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.

Konrad: Mighty Slayer of Rats

It transpires that in the early days of Games Workshop's production of tie-in novels, one of the co-editors of GW Books (their publishing subsidiary before they reached a deal with Boxtree, which lasted until the foundation of the Black Library, the current Games Workshop publishing arm) was David Pringle, who at the time also edited the widely-respected SF magazine Interzone. This allowed him to draw on a wider range of talent than, say, the publishers of Dungeons & Dragons tie-in novels ever could, although many of the people he convinced to write for GW Books chose to write under pseudonyms. David S. Garnett, known more for his revival of classic New Wave SF magazine New Worlds as an anthology series than for his writing, is one of those individuals; under his "David Ferring" pseudonym, he wrote the Konrad Saga, a trilogy of novels set in the Warhammer fantasy world.

Compared to the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Warhammer fantasy world hasn't changed much since its original conception, and so most of the early GW Books output remains in print through the Black Library, in contrast to, say, the Warhammer 40,000 novels written by Ian Watson, which have largely been consigned to the memory hole as being No Longer Canon. But does The Konrad Saga really deserve to remain in print on the grounds that it's still somewhat consistent with the tabletop wargame it's based on? Is there anything special about it, beyond the fact that it was amongst the first Warhammer novelisations? Questions like these are what the Canary was hatched to answer...

Konrad

Konrad, the first book of the trilogy, suffers mildly for being more prelude than plot. Perhaps that's unfair; plenty happens in this book, but almost nothing is actually resolved. Perhaps this is because of the space constraints that Ferring/Garnett was working under; like many contemporary GW novels at the time, Konrad barely exceeds 200 pages, and that's with reasonably large type, thick margins, and plenty of full-page illustrations (in that classic early Games Workshop art style that also graced the pages of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks). Ferring clearly wants to tell a single, multi-volume story with this series as opposed to writing three self-contained but connected stories, like Dan Abnett did with Eisenhorn.

The first half of the book is extremely good, establishing a standard rarely exceeded in wider fantasy fiction, let alone in Warhammer novels. Konrad is an orphan, kept like an animal by the cruel tavern owners who took him in as a baby. Refusing to even speak to him, they have the village convinced that Konrad is a mute idiot, and for his part Konrad has no inclination to demonstrate otherwise. Out in the woods collecting firewood, as is his usual chore, Konrad saves Elyssa, the daughter of the lord of the manor, from being slain by a beastman. In her gratitude Elyssa befriends Konrad and becomes the only person in the village who knows he can talk; she names him Konrad (his foster parents didn't bother to give him a name) after an imaginary friend and they soon discover that they have mysterious powers in common; Elyssa secretly knows magic, whilst Konrad possesses an erratic sort of precognition, usually limited to mere seconds into the future and never 100% reliable. Their friendship soon becomes a romance, doomed to failure because Elyssa is betrothed to the baron of the next valley over.

Ferring's treatment of this friendship is unusually tender for a franchise that mainly emphasises good old-fashioned violence, and is delivered exceptionally well. The friendship of Elyssa is depicted as key to Konrad developing a personality of his own, in effect humanising him and raising him above the animalistic status he had been confined to through neglect. Naturally, things begin to go a little wrong. Konrad has precognitive flashes of Elyssa betraying him in the future, and of Elyssa dying horribly; Konrad and Elyssa also have a strange and frightening encounter with a mysterious rider in bronze armour. These things convince Konrad that it's time for him to leave the village. Spending the night sleeping in a hollow tree, Konrad wakes up to find himself surrounded by an army of Chaos creatures, about to strike the village. Witnessing the destruction of the village, and escaping only though his wits and a mildly unrealistic disguise (can you really skin a man-sized creature that quickly?), Konrad runs far, far away, and after a couple of misadventures falls in with the mercenary captain Wolf, who takes him on as a squire.

At this point, Ferring seems to realise that he only has a hundred pages left to cover Konrad's training under Wolf and the traumatic circumstances of their parting, so five years go past almost in a blink of an eye. Some parts seem a little rushed - Wolf's 1-page monologue where he explains the history of the Empire to Konrad (and, incidentally, to those readers who are new to the setting) could have been delivered better, but at least it wasn't thrown at the reader in a big chunk at the start of the book. Konrad's ignorance is swiftly alleviated, along with his lack of weapons training, literacy, and numeracy, in five years of mercenary work guarding a gold mine in Kislev, the Warhammer world's equivalent of Russia with the serial numbers filed off. One failed dungeon expedition later and a chance sighting of the bronze knight and Konrad's ready to head off in hot pursuit into the next novel.

There's little-to-no filler in Konrad, other than a quick and mildless fight on a waterfront with some sailors. The one complaint I have is that the prose relies a little too much on narrating Konrad's thought processes, which at times strikes me as lazy: if Ferring said more with Konrad's actions and less with direct narration of what the guy was thinking, the novel might be a little tighter. On the other hand, sometimes this is necessary to convey Konrad's precognitive abilities. The biggest complaint I have about Konrad is that there is a massive and unsubtle hint as to the truth of his mysterious origins dropped at the end of the book, to the point where I wonder whether it won't become frustrating that Konrad fails to guess what we, the reader, know full well already. We'll have to see.

Shadowbreed

Shadowbreed overlaps very slightly with Konrad, the opening chapter joining the action midway through the climactic battle and retelling the fight and its immediate aftermath. This is either useful or irritating, depending on whether you're reading Shadowbreed immediately after Konrad (quite likely if you're reading the one-volume compilation). After a certain amount of exposition and recapping, however, we're back in the thick of the action once more, as Konrad finds himself on the trail of a rampaging warband of Chaos mutants.

The action, however, now feels subtly different. Konrad could be fairly confidently identified as "low fantasy" - grim, gritty, with a relatively powerless protagonist struggling merely to survive. However, the five years of training and battle slotted into the end of the last book have made their mark on Konrad, as has the climactic battle at the end of the first volume. In Shadowbreed, Konrad is a wily, strong, and highly capable warrior, and the action is more reminiscent of sword and sorcery, that ill-defined subgenre of fantasy that floats somewhere between low and high fantasy. Konrad is now a solo, wandering hero, of the likes of Conan, or Elric, or Karl Edward Wagner's Kane. The incidents that occur are, frequently, classic sword-and-sorcery situations, just as the incidents in Konrad represent quintessential low fantasy: Shadowbreed has occult curses, hidden cities of rat-men deep under the earth, bloody fights against horrible odds, dubious wizards, blood sacrifices, trippy mystical visions, perilous missions and a hero who is out for himself but nonetheless does the right thing in the end.

At the same time, Ferring does not neglect the continuing plot. A surprise meeting with Elyssa's brother and hints at a widespread conspiracy against the Empire build on themes developed in the previous book, and Konrad's musings about his fate prompt the reader into realising how little freedom Konrad ever has - there's very few times when he isn't under someone's authority, whether that be as a willing ally or as a prisoner. The heavy-handed hinting at Konrad's true nature makes a comeback, but only once, and Ferring manages to spin it a manner such that it isn't irritating or unrealistic that Konrad doesn't guess. Konrad endures torture, betrayal, and black magic, and wades through it all in pursuit of his epic quest, and that's just as much fun as Konrad enduring scorn, harassment, and servitude in pursuit of his quest in the first book.

On the other hand Shadowbreed does have its downsides. It does, of course, suffer from "middle book" syndrome: many questions are raised, but few are resolved. Ferring apparently got tired of Konrad's precognition during Konrad; midway through Shadowbreed, he writes it out entirely. There's a scene where Konrad is able to allow a she-demon to briefly recover her lost humanity, allowing him to kill her (it is hinted that she's absolutely OK with this because death is better than being a naked psychotic ninja death dancer demon) and escape from the clutches of the army of Chaos. He is able to achieve this by giving her what I believe is known as a "deep dicking".

David Ferring is a classy and sensitive man.

While I remember, I should mention a really strange thing about the Konrad Saga: while there's plenty of gore and a fair number of sex scenes, there's no swearing. Scenes of violence are recounted in loving detail, all kinds of sex acts are alluded to pretty dang directly, and yet at no point does anyone say "fuck". I'd love to see GW Books' content guidelines from 1989 to see whether this was some sort of corporate policy: oh, sure, we can have knife-wielding dominatrix-demons soaked in blood and gore cavorting across the battlefield, but they can't be called Dickslicers of Slaanesh because then people's parents will stop them buying GW products...

All in all, Shadowbreed is more violent, cruder, and sillier than Konrad, but as a celebration of sword and sorcery I suppose that's only to be expected. We end on another cliffhanger, leading us straight into the next book...

Warblade

...which is, to use Dan and Kyra's phrase, made of stupid.

Warblade uses a title that, as you might have realised, can be derived from Dan's handy-dandy fantasy novel name generator. In the tradition of such books, the title is meaningless. It refers to a sword that Konrad obtains late in the book and doesn't really seem to do very much. Very frequently in this book does Konrad suddenly stumble across things which might have been more effective if they'd shown up a few hundred pages ago; it's as if Ferring got a call from Games Workshop halfway through writing this to inform him that he might have to trim down his seven-book plan to a trilogy, because there's no way you're going to get 13-year-old kids to read a fantasy series that long. For the first half Ferring is meandering along the same sort of course he followed in Shadowbreed, throwing little adventures at Konrad interspersed with hints to the wider plot. This time, however, it's beginning to wear a little thin: we're more than ready for some answers, and the fact that the prose is so heavily laden-down with recaps of the previous book and Konrad's musings about the web of fate which has him in its grasp (the web analogy gets more than a little overused in this one) only reminds us that we're not really that much closer to learning where Konrad comes from and what's happend to Elyssa and what's the deal with him being possessed by Sigmar or a reincarnation of Sigmar or whatever and so on and so forth. All we know is that the Skaven are trying to switch the Emperor with a handy doppelganger in a plot straight out of Basil the Great Mouse Detective and Konrad is determined to stop them, and maybe track down Elyssa while he's at it. (Oh, yes, and Elyssa survived the attack on her village, but anyone who hadn't guessed that that was going to happen should hang their head in shame.)

About halfway through the book Ferring suddenly picks up speed and throws plot-shaped anvils at Konrad's head. Wolf shows up and takes Konrad on a trip to a mysterious island where a recovering ex-demon explains that he is being possessed by Sigmar in order to enact the First Emperor's will within the mortal world, which is great but by that point both the reader and Konrad have worked that one out, and for a meeting which promises Konrad all the answers he could possibly want it's massively disappointing and kind of a waste of time. In fact, the entire second half of the book is taken up with incidents like this (the forging of Konrad's cool new sword is another one) which serve no purpose beyond taking up space which Ferring really needs to be using to wrap up the plot and answer all of those pesky mysteries posed by the first book. It's as if Ferring has suddenly become immensely fed up of the entire project and is just making time until he can clock off and get his last paycheck from Games Workshop (which if they pay their authors as well as they pay their staffers probably consisted of ten quid and a box of Space Marines who are missing their left arms). When he isn't wasting time, he's making reference to Wolf's backstory in a manner which suggests that he'd actually be much happier chronicling the earlier adventures of Wolf, or which might be references to short stories featuring Wolf published in GW compilations in between Konrad and Shadowbreed; either way, we end up getting the impression that we're only getting half the plot, and not in a cool intuitive "work it out for yourself" David Lynch way but in a frustrating "projector dies halfway through the film and the cinema manager sheepishly offers you a refund" way. It's like hearing only half of a telephone conversation between Robert Jordan and David Gemmell.

The skaven Emperor-swapping plan gets wrapped up at a ludicrous pace, as Wolf and Konrad meet up with a wizard and a dwarf that Konrad encountered in the previous book, quarrel because Wolf and the wizard have some kind of history which Ferring basically pulls out of his arse, they come up with a ludicrous plan to get into Altdorf to save the Emperor by attacking it with pirate ships and this plan is set up and implemented without even a token effort to convince the reader it isn't the most ridiculous thing that's ever been scrawled on the flesh of dead trees. There is a fight in the Emperor's palace, oh the main skaven bad guy just died, well done Konrad, oh, and thank you to Sigmar for a really heavy-handed bit of divine intervention. Then the wizard, Wolf, and Konrad (the dwarf dies pointlessly off-screen) decide to randomly jump into a hole in the ground in order to go to a nigh-certain death which, hey, funny that, only turns out to be nigh-certain for everyone who isn't possessed by a God.

I'm telling you all this because this shit leaves Ferring with only ten pages to wrap up the whole finding Elyssa/learning Konrad's origins/confronting the evil skull-faced guy who orchestrated the attack on Konrad's village thingy - you know, the issues which Konrad has spent around a third of the text brooding about and have been his primary motivators for the entire trilogy. To be fair, a lot of the big reveals are worth the wait, but they are ruined because they simply have no space to breathe, and Ferring doesn't have time to play with them at all. The whole thing where Konrad had a vision where Elyssa would betray him in the future? Resolved in less than a page. Less than a page.

And then it's all over and Konrad's won and he's finally free from the fetters of predestination and I've completely stopped caring a hundred pages ago. One of the aspects of Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn trilogy which really impressed me was the way that Abnett could trick me into treating these characters as actual three-dimensional characters living in a setting which sort-of made sense, even though it's the Warhammer 40,000 universe and it doesn't make a blind bit of sense. Warblade does the reverse, for me: whilst Konrad presented us with interesting characters in a setting which we could believe wasn't just a pretty backdrop for set-piece battles, Warblade flattens the characterisation utterly and consists entirely of wobbly cardboard sets. The greatest sin it commits, of course, is that these set-piece battles are boring, the characters are stupid, and the cardboard sets are entirely unimpressive. Warblade is one of the most mediocre fantasy novels I have ever read.

The Canary Says

The issues I had with Warblade, the somewhat muddled and aimless nature of Shadowbreed, and the somewhat abrupt transitions between the three books in the series... all of these things make me seriously wonder whether Ferring even did a second draft of the Konrad Saga. If he'd trimmed a little bit here, and a little bit there, moved some incidents around, took some out, put some different ones in, moved around the beginnings and ends of each of the books, and basically did a complete rewrite he'd have written a trilogy worthy of its excellent beginning. As it is, it simply isn't quite worth it. The most galling feature of the series is the way that the brilliant first half of the first book sets up an intriguing mystery, only to undermine its most interesting feature (the bronze knight) as a red herring and not properly address any other feature of it except as an afterthought at the end. The best way to experience The Konrad Saga is to pick up Konrad, read up to the point where he's leaving the village and he wakes up surrounded by monsters, and then write your own ending. You will be more satisfied with that than Ferring's poor effort.