Rhialto the Marvellous

I absolutely adored the previous three books in The Dying Earth, but I feared that the last book would not have the same magic as the previous three.

Unfortunately this was exactly the case. Rhialto is not a bad story - in truth a set of three short stories where the characters are the same but are otherwise independent of one another - but it lacks both the personality of the Cugel books and the soul of the 1st collection of stories.

As with the other books, it's a comedy of manners where the absolute worst people you could ever meet do monstrous things to one another and the world around them for the pettiest of reasons, but it's all couched in polite, understated observations and flowery language. Old men more powerful than gods bicker and prank one another like a college frat while decorum is staunchly upheld or carelessly discarded depending on the mood.

It remains funny and novel and very weird. The problem is that we've seen all this before, only with much more interesting characters with better stories and journeys. Rhialto himself - despite the flamboyant title - is boringly mundane. He's a straight man in a setting that does not need one.

This book falls into the same trap I see a lot of long-in-the-tooth stories get stuck in, which is that it tries to revive a tired setting by introducing some new idea never hinted at before and then immediately concluding it. These self-contained story arcs feel disconnected from both themselves and the previous books, and you're left with the feeling that they were completely unnecessary.

This is in fact the opposite feeling you want to have when finishing a series. The rest of the series is fantastic, but skip this one.