And the first with Cugel the Clever. While I do like a good picaresque story, this one (near the end) got a bit monotonous. Cugel stumbles upon a bunch of weird people (mostly deformed in some way) with unique customs he doesn’t understand. He tries to weasel his way into power, money or a way back home. In the end he ends up getting screwed, and back to square one. Lather, rinse, repeat.
At times it can be interesting, and the problems he gets into creative and imaginative. Cugel is not a nice person, and pretty much your standard Trickster anti-hero, who ends up scheming himself into more and more trouble. But after awhile the repitition does get to be a bit much, and the whole Dying Earth backdrop seems stretched. At points the world doesn’t even feel like the same one within the first book of the series, and most of the flavor is gone (with, every once and awhile a reminder that the sun is going out).
The ending redeems the novel, and makes everything before it far more interesting. But I won’t say anything more than that. I’m currently reading Cugel’s Saga (the first book I’d read of these as a preteen, and whose cover I remember very vividly) and this is far better then the Eyes of the Overworld, and feels like the world is more in touch with the one in the first series of short stories presented in The Dying Earth.
