Sunday, 22 November 2015 03:34 pm
Book Review: Oathbreakers
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deckardcanineI said before that my next book would be Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks. Alas, after about 100 pages, I decided I'd read enough. It sorely misses the variety of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So I picked up another high fantasy.
You may recall that my first taste of Mercedes Lackey was diluted with my first taste of Larry Dixon. Well, this second book in the Vows and Honor subseries (after The Oathbound) shares the same pseudo-medieval world but has only Lackey at the helm. One notable difference is that the two most prominent characters are women -- and basically the good kind of feminists. Tarma the physical warrior, last of her tribe, is so powerfully devoted to her evidently real goddess that she'll never have an interest in sex or romance. Kethryn the mage is as close as anyone can get to Tarma, but she can fall for a man. Together, they are probably the best fighters in their egalitarian mercenary company. It stands to reason that they would be the ones to follow the trail of their suspiciously missing female captain...and decide the fate of a disputed throne in the process.
I had guessed that Owlflight, being a beginning, was ironically a bad place to begin. Oathbreakers may or may not be better than The Oathbound. There's clearly a lot of backstory for which I have only a bare outline, but maybe I wouldn't have liked Tarma and Kethryn as much before they became awesome.
The other major complaint I had about Owlflight was the slow pacing. Here the pacing...has different priorities, anyway. I suppose it's faster overall, especially when skimping on details in violence, but the tradeoff is a reduction in immersion. I rarely if ever felt like I was there. Then again, that may have more to do with a looser use of POV, all too readily switching characters or not really getting into anyone's head. Sometimes Lackey deliberately has us confused about them for a bit, as other bystanders would be.
I should mention the third POV character: Jadrek, an arthritic middle-aged scholar who, for all his knowledge, has not felt important or welcome in years. That changes in the course of the main quest. Kethryn's pity and admiration for him metamorphose into something we don't often see in fiction between these two types.
In terms of fantasy premises, the two books are about equally hackneyed, but at least we get to see more spells at work, mostly in the form of shields and deceptions. I rather like the enchanted sword Need, which automatically provides some healing to whomever Kethryn cares about. We still have telepathic animals with their communications represented :like this.: (Unorthodox punctuation may explain why the copy editing is even poorer than usual in this edition; I counted three major errors in one paragraph of typical length.) Okay, just one: Tarma's lupine familiar of sorts, Warrl, who has a habit of butting into her thoughts, as in the lightly amusing introduction where he criticizes the line, "It was a dark and stormy night."
I can't say I like how the story plays out (SPOILER ALERT). Despite early insinuations that the captain is still alive somewhere, they arrive too late even to bury her. Since the culprit now holds the throne, they now have vengeance as their key reason to lead a revolution. As bad as he is, it bothers me that they never offer him a chance to repent or receive mercy, nor does anyone ever doubt the rightness of what they do once the story of his guilt gets out. To me, that's a "fantasy" in another sense, and it's rather ugly. It is somewhat intriguing, tho, that they summon his victim's spirit to punish him. I wonder if any real culture ever tried communicating with the dead to determine how to deal with a murderer.
As often happens in fantasy, we get a smattering of made-up words with excessive apostrophes, especially from Tarma. Only when I'd finished the story did I discover the glossary near the back, but it hardly mattered for my comprehension. One reason I hadn't discovered it earlier was that the last few dozen pages comprise rhyming, rhythmic poems, many supposedly composed by the characters. Much as I like poetry, that in itself is weird: Apart from the comical bard who annoys the heroines by exaggerating their feats and implicitly courting Tarma, why should we believe that the others have a knack for it? This isn't a musical. Even the ease with which they flow in plain English seems jarring; I could take it from The Lord of the Rings just fine, but there the language is as stilted as one might expect from a translation.
In some ways, it's an improvement compared to Owlflight. Ultimately, however, it doesn't whet my appetite for anything more from Lackey. Thanks anyway to whoever got me interested in the first place.
I have now started a more old-fashioned adventure novel: She by H. Rider Haggard. The same binding includes King Solomon's Mines, which I've enjoyed as a movie.
You may recall that my first taste of Mercedes Lackey was diluted with my first taste of Larry Dixon. Well, this second book in the Vows and Honor subseries (after The Oathbound) shares the same pseudo-medieval world but has only Lackey at the helm. One notable difference is that the two most prominent characters are women -- and basically the good kind of feminists. Tarma the physical warrior, last of her tribe, is so powerfully devoted to her evidently real goddess that she'll never have an interest in sex or romance. Kethryn the mage is as close as anyone can get to Tarma, but she can fall for a man. Together, they are probably the best fighters in their egalitarian mercenary company. It stands to reason that they would be the ones to follow the trail of their suspiciously missing female captain...and decide the fate of a disputed throne in the process.
I had guessed that Owlflight, being a beginning, was ironically a bad place to begin. Oathbreakers may or may not be better than The Oathbound. There's clearly a lot of backstory for which I have only a bare outline, but maybe I wouldn't have liked Tarma and Kethryn as much before they became awesome.
The other major complaint I had about Owlflight was the slow pacing. Here the pacing...has different priorities, anyway. I suppose it's faster overall, especially when skimping on details in violence, but the tradeoff is a reduction in immersion. I rarely if ever felt like I was there. Then again, that may have more to do with a looser use of POV, all too readily switching characters or not really getting into anyone's head. Sometimes Lackey deliberately has us confused about them for a bit, as other bystanders would be.
I should mention the third POV character: Jadrek, an arthritic middle-aged scholar who, for all his knowledge, has not felt important or welcome in years. That changes in the course of the main quest. Kethryn's pity and admiration for him metamorphose into something we don't often see in fiction between these two types.
In terms of fantasy premises, the two books are about equally hackneyed, but at least we get to see more spells at work, mostly in the form of shields and deceptions. I rather like the enchanted sword Need, which automatically provides some healing to whomever Kethryn cares about. We still have telepathic animals with their communications represented :like this.: (Unorthodox punctuation may explain why the copy editing is even poorer than usual in this edition; I counted three major errors in one paragraph of typical length.) Okay, just one: Tarma's lupine familiar of sorts, Warrl, who has a habit of butting into her thoughts, as in the lightly amusing introduction where he criticizes the line, "It was a dark and stormy night."
I can't say I like how the story plays out (SPOILER ALERT). Despite early insinuations that the captain is still alive somewhere, they arrive too late even to bury her. Since the culprit now holds the throne, they now have vengeance as their key reason to lead a revolution. As bad as he is, it bothers me that they never offer him a chance to repent or receive mercy, nor does anyone ever doubt the rightness of what they do once the story of his guilt gets out. To me, that's a "fantasy" in another sense, and it's rather ugly. It is somewhat intriguing, tho, that they summon his victim's spirit to punish him. I wonder if any real culture ever tried communicating with the dead to determine how to deal with a murderer.
As often happens in fantasy, we get a smattering of made-up words with excessive apostrophes, especially from Tarma. Only when I'd finished the story did I discover the glossary near the back, but it hardly mattered for my comprehension. One reason I hadn't discovered it earlier was that the last few dozen pages comprise rhyming, rhythmic poems, many supposedly composed by the characters. Much as I like poetry, that in itself is weird: Apart from the comical bard who annoys the heroines by exaggerating their feats and implicitly courting Tarma, why should we believe that the others have a knack for it? This isn't a musical. Even the ease with which they flow in plain English seems jarring; I could take it from The Lord of the Rings just fine, but there the language is as stilted as one might expect from a translation.
In some ways, it's an improvement compared to Owlflight. Ultimately, however, it doesn't whet my appetite for anything more from Lackey. Thanks anyway to whoever got me interested in the first place.
I have now started a more old-fashioned adventure novel: She by H. Rider Haggard. The same binding includes King Solomon's Mines, which I've enjoyed as a movie.