The City by Stella Gemmell

Yes, Gemmell as in David’s wife. She worked with him on some of his books and completed his Fall of Troy series after his death. This is her first solo novel and by heck, it’s a cracker. This is, for me, the equivalent for fantasy of what Hawk Quest was for historical fiction. I don’t think she put a foot wrong in this one – it’s so well written, inventive and plotted that it was a joy to read.

What’s it about?  Well, it describes the efforts of a motley assortment of characters to bring down an apparently immortal and thoroughly decadent emperor who rules over the eponymous City. Some of them are fighting in an incredibly long war between the City and its enemies, others are inhabitants of the gloriously intricate under-City which is like some kind of mega-dungeon, slowly flooding and causing the city above it to sink. They are tied together by some truly brilliant plotting that is immensely satisfying when you finally realise how it all falls together.

The prose is realistic, particularly the combat scenes, gritty without being nihilistic or bleak in any way, with characters that you really come to like and want to see succeed. One of the main characters, in my mind at least is the City itself. There’s no map but by the end of the book you feel you could probably draw one. It’s a huge, sprawling place, amazingly real, and – as I mentioned before – built on so many levels, it’s a bit like Gormenghast. The world-building is sans pareil, and could give many DMs a lesson in how to make something at the same time familiar and yet strikingly new in its exoticism.

It’s 560 pages long, so as fantasy epics go, it’s rather mid-length. I could have done with more pages, to be honest as at no point did I feel that the pace was flagging. I’d recommend it if you like David Gemmell’s work but I think Stella should be read on her own merits – of which, if this is anything to go by, she has plenty.

Legend by David Gemmell

 There’s late to the party and then there’s only reading this book this year. It was published in 1984, when I was just 19 and Joe Abercrombie was 10 (or possibly 9).  All this time, it’s been off my radar and only now, having read stuff that’s been compared to it did I decide to find out what all the fuss is (was) about.

So what is it all about?  Well, Legend can best be described as what might have happened if a 60-year-old Conan with a bad back and a gammy knee was drafted in to defend Helm’s Deep against the Mongols. If you feed that combination through the directorship of John Ford, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Of course, with a summary like that, and it being fantasy, you’ll probably be expecting action of the most military sort. To tell the truth, Legend has plenty of fighting but there isn’t an overwhelming amount of it. We get battle scenes in which named characters participate but the fighting isn’t where the real story takes place. That is reserved for the sections of the book where Gemmell peels back the outside of his characters and looks into their souls.

Having done this, he reveals that his characters are just as fallible and human as the rest of us. There are no larger-than-life heroes here, unless you count Druss, and even he has his shortcomings, although as a paragon, personifiying the virtues of nobility, sacrifice, duty and honour, he has few equals.

In essence, what Gemmell has done with this book is to humanise Tolkien, giving us people with whom it’s very easy to identify, rather than Kings and Princes with Destinies and magic swords.

There are flaws in the book, of course; Rek’s romance with Virae seems to progress very fast indeed whereas it might have been a better idea to have had them meet at Dros Delnoch and there find each other. The length of the book is perhaps not quite enough for us to witness the fates of various characters, some of whom are killed off-screen, as it were. But given that Gemmell is no longer with us, we’re unlikely to get a Director’s Cut of the book and so must be satisfied with what we have – and thankful for it.

Gemmell is lauded by those who came after him – less charitable souls than I might dub them epigones – and he has an annual fantasy awards ceremony named after him. There are many debates as to his legacy on fantasy with many claiming his standard and marching forward with it. 

I suppose that rather than the vanguard of gritty fantasy as it is now defined, Gemmell was in fact the rearguard of heroic moral fantasy, where there was something larger than the character to which they could give allegiance, be that a principle or a cause.  It seems odd that he has been beatified by a genre which seems, over recent years, to have drifted away from the underlying values which made him such a popular and enduring author.

Malice by John Gwynne

Another week, another big book (628 pages). Unlike Hawk Quest, this one takes a while to get going and I suppose that there are  readers who would have given up by the time the slow-burning plot really fires up. It’d be their loss because once it does get underway, the iron shackles of the quality writing grip and won’t let go. In tone, it’s similar to both Paul Kearney and Brian Ruckley; it’s also been compared favourably to David Gemmell but (and I know this is going to come as a shock) I’ve never read any Gemmell, so I can’t comment.

Gwynne has taken what appears to be the Dark Ages (always a plus in my book) and set his story there. The map seems to be based, in the North at least, on Europe – with the British Isles expanded slightly and attached to the mainland, similar to the way things were before the end of the last Ice Age. I’ve done something similar when designing a campaign map many moon ago, so I recognised it pretty quickly.

Into this familiar arena are pitched the protagonists; chief amongst these are Corban, a blacksmith’s son and Nathair, a prince with big ideas. Starting at almost opposite ends of the continent, they’re clearly on a collision course as kings, warriors and mysterious wise men are swept up in a frenzy of expectation at the imminent rising of champions of good and evil known as the Bright Star and Black Sun respectively. Add to that tribes of giants who haunt the huge forest at the heart of the continent and we’re set for hundreds of pages of good old-fashioned action – and there’s plenty of it to go round. One of Gwynne’s publicity shots has him sitting with two huge dogs (both of whom appear in the book) and a massive axe, so he clearly knows his stuff when describing the combat scenes. There’s blood in bucketloads and when he says, on the cover of the book ‘even the brave will fall’ he means it. There is, however – as far I could see – no foul language in the book so in this respect, it differs from other ‘gritty’ fantasy novels out there.

The book uses a single point of view per chapter, each headed with that character’s name. There are actually six individual point of view characters and that, to me at least, was perhaps too many. Gwynne could have pruned it down by two without losing any of the story’s strengths and a good case could be made for further pruning. Still, spending time with the characters means that what happens to them during the book does affect the reader more than if they had merely been referred to in the narrative of another. The structure does mean that on occasion, the reader has to wait a considerable number of pages before finding out what happened to a particular character, left dangling on a cliff-hanger.

If you’re prepared to put the effort in, Malice is a good read; I found myself making time to read on once the pace picked up and having been drawn in by Gwynne, I’m looking forward to the second book, Valour, due out in the UK early 2014. 

Seven Princes by John R Fultz

(Spoilers ahead)

I wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did, which is not to say that I disliked it.

The opening scene, where a sinister sorcerer visits the royal court, survives two executions (and to be fair to the King, one of those executions is pretty thorough) and then animates the dead of the city’s catacombs to rip apart the King and sundry other courtiers is a pretty good start. However, Fultz then breaks stride to start bringing in his cast of characters, the eponymous Seven Princes. A caveat – the cover suggests that somehow this regal heptad assembles, much like the recent Avengers, to take revenge against the sorcerer of the first chapter. This is rather misleading, since at no point in the book are all seven either together or on the same side.

Nevertheless, the book bounds along like an over-large puppy who is so excited to see you that it doesn’t notice the smashed ornaments and muddy pawprints.  In this instance, allow me to extend my analogy – at certain points, plot logic takes a back seat to the needs of the plot; one particular instance is when two of the princes are hurrying from location A to location B and suddenly realise that they won’t get there in time, whereupon a colossal (and literally true) deus ex machina eliminates all that fussy travelling.  There are also a couple of instances of “With one bound he was free” which get characters out of seemingly fatal scrapes.

And those muddy pawprints – the prose is pretty good for the most part but there are areas where we veer into the Colour Purple. Fultz might have benefitted from a stricter editor at these points as my eyes started to glaze over and I found myself flicking ahead to the next action sequence (fortunately, there are quite a lot of these).

But damn me if that over-large puppy didn’t grab me by the teeth and pull me from one end of the book to the other. I found that I did want to find out what happened to the characters; they are sufficiently well-developed that they stand out and Fultz does seem to throw everything he possibly can at them to keep the reader entertained (alas, poor characters, however; they don’t all survive!).

I think it’s best to approach this book with few expectations; it’s not the next Tolkien, Joe Abercrombie or George R R Martin but it’s not Terry Goodkind, Robert Newcomb or Jim Theis either. If you don’t expect perfection, you may be pleasantly surprised.

Hawk Quest by Robert Lyndon

To what can I compare this book?  In terms of the geographical distances travelled by its characters, it’s on a par with Lord of the Rings.  Regarding its depth of historical immersion, it reminded me of the early House of Niccolo novels by Dorothy Dunnett. It’s gritty without being bleak, heroic without being cliché, heartbreaking without being over-emotional and it’s clear that Lyndon loves his subject and, more importantly, respects both his characters and his readers.

The book weigh in at 658 pages, which is about two thirds of the length of LotR. However, such is Lyndon’s skill at bringing his settings to life that I don’t think a single one of those pages was wasted. He knows when to home in on a section of the journey and tease out every last detail of the landscape, the weather and the hazards that his characters face, whilst capable and willing to pull back if the pace of the novel requires it.

The setting is Europe in the year 1072, a scant six years after the Norman Conquest. A knight has been captured by Seljuk Turks at the battle of Manzikert and a message is dispatched to his family in northern England, requesting a ransom for his release. That message starts the Quest itself – to find four rare white gyrfalcons and bring them to Anatolia in a matter of months. We follow Frankish mercenary Vallon and his Sicilian companion Hero as they begin to gather their own fellowship and set off on a journey that will cover thousands of miles and more dangers than you can shake a stick at. In fact, it seems at times as if everything that can happen to them does so; however, Lyndon’s ability to draw sympathetic (if not likeable) characters means that you empathise with their plight, cheer their victories and mourn their losses.

Although my recommendation is (virtually) unreserved, I would add that there are sections that are not for the faint-hearted; Lyndon doesn’t stint on the gore and detail of combat. There was one scene, however, that will reward fans of Monty Python; a character comes within an inch of being disembowelled and then remarks to the character stitching him back together that “it was only a flesh wound”.

The back cover proclaims that this book was ten years in the making; it’s weird to think that I was reading a book that was started when my son was born. I would hazard a guess that a lot of that time was spent on the research, for it absolutely drips period realism without ever overloading the reader. The landscapes were extremely well-described, so much so that I could imagine myself slogging alongside the fellowship on their epic journey.

You may not think that historical novels are for you; perhaps they’re over-detailed or uninteresting, concentrating on the history rather than the characters or plot. Let me assure you that this is not a criticism that can be levelled at Hawk Quest.

Best of all, I hear that Lyndon is now at work on a sequel to this epic tale. When I got that news, I experienced the thrill that a fan of Lord of the Rings might have felt had they learned that Tolkien had started work on a follow-up in the 1960s. I just hope it's not another ten years before I encounter Lyndon's fellowship again.

The Lion of Cairo by Scott Oden

I don’t often use the word ‘excellent’ when talking about books; there’s often some niggling little thing that detracts from the performance that an author has crammed into the space between the front and back covers. However, in this instance, I think the word ‘excellent’ is justified.

I found this one through following up on The Desert of Souls by Howard Jones (another cracking read). I’ve become less enamoured of modern fantasy, finding the rush towards the Edge of Grit a bit off-putting; perhaps as I’ve got older, I’ve started to hanker for the more heroic lustre of the fiction I used to read. In Oden’s book, I think I’ve found it.

The Lion of Cairo is set in the Middle East of the mid 12th century, a time when caliphs and viziers, Mamelukes and eunuchs vied for power in the greatest city of Egypt. Add to that the presence of the Crusaders, their military hardmen the Templars and a generous sprinkling of sinister sorcerous shenanigans and you’ve got a recipe for intrigue, skulduggery and high adventure.

The main character is Assad, a member of the Nizari Ismailis, otherwise known as the hashishiyya, the original Assassins. He is a fascinating fellow who carries a sword that has echoes of Stormbringer; there’s more to his weapon than meets the eye and I suspect we’ll find out more about it in future volumes. Oden brings a good-sized cast onto his stage and gives them all plenty of time in the limelight with a shifting focus depending on the needs of the plot. I liked this technique and didn’t find it distracting; it personalises even the minor characters effectively. Speaking of which, a major historical figure in the Crusades appears here as a minor character; he’s one to watch, as I suspect that his part in future adventures of Assad will be key.

Oden’s pace is cracking; there’s never a dull moment and even when there’s no swordplay, he manages to keep the tension high. The plot runs right to the very end as well. No winding down in the last few pages for this writer. He really can write as well; his descriptions evoke a real sense of place that should be a lesson to many fantasy writers who, it seems to me, struggle somewhat with imaginary cities and fall back on the bog-standard mediaeval European setting.  Oden’s Cairo really does drip with atmosphere; perhaps a map might have come in handy but often I find that when there is one, I’m popping to the front of the book to check where we are rather than paying attention to the action.

And speaking of action, there’s a lot of it. Deaths aplenty and swords spend a lot of time bloodied. It’s rippingly good stuff. Here’s a taster

“…his broadsword licking out to shear through a Turkish neck. The heathen’s head rode a geyser of blood as his body tumbled to the ground…”

Oden references Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard in his introduction. Howard’s Gates of Empire covers this period as does Lamb’s Swords from the West. It’s a worthy tradition and Oden is a fine inheritor of it.  I hear that this is the first book in a planned trilogy and I hope Volume 2 hurries along soon; I’ll be waiting.

The Case of the Syphilitic Sister by James Hutchings

Doubtless you will remember last year, James Hutchings produced his collection of short stories and poetry entitled “The New Death and Others”.  I had the privilege of reviewing it and was very pleased with what I found therein. I mentioned that I’d quite like to see him tackle longer formats and now he’s done just that, albeit in serial style with The Case of the Syphilitic Sister.

The tone of the first chapter (all that’s available right now) could best be summed up by imagining Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett teaming up to write Watchmen. If that give you a fanboy squee, then you’re not alone; I really got into the crime-fighting superhero tone of this work, although it feels closer to the Minutemen than the later Watchmen themselves. There’s even Hutchings’ equivalent of the Keene Act and some sly metafictional asides to the films of the era.

Hutchings handles the pace well and his prose is confident and assured, although it lacks the hardboiled and cynical edge that marked out Chandler and Hammett. It’s only the first chapter so it may develop as we go. His characters, even at this early stage, are starting to become real, the dichotomy between their public and private personae being one of the themes of the chapter.

There’s a smattering of NSFW language, as might be expected in a work of this genre and after the first scene break, there’s a slightly confusing shift of POV within a paragraph, which might have been better handled by splitting it into two, one for Catherine, one for the Green Dragon.

In conclusion, a solid start for this serial and one that I’m hoping to see developed in further chapters. It can be found here.

Mr Holland's Opus

This book is not an easy read; firstly, it takes, as one of its objectives, a review of the historical evidence regarding the birth of Islam and the conclusions to which Holland has come have attracted the opprobrium of certain adherents of that faith.

Right, that’s the elephant in the room out of the way. Secondly, the book covers a period from 224 to 800, which is a lot of years to cram into 430 pages (which does not include the chronology – vital – the dramatis personae – likewise – and the many pages of supplementary notes on the points raised in the chapters.) This is not a book to rush through; it will need the backflipping of pages to refresh yourself on details that you may have noticed but – due to the densely-packed narrative -  you might have forgotten about.

This is because Holland’s prose style is almost novelistic and this makes his account of the end of the classical world and the rise of the three monotheistic faiths and their transformation into the religions we know today a very entertaining read.  The bloodthirsty nature of both large-scale events – battles, massacres and plagues – and individual deaths (often gruesomely described with relish by Holland) is brought into sharp focus and we’re never allowed to forget that these deeds were carried out by men who firmly believed that what they were doing was right and sanctified.

Because he does not focus primarily on a simple chronological progression but rather examines his topic subject by subject, we retread the same years but from different perspectives. Holland slowly builds up his evidence in the style of a lawyer presenting his case; such is his technique that when he finally drops his bombshells, as outlined above, you find yourself nodding to yourself and saying “Ah yes, of course, I see it now.”

If you’re looking to build some historical verisimilitude into your campaign world, merely letting the book fall open at a random page will spark your imagination in a dozen ways. The methodical examination of the origins of religion can offer many clues in designing faiths into which your clerics can fit with ease; no milquetoast goody two-shoes here, but holy warriors who were completely unafraid to get their hands dirty if their god required it.

If you're able to give this book the time it deserves, you'll find it sheds a great deal of light on an area which has previously been thought merely a transition between the ancient and mediaeval worlds; in fact, this era was much more than that - incipient within it were the seeds of a major element of the world in which we live now.

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan

Think you know the story? Think again. 

She's not in the book

This never happens in the book

Sorry, no Forth Bridge hidey bits in the book

Forget all about Mr Memory

Many people will be familiar with this one via the many cinematic or televisual adaptations which seem to come along more often than a new edition of D&D. However, few, if any, have given a faithful rendering of the book and it’s only in the past few days that I’ve actually gone back to source and read the original, which is getting on for 100 years old (in 2015).

Why, I wonder, do they feel the need to adapt it so heavily?  What about the story seems to make it difficult to transpose to the screen?  The book itself is short – around 41,000 words, so its length shouldn’t be a problem. It’s fast-paced with barely a let-up in the action, so fitting it in to 2 hours or so presents no difficulty.

No, what the problem is with the book is its sheer old-fashionedness; it champions values that are sadly out of keeping with the modern world as we perceive it and wish it reflected in our entertainments.  Nobility and self-sacrificing heroism, a rugged masculinity and a lack of sexual content seem, it appears, to make for poor crowd-pleasers.  It did, however, manage to please me, since I took it at face value and cannot really remember clearly the cinematic adaptations.

To be honest, whilst enjoying the yarn (for such it is), I was reminded for the most part of a Call of Cthulhu scenario in the Keeper is intent on giving the players the fright of their lives whilst never really intending to kill them. In fact, the whole book could serve as an object lesson in how to survive whilst on the run in the aforementioned game, since it is set in 1914, barely a decade or so before the time during which many Keepers set their adventures. Merely substitute ‘sinister plotters’ for ‘sinister cultists’ and you could probably run this one.

Of course, there are, it is freely admitted, colossal contrivances that conspire to make the story work. It’s a yarn, as I’ve already said. The pace manages to overcome the disbelief that may rear its head at certain points and if you read it in the spirit in which it’s written, the enjoyment is heightened. There’s also a rather abrupt ending and some dialogue that might be read as a ‘comedy Scottish accent’ although since Buchan was Scottish, I must bow to his inestimably superior knowledge.

As a glimpse into another time, another world and another set of values to which we may well glance with wistful nostalgia from time to time, especially when confronted with the less than savoury aspects of our own time, this book stands as a very good example.

Long John Silver by Bjorn Larsson - Review

I’ve just finished this one and had to take the opportunity to recommend it to anyone who likes a good pirate story. But it’s more than that, actually. Not only does it riff off the original Treasure Island but it takes the Silver character and fleshes him out in a way that’s wholly respectful of the source material and yet at the same time very much an original creation.  The prose is excellent and totally in character for the eighteenth century, made all the more impressive that it was written in Swedish and translated brilliantly into realistically briny and nautical English.

Larsson’s Silver is a compelling and fascinating individual, powered by the desire to live on after his inevitable demise. To this end, he sets to penning his autobiography from the island sanctuary to where he has retired. Larsson has given him a truly memorable history, full of incident and adventure, stuffed to the gunwales with authentic period detail. Real characters and events mix with the fictional creations and it seems from the author’s postscript that the former might well outweigh the latter.

At a certain point, Silver starts to realise that the literary character bearing his name has taken on a life of his own; in a way, the act of writing down his account of his life is almost hastening his end. The flesh and blood fades away as the legacy steps forward to take its turn in the spotlight.

For all the treachery, bloodshed, rapacity and lusty seafaring, Silver’s character comes across as immensely likeable in a strange way. He breaks from the linear narrative several times, at one point encountering Daniel Defoe in a London tavern, assisting the author with his work “General History of the Pyrates” on the condition that Silver himself is left out.  As the story continues, an air of melancholy infects the narrative as, one by one, the old pirates are hunted down or die in mires of vomit and brandy. Just as Pike Bishop saw out the era of the traditional outlaw, so Silver stands as sentry at the exit door for such colourful characters as Flint, Taylor, Hands and England.

A thoroughly enjoyable work and recommended – not just for pirate enthusiasts but for anybody who is starting to look at the story of their own life and wondering how they will be read by generations to come. 


Did I mention that the front cover is by Howard Pyle?

Review - Farlander by Col Buchanan

First of all, forget the cover. Yes, at a pinch, it could be illustrating the book inside, but the further I read, the less I liked it. I guess that as figures with hoods are now de rigeur for fantasy book covers, the publishers decided that they had to join in.

According to Buchanan’s website, Glen Cook had nice things to say about this book. I think Glen is on the mark with his views. Overall, this is a good read, pacy and rather fun (despite the dark tone of the events that happen within the book). There have been books just recently that I felt I had to finish, given that I had either bought them or had a limited amount of time to read them before they had to go back to the library. This one I finished in short order because I found myself making time to pick it up and get on with it. It’s 388 pages but such is the pace of the writing that this slips by in no time at all.


The setting that Buchanan has created is at the same time original and derivative – a huge inland sea around which the sinister and all-conquering Empire of Mann is filling in the map with blood and boots. He’s a tad unoriginal on the naming (Las Alamos, Skara Brae, Minos, Lagos, Sargassi Sea, Mercia) but he doesn’t play around with them the way that Paul Hoffman did in the Left Hand of God (that just annoyed me after a while).

Buchanan is also splendidly inventive (with the caveat that you may have seen elements of his inventions before in many places). That having been said, he does a mash-up very well and puts his own spin on things. We have Samurai Jedi (no, really, it works – master and apprentice with kick-ass sword skills and a mystical philosophy of meditation), an evil empire that appears to be a cross between Rome and the Persia of Xerxes (300’s version), airships that almost cry out for Robert de Niro’s captaincy.

The atmosphere of the book shifts with its tone and setting; there is an almost Zen-like calm to scenes in a monastery, an espionage undercover plot strand uses the edgy and almost paranoid technique of describing the mundane as if everything holds a significance that will become apparent later. Buchanan does not linger overlong with any one particular character and indeed, there are even character shifts within chapters, which keeps the reader’s interest. Buchanan also manages to pull the rug out from under the reader’s feet on a couple of occasions, although I won’t say any more about it.

This being a modern fantasy, there is of course the question of religion and Buchanan delivers in spades. The Empire’s savage cults may turn stomachs (and they do motivate the main plot strand) but they are well created and explained logically, not just thrown in for shock value). The competing faiths battle for page space against the cult of Mann but they do manage to get their time in the sun. There are more than a few 'Grasshopper' moments that reinforce the oriental origins of the Samurai Jedi mentioned above.

This is Book One of what will probably be a trilogy (it kind of goes with the territory when it comes to fantasy) and Stands a Shadow is already out (I'll be reading that soon). A third book is in the works.

Hawkwood’s Voyage by Paul Kearney - Review

The history of Europe is a fascinating one and the 15th century is a particularly interesting time, what with the Voyages of Discovery, the development of gunpowder and the expansionist march of the Ottoman Empire. Yet it was still a time when superstition held sway, when the fastest thing man could use to travel was a horse, when great swathes of the continent were still uninhabited, littered with the ruins of fallen Empires.

A perfect time, you might think to use for a D&D campaign; It’s clear that Paul Kearney thinks so too, because Hawkwood’s Voyage reads very much as if he’s written such a thing up. He hasn’t, of course but he has done the next best thing and set this fantasy novel, the first of several, on the cusp of mediaevality and modernity, hurling two power blocs against each other and giving us the tales of the ordinary folk who are caught up in the middle of things.

I came across this via Amazon’s “People who have bought this book also bought…” and I’m very glad I did. It was written in 1995, a year before A Game of Thrones was published so Kearney was in at the forefront of the gritty, morally ambiguous, hard as nails combat genre. He’s also a keen sailor and that comes across in his chapters concerning the eponymous sea voyage.

A brief outline of the set-up – an abandoned ship is found, its crew dead or missing and something horrible in the hold. In the captain’s cabin is a rutter and log that hints at a western continent unknown by the civilisations known as the Monarchies of God. Meanwhile, the magic-using peoples, persecuted by the Church are seeking escape and a young, free-thinking King realises that he can kill two birds with one stone. Before you can say Columbus With Spells, two ships have been chartered and filled with mages, dweomer-folk and a shifter – this world’s version of a lycanthrope.

Meanwhile to the east, the vast armies of the Merduks, (resprayed Ottomans) are marching to crush the infidels, having already captured Aekir, the Constantinople of this world. Once they’ve got that under their belt, they’re heading west – unless the armies of the Monarchies of God can stop them. And they’re too busy trying to work out a way of getting the too-keen-on-burning-heretics Church off their backs.

I must admit that for the first 100 pages or so, I was getting used to Kearney’s chop-and-change style of switching viewpoints; there are quite a few different plot strands but they’re needed because, rather in the fashion of journalists being embedded with the US and UK armies, his characters are right there in the forefront of the action. And there’s a lot of action to cover. Even the politics, which can sometimes make my eyes glaze over in other works, don’t have that effect in this one. The battle scenes really come alive, with changes of focus from the strategic to the personal exactly when needed. He also knows precisely when to switch characters in a way that gives the reader just enough to make them want to get back to that strand again.

Constructed to cover several books, Kearney is taking his time in developing the plot strands but even though he has to break off at some point, he manages the suspense in such a way that my reaction at the end of this volume was definitely not “Meh”. I’ll be checking out the second book in the series “The Heretic Kings” soon.

The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud – Review

I’ve just spent a few days in the company of a djinni and a boy magician and loved every minute of it. I’m talking about Bartimaeus and Nathaniel, the protagonists of the aforementioned novel (2003) which, although aimed at the teen reader market is thoroughly enjoyable, fast-paced, very well-written and extremely funny to boot.

What’s it all about? Well, it’s set in an England that has all the hallmarks of the modern day (give or take a decade or two) but is ruled by magicians who summon and enslave the djinn, marid, afrits and various demonic entities of Arabic mythology. Imagine Harry Potter written by Michael de Larrabeiti and that gives you a rough idea of what to expect.

The viewpoint switches between the two main characters, with some backstory for Nathaniel, filling in some details on the world without going all Captain Exposition. The use of footnotes for Bartimaeus’ sections, in which he snarkily comments on the goings-on is a very witty and well-executed technique which had me laughing out loud on more than a couple of occasions. It certainly brings home the point of view of the summoned as well as the summoners. Something to think about when your magic user is standing in the middle of his pentacle, about to cast Spiritwrack.

I found myself making time to dip back into it in a way that I did not with some ‘grittier’ and darker adult novels and am delighted to report that there are two more volumes in the series and a prequel which came out a couple of years ago. All three have gone on my reading list.

Next on its way from the library for me is The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley.

Fantasy as it used to be - Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper

Tired of gritty fantasy with a cast list of scum and villainy that makes Mos Eisley look like Paradise Beach? Tired of books that turn the air blue just by reading them? Tired of tales that lack a moral compass?

Well, this one is for you. Songs of the Earth isn’t mould-breaking or innovative – it clings fast to numerous tropes of fantasy literature and will seem very familiar to well-read fans of the genre. It was likened in the publicity to Patrick Rothfuss but I tried not to let that put me off.

The story begins in media res, with Gair, the protagonist imprisoned and awaiting sentence for witchcraft. The setting is a fairly standard vanilla fantasy, mediaeval with a resprayed Catholic Church as one of the main power brokers in the world. It might have been interesting had Cooper developed an original theology since everything we discover about the church in this book sounds very familiar. Still, since many D&D worlds run along a mediaeval format, there is plenty in here to loot if you are looking for ideas for your cleric’s backstory.

The plot from there onwards will tick the boxes of anyone who likes their fantasy served up on a plate of Joseph Campbell. A mysterious old man takes Gair under his wing, acting as a cross between Captain Exposition and the Unreliable Narrator and conducts him to an academy where he can learn to use his powers properly. So far, so Earthsea, Hogwarts – or Star Wars. Or even Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Once he arrives, there is a period of settling in and the obligatory sequence where Gair makes an enemy (for no obvious reason other than I suppose said enemy is a trope of magic schools) of another student (hello Malfoy)

There is also a lurking villain who, needless to say, was once a student at said academy but turned to the Dark Side and now poses a threat to everyone due to something that seems to hark back to the Dungeon Dimensions from Pratchett, always threatening to break through to our world.
The villain is a brooding presence in the background of the narrative for quite some time; Cooper knows when to wheel him out for maximum effect and then slips some unpleasant back story in for him. Let’s hope he develops further in the next book.

The magic is something different – there’s no Vancian stuff here, no Codex of Eldritch Lore, no pointy hats. If you’re looking for something to replace the old D&D system, try this for ideas. The magic is described as The Song, which to me brought back memories of the Metaconcert in Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles and Charter Magic from Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series.

There’s no map – although somehow I felt that I was able to see one in my mind’s eye. There are enough hints of what’s out there to allow the world that Cooper is creating to seem realistic without being over-developed so early in the series. Some fantasy authors have their characters go off on a long world-wide wander just so that the reader can get the full benefit of the world the writer has created. Cooper is refreshingly restrained in this aspect, although there are some hints of locales that seem pregnant with potential for inclusion in the next book.

There is some very mild language, an ‘arse’ here and there but nothing that would make it unsuitable for the young adult reader – in fact, some very mild lurve scenes notwithstanding, I’m surprised that it wasn’t targeted at that specific audience.

My copy was 420 pages (other formats may vary) but in fact I felt it could have been longer with no loss of pace. The finale, which reminded me of the Battle of Hogwarts but so much better done here, could have been made more intense if space had allowed.

All in all, Cooper treads a well-worn path with a book that gives me that nostalgic glow for the days of yore when ‘edgy’ and ‘gritty’ hadn’t become literary buzzwords and you still had good guys to cheer and baddies to hiss.

The next volume is out in the spring of 2012 and the third for September 2013. So quite some time to wait.

Review - Winterbirth by Brian Ruckley

I’ve recently read this one and I thought I’d just post a couple of reactions to it that chimed with my gamer side.

You’ve probably not heard of Ruckley – this is his first book, as far as I know, the first volume of a trilogy (why do fantasy novels come in threes?) and he’s just released a new one about the body snatchers of Edinburgh. Must check that one out as well

The setting for the Godless World trilogy is Dark Ages with impressive scenery – Ruckley can make me ‘see’ his landscapes in a way I’ve not experienced since LotR. The first book is set just as winter begins, hence the name, and whilst it’s got some brutal scenes in, with unexpected deaths and cynical betrayals, there seems to be no language NSFW, which is quite refreshing. Ruckley also knows when to cut away and not revel in the gore.

There’s very little magic in this one. We’ve got humans, elf equivalents and half-elves who seem to be equally despised and distrusted by both. The elves and half-elves have something called the Shared, which seems to be very like the Force (even to the point that one character refers to feeling a disturbance in the Shared) but anyone growing up since 1977 is going to find that sort of thing hard to shake off.

What is quite ground-breaking here is that the elves (and I’m using that term rather than the in-book name, which will mean nothing to anyone who hasn’t read it) are tribal in organisation and more or less hostile to each other, to the point at which they launch raids and attacks on each other’s camps and territories. Some are nice elves, some are rather nasty – I was minded of the inter-tribal hostility of the Indians in Last of the Mohicans when I read this. They are also enlisted by the humans as guides and allies during their campaigns (again, another North American reference) but take offence quickly and easily and drop those who they don’t get on with.

There’s also precious little in the way of religion here (or priests); the series title “The Godless World” refers to the fact that at a certain point in the past of the world, the gods abandoned the races they had created; part of the driving force behind the wars that course through the books like a dark heartbeat is the effort of one particular sect to convince the gods to return. There are five specific races in the books, only two of which (humans and elves) we really encounter in Book One. There’s reference to what might be a race of werewolves, attacked and wiped out by a human/elf alliance in years gone by, and that’s something I hope we learn more of in subsequent books.

The whole thing weighs in at 539 pages and whilst it could probably have been shorter, I didn’t feel that at any point I was skim-reading. There are maps (which I found I was glancing at quite regularly) and a list of characters (which, until you’ve got your bearings, you’ll probably be checking on too). I’ve got the second one lined up and ready to go after I finish Songs of the Earth (and I’ll give you a review on that one too).

The New Death and others - review

James Hutchings at Teleleli recently asked me to take a look at his new e-book, The New Death and others. I’m sorry it’s taken a while to get my thoughts together on it but it is 94 pages long and to skim-read it would be to do it a great injustice because it’s a very good read.

The work is a collection (44 stories and 19 poems) of very short, short and longer pieces with a weird slant, very well-written and with a vein of knowing humour that had me laughing out loud on several occasions. Older readers may well recall The Argosy, a UK magazine that ran between 1926 and 1974 (and boasted such contributors as Ray Bradbury and Lord Dunsany) – it had stories, serials and page-fillers and James’ book reminded of this and others of similar format, such as Amazing Stories and Analog. All that’s missing from The New Death are black and white illustrations amidst the pieces; there is a cover illustration, a delightful woodcut skeleton couple.

As I’ve mentioned, the slant of the content is towards the humorous, with several instances where the punchline creeps up on the reader and takes them by surprise; a turn that makes the humour all the more effective. Whilst the tone is welcome and makes for an enjoyable read, I’d like to see James tackle some longer and darker pieces too – maybe the next release could tilt towards the eldritch and the grim.

The subject matter of the pieces varies as well; we have stories that remind me of the HPL mythological tales (oddly enough, I’d never really liked them when Lovecraft did them but James manages to pull off these pieces with aplomb), neat little quarter page paragraphs that slip down effortlessly and then repeat on the mind for hours afterwards. There is also poetry that works particularly well; some of the longer pieces are in a poetic style. There are also hints of Borges that creep in; the sources are eclectic and the collection is all the richer for that.

Overall, it’s a book that can be dipped into, rather than devoured in one sitting (although you can do that if you want to). James is clearly a writer to watch, which I will do with anticipation of his next effort. His blog is pretty cool too!

The New Death and others is on Smashwords at $0.99. That’s ridiculously low, so you have practically nothing to lose and a very good read to gain.