Darkwell by Douglas Niles

This marks the final installment in the Moonshae Trilogy.  And, as I am going to start writing shorter blog posts, let me simply outline a few points about the series, about the Realms, and about this particular novel.

The Moonshae Trilogy are some of the first books published in the universe of the Forgotten Realms, published in 1987 to 1989.  And this was a period of great schlock in the fantasy genre.  And these books fit the bill.  They are pure swords and sorcery.  Dungeons and Dragons at its most obvious level.  In some ways, though the books were intended to help sell the games, and vice versa, the books are fairly limited by the universe of the D&D world.  Anyone who has ever read the Players Handbook has had their eyes glaze over with the sheer number of rules, dice roles, and mathematical calculations required for even the simplest of actions.

So when a level six druid casts the level three spell Plant Growth, what happens can be described anyway the dungeon master wants, but at the same time has to adhere to a very specific set of limitations.  And in many ways these stories of the Forgotten Realms are just that, well DM'd stories by a group of players fulfilling quest objectives.

Or the DM can break the rules entirely, as they sometimes do.  But breaking the rules is dangerous business and it can backfire on the author.  One nice thing about writing in a new, or less proscribed fantasy realm is that the limit is your own imagination, and the rules are yours.  Breaking your own rules creates problems too, but a re-envisioning of said rules, an enlarging of the paradigm, is a simple escape from these sorts of problems.

And in each of the Realms books I've read (and I've only read up to 1989) you can literally see spells being cast out of the Magic User's guide.  When the dark god Bhaal creates his evil champions to battle the heroes, they came straight of the Monster's Compendium.  And they have to, because the main rule of writing in an open series like this is a certain consistency.  Still, I'm not sure how I feel about a Displacer Beast being a big bad.  On the one hand, it recalls my egregiously misspent youth (playing with dice and pencils when I should have been out drinking and having sex) on the other hand, the sense of horror and intrigue created by the unveiling of a "new monster" is almost entirely mitigated.

Up until now, just three years into the history of the Forgotten Realms, the books have no inter connectivity, save for a few common city names.  The tales have begun at the far ends of the Realms and have involved relatively little geography.  Though R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale series has some decent travel.  Ed Greenwood's own first novel, the man behind the Realms,  taking place in his own world was simply atrocious.  Spellfire has to be one of the worst books I've ever read.

This was never the case in DragonLance, which had such a serious and continuous narrative of the War of the Lance to underscore the personal dramas within.  That said, the Realm of DragonLance was much less flexible, and probably why the Forgotten Realms have, I think, ultimately triumphed in the worlds of TSR.  Anyway, my next book in this series is Shadowdale.  A town first discussed in Spellfire.  I am looking forward, finally, to some crossover.

Last point, about Darkwell.  This book was a pleasant surprise.  The characters took some dark turns, and some of the most intrinsic characters actually died.  That said, the book would have been vastly improved if Niles had NOT decided to make it a happy ending.  Meaning boy gets girl, boy gets forgiven, atonement occurs, and they have many happy children together.  If Niles had not pulled his punches at the last minute, his characters could well have lived on to a fourth or fifth book.  The druid heroine, Robyn, having turned Cleric after the death of her god, the Earthmother, would not have forgiven the King's infidelities.  And Tristan would have actually grown for it.  If Tristan had been wracked by actual guilt over the death of his friend, then he would never have forgiven himself, and the sadness this engendered in him would have made him a far better King.

That said, until the last six pages this novel was difficult to put down.  And that makes it the best Realms novel in the series so far.

For a nice history of D&;D, look here.

Azure Bonds by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb

Now this is really the beginning of the Forgotten Realms Novels.  You might remember my complaints about Darkwalker on Moonshae. It was a fairly shallow piece of princely do-goodery, that really said nothing about the Realms or their history.

Azure Bonds is everything I hoped for.  It has the beginnings of characters who were well known to me, long before I started reading the Realms, action, adventure, and humor.  If there was no romance, that's ok.  This time.  When I was a young kid, Dungeon & Dragons, attempted to compete with the already-past its prime moment of "Magic the Gathering" with a series of cards called "SpellFire".  Given that TSR, owned the rights to much of the famous Dungeons and Dragon's artwork, they had a ready supply of easily choppable art for these cards.  And they often kept characters more or less intact.  I had the Alias card, the lusty redhead above.  I always thought she was crazy sexy, and so I was curious about who this person was.  Well, now I know.

As a side note, I actually saw people playing Magic the Gathering a few weeks back, in a pizzeria on the Upper East Side.  The guy was actually showing off for a girl.  He had every single card in a thick, clear, possibly bullet proof, plastic container.  Which is crazy.  That's a "back away slowly" kind of dude.  I keep my Spellfire cards under lock and key.  If I showed them to my wife, she'd probably divorce me.
Let's get back to the Fantasy Five, something I've ignored in my ardor over the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

1) Character
2) Cliche
3) Scope
4) Magic
5) Theme

Character:

Azure Bonds is definitely a plot driven story.  But it has some interesting philosophical points, as any fantasy and science fiction novel must, that help define character.  I won't ruin it for anyone who wants to reread this classic, but the nature of the main character is a central dispute of the novel.  Regardless, the main character, a warrior woman named Alias, is an extremely likable character.  She's sarcasic and clever, but at the same time cares for her companions.  Her supporting adventurers are also extremely likable, and somewhat genre breaking, save for the Halfling Thief.  The wizard, though is a what Alias calls, "A Green Grocer" a merchant of magic, and not a true wizard with the long white hair, and the mysterious airs.  The halfling, though stereotypically a thief, is a fun and enjoyable character.  Mostly, characters are skin deep in Azure Bonds.  That said, we do learn some things about Alias, and her father, that provide some interesting character insights.  Unfortunately, I can't talk much about them without spoiling the book.  Of course, the best character, is Elminster, the very essence of quixotic wizard.  And though the character of Elminster is minor, and fairly cliched, you can't help but love the fiercely powerful, irascible old coot.

Cliche:

Azure Bonds takes place in the Dungeons & Dragons, rule-based system, and in the Forgotten Realms Universe, that comes with all of the Dungeons & Dragons cliches.  That said, Novak manages to make the magic and combat systems seem completely natural and not stilted or forced.  Which makes sense, I mean, the original 2nd Edition Rules were supposed to make combat realistic.  If it didn't involve so much THACO and Armor Class shenanigans, it wouldn't have been such a trying game.  Regardless, Forgotten Realms also made several cliche's of its own.  One of the mega villains, a fantastic creation called Moander, a dark God, who is literally a living wall of reanimated detritus, was used by the UbiSoft developers in the Heroes of Might and Magic series of video games.  Used in both Three and Four, here he is reimagined.  Of course, Kate Novak's Moander looks nothing like this undead piece of work, but the developers paid homage in many respects to both D&D, DragonLance, and Forgotten Realms. In terms of character cliche's there are relatively few.  The character of the halfling thief was fairly trite, but she's a non-essential character (though her actions are important). 

Scope:
The scope of Azure Bonds provides a narrowness of focus that gives ample detail about the Forgotten Realms, while not being needlessly compartmentalized as Darkwalker was.  The action starts in the town of Suzail in the nation of Cormyr.  One thing that the Realms reminds us is that the writ of law is only as strong as the nation that rules.  And the Realms are relatively small fiefdoms, with various small time Kings.  There isn't the sense of international politics that there is in Jordan's or Martin's epics.  There are some political upheavals, but so far, things are pretty local.  Sometimes I like that.  It takes an awful lot of memory and concentration to understand the politics of dozens of fictional nations.  I know that Tear sold grain to Illian and Cairhien despite a trade embargo on the one, and civil war on the other.  That's pretty messed up.  I know about as much or more about those three nations as I do Iran, Iraq and Syria.  One thing that bothered me though, was the interplanar warfare that occurs later in the book.  The concept of planes is very neat, and it is central to Ed Greenwoods original concept of what the Realms were--but in this case, it seems like too much of a convenience for a writer to engineer an exciting ending.  I like that the Realms are fairly grounded.  The magic has limits, and even though there is a much more diverse panoply of creatures to choose from, they are all bounded by the rules of a game, making them less.  Boundaries are important in fantasy, you have to adhere to the rules you set.

Magic:
I've covered this in some part.  Spells take time to cast, they use a variety of scrolls and components, they need to be memorized before each use, etc. etc.  The magic is covered by the Dungeons & Dragon's cliches, however, it still comes across as a novel, not the mechanical manifestation of spell casting in video games and in the old paper and pencil method.  But...there are times when the magic wielded does seem to completely bypass the rules altogether.  Given that Novak and Grubbs were writing when fantasy fiction was in its adolescence, this rookie mistake can be glossed over.  It's a genuinely entertaining story.

Theme:
That Azure Bonds qualifies as fantasy fiction is unmistakable.  The themes are all there, companions, loyalty, friendship.  Likewise, the evil triumvirate, greed, pursuit of immortality, and the pursuit of power, plagues the supervillains in this novel.  One theme however, permeates the Realms in a way that other mega epics fail.  The stories of the realms, Azure included, reinvigorate the notion of the quest.  In all the big serialized fantasy worlds, there are a small set of characters who pursue a goal for thousands of pages.  The goals change, but they're all in pursuit of a larger purpose.  The Realms, unlike the world of DragonLance, a war torn world with heroes and an evil goddess, were designed to be episodic, referential without commanding a single story line.  This is a concept that has been lost by modern fantasy.  And it's sad.  Because the quest doesn't always have to be epic, it can sometimes be as hard as a paralyzed man learning to wiggle his toes, or a pair of skinny kids freeing their sister from a den of Orcs.

Overall, I encourage readers to dust off this 1988 special.

New Title - Gods of Dark - Swords of Light

In an effort to divert some small slice of the web to this humble site, I have changed the name of this blog.  Some notes.  I considered about twenty names.  Here are some of the ones I thought about. 

Book of Three
Fantasy Playland
University of Cairhien
TheGrimoire
Fantasy Playbook
Scrollwork
Fantasy Porn
Big Fantasy
Fantasy Taverna
The Giants Cup
The Wyvern's Lair
Gloin's Tankard
Iron Fantasy
Fantasy King
Come Fantasy
Lord of Fantasy
The Dark Art
Arcana Fantasy
Chaos Fantasy Light
Legend of Dongslayer
Battle Fantasy
Fantasy Legends
Infinity Fantasy

Yes, I really seriously considred using the word porn to drive traffic here.  Ultimately though I settled on Gods of Dark - Swords of Light.  It's not an easy thing to remember, we'll see how it goes.

My reasoning was thus: the subtitle of the page reads: Reviews of Fantasy Novels--New and Old, Thoughts on Fiction, Theme and Philosophy, Magic and Horror, Abundance and Dearth, Depravity and Goodness.

These sorts of dialectics abound in fantasy, in all literature and thought really.  And what dialectics really do, is provide thoughtful memory aids, imaginative boxes around imaginary objects.  These imaginary lines provide definition and scope for our thoughts.  Anyone whose played a logic game knows that the trick to solving the game relies on your ability to drop objects into boxes.  You solve the problem by seeing what's not there--not what is.

Fantasy, even in its gray areas, is about the battle of chaos and order, evil and good.  Even masters like Erickson, who provides many great examples of characters who want to destroy the world, but heck, aren't that bad, ultimately rely on this trope of all tropes.  And why not?  There is so much awfulness in the world, so much brutality, that we live like pinpricks of light, flashing all around in eternal night.  There was a video game I used to play, on the SNES, called Populous.  Basically, you leveled earth so that your population could grow.  You could create knights and such, but nothing like Age of Empires.  Toward the end of the game, and these games would go on forever, you could select the Armageddon option.  This would eliminate everybody's house, and the two populations would come at each other in full force, dropping everything.  My metaphor here is:  a beautiful dream of fantasists everywhere is to get all the good guys together, for one day, and fight the bad guys, for peace and preservation.  Jordan provided another great analogy for this fight.  The Aiel, as they existed before the breaking, were a group of pacifists who believed that there was no excuse for violence.  And in one story, they encircled a crazed madman, singing at him, buying time for the citizens to escape.  The madman incinerated them one by one, but they kept singing, until finally he listened to the last Aiel for an hour, before killing him, snuffed like a candle.  It's these pinpricks of light that make the fight against the dark so appealing.  Its so hopeless, but self sacrifice is beautiful, and never in vain.

My new title reflects this dialectic.  It also throws in a few other ideas.  Fantasy is always about dark gods.  My last post mentioned the evil god Torak.  Evil Gods are critical to fantasy, and men are like blades of grass to their casual predations.  But man has an advantage, he builds tools, and he invests them with power and meaning.  The Sword of Shannara was one of my first fantasy novels.  The power of the sword's symbolism was almost as important as its actual power.  This is an idea that many fantasy novels explore, what is man without his tools?  And when his tools are powerful, does the power corrupt him, and are the tools themselves evil?  Yet even so, they're such powerful symbols of hope in these beleaguered worlds that they retain their power.

But note that the dialectic here isn't God versus God, it's God versus Man.  The obvious non-parallelism here indicates that the central tenets of fantasy are man's struggle against fate, against mediocrity, against cowardice.  These are the things I wish to explore on my blog, and so, henceforth, Gods of Dark, Swords of Light.