Book Review: “The Painted Man” Peter V Brett

The Painted Man, Peter V Brett, Harper Voyager Paperback, ISBN 978-0-00-727614-1

Arlen lives with his parents on their small farmstead, half a day’s ride from the isolated hamlet of Tibbet’s Brook. As dusk falls each evening, a mist rises from the ground promising death to any foolish enough to brave the coming darkness. For hungry demons materialise from the vapours to feed, and as the shadows lengthen, humanity is forced to take shelter behind magical wards and pray that their protection holds until dawn.

But when Arlen’s world is shattered by the demon plague, he realises that it is fear, rather than the monsters, which truly cripples humanity. Only by conquering their own terror can they ever hope to defeat the demons. Now Arlen must risk leaving the safety of his wards to discover a different path and offer humanity a last, fleeting chance of survival. 

I’ve been eager to read this book for some time now – it’s had so many fantastic reviews – so when I saw it in the bookshop, I grabbed it. I’m very pleased that I wasn’t disappointed, as so often happens with much-hyped stories.

This is a demon of a novel: it grabs you by the throat and pulls you in from the start, and spits you out at the end, exhausted and emotionally drained. I went through this novel in two evenings, with illicit, snatched readings in the intervening day whenever I got the chance – I couldn’t keep my mind out of it, and even now it’s still turning in my head. I might have to adopt a policy of not reading trilogies until all 3 books are published: to have to wait so long for the next book (already on pre-order) AND THEN THE FINALE is pure torture.

Brett has built a world so coherent and convincing, and a trio of characters – Arlen, Rojer and Leesha – who are both engaging and credible, so that the unfolding of their stories is as enthralling as an enchantment and as gripping as a boa constrictor. The writing is spare and stark and beautiful, and the descriptions enhance without ever overwhelming the action in the foreground: Brett makes every word of every scene work for its place, and the result is a wonderfully tight and compelling novel.

In this world, there is a very good reason to be afraid of the dark, and this is hammered home in the opening scene through the experiences of Arlen, a young boy intimately affected by the demons’ destruction of his community and his family. Through him, we acquire a sense of the dread and terror under which every human must live, the knowledge that in the dark, hope only extends as far as a good ward, and without one, death is certain, slow and terrible. This sense of fear underpins the entire novel, but it is drawn subtly, a deep, cold current inferred from the characters’ actions and so deep ingrained in their thoughts and behaviour that it is a constant. Only at the end are the seeds of change sown, with fear starting to turn to defiance and action against the demons. However, one gets the impression that this is only the beginning of the war, and that there are many more battles to be fought.

Those battles will not only be against demons.

The extra dimension here is that, despite the constant fear of demons, humankind is riven by political factions and the delicate balance of power between church and state, and between duchy and duchy, are under strain. The demons are killing humans faster than they can reproduce, and the economies of the duchies and states are starting to buckle under the strain. The ruling classes are looking to consolidate their own positions, with little care to the plight of common people, and the church preaches a doctrine of sin and punishment by demon plague, a puritanical and sometime hypocritical position that does little to lighten the burden of sorrow on the people to whom it ministers.

However, this church also delivers the prophesy of a deliverer, who will come to rid the world of demons and reinstate a peace and prosperity that has been long missing. Into this prophecy, Arlen’s decision to fight rather than flee unfolds. His position outside of society – one of the few willing to brave nights in the dark with no warded walls between himself and the demons – leads him to uncover what might be the salvation of humanity.  This puts him into opposition with the established church, who will either condemn him as an imposter or, worse (in his eyes), attempt to force him into the role of ‘Deliverer’.

It also runs counter to the beliefs and needs of  the ultra-religious Krasians who would rather see him dead than admit that the deliverer might arise from outside their clans. Their fanatical culture has strong Islamic overtones, and whilst the use of prejudiced, thinly-disguised stereotypical portrayals of traditional Islamic cultures as inherently evil/tyrannical in fantasy is not something I enjoy – it plays too much to the cheap seats in terms of ticking the box for an easily identifiable ‘evil empire’ that will both appeal to and strike a chord with a contemporary audience -  this one is more well-balanced than most and does make some attempt to demonstrate the effect of an absolute commitment to faith that makes the importance of the temporal world secondary to the hereafter. This dependence both drives and defines the Krasian’s outlook on life, and whilst it may have unpleasant cultural implications for non-warriors and those unable to achieve the perfection of faith, it nonetheless highlights the vacillations and hypocrises of the Northern kingdoms and places the Krasians in direct opposition to them – the more so at the end of the novel, which promises to expand the personal conflicts of this into a wider, political conflagration in the next.

Arlen’s single-mindedness contrasts well with the other major players in this story. Rojer is orphaned by a demon attack and subsequently brought up by a Jongleur (a jester, or bard) and follows in his trade. Leesha becomes an Herb Gatherer, a medicine woman, for her village after her mother and betrothed betray her trust. Both of these characters, again, exist outside of their society’s comforts, though they are important contributors to that same comfort, but neither of them posess the same certainties and determination as Arlen. Their quest for meaning and purpose both contrasts with and complements Arlen’s driven hunt, and when the three strands of their very different stories come together to make a single, satisfying whole, the result makes for a powerful, convincing finale to this story.

Like so many who have read this already, I loved this story. I am so excited about reading the next one, I can hardly bear to wait until August …

Robert Olmstead – Far Bright Star

(Algonquin Books, Paperback (First Edition), May 2009, ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-592-6)

 

Set in 1916, ‘Far Bright Star’ follows Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman, as he leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice. Though he is seasoned at such missions, things go terribly wrong and the patrol is brutally attacked. After witnessing the demise of his troops, Napoleon is left by his captors to die in the desert.

Through him we enter the conflicted mind of a warrior as he tries to survive against all odds, as he seeks to make sense of a lifetime of senseless wars and to reckon with the reasons a man would choose a life on the battlefield.

This is neither a comfortable nor an easy novel to read, but the lyrical, compelling voice pulled me in from the first sentence. That voice grew stronger until, within a couple of pages, even my unfamiliar ears were attuned to the narrator’s drawl and I could hear him as though he were stood next to me.  His story is not told in a conventional manner: the narrative is linear up to the defining, terrifying moment of capture, torture and abandonment, but then it twists and turns alongside the narrator as his experiences traverse the increasingly blurred boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, until past, present and future become inextricably tangled.

This complex unravelling of a consciousness could be interpreted as the representation of a man suffering from post-traumatic disorder (at a time when such a thing was not known to exist), a respected, hardened soldier experiencing one atrocity too many, the axes of physical recovery and mental collapse intersecting and then mirroring one another. Such an analysis offers an oblique look forward at the experiences of soldiers serving both in the First World War (the start of which ends this novel), and, moving forward still further, and in Afghanistan in the present day. Replace Pancho Villa with the Taliban, and you get the same sense of dread-laden and heat-drowned shadow-chasing in a hostile land.

However, the dense, vivid language, the rich, complex imagery hold echoes of magical realism, a sense of the fantastical that is reminiscent of a stripped-down Gabriel Garcia Marquez in its impossibilities, though without his more impenetrable excesses. Perhaps one should simply suspend one’s disbelief and accept the mystical, or perhaps mythological, qualities of the improbable rescue and recovery, and see this as a deeply personal telling of an experience from a man who does things his own way and sees things in a different light to the rest of us. His perception is his reality, and we should accept his translation of it for us.

But the reality he shows us is a bleak and stark analysis of war, in all its brutal, wasteful futility. The language may be evocative, luxurious and poetic, but such language forges a stark, telling contrast between its melodic beauty and the precise, horrific scenes Olmstead lays before us. You will not find here the glamorous, romantic stuff of Hollywood-slick spaghetti westerns, nor the idealised cameraderie and nobility of Zane Grey and Fennimore Cooper. This novel is unflinching in its exposure of the base ugliness, boredom and terror of a war of attrition in a hostile land, of the resigned disgust of soldiers who must carry out the flawed plans of distant political masters whose strategy takes no account of the human cost of their miscalculations. The heat and dust and stench of it seep into you, and, trapped in a web of sensory lyricism, it is impossible to look away and ignore the grisly outrage that concludes the betrayal and destruction of Napoleon’s small troop.

This is not a comfortable novel to read. It is a haunting, disturbing unfolding of a man disintegrating under unbearable pressure, but in a story of contrasts, of language and image, of illusion and reality, of myth and truth, he makes a sort of peace within himself. By submitting himself to war, he allows himself to accept that war has both destroyed and forged his identity and that war gives him life just as much as it threatens that same life. 

It is not an understanding easily grasped, a single reading will not suffice. Detail will catch and nag and draw you back until you move through stunned, mesmerised revulsion to uncomprehending grief to silent acceptance. It is worth the journey to get there. Read it.

Mainspring – Jay Lake

(Tor Books, Mass Market Paperback, May 2008 ISBN: 978-0-7653-5636-9)

Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria still rules New England and her American Possessions; the Royal Navy rules the skies with its mighty airships; and Earth still turns on God’s great brass gears of Heaven as it makes its orderly passage around the Lamp of the Sun from Midnight to Midnight and Year to Year.

In the town of New Haven, a Clockmaker’s young apprentice is visited at midnigh by a brass Angel, and told that he, and he alone, can find the Key Perilous to rewind the Mainspring of Earth. If he does not, the planet will wind down, and life will cease.

I’ve steered clear of Steampunk up until this point, not out of any particular prejudice, but more because it has its roots in the era of industrial revolution and that’s not, generally, a period that I’ve ever been drawn to. So when Jay Lake’s ‘Mainspring’ fell into my lap (a reward for being his 500th follower on Twitter), I wasn’t sure what I’d make of it.

I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be such an intriguing, compelling story.

The main character is as engaging as he is innocent, and the world he explores is a fascinating and well-envisioned parallel of the familiar Victorian-industrial era, coherent and by turns dazzling and terrifying in its differences.

The attitudes and social mores, the obsessions with order and outward propriety are both familiar and therefore credible links from our own recognised history into this world, and serve to set up the conflicts in which the main character, Hethor (the clockmaker’s apprentice), struggles to unravel the mystery set for him by the angel, and to work out which of the powerful figures he encounters along the way he can trust.  Hethor’s quest is simple enough: to find the Key Perilous and wind the Mainspring of the Earth, but the lack of information available to a boy with no social standing and little education AND the active opposition of theological factions, imperial ambitions and the physical barrier of the ‘Wall’ – an equatorial division on which the mechanism of the Earth turns, where heaven and earth meet – all deepen the conflicts and confusion Hethor must overcome if he is to realise his purpose. The storytelling is subtle, apparently random events driving the plot towards its climax, an unexpected realisation that flows in a satisfying way from the individual Hethor has become over the course of his various trials.

Hethor is an intriguing character. In his naivete and innocence, his lack of awareness and education, there are strong echoes of de Troyes’ Percival (indeed, there is a minor character called de Troyes – coincidence? I wonder…).  The overtones of both the chivalrous quest for the Holy Grail and darker, more Wagnerian interpretation of the story (Parsifal) in the construction of Hethor’s character work well with the religious nature of the task he has undertaken. His status as the ‘pure fool’, unknowing and unformed, does, of course, mean that we learn about this world alongside him, and as his learning and development evolves out of his experiences, so too does our understanding and interpretation of the societies, situations and characters that push the story along. His evolution into an almost Christ-like figure – a man with wordly knowledge and understanding and yet still set apart by a simplicity of thought and behaviour – with magical/mystical powers of connection to the mechanisms that drive the Earth and all within/upon it develops naturally out of the callow boy we meet at the beginning – the first clues to this potential sown early on, and refined through the trials and treachery that envelop him right up to that moment of final realisation. In places, his naivete is frustrating – in the early stages of the story, he places his trust too easily and walks into traps with a wide-eyed stupidity, which undermines, to a degree, the later demonstrations of intelligence. Of course, a more charitable interpretation is that those early betrayals forge the determined and intelligent man of the latter stages, but the initial perception persists. His progression from simple (manipulated?) boy to a man confident in his own understanding and abilities comes with the transition from his rational, ordered existence in the Navy in the Northern hemisphere over the equatorial wall to the chaotic, factional, fractured societies of the Southern hemisphere, a powerful dividing line in so many ways in this story, not least of which is the evolution of Hethor’s magic.  The form his powers take is absolutely consistent with the world with which we are presented.  His magical abilities are hinted at, the potential is touched upon, but never fully explored in the Northern hemisphere, and only in the South, beyond the equatorial Wall, do these (conveniently) take on their full form and allow him to overcome the barriers of language, culture, technology and climate that are set in his path. Again, I think there is an understanding that the escape from the ordered restrictions of the Northern hemisphere sets him free and allows these powers to blossom in the less rational, more mystical and intuitive culture in which he finds himself, but there is, nonetheless, a touch of deus ex machina about its manifestation in a couple of places. 

With the evidence of Divine workmanship on permanent, incontrovertible view in this clockwork world, atheism is an untenable position. However, theological factions exist in terms of the interpretation of Divine Intent – Rational Humanists, who claim god abandoned the world after creation and the world should therefore be freed of god, and a more spiritual faction who believe the Divine manifests in the ordinary, that god still has a care for his creation. Our earliest encounter with a Rational Humanist – the clockmaker’s son – sets them up as the natural enemy of both Hethor and his quest, and this perception is borne out with the arrival of William of Ghent. What is interesting is that William of Ghent is a magician and a prophet, a position that seems to sit strangely with the scientific precision of the faction he represents. It works, though, because the ambiguity means that right until the end, we are never sure that Hethor has judged him correctly. It works on other levels, too, particularly in terms of linking back to Wagner’s Parsifal, where William of Ghent could be interpreted as the magician Klingsor, though the impact of Hethor’s ultimate wisdom and compassion upsets that interpretation to an extent.  The opposing faction, the mysterious ‘white birds’, are never fully glimpsed, but their agents assist Hethor at every turn, rescuing him from some seemingly impossible situations. This more spiritual, mystical interpretation of the Divine again echoes back the legend of the Grail, and also offers an interesting comment on our own society’s conflicts between the rather hard-edged obsession with rational, scientific progress and a more spiritual, earth-centred stability/sustainability, and it’s interesting to see this expressed and explored in this novel. 

The two factions also demonstrate the conflicts and hypocracies within the Northern hemisphere society (and absolutely consistent with Victorian double-standards), contrasting a requirement for outer order and conformity with a hidden, internal chaos. This contrast is emphasised and deepened by the equatorial Wall dividing the Northern and Southern hemispheres where the reverse is true in the civilisation in which Hethor finally comes to rest. Although boundaries are blurred between human and animal, outward chaos is contradicted by inner calm, coherence, acceptance and, ultimately, love. I didn’t expect the romantic elements of the story to develop in the way that they did, but the relationship between Hethor and Arellya develops out of their mutual understanding and ability to communicate, mixed with a sense of curiosity, eagerness and simplicity the two of them seem to share. It’s effective and convincing, but also offers a wider comment on how a culture judged as uncivilised or primitive can actually have more coherence than those that attempt to detach themselves from the basic rhythms of life.

The juxtaposition of these two views of civilisation not only provides Hethor a framework in which to understand and question the values he has been inducted with, but also offers an interesting comment on the interpretations of Victorian analyses of civilisation and social structures from a contemporary perspective: are the societies we label as uncivilised truly so, or is it we who are the savages? The answer Hethor finds is not, perhaps, what one would expect, but it is internally consistent.

Is it a straightforward re-telling of the Grail, or Wagner’s Parsifal? No, not by any means. It draws on elements of both to set the stage, but the internal complexities of the world in which the story plays out make this quest something else altogether. It’s a riveting read, a layered story of contrasts and conflicts that come together in the end to create an exciting and satisfying finale. I loved every minute of it.