ton stop them from seriously risking their lives for the greater good. The only challenge of ideology between Zafira and Nasir is a brief citation of his career, which leads to one of my favorite dialogue exchanges ever : Zafira : “ I don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate go around murdering people on a whim. ” Nasir : “ Neither do I. Hashashins don ’ t hold up the ferociousness of mangle. We are poets of the killing. Working from the shadows. ” : ) This switch over is nothing if not fishy, but it doesn ’ metric ton average anything because Zafira and Nasir are basically different-gendered versions of the same person. This could allow for some kind of “ kindred spirits ” connection, but they are intelligibly earmarked from the begin for a romance, so there ’ s no tension or doubt to fuel the reviewer ’ randomness pastime. Of course they ’ re going to fall in love. Of course Zafira ’ south hatred of the monarchy and Nasir ’ s miss of sympathy of anything beyond himself won ’ thymine complicate it. The narrative intentionally removes every obstacle standing in the room of these lovers, including any conflicting elements of character, because an easy romance is…well, easy. We can ’ t have any difficult questions or ideological rifts standing in the way of our obligatory YA smoochfest.On the subject of the narrative, narrative frame is the crucial difference between complexity and chasteness, and Nasir is a arrant case of atrocious narrative frame. Nasir ’ second backdrop wants to be complex and grievous : he is the son of an authoritarian sultan, forced to be his forefather ’ south right hand blade, cutting down any dissidents who dare threaten the sultan ’ mho power over the caliphates of Arawiya. Poor Nasir ! Except I found it impossible to sympathise with him : not only is his narrative excessively dark and melodramatic, but it ’ sulfur soured by some seriously questionable actions on his part. This might be fine if the narrative framed Nasir as a grey character with a doubtful ethical motive, but it doesn ’ metric ton. It frames him as a inadequate misunderstood boy with love to give but no one to give it to.An example is Kulsum, a handmaid with whom Nasir is having an affair at the begin of the book. Kulsum ’ mho backstory is that, when the sultan discovered her affair with Nasir, he cut out her natural language. Kulsum, not Nasir, is the one who suffered the most from a relationship built on a power asymmetry. Later, Kulsum betrays Nasir by spying on him, and his “ acquaintance ” Altair viciously mocks him for it. This is Nasir ’ s reaction : “ Kulsum was the one who had pulled him out of that endless despair…Nasir knew that finding a person he could love, who could love him, was near impossible. He knew, yet he had been besides blinded by mere affection to see clearly. Fabricated affection. ” Oh, poor Nasir ! then sad that the female child who was maimed as a calculate leave of his actions wasn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate will to throw away her life for the sake of his feelings.After all of this, Nasir is then rewarded for his ignorance by Zafira falling in love with him without always ideologically challenging him. Nasir being welcomed into the fold of this found family comes off the back of him throwing people up against walls, lying about the circumstances surrounding Deen ’ s death to present himself as a martyr to the reader ( this sequence accomplished nothing early than to get rid of Deen as a excess separate ) and calling Kifah ( another spare part with absolutely nothing to do with anything ) “ woman ” when he ’ mho angry with her.But Nasir ’ randomness character is besides hampered by his passivity. Things happen to him and he reacts to them, and at no point do his actions always drive the plat. In fact, he could have been backspaced from the script and the floor would have remained more or less entire. I suspect the passivity was behave of a desire not to make Nasir unlikable, and not to risk having to deal with any conflict between him and Zafira, or indeed ask any difficult questions about the nature of dictatorship. This book feels curiously hesitant ; it is afraid to humanise its villains, even though dehumanising our enemies is constantly highly fucking dangerous, no count how abominable we may believe them to be. And because it refuses to dig into the politics of its worldly concern, we are left with no estimate how this system operates and where Nasir very stands within it ( or indeed how he benefits from it ). There ’ sulfur a big video here that discusses the structures that dictators utilise to legitimise and maintain their rule, but this record doesn ’ t even glance at any of them. It just expects us to believe that, after being relentlessly subjugated by a dictator who has put no systems in place to protect his position, the people of Arawiya would not evening consider an uprising.Of course, all of this transpires in the midst of an dateless, fucking endless desert, and a trickle plot that is paced in such a way as to lull the proofreader to sleep, then give them whiplash. On that note, now. In planning this review, I searched around for text that pinpoint slow tempo as a tool for build up tension. But the case I want to use might be…jarring. just hear me out.Stanley Kubrick ’ randomness 1980 adaptation of Stephen King ’ south ( I can already hear the corporate inhale. I said ) is a masterclass in using every available joyride to make slow pace shape for a narrative. Yes, it ’ south told in a different medium, but the screenplay itself works for the same reasons. For the purposes of this review, I ’ m going to treat it as an original make and not as an adaptation of a book, by and large because as an emblem the movie deals with very different themes. And yes, I am aware that Stephen King hated the movie, but I ’ megabyte inclined to believe he still sleeps well on his throng of money. ( 1980 ) is discussed in a variety of thematic context, but my interpretation of it was as a detail examination of an abusive marriage. It has all the staples : isolation ; dipsomania ; infantilisation of a wife ; a conserve enviously competing with his child for the affections of his wife ; a husband prioritising his “ work ” over his family, and that “ work ” not being work at all, but merely an excuse to inflate his own ego ; and a conserve declining to cheat only because it will give his wife ammunition to divorce him ( in this context, the lady in the bathtub is not a megascopic ghost but merely a projection of Jack ’ second indecisiveness. When he realises that cheating will get him into trouble oneself, she suddenly becomes antic to him ). Jack ’ s connection with Delbert Grady is noteworthy in that Grady rationalises the murders of his own family as an ineluctable consequence of their “ willful ” nature—in this manner, he is an abuser shifting the blame to his victims. The film starts with Wendy discussing an incident in which Jack drunkenly injured his own son Danny, which Wendy, as a subjugated wife, then makes excuses for. Danny ’ s “ shining ” represents the power of foresight and intuition afforded to children who grow up in abusive households and who are conditioned to recognise the signs of a parent poised to inflict harm.This is not intended as a broad throw appraisal of Kubrick ’ mho work ; was intolerable for me, and sol was his treatment of Shelley Duvall during the film of. But it ’ second undeniable thatuses its slow pace to masterfully build up tension to the point where it feels like the rattling eyelid of a boiling pot—if you open it up, it will scald you, but you can hear it click-click-clicking in your periphery as a constant reminder.Every view in, no matter how slow or hushed, serves more than one character or plot related purpose. This multitasking narrative is precisely why the movie works : it keeps its multiple threads taut, and every scene imparts several significant pieces of information that keep the viewer engaged. An case of this is the scene where Jack interviews with the owner of the Overlook hotel. We learn in this setting that the hotel will be unoccupied over the winter ; that the previous caretaker killed his family ; and that there is something underneath Jack ’ s calm air, ordinary demeanor. The fib of the former caretaker shudder, not only because of what we already know about Jack, but because of his force mildness, his grandiloquent matter to in the hotel, and the way he slumps in his professorship as if he already belongs there.Another model is the hedge tangle scene. We see Wendy and Danny enter the hedge maze outside, and Jack staying indoors behind a glass window, separating the family into two camps : Jack in the past, and Wendy with Danny, their kin ’ s future. We see Wendy and Danny contend to escape from the tangle, which we know will be a orient of conflict subsequently. We see Jack standing over a modest model of the tangle, which positions him as a revengeful divine name, looming over his wife and child and throwing them into his across-the-board shadow. He controls the hotel, as he controls them, and the maze they are escaping from is his toxic influence.is slow, and it feels slow, because it fails to employ the same tools as : scenes like the trip to the internal-combustion engine cream living room, Zafira saying adieu to Yasmine ( a severe pine away of a electric potential f/f romance ), Nasir and Altair getting tangled up with the Dandan, Benyamin reeling off the bore history of his past, don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate achieve anything early than what they say on the canister. They hone in on one character, or one small plat point, and lunar month over it while everything else is dumped at the wayside. This is besides the reason why, after so much mobile in the desert, I had forgotten where we were going and what we were looking for, and who the hell the leo of the night was. It ’ randomness because these threads are left slack for most of the floor, then clumsily yanked on toward the goal of the book. The narrative crawl along, stacking one engine block at a time, and then expects the reader to be excited about something that was concisely touched on once at the very begin of the book.Some threads are besides wholly dropped, namely the Arz and the danger surrounding Sharr. Our characters build these regions up to be ineluctable prisons of death, but they traverse them with ease and without the appropriate equipment for survival in harsh climates. The Arz is the most baffling, in that Zafira ’ south unique and truly matter to charming aptitude for focus is built upon the threat of the Arz. however, the Arz is handily magically removed before she and Deen are due to cross it to reach Sharr. Why include the Arz at all if it has no carriage any on the plat ? Continued below :
