Microreview [book]: Wrath, by John Gwynne

A satisfying denouement to a tetralogy teetering on the edge of drowning in grimdark savagery

The reviewer isn't kidding about 'all manner of betrayals'!

Gwynne, John. Wrath. Orbit, 2016.

You can buy this book here.

A fundamental principle of fantasy (all?) literature is that a sufficiently melodramatic, cathartic victory/ending can only be achieved through the sacrifice of (usually) second-tier characters. These are the ones you can remember, whose names and backstories are vivid in your minds, but whose survival isn’t absolutely essential to the everything-and-everyone-tied-together happy ending the book or series has been moving towards since page one. A series like Harry Potter, hurtling towards happiness, could never dare off one of the three principals, forcing Rowling to select her final victims from the B-list: Snape, one of the Weasley twins, etc. Killing anyone more central to the narrative would jeopardize the catharsis. And I don’t mean to single out Rowling/Harry Potter: this is a near-universal feature of fantasy literature. A few B-listers have to die nobly so that the A-listers can live happily ever after.

Enter John Gwynne, who has taken this principle and grimdarked it. The essential calculus hasn’t changed—the principals will still survive and earn their happy ending—but the sheer quantity of second-tier characters required to throw themselves into harm’s way boggles the mind. Readers of the first three books of this tetralogy will be quite familiar with Gwynne’s penchant for throwing beloved but still slightly peripheral characters into the meat grinder, but he has savagely upped the ante here. I thought at one point of the memorable exchange from Casablanca: “What is [this book] like?” – “Oh, just like [the other three], only more so.” Remember Rowling’s judicious choice of a single quasi-central figure, one of the Weasley twins, as scapegoat? Gwynne puts almost the entire cast of B-listers on the sacrificial altar. I haven’t spoiled the story if I say: expect the very-most central characters to survive (obviously—no writer dare do otherwise) and practically no one else!

Multiply this scene of grief at a dead B-lister by a billion, and you will understand Wrath

This savagery may or may not register in the reader’s mind as a bad thing (it struck me as gratuitously excessive, but others might respond more favorably). But one feature of Gwynne’s approach does seem unambiguously problematic: his apparently quite dark view of mercy. Several times in the series, but especially in this fourth and final volume, “bad guys” spared by well-meaning heroes take their unexpected reprieve to (often literally) stab those same heroes in the back at the first opportunity. It’s as though Gwynne believes a) bad guys are incapable of change, or even of admitting their guilt, and (perhaps as a result) b) mercy is always a terrible mistake.

Take Nathair, who has sensed the error of his ways. Gwynne seems to be building to a tearful confession, leaving open the possibility of a way back to the light even for a treacherous viper like Nathair, only to slam that door shut and have the king double down on his evil deeds. Truly we are living in the age of the double-down! But the worst example of the heavy cost of mercy must be Rafe, who once again seemed potentially redeemable (indeed, quite a close approximation of the Harry-Draco dynamic is at play with Corban-Rafe), only to amass quite a body-count after the good guys (foolishly, it would seem) let him go. Naturally, some of the evildoers in the world, if granted a new lease on life, will misuse their second chance, to be sure, but since Gwynne’s only positive examples of the potential of bad guys to change were Veradis (the honorable if naïve warrior) and Alcyon (the honorable giant forced into evil due to magic and the fact his wife and son were held hostage), neither of whom, of course, is actually bad at all, his message is clear: genuine bad guys can’t learn from their mistakes, and will betray their merciful benefactors 100% of the time.

Ironically, this dark-as-grimdark-can-be attrition of B-listers and total denunciation of the idea, for bad guys, of moral rehabilitation after doing something terrible has restored my idealistic faith in humanity. I’m left strangely optimistic, muttering “Surely we humans can’t be that bad?”

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for keeping victory for Corban at all almost inconceivable until the very last minute, +1 for managing a fairly emotionally satisfying denouement

Penalties: -1 for the somewhat gratuitous/monotonous near-total annihilation of the second-tier characters, -1 for reinforcing the pessimistic idea that those who have once done wrong have essentially no chance of reform (and instead will stab a bunch of beloved B-listers in the back)

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 “An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws”

Read more on our nerdy scoring system here.

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, still an unabashed optimist despite a steady diet of the most savage grimdark out there, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since 2013.

Microreview [book]: Valor, by John Gwynne

Not bad, but the problems of Malice worsen...

Gwynne, John. Valor. Orbit: 2014.

Buy it here.

In my review of author John Gwynne's first installment of this trilogy, Malice, I pointed out the extreme difficulty, as a reader, in suspending my disbelief that some 'good guys' would continue to serve an antiChrist-like figure even after he starts showing his true nature. Such guys include legions of samurai-like ninja supersoldiers who had spent their entire lives preparing to serve the prophesied avatar of the good god, one half of the world's Zoroastrian battle between light and darkness (complete with angels and demons). But even if they're completely unable to tell right from wrong, and even if we as readers are willing to swallow this wildly improbable state of affairs, Main Baddie Nathair's right-hand man, Veradis, continues to be such a good soul in this volume and to serve Nathair loyally—even after seeing his friends murdered by Nathair's other right-hand man, the "angel", and his pet giant—that I have to draw the line at him.

Gwynne is obviously building up to a Big Reveal, when Veradis will realize the error of his ways, switch sides to Main Good Guy Corban and (it's looking likelier and likelier) fall in love with Corban's spunky sister, but the sustained dramatic irony, an annoyance in the first book, is an extremely distracting cacophony here in book two. Much of the suspense in the book is built around different characters (finally!) figuring out who's good and who's bad, and that sort of thing got old quickly. Essentially, it's melodrama: we the readers are meant to empathize with poor misunderstood Corban and hate slimy pretender Nathair, grow furious with each new betrayal of the latter and cheer for each narrow escape by the former. That formula worked fairly well for book one, but here in Valor, it's not doing it for me anymore—I feel like Gwynne tried to milk this angle for too long.

On the other hand, in world with such starkly delineated notions of good and evil, once the battle lines are drawn, there won't be much left to do but have a Big Fight, and Gwynne wisely reasoned, I suppose, that having Corban and Friends on the run, constantly harried by foes, makes for better entertainment than a 500-page battle. Only trouble is, the extended chase scenes follow a predictable formula as well: each time, Corban manages to escape, but almost invariably loses another person precious to him, a member of his (as they literally call it) 'pack.' So I didn't even need to glance at the number of pages remaining in the book to know when I was getting near the end—let's just say the steady attrition of Corban's buddies takes its toll, until there obviously wasn't any more mileage Gwynne could get out of it without sacrificing a Main Character (you know, the kind that Storm-trooper types can never hit no matter how many times they fire their ray guns!), since he'd run out of Second-Tier Important Characters Whose Death, While Sad and All, Doesn't Really Change Much (you know, the kind people like J.K. Rowling sacrifice instead of really important characters so there can still be a happy ending! Just imagine the stink everyone would have put up if, instead of one of the totally expendable Weasley twins, it had been Ron—or Harry!?!?—who fell at The End!).

In Gwynne's world, bad guys hit their targets, alright, but only if they're aiming for second-tier nobodies!

You might be sensing by now that my tolerance for authors who have melodramatic cake and eat it too is rather low. I'd prefer to see an author unafraid to sacrifice the Ned Starks now and again, because it makes the story weightier to know that even those hard-to-hit Main Characters are vulnerable—in short, it places the Happy Ending in jeopardy! But Gwynne, at least so far, is having his Storm-trooper stand-ins fire and miss (or at least, hit only the equivalent of the Weasely twins).

The vaguely post-apocalyptic setting remains interesting, as does the under-populated human lands—but the latter are definitely firmly within a Celtic/Western European middle ages paradigm, and I'd say that particular brand of fantasy has been war-hammered almost to death by now. I hope that Gwynne can raise his game for the titanic final volume in the series, which I will look forward to reading—even after the slight disappointment of Valor.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for continuing the cool blending of post-apocalyptic world with Mithraic/ Zoroastrian struggle between angels and demons, light and dark

Penalties: -1 for continuing to milk the dramatic irony/melodrama angle for all it is worth, -1 for keeping Main Characters safe at the expense of the second tier of supporting characters

Nerd coefficient: 6/10 "Still enjoyable, but the flaws are (getting) hard(er) to ignore"

[I know what you're thinking. "A 6/10? That's harsh!" Not so—at NOAF, that means Valor is a cut above the typical fare out there.]

This has been a communique from Zhaoyun, glasses-wearing academic by day, superhero sf/f aficionado by night, and one of the Main Characters at NOAF since 2013. Vive la resistance boutonneux! 

Microreview [book]: Malice, by John Gwynne

Gwynne, John. Malice. Orbit, 2012.

 Buy it here.

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!).

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!