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Grimdark Magazine Issue #7 ePub Page 4
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Abercrombie takes the great heroic quest through horrific circumstances, weird locations, and past monstrous creatures before turning it into a farce. The Fellowship of the Ring's journey in The Lord of the Rings has deep and important meaning, bringing our heroes closer to their goal. In The First Law trilogy, the journey is merely a distraction from the larger political and economic realities which ultimately decide the fate of the war.
Jezal Luthar is, himself, something of an anti-Tolkien character. The spoiled, vapid, sexist, classist, and cowardly nobleman is about as far from Tolkien's conception of a warrior noble as you can get. Yet, it is Jezal Luthar who is revealed to be the ‘lost’ bastard heir of the Union's reigning dynasty.
Much like Aragon, Jezal does his best to rally the forces of the Union against the Gurkish. Ultimately, Jezal's attempt to be a warrior king proves disastrously ill advised and nearly gets him killed. Unlike Aragorn, who leads his armies from the front, Jezal’s leadership threatens to destroy the symbol of resistance against the Gurkish. As Bayaz says:
'It is easy to find men to lead charges.' The Magus pronounced each word with exaggerated care, as though addressing a simpleton. 'Finding men to lead nations is considerably more difficult.’ [6]
Even Jezal's kingship is built on nothing more than a pack of lies. According to Bayaz, he is no blood relation to the late king and is just one of many potential kings that the wizard had raised like a demented gardener. Jezal is the child of a whore and was chosen to become king merely because he looked the part and had become famous due to his professional dueling career, which Bayaz himself rigged. Jezal becomes nothing more than a puppet to Bayaz, one very similar to the kind that Denethor believed Aragorn to be to Gandalf.
‘With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me. But I say to thee, Gandalf Mithrandir, I will not be thy tool! I am Steward of the House of Anárion. I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart. Even were his claim proved to me, still he comes but of the line of Isildur. I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity.’ [7]
Also unlike Aragorn, Jezal also does not get to marry his true love but instead is trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman who despises him. Indeed, whereas Tolkien romanticized the warrior nobility of old, Abercrombie seems to take a delight in treating them as vain, stupid, spoiled incompetents.
There is no ancient blood of Numenor marking the noble lines of kings. Instead, the closest thing we have is Ferro's blood of demons, which is a double-edged sword providing both strength and psychosis. The greatest living soldier of the Union, Collem West, is a commoner who fought his way up through the ranks and, unlike Samwise Gamgee (who adored Master Frodo), lives in a mixed state of envy and distaste for his social betters. Whereas Gondor is a land living on the glories of past nobility and blood, the Union is a land sustained by new and strong commoners who deal with their nobility’s incompetence.
The conflicts between the races in the two worlds are also markedly different. Rather than present conflicts between supernatural races like elves, orcs, and dwarves like those in The Lord of the Rings, the majority of the conflict in The First Law is between humans. Monsters still exist, like the Flatheads and the Feared, but they have smaller roles than similar characters in Tolkien's work. While racism and racial conflict exist, there is a diverse cast of nations and ethnicities throughout The First Law.
Similarly, the racial makeup of Tolkien’s nations tends toward the segregationist with Gondor, Rohan, hobbit, dwarf, and so on rarely mixing. Cosmopolitanism and trade are nearly absent in Tolkien's work, (with the exception of Bree of all places), but form the basis of many subplots in The First Law. By contrast, the free flow of trade and interaction between every party forms the basis of not only their societies but also of how economics and warfare take place. Byaz is able to make war against his enemies not through loyalty or the allegiance of kings (Logen Nine-Fingers ruins his kingship before it really begins by assisting in a war which doesn’t involve his people) but through control of commerce.
'It was money that bought victory in King Guslav's half-baked Gurkish war,' said Bayaz. 'It was money that united the Open Council behind their bastard king. It was money that brought Duke Orso rushing to the defense of his daughter and tipped the balance in our favor. All my money.' [8]
The difference that made the most lasting impression on me and inspired this essay, though, is the two series' differing endings. In Return of the King, we get a rough explanation of where everyone ends up with the good rewarded and the evil vanquished. The Last Argument of Kings ends on an ambiguous note for everyone involved.
Logen Ninefingers, rather than be rewarded for his Theoden-like charge to rescue the Union, ends up dethroned and exiled. Jezal's loveless marriage and puppet kingship remain. Collem West is left a sickly shell of his former self, in all likelihood soon to die of something akin to radiation sickness. Inquisitor Glokta becomes the most powerful man in the Union and, married to a woman he loves, but is unable to enjoy either. In a very real way, the stories of the characters do not end with the war but continue on in directions we cease to follow. There is no Happily Ever After or even Unhappily Ever After because there is no ever after.
Life goes on.
So, is The First Law the anti-Lord of the Rings? No, not really. There’s no such thing but it does invert a lot of Tolkien’s themes and ideas. There is no good or evil, there are heroes on both sides, class differences are a constant source of tension, the characters must live with their enemies after they're defeated, and enough suspicion and hatred remains to justify any number of future wars. Despite this, I think The First Law draws a lot of influence from Tolkien's work and in its contrasts to The Lord of the Rings pays homage to it more often than not.
I also strongly recommend both series.
* * *
1. http://www.joeabercrombie.com/2011/02/15/bankrupt-nihilism/
2. Before They Are Hanged [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 513-514
3. ibid [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 517-518
4. Last Argument of Kings [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 585-586
5. Before They Are Hanged [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 603-604
6. Last Argument of Kings [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 413
7. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy [Omnibus] page 513
8. Last Argument of Kings [Kindle Cloud Reader] pages 522-523[GdM]
C.T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger on The United Federation of Charles (http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/). He's recently released the novels The Rules of Supervillainy and Esoterrorism. His third novel, Wraith Knight is expected to be released in January of 2016.
Review: Dragon Hunters
By Marc Turner
Review by Matthew Cropley
Here be dragons. Need I say more?
Dragon Hunters is the second book in Marc Turner’s debut fantasy series The Chronicles of the Exile, but features new characters and a different setting within the same world as the first instalment, When the Heavens Fall, a review of which can be found on the GdM blog. In Dragon Hunters, however, Turner changes things up, telling a much more grounded, political story than the grand fate-of-the-world tale told in the first book. It’s a standalone adventure that can be read before or after the first book without any confusion.
Hunting dragons for sport sounds like a good idea, right? The citizens of the isolated Sabian Sea think so, and every year they release a single sea-dragon into their waters to hunt down as part of the festivities of ‘Dragon Day’. Naturally, things go sideways thanks to vying political factions, power hungry water-mages, magical assassins and meddling gods. Stuck in the middle of all this are four complicated, nuanced chara
cters: Senar Sol, a telekinesis-wielding swordsman, stumbles into the fray and, despite the best intentions and stunning competence, flounders as he tries to figure out who the ‘good guys’ are (hint: there aren’t any). Agenta is a callous, determined noblewoman who tries to pursue vengeance against those who stole a shipment of gems and threatened to bankrupt her family. Karmel is an insecure priestess of the Chameleon, a god who grants her limited invisibility, a power she uses to disrupt Dragon Day in the pursuit of her brother’s acceptance. Stuck trying to sort this mess out is the belligerent, surly city watchman Kempis, who is drawn ever-deeper into intrigue despite wanting nothing to do with it. Each of these characters starts off in their own setting and in seemingly unconnected, personal plots, yet they’re all woven ever tighter together and drawn towards the explosive climax that is becoming Turner’s signature.
While When the Heavens Fall harkened back to traditional high fantasy with a grimdark twist, Dragon Hunters feels more like the modern grimdark fantasy we’re used to, which is both a good and a bad thing. It’s a refreshing change of pace that displays admirable range on the part of Marc Turner, and the personal, ‘street-level’ stories make his world feel like a real place. There’s less grit and darkness from page to page than in the undead and necromancy-filled When the Heavens Fall, but Dragon Hunters makes up for it with its political and moral complexity. Instead of huge, epic stakes involving the fabric of reality itself and a clear villain like Mayot Mencada, the power-hungry necromancer in When the Heavens Fall, the plot in Dragon Hunters revolves around different factions struggling to gain power in the chaos surrounding Dragon Day. There’s no clear path to a good outcome, and it’s more of a choice between someone terrible and someone slightly less terrible, which makes for compelling grimdark reading. Even the dragons are more of a chaotic by-product of this ongoing power-struggle than an antagonistic force. As should always be the case in grimdark, the real monsters are people. However, there was a certain charm to the marriage of high fantasy and grimdark that was achieved in When the Heavens Fall. The epic, magically saturated struggle between gods and monsters gave that book a sense of wonder that Dragon Hunters doesn’t capture in the same way. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, and Dragon Hunters succeeds in being more than just a sequel stuck in the shadow of its predecessor and is a unique experience in its own right, a more mature story that’s closer to contemporary grimdark than high fantasy.
Similarly, Dragon Hunters shows Turner’s development in characterisation since his debut. I found myself reading less to discover the outcome of the large-scale power struggle and more to reach the resolution of the individual tales, although the wider plot is still interesting. I’m the sort of reader who usually falls in love with the first character I’m exposed to in a book or series and resents point of view changes, but I found myself genuinely interested in all four of the characters. Not once was I irritated by the at times very frequent point of view changes, and I consider this to be quite an accomplishment. Each of the characters has a unique voice and provides a distinct, sometimes wildly conflicting view of events, resulting in compellingly conflicted loyalties about whom to side with as a reader.
While they’re each vastly different, none of the characters are heroic, barring Senar Sol. At first glance he appears to be the classic fantasy hero that grimdark has disposed of, yet his presence in Dragon Hunters never feels odd. He’s an interesting exploration of what a ‘hero’ might do when dumped into the middle of a morally complex plot, and despite being arguably the most competent fighter of the four protagonists, he achieves surprisingly little. How do you save the day when the villain isn’t a cackling ‘big bad’ but the ruthlessly self-serving nature of humanity? In a realistic world like that in Dragon Hunters, heroes are pretty useless. The other characters suffer from no such delusions. For example, Karmel uses the ability to become invisible when standing still to infiltrate and murder, yet displays surprising vulnerability and insecurity. She’s a conflicted character, and some of the decisions she makes are fantastically murky in their morality. Invisibility risks being overpowering, but Turner places strict limits on its use that heighten the tense action rather than making it a cakewalk. My one complaint with Karmel is that her power isn’t explored in more depth and used more often. Kempis, the grumbling city watchman, has a rough, sardonic voice, “…it was amazing the shit you could get away with just by adding ‘sir’ at the end of a sentence,” and seeing the fantastical world of Dragon Hunters through his cynical eyes is a pleasure. Despite his employment as a protector of the city, he seems to be motivated by self-interest and laziness, yet at times shows surprising determination. Agenta, on the other hand, manages to be likeable despite being essentially a self-interested noble. Insights into her tortured past and grief-fuelled drug addiction mean that you can’t help but sympathise with her. She cuts her way through the plot driven by anger and sadness, and it makes for some satisfying scenes. There’s a large cast of complex secondary characters that complement the protagonists wonderfully, and even those who make only brief appearances are always entertaining and multi-layered.
The settings in Dragon Hunters are also distinctive and authentic, the most notable of which is the half-sunken island city of Olaire, capital of the Storm Isles. Guards wear fish-spine armour, water-mages are at the top of the food chain for once, and fish-people whistle through their gills on every other street-corner. It’s a vibrant and well-realised setting brought to life by little touches such as the water-mages that are employed to keep the city’s ‘night soil’ from building up in the water too close to the inhabited areas. These clever and unique touches make magic feel like a genuine part of everyday life in Olaire. That isn’t to say, however, that there’s nothing to gawp at. The main attraction, of course, is the presence of dragons, and while they take a while to make their appearance, it’s fantastic when it happens. In Dragon Hunters, the creatures are gigantic sea-monsters rather than the winged, fire-breathing type most common in popular culture, but there is still an unmistakeable air of ‘dragon-ness’ about them. The spectacular dragons and the clever use of magic in Dragon Hunters are just two parts of a rich tapestry of top notch world-building.
Turner structures his story like he’s setting up dominoes. First, he carefully arranges all of the pieces, taking time to ensure that they all fit a pattern. Then, he knocks them over and cackles as they fall. The first half of Dragon Hunters is quite slow, and a lot of time is spent setting up the decidedly well-realised world, characters, and political landscape. Admittedly, this detailed setup can become tiresome after a while, and it is only broken up by a few action scenes. It feels as if not much is moving forward in the first half, even though there’s a lot going on. By the time the book hits the halfway mark, however, the shit hits the fan and the story explodes into life. All of the careful setup pays off and things continue to ratchet up until all four plot-threads are drawn together for a final showdown. If you stick with it, it’s definitely worth it.
The writing, however, is tight and the influences of Steven Erikson and Joe Abercrombie can be clearly felt in the tense slow-paced conversations and skilfully constructed, high octane fight scenes. Point-of-view is switched deftly, giving long stretches with each character when it’s slower, but changing almost every page when things heat up. It keeps the tension going and the storylines mesh very well.
Overall, it’s a good read and Marc Turner is carving out a name for himself in our grim little corner of fantasy. Like When the Heavens Fall, it’s a great standalone story, but there are a few morsels of mystery sprinkled in that provide tantalising glimpses into what might be coming in the third instalment in The Chronicles of the Exile, Red Tide, this September. If you have the patience for a carefully constructed tale, go give Dragon Hunters a try, chances are you’ll enjoy it.[GdM]
Excerpt: The Kid
By Rob J. Hayes
The Kid had suffered a broken nose just a couple of weeks back, and it still hurt
like all the hells. He had no wish to repeat the experience, so he turned his face just enough, and the punch caught his cheek instead.
He hit the ground hard and gasped. Dirt and air rushed into his lungs in equal measure, and a coughing fit exploded from his chest. He heard laughing, but couldn’t work up the bother to care. Kav spat at him, Benben and Jan were doubled over from their braying, and Lissa shouted something about him being of less use than the horseshit he’d fallen in.
Lissa’s insult shouldn’t have hurt. She never spoke to him other than to mock him, but for some reason it felt like a knife in his chest. More than the punch, more than the coughing fit, her insults hurt.
The Kid managed to get his coughing under control and opened his eyes. Kav and Lissa weren’t even looking at him anymore. Benben and Jan were making stupid faces. Nobody else around paid them any attention. Folk moved about their business as if they hadn’t even seen the punch. One guard glanced their way, then went back to staring at a merchant hawking spices from Sarth. Wasn’t exactly illegal to set up a stall so close to the docks, but it was frowned upon, which was reason enough for a shakedown.
“Reckon he got the point,” Kav said. “Ya get the point, No Name?”
The Kid pushed himself to his knees and then to his feet. His cheek was stinging something fierce. He touched it and winced. His hand came away bloody.
“Aye. I got it.” The Kid looked down at the ground, lest any of the others see the dark scowl on his face.
“Let’s get o’er ta the Burn. Reckon we can scrounge us a meal if we make No Name beg,” Kav said and started walking. Lissa stuck by Kav's side, like a flea to a dog. Benben aimed a kick at the Kid, then he and Jan hurried after the others.