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| Gwynne, John. Malice. Orbit, 2012. |
The Meat
When this book makes
it big—and it certainly deserves to do so—people will be jumping all over
themselves to make comparisons to George R.R. Martin, the current king of
gritty fantasy (just as everyone used to compare everything to Tolkien, the doyen
of high fantasy). As a comparison, it's not entirely without merit: it's plenty
grim, with distinct echoes of Red Wedding-esque betrayal in particular, and plenty
of great game politics, with only a limited deployment of magic. But what
Gwynne has accomplished is both less and more than the Song of Ice and Fire.
First of all, the
scale—while impressively detailed—is noticeably smaller, and feels more
manageable than the grand epic drama of Westeros (let alone the rest of
Martin's wide world), with their huge armies and titanic clashes. If Martin
speaks of tens of thousands (or more), Gwynne limits himself to thousands—and usually
far fewer. In Gwynne's world of exiles decimated by an ancient
catastrophe, humans have only started to dominate the land recently, and while
the warrior arts are important to every man's life, each also seems to have a
trade: the 'armies' of this world are not professional soldiers but a
kind of clannish militia.
This should not be
thought of as a weakness of the book, not by any means. Combat in Malice takes place on a human scale,
where it is still possible to believe that individuals, perhaps even those
without any great martial skill, can affect the course of a battle. This is so
because a culture of honor—but not chivalry per se, at least not of the
Arthurian kind, the knights and ladies and foppery of high medieval romances—pervades
life in the world of Malice, and as
such, combat is still largely a series of duels, almost Homeric in its cadences
(though thankfully without Homer going on and on about Achilleus's shield in
book sixteen!).
Gwynne's work is
also more than the rather limiting knee-jerk comparison to Martin might
suggest. For one thing, he is to be commended for crafting such a powerful mythology
for this small-enough-to-be-comprehensible world, and keeping a tight focus on
the moral drama at the heart of the prophecy regarding the Zoroastrian struggle
set to commence between the nice god and his human avatar, Bright Star (the
good guy, who the attentive reader will correctly ID almost immediately) and the
bad god and his own avatar, the Black Sun (not such a good guy). Rather than
"malice" itself, I would say the one catalyst provoking much of the more
horrid events in the book is jealousy, which, combined with an honor culture in
which any sort of slight could lead to vicious duels (or any success to great
rewards), is a potent motivator indeed. One hopes Gwynne wasn't drawing on
personal experience to paint such a vivid picture of the sort of childhood feuds
that festered, in this honor-based society, into full-blown murder plots!
(For any foolish romantics who still long for a return to
the glorious days of the past, back when men were men and any problem could be
solved by sticking it with your sword until it stopped talking, you should read
Steven Pinker's book Better Angels on
the astonishing reduction in violence over the course of human history, and how
the last holdouts opposing this growing aversion to violence were honor-based
cultures.)
Naturally, some aspects of the book could be better. Stylistically, Gwynne's prose, and dialogue, is somewhat uneven, with his strongest passages tending to be the least dialogue-heavy; still, he does manage occasional flashes of true brilliance (the chapter describing Corban eventually selecting a name for his horse was especially memorable). And some aspects of the story he's begun to weave together here are formulaic enough to be predictable, and predictable enough to be, essentially, quite melodramatic dramatic irony; sometimes a good-hearted character keeps following at the beck and call of a(n obviously) black-hearted traitor for an unbearably long time. But lest we judge too harshly, remember this: Malice is Gwynne's first book, and as such is an astonishingly forceful tour (I've sworn off French expressions while writing under my nom de plume of Zhaoyun—haha!).
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| When you look at this guy, is your first thought "Gosh, I hope I can protect this gentle soul from the bad guys impugning his good name! I'll bet he likes to pet bunnies, too!" If so, you're like more than a few good-hearted characters in Malice, devoted to guys who are obviously sworn to their world's equivalent to Satan! |
The Math
Baseline assessment: 7/10
Bonuses: +1 for consciously limiting the scale of his world,
+1 for the intriguing mix of realpolitik, magic lite, and various animal and
other factions (giants, wolven, draigs, wyrms, etc.), +1 for the scintillating
story of how Corban came to name his steed
Penalties: -1 for not managing that same scintillating
brilliance throughout the book (especially with the sometimes stilted
dialogue), -1 for making who is good and who is bad so obvious (despite their
little glamours!) that it amounts to dramatic irony/difficulty in suspending
disbelief that good-hearted people would continue to serve these monsters
Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and
attention"
Don't be fooled by this score, which probably seems low to
readers used to other sites and their endless lists of 10/10; here at Nerds of a
Feather, an 8 is quite rare!