The Pariah

The Pariah by Anthony Ryan is the first in his bibliography that I've read, and I have to say, what a first impression it was. The TL:DR of this review is that it absolutely blew me away despite a rocky start, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who is fond of Grim Dark, because to date, this is one of the best I've read yet.

It follows Alwyn Scribe, a figure of note in the kingdom of Albermaine, who is telling us the tale of how he became this figure of note. Throughout the book, great deeds and stories of him and his companions are hinted at, but we don't see any of the major ones in this book.

This book serves primarily as setup for the future installments in the trilogy (albeit a very good setup), essentially acting as the trilogy's prologue. This is a method of storytelling some author's try, but rarely manage to make work in any meaningful way, as this style of first entry can end up being rather boring, lacking any meaningful form of conclusion to character arcs.

Ryan managed to setup and deliver on multiple satisfying story arcs throughout the book, while still dangling enough threads in front of me to entice me back for the entire trilogy. At this point, I've gone ahead and ordered my copy of the Martyr, and pre-ordered my copy of the Traitor for when it releases.

The world that Ryan built consistently had me wanting to know more, and getting frustrated at Alwyn's lack of knowledge on the world around him, because it always felt like there was some bit of information just outside of his knowledgebase, which added so much to my experience with the book.

And if the world was good, the characters were masterful. Every single character felt realized to their full potential, none of them boiled down to good and bad, they just were, and it was fantastic. Characters would be coloured as either good or bad based on Alwyn's world view, yes, but by the time the story was done, they were usually much more complicated than it would initially seem. There is one exception to this, however it would be spoilers for me to get into it.

There are 3 characters I want to highlight, as I think they're deserving of extremely high praise.

The first is Wilhum. Without going too deep into spoilers, Wilhum's character arc, and delving into his reasoning behind joining the pretender was excellently done, and when his devotion to his god was explained, it made me bawl my eyes out, the only event to do so in this novel.

The second has to be Evadine. Evadine feels like a character that has been heavily inspired by multiple historical figures, such as Joan of Arc, Martin Luther (the protestant, not the King), and, oddly enough, Jesus. Usually, a character being this heavily inspired by Jesus would make me not all that fond of them, but again, Ryan just has this very clean way of sequestering his characters within the pages in a believable way that doesn't feel inauthentic to the story he tells.

Lastly is by far and away my favourite character, and that's Alwyn. Alwyn is one of the most enjoyable protagonists that I've seen in a while. I adore how he was written as this man who was so complicated, not even he could parse the maze of his own goals. This led to an ungodly well thought out character arc, that will subtly sneak up on you, and again, is just utterly believable.

His worldview is never changed drastically, instead he just finds the ability to understand how he truly views the world, instead of simply latching onto the beliefs of others that don't clash with his own enough to cause issue with him. This lets him, and by extension the reader, begin to see the world from perspectives that were locked off to him either through ignorance, or just through fooling himself.

Watching Alwyn grow in faith was absolutely fascinating to watch, as was his deep loyalty to the people he aligned himself with. If he continues to grow like this in future installments, he might end up as one of my favourite protagonists in modern fantasy.

The prose in this book is also something worth praising. It's generally quite easy to read, and won't challenge you with it's wording, but it does have a tendency to just come out of left field with an absolute banger of a quote. This is evidenced by Ryan opening the book with one.

“Before killing a man, I always found it calming to regard the trees.”

What a way to start a book. It's not going to go down as one of the great openers of fantasy, but that line just sticks with me as such a solid tone setter.

All this glowing praise is to say, I think you should read this book. It truly is a phenomenal time. There are some caveats, and outright cons in that, and I'm going to expand on them as I go on, but I just wanted to make it clear that I love this book. But it has some problems that are going to end up rubbing people the wrong way.

So, I'll start off with a light one. There's no blurb on the back of the UK Mass Market Paperback. This might not sound like much of an issue, but in my opinion it's a big deal. You should still read this book, but my god, does it seem like Orbit didn't want you to. Instead, they just have a quote from the book, and then multiple recommendations from other authors. But all you have to go off of is a quote, that, to be honest, can very easily mislead people into thinking this is a book about an Assassin.

This isn't an issue that solely exists for this book, Shadow of the Gods is another book that Orbit have decided doesn't deserve a blurb. However, that book has the benefit of releasing with one of the most striking covers in the last ten years. The Pariah has very generic art on the cover. It's a hooded man with a sword. It's very well made and was obviously painstakingly designed to get the tone of the book across, but it doesn't do as good a job of conveying the series as the next two books in the trilogy's covers do. This cover also doubles down on the issue that the quote at the back creates. Again, this is a very small gripe, and I've spent more time than it's worth on it, but it really made it difficult to want to continue at first, especially when combined with the next issue.

The plot takes a very long time to get traction. For me, it took about 100 pages before I got into the story for the story, since up to that point, the quality of Alwyn's voice was the thing that kept me going. The blurb that Goodreads has, or even a shortened version, would have had me in the gate from the word go. It's important to note however, I have seen some reviews of this say that they didn't get into the book until almost halfway through. The events in the blurb don't take place until after the midpoint of the book.

This can lead to the story not really feeling like it has much thrust in it for a good portion of it, which is a massive problem, that again, is only really saved by Alwyn's voice. I'm generally a character reader, as opposed to a plot reader, so this wasn't the worlds biggest turnoff for me, but I can 100% see people wanting to drop the book as they get halfway through the book and still don't even see a goal in sight.

However, all that being said, this book is stellar, and if you can get past these issues, I cannot recommend it enough.

I rate the book a 4.5/5, the only reason it's not a 5 is because of the difficulty I had in maintaining interest with the opening. Other than that, I find very little within the text to actually hold up as an issue.