I didn't expect to like The King in the Window as much as I did. It loses points right off the bat - the little amount of action in the first chapter is stifled by what amounts to a travelogue of Paris, as well as way too much character backstory that brings the momentum to zero. As I continued reading the book, it became evident that the author of King (Adam Gopnik) had a lousy editor; the first chapters, at least, are drawn out longer than they should be. The novel feels rough around the edges.
Still, The King in the Window is... largely pretty good, actually. It's extremely imaginative, even when it follows the standard fantasy narrative formula. There's the hero, his female and male sidekicks, the old wise and witty mentor, and the faceless bad guy in an iron mask. At some point the female will get kidnapped, the male sidekick will inspire the hero, and the mentor will learn something about herself. It all ties neatly together in a plot by which the world is almost destroyed but, at the last minute, saved.
Around that framework, though, is draped a story of mirrors and windows, around which Gopnik creates a pretty complex mythology. He even manages to link this to modern-day real-life and conceptual computers, bringing both past and future into play. Dualities abound, which is as it should be in a story about mirrors.
The hero thinks a lot of himself at the beginning of the story, because he knows he is the hero of a story. That's also a concept that has some promise. And the woman's a little subversive, too.
Oh, it wasn't easy to continue liking this story. The imagination is something I'd kill for in most other stories, but its presentation has flaws. For example, much is made of the process of thinking, and of the fact that each event in life should follow logically from the other. Yet The King in the Window lacks logic. All over the place, characters make leaps of faith that don't make sense. And sometimes concepts are introduced and used before they are fully explained. This can be done well, but here it isn't. In other books, I get the feeling that the author always had a sense of the underlying logic of his world, and managed to only gradually reveal it to us. Here, Gopnik really feels like he's making it up as he goes along.
So, in essence, while the beginning of the book explains too much, the end explains too little. Characters with promise, like that male sidekick, are tossed away. The Window Wraiths, a kooky band that crowns our hero, is forgotten for the middle of the book. There are a lot of great concepts, but they weren't well linked and there wasn't quite enough time to develop them. The pacing of the book has improved, but not its content. I wanted to understand this world better.
Gopnik dedicates his book to his son, who requested that all the cool parts be put closer together. Which makes for a well-paced yarn, but a shallow one. The King in the Window reads well, will be contemplated for a couple of days after, and then quickly forgotten. The substance to this novel is a well-worn framework, and it's the only thing, in the end, that the reader can hang on to as the author leaps disjointedly around his universe. Still, it's an entertaining read, and it's a good way to start the summer.
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