A Thief in the Night - David Chandler

If I told you this was 

the movie poster for 

Ladyhawke would you 

be surprised?

I am never excited to write a negative review.  Last month I reviewed the first book in the Ancient Blades Trilogy titled Den of Thieves.  David Chandler's first foray into high fantasy had its problems.  I regret to report problems have continued into A Thief in the Night albeit not always the same ones.  After finishing the novel I wondered why I didn't like it?  Harper Voyager liked it enough to purchase the entire trilogy and release them over three months.  Is it possible there's something fundamentally flawed in the way I read the novel?  Are my expectations out of whack?

I'm 30 years old and I've read a lot of fantasy over the last twenty years.  My first fantasy novel was in the 7th grade - Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain.  I moved on to The Sword of Shannara, The Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, The Dragonlance Chronicles, and every other book I could lay my hands on that was available at the Vista Campana Middle School library in Apple Valley, California.  I wanted sweeping epic fantasy with dwarves, elves, and all kinds of other fantastic constructions conveyed in straight forward no nonsense prose.  The farm boy prophesied to save the world was the end all be all for young Justin.

Somewhere along the road to adulthood I decided I wanted a little more from my fantasy and modern fantasy has delivered.  Of course, fantasy has always had ambition - Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, John Crowley's Little, Big, Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, to name a few.  But, for the most part, the development of more ambitious epic/high fantasy is recent.  Authors like George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Daniel Abraham, and Steven Erikson have brought a great deal more depth to the sub-genre.  Elves and dwarves are largely gone and the farm boy is more likely to get a sword through the stomach before he gets far enough into the game to impact anything.  Abraham has even gone so far as to turn the farm boy paradigm into a female alcoholic banker.  These authors led me full circle back to Holdstock, Crowley, and Beagle who have in turn led me to Gene Wolfe, Carthrynne Valente, and China Miéville.

And yet, I very much enjoyed James Barclay's Chronicles of the Raven and Michael J. Sullivan's Riyria Revelations both of whom in terms of world construction and character archetypes bear close resemblance to Chandler's Ancient Blades Trilogy.  I guess what I'm saying is that while I may have developed tastes that take me beyond elves, dwarves, and straight forward narratives, it doesn't mean that I'm not up for a simple adventure romp from time to time.  If that's true, and my expectations aren't broken, then why didn't I enjoy the first two installments in Chandler's series?

I'm so glad I asked - because they just aren't as good.  The prose is fine and even quite good in places if a bit overwritten.  The stories themselves aren't terribly contrived, at least no more so than "comparable" novels like the aforementioned Barclay and Sullivan.  But, and it's a big one, I cannot ignore a novel whose plot and characers just aren't interesting.  It's unfortunate that Chandler has fallen into this category because I actually think there's a lot of potential in the world he's created - which is interesting.

Based on a serf/lord model of medieval Europe, it's a world where most folk are oppressed.  In the free-city of Ness, where Den takes place entirely and Thief begins, everyone is free to choose their own destiny - albeit options are rather limited.  Magic is based on the summoning and harnessing of demonic energy.  To combat this threat to the fabric of reality seven blades were created and seven warriors were chosen to wield them.  But demons have almost been exterminated and the ancient blades aren't quite sure to do with themselves.  Cool premise, no?  Once things move beyond world building though, the whole thing falls flat.

The two points of view Chandler writes from - Malden and Croy - undergo a shift in Thief where they betray the mores built up throughout the series.  To me, it all felt very forced as though the characters changed because the author needed them to. Brent Weeks, author of the Night Angel Trilogy and the bestseller The Black Prism wrote:

Other than looking like

an Indiana Jones travel

montage, this cover is

clearly superior to the

US  version.

"My characters are mine. They must do what I have decided they will do. If you get to a point in the story where you realize your characters will not do that thing and remain true to themselves, you have a couple of options: you can just make them do it for the sake of the story, and your story will suck. Or you can sit there and wrestle with it. "

For me, Chandler swung and missed at this.  I understand where he wanted to take his protagonists.  I just didn't buy it.

I also struggled with Chandler's use of magic throughout the novel.  Cythera - Malden and Croy's mutual love interest - has an ability to absorb curses.  This absorption manifests itself as tattoos on her body.  In the first novel Cythera cannot be touched lest this magical energy be unleashed.  Lo and behold, come Thief she can release such energy at anyone/thing she likes.  Brandon Sanderson in his treatise on magic (which I highly recommend) said:

"If we simply let ourselves develop new rules every time our characters are in danger, we will end up creating fiction that is not only unfulfilling and unexciting, but just plain bad."

For example, Thief takes the merry band of adventures to an ancient city that's been entombed beneath a mountain.  The entrance is chained shut with magical chains that (it seems) will strike anyone dead who touches them.  Cythera, being magically cursed, touches them, absorbs their power, and channels it to burn a hole in the door.  Snazzy, right?  Of course, she couldn't do this in Den and I didn't see any explanation about this new found ability.  I suspect this scene was included to setup how a much more pivotal conflict is resolved in the novel's conclusion (actually, in EXACTLY the same way).  Instead, a few sentences about how Cythera has been learning to control her ability and using a well established capability of another party member to open the door (say... I don't know the master engineer of a dwarf maybe?) would have been more interesting and set up the later scene just as well.

Ok, so I think it's fairly obvious that I really didn't like A Thief in the Night (or Den of Thieves for that matter) and I don't want to further belabor the point.  The truth is, they're not bad books.  I read them both quickly and never cast them aside.  However, as a reviewer advising my readers about what is worth their time, or not, I believe there are far better options available.

The End Specialist - Drew Magary

The tagline for The End Specialist by Drew Magary is, "Who wants to live forever?"  My immediate answer is, well, I do.  Who would turn that down, right?  My review copy from Voyager differed slightly with the words, "Immortality Will Kill Us All (Except for me)."  Interesting how a few words could make me reevaluate my answer to the first question.  That's exactly what Magary's book is all about.  What would happen if we had the cure for aging?  Is it really a good thing or something we should even be pursuing?  End Specialist is a long form response to those questions, very much in the tradition of Marvel's What If? comics.

A cure for aging is discovered and, after much political and ethical wrangling, made available worldwide. Of course, all the cure does is halt aging doing nothing to prevent all the other fun and gruesome ways to die (think heart attack, cancer, torture, etc.).  And surprise surprise, not everyone wants the cure leading to extremist groups and zany religious cults.  Everything quickly descends into a downward spiral.

Told through the first person blog entries of John Farrell, the novel follows the cure's progression from lab tests, to illegal experimentation, to full-blown saturation of the population before then documenting the fallout and hinting at eventual recovery.  If that reads a bit like the plot line for a story about an outbreak of black plague then I may have painted the appropriate picture for how Magary's novel treats the cure for death.  Interspersed throughout the novel are chapters that include asides to the main story.  These windows into the world outside Farrell's view are vital bits of world building that provide haunting, and occasionally hilarious, examples of how the cure for death is failing.

I think haunting is the right word to use to describe End Specialist because it's a novel that going to stick with you for a bit.  I'm not sure how the general public reacts to death, but for me, I find it a generally distasteful line of thinking.  Whether one possesses religious conviction or not, the thought of losing the "now-ness" (boy, that was articulate) of life is frightening.  Magary taps into that fear capturing not only the raw desire for immortality, but the depths to which humanity is willing to sink.

Wrapped up in the novel is something that resembles a love story, albeit not exactly boy meets girl, marries girl, has kid with girl variety.  There is some of that, but more often than not it's about falling in love with the moment, and the realization of how stagnant such things are.  It's also about vanity, selfishness, and pride as tragic stories tend to be.

There will be parts of the novel that drag a bit as most of the first half is spent in the moderately mundane life of John Farrell the newly immortal.  In fact, the end specialist bit promised on the back cover doesn't really get going until about the two-thirds mark.  That's not a knock, as the pages flew by, but I was frequently asking myself when Farrell was going to be become a licensed U.S. government end specialist (which in my mind conjured up James Bond with a hypodermic needle).  Things pick up significantly in that last third and provide a satisfactory ending to a tremendous setup.

I have a feeling that most of the people who read End Specialist (especially in the UK) aren't going to have a clue who Drew Magary is.  The cross-over from U.S. sports humor blogger to international science fiction author isn't commonplace.  For the last six or seven years Magary has written at Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber, two blogs that somewhat resemble TMZ or io9 for sports enthusiasts.

Having read these sites off and on over the years I've been pretty exposed to Magary's writing.  I have no idea how he went from this to science fiction, but I'm sure glad he did.  The End Specialist is a top-notch novel that should have a great deal of appeal to a wide swathe of readers.  I've already ordered a copy for my mom.

The End Specialist is available in eBook now from Amazon.uk and in hard copy September 29, 2011.

Sidenotes:

• In the U.S., Magary's novel is being published by Penguin under the title The Postmortal.  It's should be available today in all formats.

• The author will be at Politics & Prose in Washington D.C. tomorrow for a reading and I presume signing.  I may attend to learn more about immortal strippers.

• Read this post from Magary today on Kissing Suzy Kolber. It's a detailed list of things you can expect in the novel. Funny, and informative.

Den of Thieves - David Chandler

Far superior U.K. cover.

If zombies and vampires are the flavor du jour in urban fantasy, then thieves and assassins are their mirror image in high fantasy.  I suspect it all started with the massive success of Scott Lynch's The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006.  Since then the genre has seen The Night Angel Trilogy, Shadow's Son/Lure, The Riyria Revelations, Farlander, Among Thieves, and Mistborn, to name a few off the top of my head.  Sure the thief/assassin sub genre owes fealty to the progenitors - Fritz Leiber, Steven Brust, and Robin Hobb - but I suspect today's out pouring has more to due with Lynch's success and publishers eagerness to fill a demand.  So of course it came as no surprise to me when Voyager announced The Ancient Blades Trilogy by David Chandler would be released over three months starting with A Den of Thieves.

In the Free City of Ness, Malden became a thief by necessity.  Under the thumb of Cutbill, lord of the underworld, he gets pulled into a plot to steal the coronet of the Burgrave on the promise of freedom.  Joined by his not-so hand picked crew of conspirators, Malden must execute his heist flawlessly or the whole city will pay the consequences.

I initially thought Den was Chandler's debut novel.  As it turns out he's written several published novels under the name David Wellington although this is his first under the HarperCollins umbrella.  While Chandler writes a good sentence and has a knack for description, the novel's depth and pacing are something I would normally expect from a debut author.  As my "blurb" indicates, the plot itself is relatively simple and there's not much going on outside of Malden's heist.  I'll never complain about a simple straight forward plot if it's well paced and filled with interesting characters.  Unfortunately, Den does not consistently meet those standards.

At 400 pages, the novel is about 100 pages too long for the plot it contains.  Lengthy descriptions and scenes that don't really provide any growth for the plot or the characters weigh down the early going making it difficult to get immersed.  I've always felt that heist novels revolve around planning and executing the heist laying the foundation for everything else around it.  Chandler neglects to build this foundation until two-thirds of the novel is gone.  That said, once Malden and his crew get into it the pace really picks up and Den captures the fun associated with a good caper.  

The characters themselves are a mixed bunch with most of them feeling flat with the except of Sir Croy, the dim-witted knight in possession of a magic demon killing blade and Bikker, a brother in arms to Croy turned mercenary.  Their history and layered motivations provided subtext that the others lacked.  Croy in particular lacking common sense and sense of self preservation provides a great foil for the bland bunch around him.  Given that the title of the trilogy is Ancient Blades I found it strange that Malden was such a prevalent character considering he never actually has a blade.  I suspect this will become clearer in future novels.

In one of the more fun parts of the novel, Chandler embraces elves and dwarves which are so overrated, they've become underrated.  So much of today's high fantasy totally rejects the notion of the elf and dwarf of Tolkein (and/or D&D).  In fact, they've become so rare (relatively speaking) that when I see them it's a little nostalgic.  Quite a few dwarves are running around smithing this and that, elves are hinted, and even an ogre is dropped in toward the end.  Equally nostalgic is his magic system - or lack of - which relies on components, pentagrams, incantations, and hand motions.

U.S. cover, really??

Clearly, Chandler isn't reinventing the wheel and that's a little charming.  The novel has its flaws, and I can't really recommend it, but I also can't totally denounce it.  I very much enjoyed the novel's second half and Chandler is a fine writer if not the best "plotter".  For someone looking for a fun read, with the patience to wade through the early parts, Den of Thieves is a nice fit.

Side notes:

• The novel is a complete arc and stands entirely on its own.  For a book that's going to have a sequel (A Thief in the Night) on the market in less than a months time, there isn't really a plot element that Chandler left dangling (not necessarily a bad thing).
• Awful awful U.S. Cover.  Much better in the U.K.