Troubadour
Donn Fenn

Review by Mylan Vaugeois

Troubadour is billed as a "psychological novel," since the protagonist is a psychologist and matters of the mind weigh heavily in the novel. Disaffected with his life on Earth, he agrees to visit the planet Troubadour and learn about its people and help the previous visitor from Earth. As a consequence, our hero spends a lot of time discussing emotions. Even so, the novel offers a poor example of psychological behavior. Dr. Peter Icarus is a psychotherapist suffering from untreated depression. We are meant to empathize with him, to learn from his actions and his emotional journey throughout the novel. The problem is that his characterization is so uneven and unlikeable from the start that there is little interest to continue.

Peter prides himself on being an excellent psychotherapist, yet admits in the very next chapter that he willingly will go beyond proper psychotherapeutic boundaries. This blurring of boundaries actually makes him lose his objectivity and focus, hindering treatment. In addition, Peter's speech weakens his characterization. Within the same sentence, he will use fairly sophisticated words and then slang terms. Most people that work in the health field would not casually call psychiatrists "shrinks" or blame them as the root cause of their personal problems interacting with others. Peter also behaves erratically in response to situations. He berates his children, curses at the drop of a pin and is generally disagreeable even with close friends. All of this occurs right after the author took great pains to paint Peter as a stable and sympathetic character. This is a sharp enough dichotomy that it is difficult to sympathize with Peter. He comes across as unstable, erratic and in desperate need of therapy himself.

All of this occurs in the first seventy to eighty pages of the novel, and the book is over six hundred pages. There is little will to continue past that point. If the main character is treated in such a slipshod manner, what will the next six hundred pages be like? As it happens, they are exactly the same. Characters are casually psychoanalyzed; every action or statement is charged with meaning and motive for the reader, rather than letting the reader discover it gradually. The language and tone I overwrought and self-important. The novel is less about telling the story of the psychological changes and more about analyzing every move. Peter supposedly learns from his journey, but immediately falls into the same pattern he was in at the start of the novel. Also, he didn't appear any different in his interactions while on Troubadour. His sudden change in the final chapters feels forced, as though there was a shortcut to the emotional growth.

It is very important to acknowledge emotion, and the painful ones do take work to deal with. Peter rings false throughout the novel, and it is too difficult to care about him. In a psychological novel, it is important that the reader care about the characters, flawed as they are. This book felt as though it was less of Peter's journey to understanding himself and more of the author's journey to learning how to write a novel.

Synergy Books, 2005: ISBN 0-9755922-6-2