Fresh
Fast-paced
Thrilling
Intriguing
Original
Utterly engrossing
Penetrating
Masterfully characterised
.... Count the adjectives, pay attention to them, but they don't do justice to Talyn. Adjectives cannot tell you how powerfully Lisle's imagination creates the sense of being surrounded by the time and space and culture of this novel. Adjectives are impotent in describing how this novel digs its hooks into you as surely as any Feegash flesh-magery, and holds you helpless in its thrall as it unleashes terror after terror, twist after plot twist, revelation after startling revelation.
Talyn (her full name is longer, and much harder to spell) is a soldier in the Tonk Confederacy, a nation that has been at war with its neighbour, the Eastil Republic, for the better part of three centuries. It's a war that's fueled by the forces of habit and mischaracterisation of the enemy more than anything, and though as a reader, it is easy to see that the Tonks and the Eastils have a lot in common, Lisle to her credit does a superb job of keeping this realisation from her characters without the usual cheap trick of dumbing them down in contrived ways. No, Talyn is committed to her enemity with the Eastils.
Then come the Feegash, a foreign race from distant lands, who insist on brokering a peace between the two nations for the safety of the rest of the world. Talyn finds herself out of a job and purpose in life, but what disturbs her most is the enforced disarmament of the Tonks. As the warriors of Tonk begin to leave for other shores, other work, Talyn's unease deepends... but by then, she is falling in love with a Feegash diplomat who is bringing out a dark side of her she never knew existed.
Talyn struggles to keep a hold on herself as she uncovers the Feegash people's insiduous plot against her people, and is finally rescued by an Eastil prisoner of war, Gair.
The alliance is one that is anything but welcome to both Gair and Talyn. But they alone among all their kinsmen are free of the deadly magic that the Feegash have cunningly unleashed upon their shared land. Now, to save their people, their way of life, and everything they love, they must work together on a mission that rides on but a fool's hope, each trusting the honour of the other, the enemy they have been fighting three hundred years against.
The plot just grabs you from page one, and pounds you over the head with a relentless, ever more urgent chain of events. Nothing about this story is trite, or even "read it before, seen it done better"; nothing ever plays out in even remotely the way you expect. The usage of words themselves might not be Holly Lisle's strength (her writing is not the stuff of literature), but she is an awesome storyteller. This book is a testimonial to how great plot compels a reader to forgive most everything.
There are weaknesses, though, that are only fair to mention. Tiny ones, like slip-ups in point-of-view: Lisle tells her story alternatingly through Talyn's eyes, in first person, and through Gair's, in third person, but sometimes, very rarely, she shows us Talyn's thoughts while in Gair's head. There are some characters who are represented as misleadingly important in the first few chapters, only to practically disappear on us later. Some of the descriptions of magic were completely lost on me... it sometimes seemed not so much incomprehensible as improbable, perhaps because the analogies Lisle uses to explain how magic works in her world don't stretch to fit how Talyn uses it. The villainy of the Feegash was somewhat weakened when Lisle chose love as one of the motives of their mastermind - somehow makes the guy seem wimpy, you know, instead of the horrible slithery creature he is in all other respects. Plus, the ending of the book is quite rushed, which is probably the reason there's just one too many neat explanations that ties everything up in a bow. Not that's it's bad, per se, but after the brutal honesty with which Lisle treats the rest of the book, it was a bit disconcerting to see the end become so unrealistically neat and ordered.
But on to the book's strengths. Lisle's grasp of the intricacies of diplomacy and politics is once again evident in this work, and she shines as she deals with the plots and intrigues of war in her world. Her even bigger strength lies in her world-building. Talyn's despair at seeing her people's culture being thrown up in flames is our own, because by then, we are able to appreciate its beauty and rarity. In Lisle's commentary and descriptions of the differing Tonk and Eastil cultures, we gain a better understanding of our own world and our own societies... and in the end, that's what good fantasy should do.
Thumbs up for this book. Seriously. If you're going to pick up a fantasy book to read outside of Harry Potter (:D), pick this one. It's really good, and it goes easy on the weirdness factor that most often throws me off in mainstream fantasy. It's fun, it'll make you think, and it packs quite a plot punch. What more could you ask for?
No comments:
Post a Comment