The Reading Canary: a Reminder

Series of novels - especially in fantasy and SF fiction, but distressingly frequently on other genres as well - have a nasty tendency to turn sour partway through. The Reading Canary is your guide to precisely how far into a particular sequence you should read, and which side-passages you should explore, before the noxious gases become too much and you should turn back.

The Empire Trilogy: a Political Adventure Story

The Empire Trilogy is a collaboration between Ray Feist and Janny Wurts, and is linked closely with Feist's Riftwar Saga. It is set mainly during Magician, throughout which the Tolkeinesque world of Midkemia is at war with the Tsurani Empire, a unique culture from the world of Kelewan.

The war, while significant, occurs mainly in the background, however: while the Riftwar Saga dealt with the events of the war from a mainly Midkemian point of view, the Empire Trilogy follows the political career of Mara, Ruling Lady of the Acoma family, as she becomes a great power in the Tsurani Empire, a distinctly different fantasy world more inspired by the cultures and myths of South-East Asia than Tolkein.

Incidentally, this marks the place where I bury the hatchet with Feist over the Kelewan/Tekumel issue. (See my review of the Riftwar Saga for a reminder of that.) In the acknowledgements section of Daughter of the Empire, Feist explicitly thanks the designers of the games that the Dungeons & Dragons game which spawned the Riftwar Saga sprang from - and this, implictly, must include M.A.R. Barker, author of Empire of the Petal Throne. In addition, while the Kelewan of the Riftwar Saga was indisputably the same as Barker's Tekumel, in the Empire Trilogy the two worlds diverge: Feist and Wurts make the world fully their own, and while the similarities with Tekumel remain, their own original contributions finally outweigh them.

Although I have no moral objection to buying Feist's work first-hand now, I'm still glad that I bought the Riftwar Saga second-hand, and would encourage readers to do so: it's a fun, light, sprawling adventure story which isn't quite good enough to be worth deliberately seeking out and paying full price for. At the end of this review, we'll see if the Empire Trilogy exceeds or falls short of the standards set by the Riftwar Saga.

Daughter of the Empire

Though the books of the Riftwar Saga had a tendency to sprawl, Daughter of the Empire does not share that flaw. Don't be fooled by the page count: this is a lean, tightly-written story, with no fat and an absence of filler. It's an exciting and not too complicated page-turner, an adventure story of the type that Feist has perfected - but while the Riftwar Saga was a fantasy adventure, with long journeys and arduous quests and kick-ass fight scenes, this is a political adventure. With the occasional journey and quest and fight scene, true, but a political adventure nonetheless.

No time is wasted with needless fluff: Feist and Wurts toss us straight into the story, as Mara's initiation into the priesthood is disrupted by the news of the death of her father and brother in a misguided attack on Midkemia - which they were forced into through the manipulations of Jingu of the Minwanabi. Mara is presented with a family whose affairs are in disarray thanks to their heavy losses on Midkemia, but through a serious of desperate political gambits manages to evade assassination, restore security and prosperity to the Acoma, and take bloody revenge on Jingu of the Acoma.

The Tsurani Empire is a Machiavellian place, where almost any action is acceptable so long as the traditional forms are observed. Mara throws herself into it without mercy, fighting for the survival of herself and her clan, occasionally taking a very loose interpretation of tradition in order to gain advantage. Mostly, she does not question the brutal assumptions of her culture, but the occasional twinge of conscience suggests that she may find herself questioning the traditions which both threaten her and provide her with the means of survival.

The pitfall of political fantasy novels is that they are based on political systems which the authors essentially pull out of their arses - so any victories or defeats the characters suffer can seem like cheap shots, because the author can always save or condemn a character by inventing some random loophole. Impressively, Daughter of the Empire avoids this pitfall: the cultural mores of the Tsurani are either communicated effectively to us or are reasonably obvious, and the various gambits Mara and her counterparts engage in tend to rely on the broad assumptions of their culture as opposed to legalistic minutae.

Characterisation isn't this novel's strong point: most of the characters are fairly one-dimensional. However, the important members of Mara's household are all relevant to the action, and all have a clear niche in the Acoma. The main strength of this book is the tight plotting and exciting Gordian Knots that Mara slices through, which are presented efficiently and engagingly. We feel Mara's humiliation as she marries the son of an enemy house in order to force an alliance, and her mixture of regret and triumph as she successfully eliminates him, and we feel Mara's fear as she walks into the headquarters of the Minwanabi, her arch-enemies, to attend a birthday party for the Imperial Warlord which she cannot honourably stay away from.

The biggest problem I would have with Daughter of the Empire is that for most of the book almost everything goes Mara's way. Every political challenge Mara faces is either a) crucial to Acoma survival or b) a once-in-a-lifetime chance to enhance the Acoma's standing and financial situation. This means that the authors can't very well let Mara lose; while she may run across temporary setbacks while dealing with a particular issue, at the end of the day she always ends up ahead. If the entire trilogy is this predictable, this will soon get tired, but Daughter of the Empire is brief enough that it doesn't outstay it's welcome. Don't be fooled by the thickness of the book - large print means that the story's actually much shorter than it first appears. (Presumably the publishers felt that it would sell better to the fantasy crowd if it was fat and brick-sized.

Since the war on Midkemia remains mainly in the background, close familiarity with Magician is completely unnecessary to understand Daughter of the Empire, the events of which are roughly contemporary with the early parts of Magician. Daughter is also a strong collaboration: I can't easily tell which segments are Feist and which are Wurts, so they were clearly working in synch with one another. And while there are still loose ends by the end of the novel, it could happily stand alone: Mara's conclusive revenge against the man who caused the death of her father and brother would be a reasonable enough place to stop reading if you weren't inclined to keep going.

Servant of the Empire

That might be a good idea. Whereas Daughter of the Empire starts with a bang, dropping the reader into the action straight away, Servant of the Empire stumbles at the beginning, and stumbles bad me enough to lose me entirely.

Feist and Wurts had, to be fair, a difficult task before them. Another volume of Mara Kicks Ass All The Time would feel repetitive; an 800-page volume of it (containing around 50-100% more text than Daughter) would massively outstay its welcome. Clearly, at this point they needed to introduce a major twist to put a new spin on the series. Unfortunately, they decided to do this by emphasising two subjects, neither of which they handle very well: Midkemia and sex.

At the beginning of the novel, Mara is going to the slave market to buy some new stock. There happens to be a large number of Midkemian slaves going for cheap: they are plentiful after the recent successes in the Riftwar, and aren't very well behaved. She stands there and watches as the slaves carefully co-operate to make fools of the slavers - the proud, noble, and very white men of Midkemia obviously being less willing to submit under the lash than the weak-willed, dark-skinned folk of Kelewan - but decides to buy them anyway. She also finds her heart racing and her cheeks warming when she gazes upon the rippling thews of the slaves' apparent leader, a red-haired giant of a man. No matter how much she orders her servants to flog him, wash him, and oil him, he won't submit!

Now, I thought that the handling of Mara's sexuality in Daughter of the Empire was very sensitive; she is required to use it as a tool like any other at her disposal in order to secure the continued survival of her house, but the authors never quite manage to make that distasteful. She tricks someone into marrying her so that she can have a child to continue the family line, and then manipulates the individual in question into a social blunder that forces him to commit suicide to preserve his honour; she tempts one individual into compromising himself with implied promises of sexual favours that never actually manifest. Thus, Mara is established as someone for whom sex has become tarnished by political considerations, who cannot allow her passions free reign and whose only previous sexual experience (with the husband she kind-of murdered) was full of hurt and tears.

The romance novel readers in our audience will now have guessed what sort of direction Servants of the Empire and Mistress of the Empire are going to go in, and stone me if a quick glance at Wikipedia doesn't confirm all my suspicions. Apparently, this red-haired barbarian giant from another culture who belongs to a caste that Mara has been culturally conditioned from birth to regard as subhuman is going to turn out to be the perfect man for her, as well as a surprisingly useful ally in the political shenanigans of the Tsolyani Empire - sorry, Tsurani Empire. Her past difficulties with sex will melt away under the sustained pounding of manly Caucasian Midkemian man-meat. Now, romance isn't exactly my cup of tea, but at this point I still had faith in the book; after all, a romance plot intertwined with the vicious politics of the earlier books and with a splash of cultural conflict could help maintain my interest for the 1600 pages I have left to go in The Empire Trilogy.

However, there's a really serious problem with presenting a culture clash between a princess of Kelewan and a knight of Midkemia: the culture of Kelewan is far more interesting than that of Midkemia. (Disgruntled Tekumel fans in the audience might point out that this may be because the culture of Kelewan-Tekumel was invented by M.A.R. Barker...) After a while, there's the expected confrontation between our red-headed champion and Mara, in which he points out how horrible her culture is and she is intrigued by the details of his culture. The problem is, comparing and contrasting the two only serves to highlight how two-dimensional and nonsensical the culture and economy of Midkemia is. Hooray, they do without slaves! Er, but they must have oodles and oodles of serfs living in effectively slave-like conditions, right? They are a feudal society, right? Well, only kind of: they're feudal in a sense that they have knights and nobles and kings and some idea of fealty, but not feudal in the sense that 90% of the population isn't tilling the soil and performing backbreaking labour in return for food and a roof over their head and the generous protection of their patron robber baron from the bloodthirsty rampages of the other robber baron's knights (or, indeed, their patron's own knights).

Fundamentally, throughout the Magician trilogy we've learned how fluffy and delightful and absolutely unoppressive Midkemian culture is, while we've learned how debased and cruel the culture of Kelewan is. It is clear that it will be no different in The Empire Trilogy, and that strikes me as brutally unfair: I'm pretty sure that life for the common man in medieval Europe wasn't really that much better than life for the common man in medieval Indochina, but our fantasy world based on medieval Europe presents a sanitised, airbrushed version of feudalism, while our fantasy world based on a hodge-podge of Indochinese civilisations presents a harsh, unflinching look at slavery. I found the implication that the people of Midkemia - a vague analogue to medieval Europe - were somehow culturally immunised against becoming slaves, and are inherently rebellious even under the lash. Plonk a bunch of French serfs in the Tsurani Empire, sell them to a noble house as cut-price farm labour, and they'd knuckle under soon enough.

Also, it turns out that our red-headed Midkemian heart-throb's name is Kevin.

Kevin.

Kevin.

KEVIN.

At that point, the book had managed to bore me, annoy me, and make itself look totally ridiculous in the space of 60 pages. I wasn't up for 1500 more pages of it. The canary was squealing and squawking in its cage, and I trusted its judgement and fled.

The Canary Says

Definitely make time to read Daughter of the Empire: it's a highly competantly-told political adventure story sold in a genuinely interesting and different fantasy setting, and it can more-or-less stand alone. Be wary of the other volumes in the series, especially if you are allergic to cliched romance subplots, irritating cultural myopia, or heroes named Kevin.