A Messy Ending Sends Us Off

I have to admit, the last books of this series have left me feeling pretty cold. As the series of 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. has gone on it’s felt like author Andrzej Sapkowski has struggled to rein in the story enough so he can bring it to a solid conclusion. Over the last couple of books – Baptism of Fire and The Tower of the Swallow – we saw the introduction of a massive amount of new characters, all of them bringing their own plotlines with them, on top of the world events that were continuing in the background, and it all felt like it was drawing attention away from the core story. Specifically, there was little movement on the plotline of Geralt, Yennifer, and Ciri all battling against whatever it was that Vilgefortz had planned for Ciri, and how somehow that would change the balance of power for the world (and maybe the universe).

Now we’re through book seven, The Lady of the Lake, and the book (spoilers for novel that was written almost thirty years ago) still doesn’t seem to know how to bring it all home. This is the last book in the series, and one would expect it would put the most emphasis on Geralt, Ciri, and Yenn, all so that their story can conclude in a satisfactory manner. Far from it, though, as this novel meanders wildly, spending even more time drawing out all the little events of the world such that by the time we do get to the conclusion of the story we were actually here for it feels like too little, too late.

It doesn’t just lead to a frustrating experience reading this novel in particular. The way this whole conclusion is handled actually makes me wonder why I was even reading these books at all. A good conclusion can bring a story together, even if the various parts were starting to fall apart in the lead up, but a bad conclusion can ruin the experience, even when there were parts early on you enjoyed. While I might not say this seventh book is as bad as other, more recent conclusions that went way off the rails (Game of Thrones season eight, The Boys season five, and the Stranger Things finale all come to mind), it’s still a weak conclusion that wastes the reader’s time in pursuit of… well, I’m honestly not sure at this point.

To be clear, The Witcher was never really about the grand political game. The early novels nodded towards the fact that Ciri was a princess, and that she technically had a claim to the throne of Cintra, but it also established quickly that she really had no interest in pursuing that claim or being a princess. Once she fell under the care of the witcher, Geralt, all she wanted to do was become a witcher herself. She had great power, and great magical ability, which Yennifer tried to get under control, but as far as the grand political game, Ciri and her story seemed willing to ignore all of it. The machinations of the political factions were background noise.

But by the seventh book, the political machinations are most of the story. We get long passages about the coven of witches trying to balance the power of the world. We get whole chapters going into the war between nations, and how all the events of this conflict – which, bear in mind, in no way involved Geralt, Yennifer, or Ciri, our three main characters – actually played out. We get a lot of discussion about how the war ends, and how all the nations find a way to broker some kind of peace. None of this matters, though, to our main characters. This is a story totally divorced from the focus of our characters, and it only serves to detract from the story we’re actually here to read.

That story plays out in two main chunks, near the start and near the end of the novel. The first part concerns Ciri, who is stuck in a different dimension, one controlled by elves, and those elves want to breed her to steal her magical potential. We’ve been told, time and again, that there’s special blood within Ciri and that, somehow, she could lead to a realignment of the cosmos if, somehow, her magic could be tapped. Generally people want to do that by breeding her and using her offspring, but the goal is still the same: Ciri has magic, and they want it. So she has to find a way to escape, which she does via the help of unicorns. They teach her how to tap into her magic, and she suddenly becomes a planeswalker, moving from world to world and she learns to control her power.

The other chunk is, then, about how Ciri comes back to her own world. She learns that Yennifer, her adoptive mother, is in trouble, held prisoner by Vilgefortz to be used as bait to capture Ciri. The witcher girl goes to Vilgefortz’s castle so she can confront him, but she falls into his trap and is nearly tortured and killed by the wizard and his hired bounty hunter, Bonhart. Just before she can be surgically tortured, though, Geralt and his team of heroes show up, and a great battle ensues. And then, within a chapter, the whole conflict is resolved and, well, you end up wondering what all the fuss was about.

I think part of my issue here is that the last couple of books have felt incredibly padded. From the point where Sapkowski spilt of the three main characters – having Geralt laid up in the dryad forest of Brokilon, with Yenn captured (and turned into a tiny figurine for a time) by the elf witches only to then fall into the hands of Vilgefortz for him to do almost nothing with her, and Ciri off having her own adventures as “Falka” while traveling with the Rats – it’s felt like the author hasn’t really known what to do with the characters. Putting Ciri through a trial by fire, fighting off Bonhart while trying to escape the clutches of Vilgefortz was the closest we had to an A-plot, but nothing that happened with Geralt or Yennifer really mattered at all.

That’s not to downplay the characters that Geralt traveled with, mind you. I liked Cahir, Angouleme, Milva, and Regis, and while I feel like their adventures went on far too long (we seriously spent nearly three books with them and all they did was wander the continent aimlessly) they were solid companions. However this book disposes of them like they were nothing, killing all of them in a span of pages, as if they really didn’t matter at all. If they weren’t in the series to begin with the whole epic would be two novels shorter and the end result would have been the same.

Yennifer is in a similar boat. She is captured by the elves, and then when she’s brought back to life (after getting turned into a stone figurine for a time), she is brought before the coven of witches, escapes them, travels to an island nation to gain help in tracking down Vilgefortz, and then eventually finds the mad wizard, who easily captures her. She then spends the next two books as his “guest”, and we learn that he tortured her to try and turn her against Ciri. That doesn’t work… and then nothing else happens in Yenn’s story until Ciri arrives and Geralt saves the day. Yenn could have traveled with Geralt the whole time and the story would have functionally been the same. Nothing she does really matters, and I can’t even make the argument that her torture at the hands of Vilgefortz substantially changes her character as the book barely acknowledges it after it happens. She suffered, then she moved on, and the book gives it little more than a shrug.

And all of this (spoilers again for an older novel) leads up to a conclusion that, despite ending the stories for two of our three characters, doesn’t actually conclude anything we care about at all. Geralt and Yennifer as seemingly sent off to the afterlife (after Geralt takes a grievous blow in battle), and Ciri decides to travel with them to that afterlife. But then she teleports herself somewhere else (to Camelot, as it turns out), and goes off to have adventures there… maybe? And the whole storyline about her having the power to realign the universe, and maybe stop the end of her own world (which will come via a growing ice age in a couple of thousand years) is never mentioned. The whole matter is dropped without a shrug from Ciri.

Seriously, what was the point of any of this? Not only could this series easily have been two to three books shorter, it also could have addressed all of the main storylines that actually mattered to the main characters. Instead we get a meandering mess of an epic that leads to a long and drawn out final book that really doesn’t do justice to anything that was set up in the earlier novels. I liked The Witcher for the first few books as it was a fun, albeit dark, take on fantasy and fairy tales. As the novels went on, though, everything I liked about the series faded away until we get this, The Lady of the Lake, a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion.

While I think there are parts of the epic I did like, I can’t really recommend The Witcher at this point. I got through it based just on sheer narrative momentum, but unlike many other series that I’ve read and gone back to before, I just don’t see myself reading through this epic a second time. It has such potential and then squandered it all via a series of boring novels that wasted all my time. This was just not a good conclusion to what started out as a really excellent and interesting fantasy series.