Entry tags:

books, reviews

Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe, The Privilege of the Sword
And here's the other two reviews. But they're longish.


Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe (James Ward): I rarely show good judgement of any kind, but when I saw the title of this book as it sat on the shelf, I knew 1) it would be terrible and 2) I was going to read it anyway. I guess that doesn't really show good judgement either, but it shows accurate judgement. It is the sort of book where over the course of it we find out that the protagonist:

• is a wizard, which means all his hair is white
• has demonic heritage, which gives him glowing red eyes when he's angry
• is the seventh son of a seventh son, which gives him super-magic
• can telepathically talk to dragons
• can do not just one school of magic like everyone else, but two schools, and can cast each of them better than everyone
• has a magic wishing potion
• and, best of all, can control ropes

I mean, even Harry Potter just got by with being super-magic and that scar thing.

There are a number of other selections extracted from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: the tough female warrior, the elemental magic, and the beverage which is almost exactly like coffee but has a different name. There is no cute talking animal companion, but he does get to talk telepathically to the dragonship, so that counts half.

And the most amazing part is you can predict the entire book from the title! Modeling it after "Midshipman <character name>" means that it's the planned first book of a Horatio Hornblower type series, but the fact that "Midshipman" has been changed to something with "wizard" means that the author's idea is "hey, I'll do Horatio Hornblower but shoehorn in some magic!" and the fact that he chose the clumsy and implausible "Midshipwizard" means that he's going to do it in a ham-fisted way. From there it's trivial to deduce a standard fantasy setting with a good guy kingdom with a good guy name (Arcania) that has pixies and magic and stuff, and a bad guy kingdom that is evil and oppressive and has a bad guy name (Maleen) and some kind of evil magic (shape-changing into four-eyed monsters).

"Halcyon Blithe" is a pantywaist kind of name that can only be explained in a protagonist by him coming from a long line of noble magic people, but nevertheless everyone will be surprised to find out just how powerful he actually is, perhaps because he comes into his power late. Furthermore he will inherit all sorts of loot and magic trinkets from his family, but he won't actually be able to interact with or rely on his parents, probably because at least one of them died heroically in a naval battle.

Since he's starting off as a midshipman he's never been to sea before, so that will be an excuse to let the whole book be a series of lectures from various side characters telling him and the reader all the details about the elaborate fantasy world and ship magic the author has worked out. Blithe will of course screw up somehow and get punished for it, but this punishment will turn out to put him in a position to save the day when the true bad guy reveals himself*.

And if you were actually able to deduce all that, the advanced lesson is this one.

*The bad guy, incidentally, is a shape-changer who has infiltrated the crew. If you wish to test your traitor-detection skills, feel free to try to guess which of the following is the bad guy: Alvena Merand, Master Giantson, Dart Surehand, Dire Wily. Or perhaps the name just means he's a larger and fiercer version of this guy.


The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner): It's been ages since I read Swordspoint, but the main thing I remember about it is the ending -- for the whole book I'd been expecting it to end in a crazy Hamlet-style "everyone dies in a burst of tragic violence" way, and instead the author went twist-snip-snap, and suddenly the good guys triumphed and the bad guys lost and people lived happily ever after. I was kind of pleased but in retrospect a little disappointed too. Like, it was a big shift in the kind of story I thought I'd been reading, and it felt like a little damage had been done to the integrity of the characters in the process.

This book isn't quite like that, but the guiding hand of the author definitely comes down near the end. I think the problem is that not enough happens for the first two-thirds of the book -- it's two hundred pages to set up a girl brought to the city and learning to use the sword, her dropout-turned-duke uncle and his political enemy, and another noble girl who's leading a more conventional life until something goes wrong. See, it can be done in two hundred characters instead of two hundred pages. I don't mean the ending is bad. It's not the kind of ending where a character comes up with something clever and saves the day, true; it's the kind of ending where a character makes the decision to win the battle and lose the war -- but then it turns out that war was just a battle within a larger war, and there's still a victory to be made.

Unfortunately, there are always casualties in war, and in this case the main casualty is the one who's theoretically the main character. While the book starts out making a strong attempt to be about the girl's new life in the city and as a swordswoman and the people she meets, the plot is clearly way more interested in her uncle and all his crazy schemes. There are a number of tentative steps to give the girl some plot, but almost all of them are cut short, sometimes by fate and sometimes by the uncle. Worse yet, two major ones that aren't cut short just peter out at the end of the book -- there's a big "which'll she pick?" question that is left totally unresolved.

The note at the back of the book makes it sound like this was written with much prodding from the fan community. I guess this might explain some of the rambling in the first part of the book and the way the plot was taken over by a character from the first book*. Anyway, I understand there's a third book out now. There are some obvious ways to continue on from this one; I wouldn't be surprised if taken together they repair some of the structural deficiencies of this one.

(EDIT: Ok, I was wrong, this is the third and latest book in this setting. The second book is set after this one, though -- I guess I'll read it at some point and see how they relate.)

*I darkly suspect it also explains the inclusion of a side character who's a particular archetype I really can't stand; in this book she's just described as "the Ugly Girl" which is one of the main required traits -- along with ugly she's intellectual, scorns the masses, and (in this book) those are her only distinguishable characteristics. Basically, she's a Meg Ryan character for intellectuals. I won't say I never like this kind of character, but too often it's done as the worst sort of Mary Sue, where the author carefully sticks on a flaw they don't care that much about so the character can otherwise be total wish-fulfillment.