The Time of Contempt

Seeing that I'm currently viewing House of the Dragon with friends, the grandiose fantasy worlds filled with white hair protagonists were destined to be compared. As I said in my previous Witcher log (Blood of Elves, which S02 of the Netflix show uses a lot from), I'm writing these partly in hindsight, as I have been pushing myself to use GoodReads more as I begin to regain my literary stride. I had a couple pages left apparently, so I just finished it up with haste in order to pick the series back up. Time of Contempt, while not bad, is certainly the most dense and convoluted of the series so far. On one side of the blade, if you're not invested into this world and its politics by this point, good luck getting through this one. But on the opposite side of the blade, there's a similarity to the sociopolitical dynamics of Game of Thrones (the elongated banquet chapter specifically).

The fourth entry—if reading in chronological order of events—Time of Contempt sees most of the chess pieces prior set, all fall into place: traps, betrayals, deaths, and deceptions all ignited. By now, we are comfortably familiar with the majority of the big names, the complex world and its multifaceted politics, and the inevitable dawn of the Second Great War. What I'm trying to hit home, is that a lot happens in this book. A lot. So much that Geralt himself is forced to finally break free from a Witcher's neutrality and pick a side.

Those who were upset that Ciri had a lot of focal time will be glad to hear that the balance with her adoptive father, Geralt, is much more aligned here. Yenn and almost all of the sorceresses get moments to shine here (particularly in the aforementioned banquet chapter), and even Dandelion/Jaskier aren't forgotten in the giant mix of tumultuous events. There are various reunions of crowd faves, long-time-coming face-offs, and the lifting of the veil for the established cogs of destiny to begin speeding up. Suffice it to say the book does live up to its title quite well.

If their pacing and timeline is what I think it is, I'm both concerned and interested to see how the next season of Netflix's The Witcher manages to include all of this. I brought up HotD earlier because I can foresee S03 of Witcher also struggling to balance the lack of action with the abundance of dialogue, royal court negotiations, and political espionage that is overtly present and pivotal in Time of Contempt. It'd be smart of the show runner to break this book into two parts, were it up to me (I wouldn't want to miss smaller detailed moments like Codringher & Fenn, Yenn & Ciri dealing with tuition costs, Black Rayla, and Geralt & Yenn's romantic daydreams of impossible love and peace).