Spells + battles + magical artifacts = James Barclay’s novel Dawnthief. This is what happens when your book is inspired by a computer game and some 20-sided dice.
A band of mercenary fighters are caught up in a search for Dawnthief, a spell that can destroy the world. The premise of James Barclay’s novel Dawnthief is simple and direct, and has the potential for an ending where things get blowed up real good; well, things most certainly do. Characterization, for instance, never has a chance in the face of the action. The magic system goes down screaming, “Call Blizzard Entertainment’s lawyers!” And the romance was dead to begin with. This is one book that coulda been a contender, but instead settled for being dozens of action scenes connected by clichés of every kind. So let’s start with the most uninspired of those, the system of magic, which owes its existence to some role-playing game and probably should have remained there…
The currency of magic in the land of Balaia is mana, which might not have brought memories of Diablo II back if many of the spells had not been almost identical to those in the computer game. Diablo II has Fire Ball and Ice Blast; Dawnthief has FlameOrb and IceWind. At times, the characters even speak as though they’re online : “Either of you two know HardShield?” (As opposed to SoftShield, the revolutionary new improvement to Depends) At least this spell gave rise to some Enterprise moments – “Shield up!” – thereby providing me with a good memory of reading this book.
The magic always manifests itself in these preprogrammed ways, which means that when facing any threat, a mage can choose from a menu of ForceCone, CloakedWalk, ShadowWings and so on (no MagicMissile, unfortunately, and Dawnthief escapes the dual capitals, for some reason). After a while, it became cartoonish, and I started asking questions like, why does HellFire fall from the sky, much like HotRain? Wouldn’t it make more sense for HellFire to erupt from the ground? And although there are four different colleges of magic, which maintain a suspicious distance from each other, they all know the same spells, which doesn’t strike me as entirely realistic. The only thing that differentiates Dordovan magic from Xeteskian magic, for instance, is that Dordover mana shapes are orange whereas Xetesk mana shapes are blue; during the sex scene, which I’ll comment on later, the mana colors mix to produce a pretty mauve shade. It’s a bit like feng shui. There are references to mana meld, mana stamina, mana screams and mana spectrum as well, reminding me of the pulp science fiction habit of slapping the word “space” before any term in order to scientify it – spaceman, spacehelmet, spacegun, spacedog, spacecow, etc. Though I’d hesitate to insult pulp fiction by suggesting that it had anything to do with the names of some of the characters…
The author provides a cast list at the start of the book, but I’m not sure why he bothers to give the professions of the seven individual (and I use the term loosely) members of The Raven. With the exception of Ilkar the elf, they all do the same thing. Sirendor Larn is a warrior, as is Talan (no last name), as is Ras, as is Richmond, as is Hirad Coldheart. Named after the fearsome nemesis of the Care Bears, Hirad is supposed to be a barbarian, which would contribute to the role-playing-game atmosphere if it were not for the fact that Hirad’s only barbarian characteristic is a hair-trigger temper. He doesn’t wear pelts, eat his meat raw or wield a gigantic battle-axe, so he might as well have been a Promise Keeper. And if barbarians are named after the relative temperatures of various body parts, the narrative doesn’t say, which was disappointing.
But Hirad is far from the best that the book has to offer in terms of names. The pinnacle position is occupied by The Unknown Warrior, and yes, that’s how he’s referred to in the book. People even address him as “Unknown”, since he’s apparently reluctant to tell them his name and not imaginative enough to concoct one. Since this might not have been unrealistic enough, Ilkar goes on to explain that he and Hirad, when they first met The Unknown Warrior, allied with him for a week before they realized they hadn’t asked him what his name was. At first I thought there was a purpose behind this coy silliness – that the Unknown would turn out to be easily identified by his real name, but that isn’t the case at all. If the author was trying to convey a sense of mystery, this is the wrong way to do it; the Unknown couldn’t be more cheesy if he was called C. U. Donym, or Mae Dupname. Still, at least he doesn’t labor under the moniker of “Denser”, a mage who must have been bullied unmercifully in the locker room of his college of magic. It took me over half the book to stop making Dense and Denser jokes.
Few of these characters are developed past their single identifying traits, and some don’t even get that much. Ras dies in a pitched battle five pages after The Raven is introduced, and during the little I read of him, he displayed about as much personality as a carrot. Sirendor Larn likes to dress flamboyantly, The Unknown taps his sword on the ground, Denser smokes a pipe, and Ilkar is a human who rubbed Viagra on his ears. And none of the members of The Raven are women. Perhaps this is the fantasy equivalent of a boy-band. The only interesting female character is brutally raped and killed midway through the book, while Erienne, Denser’s love interest, spends most of the first half of the book worrying about her twin sons. They and her husband are conveniently killed, however, and after she has sex with Denser, she spends the second half of the book worrying about him instead. She needn’t have bothered, since despite the author’s reputation for killing off characters, The Unknown Warrior and Hirad Coldheart remain alive through judicious use of spells, and are even resurrected through the same methods, much to my disappointment. So let’s dispense with the cardboard characters and start on the reason for the teasin’, the complex and original (to anyone who’s never heard of fantasy RPGs) plot…
Take an amulet guarded by a dragon inside a fortress. Use the amulet to enter an ancient workshop, where there’s a portal to another dimension. In this other dimension, kill a demon which guards the parchment on which the spell Dawnthief is written. The spell itself requires three catalysts, talismans which are all in out-of-the-way places. However, if The Raven doesn’t take on this scavenger hunt, the Wytch Lords will come back to life and destroy the land. Like most of the other characters, the Wytch Lords have about as much personality dead as they do living, but they are the ubermages of the Wesmen, an army of savages from the West. Normally, I’d be bothered by the fact that the Wesmen are “tanned” while all the good guys are Caucasian in appearance, but this book is simply too flat to be offensive.
Since Denser is the only person who can cast Dawnthief and succeed, the Raven end up accompanying him on his heroic quest for amulet, workshop, portal, dimension, demon, parchment and catalysts (in that order), though not before Sirendor Larn falls victim to a deadly cliché. He decides to retire from the mercenary profession and get married, so right away you know he’s toast. Though the assassin who kills him is hardly immune to stupidity herself, since she wears the well-known sigil of her order as a tattoo on her neck. She might as well have carried a NeonSign flashing “I’m a mage killer”. In a lucky coincidence, though, the head of her order wears one of the catalysts, so once The Raven extracts vengeance from him – and meet up with his prisoner, a mage called Erienne – they get the catalyst as well. Meanwhile, a shapeshifter, a thief and another elf join forces with The Raven; perhaps the next book will see them meet a hard-drinking dwarf and a noble knight in order to complete the party. Too bad they didn’t recruit a kender right away. He could have gone around stealing the catalysts for them.
Anyway, the Xeteskian college of magic causes a problem, so The Raven and company proceed there, and along the way Erienne decides that she would really like to have another child to make up for the two that got shish kebabed by the assassins. Luckily, someone proves to have a winning line of talk to get her in the mood.
“Do you still hurt inside?” asked Denser.
“Like a knife is twisting through my heart.”
“Tonight, I want to stop that… Together, we can make you whole again.”
I’ve heard the phrase “fucking her all better”, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to witness it in action. The sex scene was as hard (pun intended) to believe as the rest of the book, though I have to commend the author on his use of blunt unsentimental terms to refer to genitalia; after reading countless romance novels, it’s a change to see a penis called a penis, rather than “the rampant evidence of his manliness”. The problem is that the scene is over very quickly. In any romance novel, Denser would have been guilty of premature ejaculation, since all he does is remove Erienne’s robe and kiss her before he penetrates her – and she’s not just ready but orgasmic as well. Perhaps this is another spell, JiffyLube. She conceives, naturally, so from then on she and Denser are a couple, and indicate this by standing with their arms around each other’s waists. Man, this could give Gone with the Wind a run for its money.
Meanwhile in a slightly less dull part of the book, the armies of Wesmen savages are sweeping over the land. Only their general is identified by name, and I never understood why he wanted to rule Balaia so badly. Was the Wesmen homeland unable to support such large numbers? And what’s the point in a battle where hundreds if not thousands of faceless savages are slaughtered in vast numbers and the reader feels absolutely nothing for them? Even the Wytch Lords, who had the potential to be good (read : more powerful than the cannon-fodder Wesmen) enemies are wasted; they’re simply evil, black-souled monstrosities from which the Wesmen Shamans draw hideous power. Plus, they don’t make an appearance until the end of the book, at which point they get their collective butts kicked without so much as killing a single person themselves. It was a bit of an anticlimax, to say the least.
In conclusion, this is a popcorn book populated by paper dolls, and its few good ideas – the College Cities, for instance – are swept aside undeveloped by a tide of frenetic battle scenes liberally sprinkled with ManaTerms and LotsaSpells. As for The Raven itself, it’s supposed to be a band of brothers held together by a code of killing but not murdering; they even refer to each other and themselves as “I am Raven” or “You’re Raven”, much like Valentine Michael Smith solemnly grokking that “Thou art God”. However, while their loyalty to each other is admirable, there’s nothing particularly novel about it, and they don’t seem to recognize any other principles or bonds (patriotism, religion, family ties, past friendships or enmities, etc). Hey, finally it all makes sense. Their code never said they had to be interesting, original or complex, after all – and they aren’t.
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