I wrote alot again. As this is the start of a trilogy there's alot of ground to cover, so I won't have to go too in depth for 2 and 3. Expect alot less of a write-up for its sequels.
Spoiler section at the back with due warning.
Ringil, the hero of Gallow's Gap, the famous last stand against the invading Lizard-people, lives in self-inflicted exile in a backwater town away from the judging eyes of his fellow countrymen, away from those that deem him a degenerate and a pervert. But his days of idle drinking and storytelling are at an end as he is dragged back into the world that hates and reviles him., the world that wants him dead and gone, back to his home-city, to find his kidnapped cousin.
Archeth, whenever the court and the erratic demands of her emperor permit it, slaves away in the bowels of arcane machines endeavouring to unlock the secrets of the enigmatic Helmsmen, searching for information and secrets concerning her lost race.
But as the emperor calls, she must answer and she will have to go south to investigate a sorcerous calamity.There she will be confronted with an older and more dangerous entity than the one she was looking for.
Egar Dragonbane, fearsome warrior and tribal leader, among the grass and the herds of his people, misses civilization. Back from his time in the south since the war, the traditions and superstitions of his people stifle him and he muses constantly on memories long held close. But for a hero of war, in the tribes life is bountiful and good.
But resentment brews on every side and when the gods themselves intervene, not even a slayer of dragons can call himself safe.
But resentment brews on every side and when the gods themselves intervene, not even a slayer of dragons can call himself safe.
But since I needed a break from thinking about my fiction for a while (yeah, that turned out great, huh?) and just let myself loose into some fairly straightforward escapism again I ventured to my TBR-shelves where I stood for about half a second before my eye landed on this beauty.
The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan is the first novel of the A Land Fit For Heroes Trilogy.
A Land fit for Heroes because it sucks, you know. As in; it really needs itself some heroes, jow.
Morgan is probably better known for his Takeshi Kovacs novels, which is quite a brutal, smart and sexy scifi trilogy that right now is already well on its way to being adapted for television (or at least book 1 is). It might even be completed for all I know.
So, from sci-fi to fantasy. Morgan's style is dark and volatile, with deeply humane characters (read: tortured introspection) and incredibly well depicted cringeworthy violence in a storyline that is occasionally spiced up with pulse-raising sex scenes. He of course manages to bring that skill to his fantasy outing but with a little twist. Or maybe a few, I'm not sure yet what that ending implies...
Alright anyway, the big twist with this one then, or rather the hook; the big thing I knew about it before I went into it, is that its main protagonist, Ringil, is gay. That coupled with Morgan's penchant for pretty damn enticing, graphically suggestive sex scenes made me slightly wary and yet very curious to see how it would pan out.
And I pretty much got what I expected: Brutal and inventively original violence that was both graphic and disturbing. Tortured and complex characters and yes indeed: sexy sex between same-sex partners. That last part occasionally went a little more graphic (like, really) than I was expecting. It's not bad, like I said: Morgan's good at this, but if you're not open to this kind of thing, and especially if you don't like sex in your novels, you should really steer clear of this one.
Characters
The characters are flat-out the best thing about this book. We have three main characters and every single one of them has so much layers on them that their bouts on introspective musings carried the whole thing, for me at least. They're all veterans of wars, with a lifetime of sorrow and loss behind them and there's alot of backstory drip fed to us during the story.
The main one is Ringil.
Ringil's past, much like that of the others, is doled out in bits and pieces in flashbacks that are incorporated quite well into the main narrative. But since Ringil has more focus than the others, his flashbacks are more frequent and a lot more revealing. Morgan doesn't break up the flow of the text by starting a new paragraph or chapter or what have you. He just italicizes and slots the flashback neatly among the rest of the character's musings. It helps alot with the strength-of-the-moment-feeling in the scenes in which this happens. It drags up all the, frequently horrifying, baggage out of the past to give it a place under the sun alongside our main characters. It imbues scenes that previously were brightly lit, star-studded diamonds glittering in the sunlight, with some very dark shadows. It's quite a neat writer's trick.
We start off with Ringil as quite a straight-forward protagonist, albeit one with his own sexual preferences and quirks that make him stand out to many others that I've read. He obviously has some baggage but he seems well adjusted. But it's as soon as he is jolted back into the places of his youth that the horror of his upbringing comes howling forward, in memories that let the pain flood back in, and then all of a sudden Ringil is endowed with a backstory of rather horrifying levels of darkness.
He is the archetype of a tried and tested character, someone with so much pain in his past that he could be the poster boy for steel tempered by fire. Described as having a core of ice, Ringil's traumatic past has gone so far above and beyond to make him what he is that he's like a dozen tortured protagonists into one.
It's a land fit for heroes but there are none to be found.
There are only people who get beat down, who stumble and fall. It's the toughest who despite all this pain manage to pick themselves up again. Does that make one a hero though?
And yet. Ringil fights for others. Maybe. Or maybe he just likes the violence.
And yet. Ringil fights for others. Maybe. Or maybe he just likes the violence.
Archeth is an alien, or something. Lesbian and all round bad-ass, she's the last survivor of a very advanced humanoid race that, a decade ago, left the earth and humanity to its own destructive devices. Highly intelligent and like all her race mechanically geared, she's a senior advisor to a megalomaniacal but shrewd emperor.
Even though she's a good character she is a little wasted in the court storyline.
The manipulative, all-powerful, drop-of-a-hair-pin-goes-violent emperor is something that's done to death. As such it's the only viewpoint that was a little boring.
I do expect alot more from her in the sequels though. Her backstory and past are fascinating and I would have loved more information. The Cold Commands is sure to give it.
Egar I have alot less to say about even though he's interesting enough.
He's the typical barbarian with a twist. Reared in nomadic warrior communities, as adolescent he left his tribe to become a mercenary and see the world. Various wars later he has formed a friendship with Ringil and Archeth that'll last him a lifetime. He has since returned to his tribe and has taken up the mantle of leadership. But having once gazed on civilization and the wonders that it offers there's a deep grain of discontent at the simple tribal life simmering beneath his surface. He's wiser because of his experiences than literally everyone around him but he's still pretty primal. It's the usual dichotomy of experience vs isolated nurture.
On top of that he has some of the most tantalizingly interesting world- and mythology building scenes of the novel.
World
The world is grimdark as-it-gets fantasy by way of the Dying Earth.
An earth that is our earth, but so far in the future that science has become indistinguishable from magic. As such there are various elements and story devices that make it be fun to figure out what they mean so I'm really not going to talk about this because I don't want to spoil it. Suffice it to say I'm looking forward to The Cold Commands for more of this.
Story and trappings
A slight problem I had with Steel Remains is that obviously from the second you've been introduced to all three viewpoints you inevitably begin waiting for them to come together. I found that when that (finally) happened it felt rather inorganic and weirdly rushed. But though it was hurried and sloppy, it was still servicable.
I also noticed that where this happened it felt like I was reading a Sword and Sorcery novel; how characters neatly and swifly line up with eachother almost out of the blue when they meet. And the acknowledgments section at the back bears that out where Morgan acknowledges his debt to Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner and Poul Anderson. The drugs several characters take to fight better do clearly call Elric's reliance on drugs/Stormbringer to mind.
It's still an odd novel, as it has the slow build-up of Epic Fantasy but then at times it suddenly it's clearly something else, something less meticulous and more fast-paced, unconstrained and unworried about conventional storytelling or maybe it's rather a throwback to earlier storytelling.
So plotting not great but for now I'm keeping that criticism contained to this novel, because it does seem like the whole trilogy is going to fit together rather more neatly than I was foreseeing, given this one's particular ending.
As I've mentioned before. I'm looking forward to reading The Cold Commands.
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Finally, some notes on sex.
If you can't abide sex in your novels I emphasize that you need to steer clear of Morgan's work. If you want the opposite, you'll likely love this because it really is quite fantastically well done.
To go in depth about this, sensitive soul; steer clear and for the rest; be mindful of the SPOILERS ahead.
I've read some comments on the gratuity of sex in Richard Morgan's novels. And yes, be warned, what's there is very explicit.
However in the case of The Steel Remains I'm thinking it really isn't gratuitous. There are several sex or suggestive post-coital scenes in the book but for the purpose of this little 'analysis' I'm remembering only one really intensely explicit one. It's a remarkable scene if only for Ringil's role during it.
Now, Ringil's a no-nonsense guy who goes ballistic at the drop of a hat, delivering extreme violence when he deems it necessary, if he's had enough or if he's just riled up. This character has a steel core, The Steel Remains, tempered by a lifetime of suffering under constant bigotry and hatred and violence. He never backs down, never shows weakness or hesitation and yet here...
Here he lets it happen. In this one scene he completely submits. He lets another have their way with him. I'm not saying there's not other times when this happens. This scene can be taken as indicative of other sexual encounters, but those are not shown. This encounter however, is the one that Morgan is willing to share with us.
To stop beating around the bush, so to speak, I'm talking specifically about the Seethlaw sex scene(s).
Where we have sex between two people via a tradionally dominant and submissive role, and yet Ringil inhabits both during their time together.
It adds a layer of depth to his character that's very hard to pin down (I find). The moments of submission stand in rather large contrast to his usual anti-submissive self. It shines a spotlight on a willingness to surrender to the whims and desires of others and more importantly; it shows a vulnerability that just isn't there outside of this sex scene. He opens himself up completely because of lust and desire and also important: because he's in a safe space. Because outside of this moment this land is fit for heroes and because it's as grim and dark as it gets and since any weakness is punished, exploited or manipulated he can never show that weakness, that surrender, except in the intimate privacy that sex offers. We wouldn't have gotten this glimpse of the possibilities in his character without the explicite depiction that this scene offers.
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Note how I wrote that last line: It's important. But I'll be damned if I can actually coherently explain it.
Maybe because since this scene is contingent on happenstance or coincidence we might have never even glimpsed the possibility for Ringil's submission? Known him only as a hard-ass? The possibility for this moment of release lies in sex, in Ringil being horny.
We are not who we normally are when we're horny. Arousal is a drug, altering the mind. In fact, let's just immediately skip to the end of this particular train of thought and say that in reality we don't have a unique static identity, only a lifetime of influences, genetic abnormalities (because what is normal?) and triggers that influence our every waking moment, one rolling into the next. Your identity, your self and your choice are illusion.
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Uh. what I'm saying is, that Morgan, in this one scene, depicts ringil as different than how he is throughout the rest of the novel. Yes this won't have been the first time and sure there are other moments of weakness, hungover awakenings after nights of drunken escapades and various levels of torpor and ending up on the wrong side of a fight and so on and so forth. And the flashbacks are practically all horrific and denigrating to ringil, especially those where he's unable to fight back. And there's some sly internal innuendo about his sexual experiences:
Learned it by kneeling at Grace-Of-Heaven's Knee (some wry joke that I forgot). I'm heavily paraphrasing as I couldn't find this particular part again.
But in the present, outside of the world of flashbacks, Ringil never backs off, never allows, never tolerates others to have a go at him, until here. That's why that scene is important.
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