Foundling by D.M. Cornish

Foundling starts off being a little too Harry Potter. Rossamund, young orpan boy, bullied by the bigger boys, mysterious origins, odd adults are inexplicably kind to him, etc. Luckily this all stops quite quickly and we find Rossamund travelling the road through strange lands.

As a travelling book this one travels extremely well.

The lands are permanently menaced by monsters, and the brave monster hunters travel the lands to hunt them down and keep people safe. As Rossamund travels, he discovers this isn’t quite as straightforward as he grew up believing and there is fairness to be found in the so-called monsters, and it is often people who offer the greater threat.

This fantasy novel is firmly on the technology side of things, with firearms, optics, chemistry, and even electricity playing their part in the tale.

This is the first book in a trilogy so there is no ending as such, more a ‘to be continued…’ The last hundred or so pages are taken up with an illustrated glossary to introduce us to the world and its odd names for things. Which is nice.

The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

I picked this book up out of curiosity, with no specific expectations. I’ve never seen the film. I did think that it would be good to read fantasy written by someone from outside the West. In that I was not disappointed.

“A healthy pensioner in shorts with a video camera – that’s the prosperity of the West.” You don’t get quotes like that in the usual run of fantasy books.

I enjoy books that present you with their setting once, and then get on with exploring what is happening to the characters within that setting. The Night Watch is one such book. Set in modern day Moscow, it concerns Anton, a lowly member of the Night Watch. Their duty is to keep tabs on vampires, werewolves and other agents of the Dark. Not eliminate, but license and control. The Night Watch is similar to books by Kim Wilkins and Jason Nahrung, the melding of the modern and the supernatural in a believable, compelling, and everyday sort of way.

This book is sufficiently different, having emerged from modern Russia rather than a Western University. The Russian humour of the characters may escape some readers, so allow me to help by showing example of the following Russian joke.

In the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, the critical need to seal the destroyed reactor in concrete. A series of robots were sent up to do the work. The American robot failed after ten minutes. The Japanese robot failed after twenty minutes. Finally, they sent up a Russian robot. After two hours, the Russian robot was still working, so the supervisor called up “Private Ivanov! You may now come down for a twenty minute cigarette break!”

Now you know all you need to about Russian humour.

If all The Night Watch were was an interesting perspective it would be a mere curio. Luckily the story is worth following, and the characters interesting. A Cold War version of the X-Files might look something like this. I liked it.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

A cutthroat city and a band of thieves add up to a great fantasy novel. Like other modern fantasy worth reading (Game of Thrones) the ‘fantasy’ element is kept light, and therefore more meangful when it appears.

The vanished Eldren left delicate glasslike structures around the city that cannot be marked or desotryed, but they can be built around.

Locke Lamora is a thief and trickster, and at the start of the novel we see him and his gang enacting a truly epic advance feee fraud scam on two of the local nobility. The scheme gets shaky after Locke is caught up in struggles within the criminal underworld.

I’ll say no more of the story. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. This book is highly recommended.

Urban Shift

Societies have been experiencing it for decades. People moving from the country to the city, where life is better.

Fantasy is going through its own urban shift. Increasingly, the fantasy worth reading is being set in the clustered innards of cities instead of the wide open spaces of the countryside. This all hit me today, reading The Lies of Locke Lamora (more on that when I finish it).

I find it difficult to internally classify Steampunk books like Perdido Street Station or Veniss Underground as fantasy, that’s my issue. Steampunk is fantasy that grew up and got a job.

It was inevitable, with the benefit of hindsight that this shift would happen, and it’s has opened up great creative vistas for writers to explore, much to the relief of readers like me who were getting heartily sick of reading yet another attempt at writing Lord of the Rings. One aspect of urban societies is a romanticisation of country life but hey, Romance novels are over in another section. Urban fantasy is where it’s happening.

Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott

I picked up this book after Taryn said she liked it – that was good enough for me.

Spirit Gate is a fantasy book set in the land of The Hundred, a European-esque land of isolated cities. The cities are presided over by the Reeves, who keep to their own castles beyond the cities and ride giant eagles around the countryside. The Reeves are responsible for meting out justice. When a crime is reported a Reeve flies out, takes statements from people and makes a decision.

This works as well as you think.

When shadowy or simply greedy forces bend the law to suit their own ends, the Reeves are powerless to act. They must be, since they do not. Eventually the Reeves themselves are discredited or ignored, or else allied with the armed groups wandering the land, killing at will.

I’m not sure what this series is about, even after 600 pages. There are the vanished Guardians who may be about to return, or something. Who knows? It’s interesting enough, and fantasy tragics will find pages worth turning before the next Raymond Feist book.

Missing Old Friends

I’ve been musing on just why A Feast for Crows was disappointing compared to the other books in the Song of Ice and Fire series.

I realised it was because of the lack of familiar characters. As the story changes and grows, the characters have changed and gown too. Some have died, and their points of view replaced by others. One major achievement of A Storm of Swords was making Jaime a character to care about.

This fell down in A Feast for Crows. While it was important to have a character to let us readers know what was happening in the Iron Islands and Dorne, this wasn’t done. Instead each of those settings had three different point of view characters across the book, making it difficult to identify with any of them. The chapters simply read like out-of-place prologues. I feel it would have been better had Victarion and Arianna been chosen from the outset and stuck with throughout the book.

The other downside was the two familiar characters to come with us, Arya and Sansa, didn’t have a lot to do in the book. Arya’s chapters were few, and Sansa’s involvement was to show us just how clever Littlefinger is.

With no Jon, Bran, Danaerys Davos or Tyrion to cling to, the book seemed detached from the rest of the series.

A Feast For Crows by George RR Martin

The fourth book in the series was a more satisfying read for me the second time through. The first time through, I had overindulged in the preview chapters posted during the interminable wait for the book. As a result, I’d read most of the first 120 pages or so already, and found it uninspiring to read through them again.

This time, I was able to approach the book as a whole, and I enjoyed it a lot more.

A Feast For Crows is still the weakest of the four books in my opinion. In many ways this book is the indrawn breath after the shocks of A Storm of Swords. A large part of this book involves dealing with the consequences of the previous book.

Another let down for me was the splintering of the points of view. Previously each point of view chapter has been named after the character it’s centred on. This character continues with chapters until they are dead, or otherwise removed from the story. The point of view chapters also give us an idea of what is going on in a particular part of the world, whether the east, King’s Landing, the Riverlands, and so on.

In this book the points of view shatter. The Iron Islands, for example, has three separate points of view – Victarion, Asha, and Damphair. What this means is that Victarion, who eventually emerges as the key point of view, doesn’t get a fair hearing, while Damphair and Asha’s chapters read like preview chapters. Unsatisfying. Similarly Dorne is finally brought into the story, but through three separate points of view, when a single strong one (Arianna) would have been so much more powerful. In my opinion. And I’ll be honest here – I haven’t written any genre-defining fantasy series lately.

While A Feast for Crows is not as good as the others in the series, it is still a very good book. I’m hoping this doesn’t mark a tailing off of the series, but as I finished I noted an author note, expressing hope that the next book would be published within the year. It was dated 2005.

A Storm of Swords by George RR Martin

The third and biggest book in the series so far manages more shocks, death betrayals and twists than most fantasy series manage in their entireity.

A Storm of Swords brings to a culmination the war of the kings, with the candidates being whittled down by death, but not by death in battle.

The greatest achievement in this book for me was Jaime Lannister, who in this book becomes a point of view character for the first time. Not only does this series villain become a character to care about and even support, the scenes of Jaime soberly reflecting on his life, while looking at the blank page in front of him is quite moving.

This is also the most ‘fantasy’ of the books, as Danaerys’ three dragons grow, and Jon Snow and the Night’s Watch face the full fury of the north. Giants on mammoths? Yes, please!

A Clash of Kings by George RR Martin

King Robert is dead, Eddard Stark executed, and there are no fewer than four kings claiming thrones. Three claim the Iron Throne of Westeros, Robb Stark claims the North, and Balon Greyjoy claims the Iron Islands and whatever lands his reavers can reach.

So begins A Clash of Kings. By the end of the book one will be dead, another driven off in defeat, and a third deprived of his lands by another.

The book begins with an appearance of a red comet, taken by each faction as a sign of their imminent success. Only Catelyn Stark sees concern, as the red comet matches the colour of House Lannister, her enemies.

The surviving point of view characters return in this book, along with two new ones, Theon Greyjoy and Davos Seaworth. Theon is returned to his father, his head full of plans for glory, but he has been away from home from ten years, and know little of his own people.

Davos is more interesting. Through him we see Stannis Baratheon, Robert’s eldest brother and one claimant for the Iron Throne. Davos is a commoner raised to a knight, and suffers slights from the other nobles who wait on Stannis. Davos is also a man who takes his religion seriously, and here lies the source of many of his doubts.

Stannis has turned to a new religion, worship of the Lord of Light. This is a foreign religion to Westeros, but many in Stannis’ service take up their king’s new faith. Not Davos, who finds comfort in his worship of the Seven, the dominant religion of Westeros.

Arya’s adventures take her through the war-ravaged riverlands, while at the Wall, Jon Snow is called to join in a great ranging, to go as far north as it takes to find the lost rangers. Tyrion must thwart his sister’s ambition and prepare for an attack by Stannis Baratheon.

Far from Westeros, Danaerys Stormborn, mother of dragons, gathers her small band of followers and makes plans for the future.

A Clash of Kings is a great continuation to the series, and the drama continues to unfold in unforeseen directions.

A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin

Talking about good books often makes me go back and read them again. So it is with A Game of Thrones, following the recent lists.

Martin has created a believable fantasy world, one without elves and goblins, ogres and trolls but with its own myths and history. What really brings this series alive is the characters who inhabit the world and their (and George’s) bloodthirsty mercilessness.

A Song of Ice and Fire (as the series is called) has no peer, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s been pleasing to introduce several friends to these books, and if you haven’t read them yet, now is a good time to start. You won’t regret it.

A Game of Thrones is a tale of political intrigue and family drama. The two principal families, the Lannisters and the Starks, are caught up in one another’s plans. Eddard Stark, a proud and honourable man, finds himself lost when he moves to the capital and has to deal with other people who are anything but.

The novel takes place through a number of point of view characters. Each chapter is named after the character whose point of view we are shown. So there are several chapters for young Arya Stark, the bastard Jon Snow, Eddard Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and so on. There are also chapters for Danaerys Targaryen, last scion of the deposed royal house, in exile in foreign lands.

Don’t relax though, having chapters named after you is no protection in this series, as you will find out. Prophecies exist only to be thwarted by the action of kings and crones, and signs from the gods will be interpreted however people wish.

Religion and more importantly faith are well represented in this series, another way in which it stands out from the rest of the genre. Other series leave religion as a conspicuous blank area, others have their characters be best friends with gods whose existence is not subject to doubt. Martin creates several religions here that rely on the faith of their believers. The wealthy may mouth words and use religion only to further their own ends, but to others religion and faith form a core part of who they are.

A Game of Thrones is the opening book in a grand series. Four have so far been published, with the fifth due… sometime. I’ve stopped checking the website. One day, I will walk into a bookshop, see A Dance with Dragons on the shelf, and be glad. I have no idea when that will be, sometime within the next three years, I hope.

edit: I’ve now completed re-reading the series, so here are the other reviews:
A Clash of Kings
A Storm of Swords
A Feast For Crows