Let us now speak of the pleasures and pains of tick-box Fantasy. Open the book. What do we have? Map at the beginning? Tick. World-spanning Fantasy empire hemmed about with troublesome nations? Tick. Magic? Tick. Grimdark? Tick. Tagline that aims at melodramatic intensity? Tick ('Shaped by loss. Forged in Flame.' Because swords, see? Because swords are forged in flame, which is here a metaphor for the whole living-through-interesting-times Chinese cursing. And because swords are also shaped by loss! By the loss of, um. Well, by. Iron filings, is it?). Machiavellian courtly intrigue, including murder and sexy assassins? Tick. Ultra-elite warriors who fly big birds into battle? Tick? Big Birds? Wait, like on Sesame Street? You're free to picture the Big Birds that way, if you like. That's a reader's absolute prerogative; so I guess that's another tick. Kick-ass heroine? Well, there are women in this Fantasy Realm, and some of them ride the back of Big Bird and kill people, so I guess so. But the point-of-view character passages are almost entirely divided between the two sons of the murdered emperor, one of whom rides Big Bird, the other of whom is living a pared-down existence as a sort of zen warrior-monk apprentice in the far north. What else? Great stodgy blocks of backstory and exposition? Tick. First in a Jordanesque series of eye-sapping length and forest-felling bulk? Tick ('Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, Book One' saieth the subtitle. That's a decidedly uneuphonious pairing of words, though: unhewn throne. Almost a tongue-twister). Small arachnid of the order Parasitiformes? Tick. Really? Well: they're not specifically described, but this is a quasi-medieval slightly Asian-y imaginary Fantasy land, so I daresay some of the characters suffer from them.
The aim here, as in all such books, is not to rock the reader's boat. Sure, says the book: get into the boat and float away under tangerine skies, assured all the while that your voyage will not provide any seasicky surprises or upsets. Books like this are carefully designed to give the reader that with which she is familiar, embroidered with only moderate innovations, like (here) the fact that the Big Birds are not just called in like Tolkienian eagles at the end, but have been properly integrated into the military hierarchy of the Imperial forces.
Story is sluggish in The Emperor's Blade, presumably because Staveley is planning a timewheely eighty volumes and doesn't want to rush things. The first three quarters is mostly faffing around -- the emperor has been murdered. His three children are disposed in various places around the empire. His son Kaden has spent eight years sequestered in a remote mountain monastery 'learning the enigmatic discipline of monks devoted to the Blank God.' This was the strand in the novel I enjoyed the most, actually; at least in its earlier sections: it's a touch wax-on-wax-off, but it also manages some real atmosphere. The discipline of saama'an is nicely sketched in, and the intricate pantheon of gods and other deities and immortal elves and whatnot was fairly diverting. Son 2 has been training to become an elite Big Bird warrior, and this whole strand bored and rather annoyed me, padded out as it is with investigating the collapse of an inn that might have been magical murder, followed by other murders and fightings. Then there's a daughter, a porcelain princess whose name -- 'Adare' -- I kept misremembering as 'Adele'. Perhaps the author gave her that name as a dare, huh, huh. Anyway, she is in the eye of the hurricane, at court, and in the 15% of the novel allotted her she does a certain amount of politicking and ruthless manoeuvring. Staveley may feel he's being gender-progressive here, but Princess only manages to survive by shagging (in fact: by gifting her virginity to) a gruff older male soldier, so not so much.
It's not well written. The description is stodged with detail, and the dialogue sucks:
'The people in there were just drinking. They didn't sign on.'It's all like that; with all the flair and verve and Fantasy otherness of teenagers hanging out in a Des Moines shopping mall. But that's also (tick!) a feature of almost all contemporary Fantasy writing, so maybe Stavely is just giving his readership what they want.
'No one ever signs on to get killed'
'You know what I mean.'
Lin fixed him with a hard stare. 'You mean you feel guilty?'
Valyn shrugged. 'Sure.' [94]
'I asked Ren,' he said. 'He told me you were fine.'There's a lot of violence, and a bit of sex ('the light shirt in which she slept did nothing to conceal the curves of her breasts' [317] -- bad shirt! naughty shirt! on your bed!). But there's a truth here, too, about the nature of contemporary fantasy.
'Fine?' she asked, glancing down at her hands as if seeing them for the first time. 'Yeah I suppose I'm fine.'
'What happened to you?' Valyn demanded, reaching out a hand once more.
'Got careless.'
'Bullshit, Lin.' [198]
'What?' the flier shot back. 'Like the other day?'We may think we go to this form precisely to escape the mundane boredom of our day-jobs governed as they are by secretarial tick-box routines. But in fact many of us seek out fantasy precisely, if unconsciously, to reinforce the tick-box regularity and mechanism of our daily lives. Because this is how we reassure ourselves that our existences are not in vain, a mere chaos of lucretian atoms falling and swerving in the uncaring immensity of Void. A little structure leavens the misery. Even when we're scratching that itch to travel to the mighty Annurian Empire, we here we find profound existential satisfaction in ticking off the tropes. Genre is a way for many of us to justify and even recuperate the hemming-about structures of late capitalist being-in-the-world. Tick!
'You weren't supposes to be on the bridge you idiot.'
'None of this is helping,' Talal said, quietly. He sat on his own bunk, lacing up his shoes.
'Helping what?' Laith demanded. 'It's certainly helping ruin my sleep.'
'Good,' Valyn interjected. 'We've got a lot to work through today and not much time to do it.'
[317]
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