Lord of the Fire Lands

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Wasp and Raider are Second and Prime at Ironhall, where the King's deadly Blades are trained. But when the King arrives unannounced, the unprecedented happens when Raider refuses to serve, and Wasp blindly throws in with his best friend.

Review
I said that the predecessor to this volume was Dave Duncan at his best, and so is this one – sort of. Again, it's a complex story of love, loyalty, magic, and politics. Again, it's distinctly character-based. But this time, one of the book's central elements is also its stumbling point.

In The Gilded Chain, Duncan offered a story that was in many ways about the frustrations of a very one-sided system of loyalty – loyalty to a very flawed and selfish king. Here, he does his best to present a fair picture of a nation whose core tenets are at odds with what many of us would anticipate. Clearly based on a version of Viking myth, the Baels are unapologetic about murder, rape, and slavery. And while Duncan tries to show them as having redeeming characteristics, I just had trouble enjoying a story in which bullying – on a grand scale – is largely rewarded and almost celebrated.

Chivial, subject of the first book, also has tremendous and fundamental flaws, openly acknowledged. Corruption, tyranny, subjugation of women, and a class system are among them. Yet I'd say that Duncan by and large acknowledges those as bad. Here, in his effort to show a different flawed system, the Baels do come across as bullies – because they can do something evil, they do, and feel just fine about it. It bothered me the whole way through. On an individual level, there's a coerced marriage at the heart of the story – openly referred to as a public ‘rape', though it's distinguished from the woman's alternate fate only by the type of coercion. What's more troubling, though, is the repeated suggestion that the woman's almost immediately happy about it, because the sex is so good. I guess it could happen, but it certainly rubbed me the wrong way.

Duncan's resolution clearly shows that he's not promoting any of this – that the bad things are bad things – but I suppose that, for me, it just didn't work that the bullies won in the end. Individual tyrants are bad; a nation of tyrants is worse. Duncan's efforts to offset that with Chivian cruelty weren't enough.

It's a good novel, still, and an effective part of this first trilogy and its larger story. But I didn't enjoy reading it anywhere near as much as the first book.

When I picked this off my bookshelf to read, I found, much to my surprise, that it was a signed copy. I don't remember why or how I got it, but I do rather wish it had been The Gilded Chain that was signed instead.