First thing: do NOT read any summaries, jacket covers, or reviews (except for this one) about Agyar. The most interesting thing about this novel is its central conceit: Agyar, you see, is a very special kind of person, but he only gives very elliptical hints about the kind of person that he is, and I imagine it would be sort of fun (if a little confusing) to piece together Agyar's true nature from the disingenuous hints he drops about his day-to-day life. I, unfortunately, already knew what Agyar was going into the book--and that seriously spoiled a lot of the fun, since you can only marvel at Agyar's skill at understatement and deliberate omissions for so long, even in such a short book, before it gets tiring.

Aside from this conceit (which I have to say is pretty well done), I didn't find much of interest in this book. It's very well written, true, and Brust has a certain way with conversation and description, but there's just not a lot of substance here. I think Agyar is supposed to be a love story, primarily--albeit a very weird one. But it's not a love story that has much bite (pardon the pun), given that Agyar's very detached narrative style makes it hard to sympathize with him or the poor women who supposedly fall in love with him.

Curiously, the feeling I got while reading Agyar was the same feeling I got while reading Roger Zelazny's very different A Night in the Lonesome October. In both books, you have some fairly horrific and violent events, described by a flippant and completely unfazeable narrator. The result is a strange feeling of being detached from the entire story--you know it's weird, you know it's interesting, but for some reason you just can't make yourself care. And that, as far as I'm concerned, is fatal for a novel.

Copyright © 2004 Steven Wu