Struggling Across the Countryside

I have to admit that I’m never certain where the books in The WitcherCreated by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, this franchise spawned not only nine books (with more on the horizon) but also a successful series of video games and a (less success) television productions as well. are going to go. By that I mean that each novel seems to forge its own path, using the characters at its disposal as it sees fit, sometimes having the three main characters – Geralt, Yennifer, and Ciri – share equal time, while other novels focus almost exclusively on one character to the detriment of everyone else. This is part of why, I think, doing a true, proper adaptation of The Witcher would be all but impossible in current Hollywood. When you sign actors to major roles, the expectation (per their contracts) is that they’ll have those major roles in every season, episode, or movie they’re contracted for.

Case in point for this is the fifth book of the run, Baptism of Fire, which sees Geralt and Dandelion teaming up with a new crew of other adventurers – the archer Milva, the renegade knight Cahir, the vampire medic Regis, and a whole host dwarves – as they venture southward to try and rescue Ciri who they believe has been captured and is being held at the imperial palace in Nilfgaard. Up until the end of the novel Ciri barely appears at all. Yennifer has even less time in the novel by comparison. This is a Geralt book, through and through, and for any reader wanting more Geralt (who hasn’t had as much to do in the previous novels), this is a great story for him… but it would make for a lousy adaptation.

You can see that in the fourth season of The Witcher, which saw the A-plot follow Geralt’s time on the road with his companions, and the series more or less did a decent job adapting these tales. It did take a number of narrative diversions that didn’t come from the novel, but at least it more or less stuck to the meat of the story. However, it also threw in storylines for Ciri and Yennifer that absolutely never happened, all because it had actresses with contracts that it had to use. Because of that, the story changes wildly around Geralt’s adventure, and the whole of the story shifts in ways that will only cause the series to diverge further from the books. It creates a no-win scenario for the series that I don’t think it’s going to be able to escape. Better, then, to focus on the good version here in this fifth novel.

Having been grievously injured by Vilgefortz, Geralt is found by Dandelion healing in the dryad forests of Brokilon. He brings news of the war in the world outside the forests, especially that a girl, probably Ciri, has been captured by the Nilfgaardians and is set to marry their emperor to legitimize his claim to her kingdom, Cintra. This leads Geralt to pack up and head out, despite not being fully healed, with Dandelion and the dryad-adopted archer, Milva, in tow. Their plan is to head North and find a way into Nilfgaard, even though that seems like a fool’s errand and, more likely than not, will get them all killed.

Along the way they pick up other companions who are swayed by Geralt’s cause (while, often, having their own reasons for wanting to head North and escape the war in the South). But around every turn they find trouble, armies battling each other of ruffians feeding on those fleeing from the battles. The South has been turned into a cold, hard land, and it’s hard to know what shape it will be in when the war is over. If the war ever ends…

The saga so far is very strangely constructed, with the heroes having been apart only to come together to then get driven apart, to come together, and then getting driven apart again. At this point our three leads – Geralt, Yennifer, and Ciri – are about as far apart as they could get, with Ciri lost in lands no one expected, while Yennifer is simply missing altogether (although that is eventually explained). That leaves Geralt as the only one of the three who could be followed for any length of time, which is what the book does. This is Geralt’s adventure, through and through… but even then it doesn’t really feel like much of an adventure.

Structurally the book works like a series of connected tales, with the band arriving at a place, taking some actions, and then leaving to head off somewhere else. Sometimes they battle bad guys, other times they try to avoid danger, but it’s less a story moving towards a specific goal and more a tale of just moving. They can’t stay where they’re at, they have to keep moving forward. It works by moments, with each chunk of progress making you think maybe the adventurers are getting somewhere… while also reminding you that, no, where they’re headed won’t actually help them complete their quest.

Bear in mind that we know that Ciri isn’t actually a prisoner of the Nilfgaardian emperor. That girl is an imposter, and the Nilfgaardians are only using her as a prop until the real Ciri ends up in their grasp (they hope). Ciri is far from where they expect, and when we finally catch up with her again, she ends up joining with a different band, the Rats, who take her off even further away from where Geralt is headed. So Geralt’s whole mission in this book is really not going to help him, long run. We know that, so we’re watching him go through the motions of a quest that won’t lead him anywhere.

In a way it makes for a frustrating read. You want progress in the story but this fifth book feels like a lot of padding. Nothing can be done, and no progress can be made, so it’s just adventurers trudging forward. The story itself can’t progress until all the pieces are where they need to be, and that doesn’t happen for some time to come (not until one of the future books). Readers have to sit and wait while the story catches up to the author’s ambitions.

At the same time, though, this book does a solid job of fleshing out the world. Instead of skipping past the war and catching up with all the characters when they’re closer to finally meeting again, the author forces us to see the horrors of the war, to watch the damage that the Nilfgaardings have wrought upon the world. We could have simply been told how much damage Nilfgaard was doing, but that wouldn’t have had the impact. “The empire is bad, we must fight them,” is a trope in writing, but it only lands when we understand why they’re bad. Baptism of Fire illustrates it with every battle, every camp packed with scared survivors, every time the heroes stumble on people starving and dying of disease.

Because that’s the real point of the book: to get through to the other side our party has to first go through hell and Nilfgaard has turned their homeland into hell. The trip is here to illustrate all that, in gory detail, so we know just how far the South has fallen. This is a country that’s been stripped apart by war and even if somehow the war ended and Nilfgaard was defeated, there’s no way the lands of the South would be able to return to the way they were. Too much has changed, too much has been lost.

So yes, Baptism of Fire doesn’t move the plot forward as much as I would have liked, but it does push the worldbuilding forward. We needed some of this to make the war in the South feel real, and this book clearly demonstrates all that for us. Now, when the saga comes to its conclusion in the next couple of volumes, we’ll have a greater appreciation for what everyone is fighting for and why these stories mattered. It just takes us a while, in this book, to get there.