the painted man

Another of those fantasy books I bought on the spur of the moment, without prior information, and that I ended liking very much! Indeed, when I was in the UK in April, I bought a few books for my son in Fort William, of all places!, and The painted man by Peter Brett was one of them. My son got very enthusiastic about it and read it within a few days. Then kept asking about the sequel… (Note that the book strangely has an alternative title in the US, The warded man. With the same so-so cover. Why?! Because UK readers could not understand the word warded?! Because US readers would think The painted man was about American indians?!)

So I took the book with me to Guérande to see how good this was and I got hooked as well, finishing it in three days. The sequel, The Desert Spear, is already sitting on top of the to-read-pile! The central theme of the book(s) is a variation on the “fear of the dark” theme, when darkness is full of real dangers, also found in, e.g., Sanderson’s Mistborn series or Terry Goodkind’s (rather annoying) Wizzard’s First Rule or yet Barbara Hambly’s mosy enjoyable (if older) Darwatch trilogy. And, of course, the forerunner H.G. Wells’ Time Machine where morlocks feed upon elois… Not a very promising start, then, especially when the three main characters are three (pre-)teenagers embarking upon their own quest and of course doomed to meet at some point in the story. However, Brett manages to turn this classic in the genre into something different and highly gripping. One of the attractions of the story is that the demons (or corelings) that come out of the ground when the sun sets down are not described into painful details, only their deadly power matters and it seems so overwhelming that the notion of fighting them does not make sense, either to the inhabitants of this universe or to the reader. When one character, Arlen, decides to, nonetheless, it is a major surprise (mild spoiler warning!) that he survives the first night, the first month and then the whole book! Although there are several deus ex machina interventions to make this possible, the story flows rather nicely and Arlen turns into the major character in the book, Further, his growing powers against the night demons come at the price of distancing himself from the other people and (stronger spoiler warning!) getting more similar to the beings he obsessively pursues. Which is why the other characters are destined to meet him. And help him recover his humanity.

Of course, this is not a perfect book. Besides the recurrence of happenstance moments, some characters are too caricatural. For instance, as in several recent fantasy novels (Richard Morgan’s Cold Commands to just pick one!), one desert-related part of the world follows an Islamic-type culture that carries all the clichés about Muslim countries. This makes the book sounds quite ethno-centric, with the bigoted and superstitious but good at heart communities from the North getting the better part over the fanatic, sexists and untrustworthy denizens of the South. I am actually afraid the second volume The Desert Spear will see more of this simplistic opposition as the southern desert tribes start an invasion very much reminding me of the Muslim invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries… The female character, Leesha, is also rather inconsistent, from strong to weak to strong again, a flaw in the story, esp. against the much more coherent Arlen. But, all in all, this remains a terrific first book and many readers seem to have felt the same way from the mostly positive reviews on line. I am eagerly waiting to get my Desert Spear back so that I can read it!

The Cold Commands

“…my intention is that anyone reading The Cold Commands should feel a constant sense of relevance in the narrative, an eerie familiarity of issue and circumstance, a intense sense of now. And that does seem to be something that the fantasy genre as a whole works quite hard at shying away from.” R. Morgan, interview on Science Fiction & Fantasy, Cot. 20122

Over the trip to Banff last week, I managed to read Richard Morgan’s The cold commands, which is the sequel to The steel remains, that I read and reviewed a while ago. It has the drawback of a sequel in that most of the novelty wears off: most characters are the same as in the previous volume, while new characters tend to die quickly and rather unexpectedly, the battle scenes are not very different either, and the plot is a continuation of the previous story. This said, the book makes for a decent middle book in the series (“in that sense, Cold is probably the least standalone novel I’ve ever written“, R. Morgan) as better discussed in this review (spoilers included), and I am thus looking forward the third volume. (Abercrombie’s second volume Before they are hanged was more disappointing by comparison.)

The most complex and interesting character in this book is certainly Ringil faced with powers he does not truly understand and with loyalty to his friends that almost certainly leads him to his death, if in virtual spaces. It must be brought to Morgan’s credit (or was it unintentional?!) that he even demotes one of the three main heroes of The steel remains, Egar, to a lackluster situation requiring the others to rescue him from his own stupidity! I also feel that the third character, Archeth, was under-exploited and too prone to soul-searching. At least within this volume. The depiction of the rising religious fanaticism of the Citadel is a well-constructed (if uncomfortably close to real-world religions) aspect of the book, even though why this is essential for the alien dwendas to return in the world escaped me. Other than that, I found myself enjoying for the first time the mix of fantasy and SF therein, a mix that I usually dislike (even in the Wheel of TIme, this usually puts me off!). This must be due to Morgan’s excellence in writing SF… Thus, if you are ready to face more graphic sex and violence,  while hoping that the final volume will show the best of Richard Morgan’s skills, I would clearly advise reading this second volume!

The Whitefire Crossing

I grabbed The Whitefire Crossing (by Courtney Schafer) in the Barnes-and-Nobles of Provo, Utah, after one great day of ice-climbing and because of the nice cover! The main plot is about a smuggler+mountain guide taking a hidden mage away from a magicians’ city. The Whitefire is the mountain range the group must cross to reach a safe haven where magic is banned. The first part of the book is quite enticing, taking place in the mountains with several stories of climbs and rescues. There is however a limit on the number of climbs you can describe in a book and the second part of The Whitefire Crossing is more tepid, in my opinion. This is the author’s first book and the way characters interact with one another somehow reflects upon this. The plot is indeed rather predictable and the very final twist not really unexpected. (The [unavoidable] love relation is clear to anyone but the main character from the very beginning of the book!) The cover is also going against mountaineering (obvious) practice that the most experienced climber stands at the back when going down…   The Whitefire Crossing still remains an enjoyable book (I had to rescue over and over from my son’s room as  he kept stealing it from me!) and I am looking forward the sequel, The Tainted City, as obviously are more enthusiastic reviewers, here and there. And there.

The steel remains

“When a man you know to be sound of mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options.” R. Morgan, The steel remains

Over the trip to Edinburgh, I read the (first) fantasy book by Richard Morgan, The steel remains, and it reads awfully well! Given the other books of his I read so far, this is not very surprising. (A stylistic improvement over those is that marks are used as terminations of sentences, not as word separators as in so many sentences in the Kovacs series. Almost. Surely.) The plot summary looks like the standard one: retired hard-boiled mercenaries from a all-powerful empire get reunited to fight a terrible threat only them can vanquish. And they do. This sounds like the last fifty fantasy novels I mentioned, right?! Well, not exactly, because the above heroes are far from the down-the-shelf heroes (in the same way Abercrombie’s Heroes are anything but heroes…!) Actually, there is a lot in common between Morgan’s and Abercrombie’s types of fantasy, mostly that they both clearly escape almost all canons of the genre, towards the gritty, the gory, and the obscene. A wonderful mix. Which explains why Abercrombie wrote a rather enthusiastic review. With the surprising (given Abercrombie’s own prose!) reservation that “a few may reasonably think it could have been just a tad less lurid at times and gained punch as a result”!

At last!

While in Lancaster, I bought the latest volume in George Martin‘s Song of Ice and Fire series. A book I have been waiting for, for about six years… Even though the size of the series is far behind the Wheel of Time, it is clearly headed towards the same fate of never getting any near the finishing line, unless someone else takes over! I am very much surprised at the TV adaptation of the first volume, A Game of Thrones, nor because it is a poor adaptation (quite the opposite!), neither because it attracted many viewers (including my son), but because there is no end in sight. Or maybe that’s a good thing for a TV adaptation! In any case, I got the heavy hardcover in the Lancaster University bookstore at the price of a paperback. A  voluminous and hopefully good enough read for the incoming summer break!