Wolfblade

Sometimes all you want to do is curl up with a cherished book that you’ve read a couple of times before, filled with characters that have become so familiar to you that turning the pages is like saying “Hello, old friend, I’ve missed you.”  But instead you pick a random fantasy novel at the library and quickly realize that you are reading the works of someone who read a book that you cherished and thought “I CAN DO THAT!” and now your old friends are slightly off and seem to be slowly turning into Deep Ones.  I’d lay down good money that Jennifer Fallon read the Song of Ice and Fire series and was just so inspired she had to make her own version of Martin’s tale.  It’s an amusing and frustrating blend of “I can make this a little cleaner and easier to understand and get rid of all that nasty incest,” and “I can be just as savage to my characters has he can!” But that’s not to say that the whole story is a retelling of ASOIAF.

I’ll start with some of the character similarities.  The main character, Marla Wolfblade, starts out similar to Sansa.  She is the pretty pretty princess who is far too naive and finds herself needing to learn politics quickly before her fate is decided for her.  There is also Laran, who fits the role of Ned as The Guy Who Is Far Too Good For This Shit.  His sister Riika is The Point of View Person Who Dies 1/2 Of The Way Through To Show That The Author Means Business.  Elezaar is the Tyrion analogue, in that he is a dwarf who is better at this politics thing that most of the other characters, but instead of being the hated son of a noble, he’s a slave.  Alija has some Cersei in her for certain, but Mahkas really embodies her spirit in that he’s never seen a minor problem that he couldn’t solve by murdering one of his siblings.

Despite the similarities, Wolfblade is a smaller story than ASOIAF.  While the latter is really the story of a kingdom, the former is the story of Marla.  Over the course of the book she grows up, becomes politically astute and eventually active, has children, and buries two husbands.  This is what it takes to shake her of her naivete and turn her into a powerful woman.  You see, her brother is the High Prince of the kingdom, and he’s a pervert obsessed so much with his own pleasure that he will never marry and father an heir for himself.  So he auctions off Marla to the highest bidder and then formally names her first born son his heir.  While this keeps the kingdom from civil war over his perversions and laziness, it also makes Marla’s child a target and brings out the mama bear in her. I am sure that following the standard fantasy format these days, this will be a trilogy, which is why this first book feels mostly like filler.

While the book likes to go on and on about the place of women and how noble women are married off against their will and how they live like slaves, it strikes a sour note because there are actual slaves too.  Slaves whose lives are not valued by anyone.  Slaves who are sterilized and used as sex toys.  In fact, when a noble woman is engaged, she has to buy one of these slaves, called court’esa, and lose their virginity and learn all about sex so that their groom won’t be disappointed on their wedding night.  Elezaar is one of these slaves, though not called in for virgin-breaking, but even he doesn’t spare a thought for freedom, just for how he can make himself indispensable to Marla.  Trying to take a stand for women’s rights in a book that happily accepts slavery is just bizarre.  I mean, roughly half those slaves are women.

Sex itself inhabits a strange role in the books.  It’s talked about frequently, especially in relation to the High Prince and his taste for boyflesh and tendency to kill multiple slaves a week with the ferocity of his fucking, but the act itself is mercifully scarce.  There is one post-(and pre-)coital scene that we hear, rather than see, through the ears of a thief perched outside a window.  The scene is more about the politics of those in the bed than who is doing what.  There is one sex scene, but since it’s inhuman magically powered sex honoring the Goddess of Love, it’s described in rather abstract terms and leaves the human of the pair helpless and wordless.

Oh yeah, I haven’t mentioned them yet.  What would a fantasy novel be without Elves Of Another Name?  In Wolfblade the elves are called Harshini.  They are tall, impossibly beautiful humanoids with solid black eyes.  They live forever, are vastly superior to humanity when it comes to magic, and they can both see and converse with the gods freely.  Did I mention that they are super-sexy to humans and are almost impossible to resist?  They do have more of a weakness than Elves Of Another Name in most fantasy novels:  they are incapable of feeling anger and cannot perform acts of violence.  Add super-sexy and can’t attack together and you get a religious order of women who kill Harshini out of fear that they will steal their menfolk.  It’s as dumb as it sounds.  Of course two characters are part Harshini.  And of course there is a prophesy about how if a Harshini of their ruling clan has a child with a human that child will have all the powers of the most powerful Harshini and all the anger and violence of a human and destroy the world.  And of course one of them has sex with a mostly-human guy in the first book.

All of the above could be easily ignored if the tale was told in a gripping way.  It wouldn’t win any awards for originality, but it would still be a decent yarn.  You remember the advice “Show, don’t tell?”  The author here employs the tactic of “Tell, Show, Then Recap” for far too many events in the books.  I will use an example.  At first the High Prince intends to marry Marla off to the king of a rival nation.  This would be bad.  Lots of people talk about how this would be bad.  An opening occurs where Laran, who rules one province, is offered the rulership of another province by that province’s ruler on his deathbed.  He talks about how this would make Laran rich enough to buy Marla out from under the rival king, and give Laran enough troops to keep anyone else from bitching about it.  Laran talks this over with the Grand Poobah.  He talks it over with his mother.  He talks it over with his best friend.  He talks it over with another provincial ruler.  Then they enact their plan.  We see it occuring from multiple points of view as everything is manipulated into place.  Finally he marries Marla.  Then he has to talk to multiple people about what we just saw him do, who had what ideas, and how this was all necessary to stop the rival king from marrying her.  I was ready to throw the book across the room in disgust because it simply would not move on.

It’s not all bad.  Elezaar is a fairly competent Tyrion and is likable despite his total lack of personal ambition. Marla becomes pretty tolerable by the end of the book once she is disillusioned and has an active goal to work towards.  The interactions with the Harshini are pretty mind-numbing, but the segments where people directly interact with the gods tend towards the amusing.  If I see the second book, I’ll pick it up to see what happens, but I’m not going to be actively seeking out Animalnoun: The Recappening.