With this section, we get a new POV character – Dianora di Tigana Certando, Brandin of Ygrath’s favourite concubine – and a new map. This one’s purely political, without any more details; it shows us that Brandin of Ygrath has conquered four provinces (three on the mainland, and the island of Chiara, where this part is set), Alberico of Barbadior four, and the last one, Senzio, is neutral.

It is, of course, significant that Brandin’s made his headquarters on the island, separate from the rest of the Palm – and like most of the images in this book, it works both ways. The island’s separate, but it’s also surrounded by the ocean, and the ocean is the soul of Tigana. We learn, in fact, about the Grand Dukes of Chiara, and the Ring Dive – the Duke would throw a ring into the sea in token of a wedding, and a woman would dive for it to bring it back.

For that matter, Dianora was sent over the ocean, on a “Tribute Ship”, as a concubine for his saishan (seraglio), and became his favourite – and came to love him, despite having sworn to kill him. The saishan is attended by eunuchs, chief amongst whom is Vencel; he is “awesomely obese”, with a “dark face”. He’s from the hot northern land of Khardhun, and rather sympathetically presented. I’m assuming that the Khardhu are North Africans, Berbers perhaps. (This will become relevant later.)

In Chapter 8, we learn that Brandin ran up Sangarios, the mountain peak of Chiara, and there he encountered a riselka. I’m not sure what a Slavic water spirit is doing in an Italianate story, but it seems to work out. As we learn in more detail later, if one man sees a riselka, it’s a fork in his life; if two see a riselka together, one of them will die. If there are three, one is blessed; one comes to a fork; and one will die.

That afternoon sees an assassination attempt – the Ygrathen master-musician Isolla has manipulated Camena di Chiara, the most famous poet of the age, into shooting at Brandin under the guise of a threat to her. Dianora pushes someone else into the path of the crossbow bolt, reacting without thinking; Brandin would have died, otherwise.

He doesn’t send for her that night, and Dianora remembers her childhood in Tigana, in Avalle of the Towers, where the noble families competed to build the tallest tower until the Prince decreed that nothing could be taller than his own masterpiece. She grew up with her brother Baerd, and under the stress of the occupation they slept together for comfort – and who else would understand?

“What are we doing?” her brother whispered once. [...] “Oh, Baerd,” she’d said. “What has been done to us?”

They are the children of the sculptor whom we met in the Prologue, and who died at Second Deisa. Baerd saw a riselka in Avalle, and left in search of the dead Prince's son - Alessan. "One woman sees a riselka, her path comes clear to her." After the night's memories, her path is very clear.

To begin at the beginning, with the author’s acknowledgements. He cites a number of scholars; the three I know offhand are Joseph “Hero’s Journey” Campbell, Robert “White Goddess” Graves, and Johan Huizinga. So altogether, a nice mix of “ooh, interesting”, “hm, could be entertaining if he doesn’t take Graves too seriously”, and “oh, god, not Campbell again”.

Next we have one of the most traditional markers for Fantasy of all; a pronunciation guide. This particular one consists of “most of it is Italian”. And speaking of traditional markers, here’s the map. The Palm looks very much like Italy turned upside down; across the water there’s what looks like the edge of a continent, Khardun, and Ygrath and Barbadior indicated by arrows pointing west and east respectively. To the south is Quileia, and we have no clue what any of these places are like.

And now the text, with the Prologue. The land is lit up by two moons, and a falling star arcs across the sky. We’re in a battle camp by the River Deisa, on the eve of a war, and “the dark-haired Prince of grace and pride” is giving the boys a touch of Harry in the night. They know perfectly well they’re going to lose, against the sorcerer-king of Ygrath; but that isn’t going to stop them. “The one thing we know with certainty is that they will remember us.”

Part 1 – A Blade in the Soul. Chapter 1 opens in a khav room, thus proving once again Diana Wynne Jones’s adage in Nad and Dan adn Quaffy that there’s always some variant of coffee around. A bit of background; the Palm is divided between two tyrants now, Alberico of Barbadior and Brandin of Ygrath. Given the Interestingly Cryptic nature of the scenes with a particular musician, he’s clearly one of our heroes. The chapter ends on the words “he’d forgotten to ask the musician his name” – and this is, of course, a theme we’ll be seeing over and over again. It’s all about names.

The other thing it’s all about, of course, is the sea, and the next chapter opens with one Devin getting drunk in a bar by the docks. Devin is a lot smarter, more resourceful, and emotionally useful than the typical 19-year-old we meet in the early stages of Big Fantasy, and that’s a refreshing change. Apart from a bit of Golden Bough background, and an introduction to a couple of people who will later become important, that’s it for this chapter – except that we learn the name of the musician from earlier, Alessan di Tregea.

The third important theme is music, and they’re all working together – Alessan, Devin, and a young redheaded singer named Catriana who resents Devin for making it look so easy. The fourth is sex, preferably illicit, kinky, and/or socially unapproved sex – and from the text, I can’t decide whether bisexuality falls into that category or not. It’s worth noting that just about all the sex anyone has, for most of this novel, is very much for a purpose – it’s to distract someone, to get close to them so they can die, as a hopeless beacon of protest in the darkness. We’ll see more about that when we come to Part 3.

In Chapter 4, it looks like Devin’s stumbled into the intersection of two complicated conspiracies – the Duke of Astibar has taken the Juliet Drug to make sure he and a few others have time to talk unobserved by Alberico’s agents. Alessan crashes the party before the Duke wakes, and points out that getting rid of one tyrant won’t do; the other will just take over the entire Palm. So here we have yet another theme, that of compromise with the stubborn imperatives of pride. More gnomic comments about names, and then – cave! Alberico’s coming. Someone betrayed the party; everyone dies before they can talk, except the Duke’s son Tomasso. Whom, it turns out, is gay and sadomasochistic, and wears makeup, and who “would leave nor ever a name to be spoken, let alone with pride”, and who is Secretly Very Competent. What a surprise that was! Seriously, though, it’s good to see a fantasy book that doesn’t immediately jump on any of those things as signifiers of Evil.

Outside, the conspirators test Devin out by telling him a story. The map shows a province called Lower Corte; the people of that province killed Brandin’s son during the conquest. In revenge, the sorcerer took their name away, so that no-one who was not born in that province could hear and remember the name of Tigana. They can speak it, but nobody will hear.

That’s really horrible – I find it an incredibly cruel revenge, to erase the identity of a people like that, and give them no way to represent themselves to others, no voice. To force them to use another’s name for their land, and to know that their children will be strangers, foreigners, that their home is lost and will die with them. And unlike most instances, this was done to them deliberately. I’ve got a particularly strong viewpoint on this one, of course, since I’m Cymraeg. Both in my country and in Scotland, the native languages were abandoned, the English names were the “real” ones, children were beaten for speaking Welsh or Gaelic at school – and the worst, saddest thing is that we did that to ourselves, to our own children. We told them to go and be English, because it was the only way they’d get on in the world, the only way they had to be better than they were.

Devin, on the other hand, was born in Tigana and can hear the name – and these passages, again, are full of water metaphors. We hear throughout the book that there’s a special connection between Tigana and the sea, even when it’s not stated outright as it is here. “If something could be remembered, it was not wholly lost” – and that shard of hope, those few people who remember and care, is all they’ve got. It doesn’t look like much, but that’s no excuse – and Alessan, it turns out, is the Prince of Tigana, child of the prideful Prince of the prologue.

The section ends as the Duke wakes, and joins with Alessan’s band because it’s the only revolutionary game in town; and when he admits to being a wizard, and uses his powers to visit his son Tomasso in prison and take him poison. The last words are “The difference between the spoken and the unspoken ceased to matter any more.”

The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper. Book 5.

In many ways, this is a wonderful book. But in a lot of others, it makes me really angry.

Written in 1977 (when mass immigration from the Commonwealth was still relatively new in most of England) it’s explicitly anti-racist, which is wonderful. Will’s family defend a Sikh child (and correctly identify his ethnicity) against a racist bully and his racist father, and the racism is explicitly linked to the Dark. On the other hand, it still doesn’t give active roles to women – Jane’s only task is to avoid being eaten by a lake monster – and demonises people with red hair.

It’s set in Wales again, both in the real and immediate landscape of West Wales and in Cantre’ Gwaelod, the Drowned Hundred – the land lost when the dykes failed and the sea came in, between Llyn^[1] and Gower, that now forms Bae Ceredigion. On the other hand, the cast take a train (an antique steam train, in fact, that the Light sends when it’s needed, and which then turns into a boat – I’m reminded of the dream travel sequences in the first and next-to-last Sandman books, though of course they were much later) back to the Chiltern Hills for the arbitrary finale.

It’s arbitrary, because we hadn’t heard about the Midsummer Tree before, nor that the mistletoe on it opened its flowers once every seven hundred years and that the side whose champion cut the mistletoe at the instant of its full flowering could permanently banish the other from Time.

For that matter, we didn’t have (or at least, I didn’t see) any foreshadowing that one of the supporting cast had been a stealth Lord of the Dark until she gets suddenly unmasked and banished on the train.

The Light never tells its champions what’s going to happen, any more than it tells the readers, so this ties in well with the single thing about the book that angers me most.

At the end of the book, after all they’ve gone through, after being chased around and stalked and threatened by the Dark, everyone who’s not a wizard-by-predestined-birthright is made to lose their memory for their own good. The one grownup is given a choice, but resigns it, and asks the Light to choose for him; the children aren’t even given that choice. It’s not even that they go Susan, and think it was all a game; they can’t remember any of it. And John Rowlands, the one mortal adult at the finale – who is a really good character – gets to live out the rest of his life in the comforting illusion that his wife was nothing more than the ordinary loving woman she seemed, and forget everything about the Light and the Dark and the Old Ones, forget that he stood firm against the greatest darkness that ever was, forget that victory hinged on his judgement.

Going back to the bright spots for a while, when Will and Bran go through Cantre’ Gwaelod we see guest appearances from Gwion^[2] and Gwyddno Garanhir, and we get a long section all about craftsmanship, which I can’t do better than to quote.

‘It was made by one who was close to the Light,’ Gwion said, ‘but who was neither a Lord of the Light nor one of the Old Ones – there are none such bred in this land… He was the only one who had the skill to make so great a wonder. Even here, where many are skilled. A great craftsman, unparalleled. But the Riders of the Dark, they could roam freely through the land, since we had neither desire nor reason to keep any creature out – and when they heard that the Light had asked for the sword, they demanded that it should not be made. They knew, of course, that words already long written foretold the use of Eirias, once it was forged, for the vanquishing of the Dark.’
Will said, ‘What did he do, the craftsman?’
‘He called together all the makers in the land,’ Gwion said. He tilted his head a little higher. ‘All those who wrote, or brought life to others’ words or music, or who made beautiful things. And he said to them, I have this work in me, I know it, that will be the peak of everything I can ever make or do, and the Dark is trying to forbid me to do it. We may all suffer, if I deny them their will, and I cannot therefore be responsible alone for deciding. Tell me. Tell me what I should do.’
Bran was gazing at him. ‘What did they say?’
‘They said, You must make it.’ Gwion smiled proudly. ‘Without any exception. Make the sword, they said.’

And the Dark’s revenge on the craftsman was to bring a great depression on him –

Fear of age, of insufficiency, of unmet promise. All such endless fears, that are the doom of people given the gift of making, and lie always somewhere in their minds.

Don’t we all know it…

[1] The y there should have a circumflex, but HTML 4.0 does not support Welsh very well. “Llyn” without a circumflex means “lake”, and this particular geographical feature is a peninsula, which is rather different.
[2] Yes, that Gwion. And when he packs lunch for the children, he gives them apples and hazelnuts.

I’ve had one or the other volume of this sitting on my bedside table for the last six months, since it’s slow, dense reading. Last night before bed, I finished it off, and after that much time spent on it I’m damn well going to write about it.

Morris wrote this in the early 1890s, and it was published by the Kelmscott Press in the year of his death in 1896. It’s an expression of his lifelong love of the mediaeval and of the Matter of Britain, though this text is closer in feel to the numerous accretions than to the “core” Arthurian tales. Fundamentally, it’s fanfic – the devoted craft of someone who can’t accept that there isn’t any more of their obsession, and damn well writes it themselves.

A lot of what I can say about this involves “despite” – it is, overall, good and fresh despite the pseudo-mediaeval style (there’s enough cod in there to restock half the Atlantic) and the interminable dullness of every scene wherein someone shows love or affection to someone else.

I think it has that freshness for two reasons. First, it has a strongly English sense of place about it – Morris may have been unreasoningly in love with the form of the mediaeval epics, but he still understood their matter. When Ralph leaves Upmeads, he goes through Wulstead, the Abbey of St Mary at Higham^[1], Bourton Abbas, and the Wood Perilous. Those are all good English place names where today you might find stockbrokers and real ale; and meseems that in the Wood Perilous might one
venture at cheap and hope to behold squirrels, ramblers, and suchlike woodland beasts.

Secondly, it’s mostly free of tired fantasy conventions. Well, technically Lord of the Rings is free of tired fantasy conventions, since it was the wellspring of most of them, but The Well at the World’s End has the added advantage that it didn’t inspire legions of imitators. I’ve a soft spot for books with no non-human characters or antagonists, too.

As for where the breadcrumbs lead next – I’ve some more of Morris’s work on the same shelf, and the next literary heritor on is JRR Tolkien. Large swathes of The Hobbit were inspired by Morris’s depictions of early Germanic life, and in his 20s he wrote self-consciously in the style of Morris. He got better though.

The other apparent followup is early Sheri S. Tepper – her True Game books et seq – though those owe as much to Dunsany as to Morris.

[1] The story is set very much in the far-off reaches of this world – the early pages make mention of “a house of good canons, who knew not the way to Rome”.

This book is available online under a Creative Commons license – ie. free to read and redistribute unchanged. You can download it here.

Like everything else Sanderson has written, it’s a how-does-this-universe-work mystery novel. It’s even got a technical appendix. I’ve never been quite sure about the point of these things – after getting to the end of the story, who wants to read the technical specifications of the magic? I suppose the same people who read the ordnance specs in a David Weber book. On the other hand, definitely and categorically not the same people who always read the historical and linguistic appendices in The Lord of the Rings. Nope. Completely different kind of geek.

So, to criticise Sanderson on his own ground – the magical system is quite interesting, very basic but well thought out. It all works by washing powder – well, if you will call it “BioChroma” then it can’t really be anything else. Everyone has a certain amount of washing powder, and can give it to other people. If you have enough, you can invest it in objects or use it to reanimate the dead, and sometimes people come back from the dead with a lot and get worshipped as gods.

When you use washing powder for magical effects, it washes the colour out of something nearby – the more magic, the more washing powder, the more colour gets lost. Given that good dyestuffs are not only expensive but labour-intensive as well, it’s an interesting idea, and points up the whole capitalist theme yet again. Oddly, though, this particular city-state has the advantage of a particular flower which gives all sorts of brightly coloured and apparently lightfast dyes. (This is of course complete scientific, botanical, and technical bollocks, but if I can let that pass anyone can.)

One interesting thing I had to check – on p.60 T’Telir is described as the only city advanced enough to have restaurants. That immediately looked very odd to me, but Sanderson’s right from a strict point of view – restaurants per se, with a choice of dishes, only turned up in eighteenth-century Paris. To the best of our knowledge, at any rate – I’d be delighted to hear of non-European examples before that.

Some other thoroughly characteristic Big Fantasy features – bloody kings, and a talking sword. One called “Nightblood” at that. I suppose we were lucky it wasn’t “NightBlood”. And magic princesses. No, seriously. All the potential heirs of this kingdom are born with magic hair. They can change its colour, or even make it grow. If they’re enjoying themselves, the Royal Locks (sic) turn blonde. Red for embarrassment, white for fear, dark for control, and blonde for unguarded fun or enjoyment…

The characterization is pretty good for Big Fantasy, though not deep. It doesn’t help that most of what we get told about people is unsubtle and fairly crashingly obvious – less so than with Acacia, at least, but still Sanderson seems to feel that we need things pointing out to us.

“They laughed. He wasn’t sure whether to be amused or insulted that they so often confused his jokes for serious statements and the other way around.”

It’s basically a good book, and very readable. The big question it asks is about who can be trusted with what, and what justifies what, but he doesn’t preach at us about it.

This is a poetic, deeply affecting book – the story of what it means to kill a dragon, and what it means to be a dragon.

John Aversin killed the Golden Dragon of Wyr to protect his people. He’s a crafty, laughing man, a scholar and an engineer with a magpie mind endlessly fascinated by all the scraps of learning he can glean from the decaying, disregarded books of his far northern province. (And one of the little details that first made me love this book, when I was young? The heroes wear glasses.) The dragon, on the other hand, was just a dragon. It’s when we meet the next one that we begin to understand…

To be a mage, you must be a mage. The power, the control, the understanding that magic stands for is an incredible temptation – either devote yourself to magic and nothing else, or be a failure and live in the messy, confusing, distracting world. Mages – and this is a recurring theme in a lot of Hambly’s work – are outside the law, dead to society, not held by the bonds of human fellowship.

Interestingly, though, Hambly shows us this temptation quite the other way around. Jenny Waynest, our viewpoint character, is forever reproaching herself, and trying not to resent her family, for all the wasted time, all the petty distractions of the world, everything that takes her away from scholarship and power.

That’s power, of course, as an end in itself – the diamond-bright glittering wonderfulness of competence and skill. It’s only the antagonist whom we see wielding power for her own ends, rather than to protect someone else or – the truest measure of magic – because there’s simply no way not to.

Gareth, our third protagonist, is also a scholar – an expert in one very narrow field – but the way he grows through the story is to learn to prize real life, real people, over the heroes of songs. Magic, fantasy, and dragons are all amazing things, but they are perilous as well.

This book is an interesting restatement of one of Nietzsche’s meatier soundbites – when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you. Look into the Perilous Realm, and leave some part of yourself behind. What effect does that fragment of soul have?

I’ve started reading David Anthony Durham’s Acacia Part 1: The War with the Mein. Will probably finish it today, but I wanted to post some preliminary thoughts first.

Let me get one thing out of the way first – it’s pretty good. I’d recommend it to all fans of secondary world fantasy series about kings and wars. Which sounds lukewarm, but then they’re generally not my cup of tea overall.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading this if it hadn’t been for the post-RaceFail emphasis on recommending BME SF & fantasy authors, but that would’ve been my loss, really. It’s good on the race issues, with actual diversity, sensibly placed skin colours, an explicit statement that they’re all the same people (none of this mucking around with pointy ears or green skin), and both some racial tensions and some resolutions to them. Of course, the cover’s still got a vaguely Celtic white chick in a red dress on it (along with a bunch of LARPers) but you can’t have everything.

It’s got a map in the front, which would be a strike against it if it didn’t already have a title including “Part 1″, the word “War”, and the name of a fantasy race, which renders the map somewhat redundant as a signifier. And yes, we will be visiting everything on it.

The character names are a bit odd in places – King Leodan Akaran, for instance. Which would be fine, if his Chancellor (“born within a few months, and from a family nearly as royal”) wasn’t named Thaddeus Clegg.

Right from the get-go, it’s like being beaten about the head with the infodump stick. We keep getting pages of stuff about history or character background, then someone notices they’ve drifted off into reverie. It’s like he’s heard of “show, don’t tell” and decided that meant “tell them then tell them it’s what a viewpoint character is thinking”. Omniscient narrator is pretending to be invisible.

The narration is – I won’t say dull and lifeless, because it’s not in the slightest, but it’s rather distant, as though he’s putting a glass pane between us and everything. That’s not helped by the way he keeps introducing us to interesting people, building them up for a large role, then zooming out and telling us how they died.

I suspect he’s still finding his pace as a writer, working out what to show us & how, but he’s got a lot of good stuff going for him – there are some unforgettable images in there, and he cares about material culture (what people wear, how they live, how they build) which is always a plus for me.

The plot follows the classic “does what it says on the back of the book, then some more stuff” arc – rebels attack Empire, Empire falls, heirs go into hiding, the counter-rebellion starts up. Nothing the slightest bit unexpected, but he carries it off.

Part 2
Part 3