and you better believe I've had to come back every day since I did to alter that opening sentence.
I started out stating that the book left me feeling very subdued. And though this has still remained more or less the same, I confess to feeling frustrated.
This frustration stems from seeming to be out of sorts with the blogging or something else I can't pin down, likely a lack of good sleep which results in me being (even more than usual) pretty incoherent. The aforementioned frustration doesn't even really come from the novel, it's just the write-up that consequently suffers.
It's a shame because the novel is in fact quite good. And comfortably quite a bit more than that.
I'd say it's the best violent epic fantasy I've read all year, if I hadn't also read the Crippled God in January.
The story continues on directly from where the Cold Commands ended, give or take a few months. It also adheres more to the story-beats of that book and manages to feel at its close more like its second and final part. A duology in three novels if you will, because book 1 is clearly set apart from books 2 and 3 who together form a single story and share a clear set of themes.
And it's a harrowing dark bastard of a tale too. Long, hard treks, violent bloodshed, monstrous acts and the long lusted-for, rooted-for vengeance is proven to be jarringly horrifying when we're finally delivered to what we've so unthinkingly clamoured for.
There are so many revelations and so many arcs coming full circle that have been present since book 1 that I feel that I can't give plot details without spoiling what one should find out for oneself.
Something I do feel like telling is that since The Steel Remains the characters have lived on the echoes of the past, manifested in their names.
Faggot, Oathbreaker, Black Mage, Witch, Kinslayer.
Halfblood, Hero, Dragonbane.
And make no mistake, it is the end, and it is beautiful. For all the blood-drenched fury and horror of the road that has led us here, Morgan, at the close, delivers his ending with an almost gentle weariness.
Even when the view finally moves away, and what comes next is found to be unwritten, untouched and undeveloped, whatever the final image we are left with; voices in calm triumph or on the cusp of violence, what comes before dictates what comes after.
And what comes before are the characters.
They are key in all things, even past the end.
Egar Dragonbane, Ringil Eskiath and Archeth Indamaninarmal matter more than ever their world, their races and cultures do, as interesting and as developed as those might be.
If you can't find yourself in the main cast you'll be lost. If you don't understand their reasoning, and if you don't feel their pain, this book will be a let-down, because the pay-off is hinged on bleak and melancholy understanding. A beat, a double-take and stark, dawning comprehension.
At its close, A Land Fit For Heroes is a song of weary souls calling for an end, coupled with a constant acknowledgment that violence breeds more violence but that pain doesn't only ever feed pain, and that sometimes it can, and will be responded to with compassion.
An acknowledgment that happiness is love, but that for most love is a lament, a could-have-been, or at best, almost always just out of reach, with one more hill, one more wish, separating one from the other.
I state again but with a caveat, the end is beautiful to those with a particular mindset.
But before we arrive at that end, the story is subverted where it needs to be; upending expectations and dashing hopes to show and more importantly; to signpost that this never was a clear-cut tale. The story is in fact unclear, it is not easily, and should not be easily summed up. It exists only because the characters do, and over the course of the narrative they progress as naturally as is possible and they end up where it most suits them, always sticking tight to who they are and the pain that has made them what they are.
Because pain is ever the great moulder.
Where goals and plans for the future are built on love or vengeance; the drives that look forward to the moment, or do nothing but exist in that moment, all of it is unshakably rooted in the pain of the past. From the point of view of those in torment all the future is, is the hope for the panacea to that pain. But when that hope is taken from you, there might as well be no future and the only thing to look forward to, is the end.
I've not often seen a trilogy that finishes so beautifully consistent, so dedicated to its characters. Even the last epilogue chapter, touching on elements only previously hinted at, delivers a last melancholy closing of a circle, defying reason and logic simply with how right it is.
Perfect as is. Recommended.
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Small Notes.
-Every book title of the trilogy has multiple meanings. I'm almost embarrassed to say that I didn't figure that out until this one. The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands and The Dark Defiles. Should be so obvious but somehow I missed it.
-I've seen alot of complaints about this book. from a climax out of nowhere, to a non-existant story.
I disagree with them all.
Morgan, in my mind, clearly knows what he's doing every step of the way, every chapter further serving to hammer home the ideas that will serve those final chapters and the reasons for the decisions of the characters, if not in fully thought out reasoning then in feeling and emotion.
-When reading a book it's good to take the pace that the book offers. Expect too much and you will be let down.
-Spines that don't match. Really Gollancz? How does one fuck this up?
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