The Reading Canary: a Reminder

Series of novels - especially in fantasy and SF, 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.

Dragon: The First Disposable Taltos

If you've been reading Ferretbrain for a particularly long time you might remember that I've waxed enthusiastic in the past about the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust once or twice. I'm sorry to report that Dragon, the eighth book in the series might be the breaking point: whereas the seven previous volumes managed to be tightly-written sword and sorcery adventures with a Mafioso twist written in a style reminiscent of Hammett and Leiber and with each book both providing a fresh twist on the formula and adding something to the continuing story of Vlad's life, the eighth book is an occasionally-sloppy sword and sorcery adventure with the organised crime element almost entirely absent and which doesn't seem particularly relevant to the bulk of the story.

Perhaps part of the apparent irrelevance is the fact that Dragon jumps back in the timeline a fair way, to a point before Vlad got married and before he quit the fantasy Mafia and went on the run. Granted, this has happened previously in the series (as in Taltos, which is the fourth book in the series but details Vlad's earliest adventures), but each time this has been to chronicle an incident which had been referred to in previous books and was clearly always part of the timeline. Not so with Dragon; I don't remember any other books where Taltos reminisced about the time he joined his warlord buddy's army in order to co-ordinate sneak attacks and recover a stolen magic sword.

Oh, yes, I should probably introduce the plot. It goes like this: Vlad is hired by a warlord friend of his to help with the security on an enormous stash of soul-eating magic weapons. (This is the sort of fantasy world where soul-eating magic weapons come in enormous stashes). Naturally, one of the swords gets stolen - by a rival warlord who wants to use the theft to goad Vlad's buddy into declaring war on him so they can fight a war. A war is duly fought, and Vlad - having been hassled by some of the enemy warlord's goons - volunteers to help out. He gets sent to hang out with the front line troops and occasionally takes a couple of them out on sneaky raids.

This is the first problem with the book: it separates Vlad and his usual companions, such as his warlord buddy and Sethra Lavode (ancient vampire-elf-sorceress extraordinaire) and his girlfriend and the various guys who help him run his criminal empire, and plonks him in the middle of a fighting unit consisting of a bunch of characters that Brust would like us to care about, when actually it would be a lot more fun if Vlad were allowed to hang out with the characters we actually care about. I think Brust was trying to make a point here about the horrors of war, but there's several problems with this approach:

• I already know about the horrors of war as experienced by troops in the front line of a fantasy war in a made-up world that works according to the author's possibly-unrealistic preconceptions of what war is actually like. Really, I do. Glen Cook's Black Company series writes about the horrors of war from the point of view of the troops in the front line; so does David Gemmell's Drenai series. So does the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. Hell, I believe Terry Pratchett has even done it a couple of times, and the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin dips in there pretty dang frequently too.
  
  It's not that I think that a novel which is all "war is fucking awesome!" would necessarily be interesting, but I feel that if you are going to write about serious topics like this in the context of a light-hearted sword and sorcery series you had better make damn well sure you have something interesting to say about it. Brust actually manages to do this sort of thing ressonably well in the earlier volumes in the Vlad Taltos series, but he doesn't seem to have much to say about war beyond "it's horrible" and "people end up fighting for the benefit of their leaders even when it's totally against their own best interests", which isn't especially clever or original. Glen Cook's stories, in particular, pretty much covered those bases (and several others) with far more originality well before Dragon was written.


• It's wildly unnecessary. Would it have killed Brust to keep Vlad with the characters we know and love, and to occasionally cut away to the front-line squad if he really had to talk about the horrors of war? It's not as if the Taltos series hasn't had characters other than Vlad take up the narration duties on occasion.


• It's boring. Dear god is it boring. Brust is simply better at writing palace intrigue or Mafia shenanigans than he is writing about war, and he should have relied on those strengths - let Vlad hang back and direct the activities of squads of saboteurs he's personally trained up, or divert Fantasy Mafia resources into cutting into the enemy's supply lines or something.

The incredibly dull nature of the "you're in the army now" segment of the book is exacerbated by the smartarse little trick that Brust pulls with the chapters: the beginning of each chapter consists of Vlad narrating a little bit of the climactic battle and his confrontation with the enemy warlord, before jumping back a little to fill in the backstory. Brust has used similar devices before to good effect (such as in Taltos), but this time it's just needlessly confusing, and kept prompting me to second-guess when the final battle was going to happen, rendering me a small child sat in the back of the Brustmobile kicking the back of Steve's seat and whining "Are we nearly there yet?" And too often he said "no, and just for asking here's three more chapters of pointless slogging and unsuspenseful stealth missions to pad out the book a bit more. Now stop asking or I'm turning this novel around and we're going straight home."

The Canary Says

The nicest thing I can say about Dragon is that it seems utterly irrelevant to the Taltos cycle as a whole and can therefore be safely ignored. Sadly, there are a few warning signs cropping up that suggests that the series itself might be about to go down the crapper. In Taltos's narration, for example, there's the occasional reference to the fact that he's talking into a metal box in order to tell this story, which suggests that the fact that the Vlad novels are narrated to us in the first person is going to become plot-relevant at some point. This is frankly irritating; Chandler and Hammett never had to explain why Philip Marlowe or the Continental Op were blabbing the details of all their cases, and they weren't part of an organisation and friends with individuals who would kill them if they spilled the beans. Ultimately, Dragon fails because Brust loses sight of what makes the Vlad Taltos series interesting, and tries to do something clever and formula-changing which ends up sounding pretentious and falling flat. The irritating thing is that his Khaavren Romances series, on the face of it, would seem to have offered him plenty of opportunities to tell the sort of story he clearly wants to tell in Dragon without taking protagonists and shoving them in places where they clearly do not belong. Brust, like Taltos, seems completely lost at this point. I can only hope that he found his way again by the time he wrote the next book in the series.