Justin Call, "Master of Sorrows" (2019)

It is ‘The Silent Gods: Book One’, it is. How many books of divine silence may we expect? Three? Seven? Seventy times seven? I don't know. I do know that story takes nearly 600 pages to barely get off the ground, so I'm assuming there are many-many more hush-hush-gods vols to come.

Our hero is Annev de Breth. He's there in the prologue as a newly delivered baby, born with only one hand (‘“The child,” Tosan said. “Sodar, he's a Son of Keos!” “He's what?” Sodar's heart thudded in horror’). Annev's mum is killed immediately, for the terrible sin of having given birth to a Son of Keos, but Annev himself survives. Then there's a chunk of cod-Silmarillioniana (‘on the thirty-first day of Thirdmonth, one hundred years after the death of Myahlai the Deceiver, the Gods and their children came together to celebrate the day Evil was cast out of Luquatra; yet Odar, the eldest of the Gods, objected deeming that mingling with the merrymaking of their children was ill-thought’ [15]; not the only thing here that's ill-thought, methinks, gadzooks). Then we're into the bulk of the story. Annev is now a kid at a kind of anti-Hogwarts, an Academy dedicated to the tracking-down and rooting-out of Magic, which is considered an Evil throughout Greater Luqura, or perhaps Jreacer Iuqura, it's hard to read the handwriting on the inevitable frontispiece map:

Physical handicaps are viewed with suspicion in Treajer Iuqura, and the afflicted banished or killed, but Annev has a special magic prosthetic hand, so nobody notices, at least until later-on in the story. A quantity of frankly blathery stuff occupies the next manyhundreds of pages, as Annev and his pals struggle with the strict training of the Academy on the way to graduating as ‘Avatars’ (‘Avatar?’ ‘No thanks, I'm trying to give them up’)—studying, learning how to fight, confronting bullies, slaying monsters and all the other familiar YA Potterstuff. They have ‘magic rods’ instead of wands and Annev has a fake-hand instead of a zigzag scar but the provenance is hard to miss: various elaborate tests and quests, like brought-to-life video games, old Sodar and his white beard overseeing things like a low-rent Dumbledore. About two thirds of the way through Annev learns the Terrible Truth of his Origins and Destiny, and the story lumbers through to its inconclusive conclusion, setting-up for Book Two. The twist is that the chosen one turns out to be the evil one, but I daresay that may change in future instalments.

It's a 150-page story told in 580-pages, but that's not unusual for the genre. Most of the text, by bulk, is dialogue, great scads of flavourless chatter within the friendship group at the heart of the adventure. Despite the fact that the story is often very violent, in a throwaway, heartless, quote-unquote ‘badass’ manner (one e.g. among many: Kenton—a kid, let's not forget—‘stabbed the guard's exposed neck, the man dropped to the ground, a fountain of blood pulsing from his neck’ [426]), the prose throughout is possessed by a spirit of terrible Blandness. There's nothing at any point stylistically arresting, or deftly expressed, or witty, or memorable, or beautiful. Instead there is a marching column of petty clichés, like a phalanx of ants crossing the jungle and devouring everything in its path: characters are forever glowering at one another, gritting their teeth, reeling in shock, waking with ‘a start’. They several times feel things (dread, for instance) ‘in the pit of their stomach’—does your stomach possess a ‘pit’? I appear to have been born without one, rather like Annev's natal lack of a hand. An older character has ‘a twinkle in his eye’ (the narrator explains that this twinkle ‘suggested he was pleased’ [361], which is good to know). ‘Therin ruffled the younger boy's mop of yellow hair’  [49]; ‘Annev's stomach lurched horribly’ [99]; ‘Sodar leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands’ [333] (he's not the only one: ‘the witwoman glided towards Duvarek, her hands steepled in front of her’ [69]). ‘The cylindrical block was about four inches in diameter and eight inches in length’ [294]. What was it the immortal Wordsworth wrote about his pond?

I've measured it from side to side
Tis six feet long and two feet wide.

‘The armies of Western Daroea had been camped on the river, holding the line against Keos for a hundred years’; and they might have held firmer for longer, had their nation not been given a name that so closely approaches the word diarrhea. ‘Titus's wide eyes had fallen on Annev's rounded stump’ [479]; pop those back in Titus's wide sockets, I would. ‘While he ate and changed his boots, Annev's mind churned’ [245]. If I were reduced to eating my boots I'm sure my mind would churn too. I could go on. What's that? You'd rather I didn't? Alrighty.

Like an attentive parent our narrator won't allow his/her nouns out-of-doors without accompanying and presumably prophylactic adjectives (‘he smoothed his blue robes, stepping inside the beige tent’ [2]; ‘the young woman stood beside her blonde friend, her dark auburn hair tied back; her eyes lingered on Fyn's handsome face’ [69]; ‘men in black and blue uniforms poured in, their short capes flapping’ [425]). Inexperienced writers think this makes their descriptions more vivid. Experienced writers know it has the opposite effect.

A black drape reached down to the floor, creating a faux wall of sorts, and Annev stopped behind it. [84]

I mean, it seems to me an author might write ‘a faux wall’, or might write ‘a wall of sorts’, but that it takes a peculiarly tone-deaf author to write ‘a faux wall of sorts’. I mean, if I were able to cast magic spells I might slip out a quiet one that froze the fingers of the writer who attempted to frame any sentence containing the word ‘atop’.

Sodar placed his manuscript atop the plates, raised his eyes to the congregation and began. [170]

How does that not trigger an autonomic ugh! in the writing? But wait; here is this book literally doubling down:

A low cackle came from atop the ridge and Annev turned to see the witch standing atop the knoll. [281]

I suppose this is all breaking a butterfly upon a wheel; or, rather, it's worse than that, a mode of prosaic elitism. Tactless, really. The briefest of online searches reveals that Masters of Sorrows has been garlanded by fans with a positive embarrassment of 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Fans love this kind of thing. They don't register bad, clichéd and flavourless prose as a problem. On the contrary, they prize it, since it offers no impediment to them getting at the stuff that really matters, the action, the characters and their sophomoric interactions, characterisation in which All The Feels and cod-intensities of tension and adventure-excitement combine with a none-too-healthy psychopathology of casualised violence. The book will, I'm sure, do very well. We'll surely be seeing a lot more of Annev de Breth: able to watch every Breth he takes, every move he makes, and so on, and so forth. Not me. Annev is annev. I remember, back in the day, when he was still alive and when I still listened to late-night Radio 1, John Peel finished one particular show in the small hours with the following sign-off: ‘I don't know why I bother.’

What Peel said.