Why doesn't Hari/Caine, the protagonist of this novel, get killed? That's right, because heroes die, and this guy is no hero.
The problem is, I'm not sure if the author's with me on this one. However, I'll let the narrative be the best judge of that. Before we begin, let me present the players in this (melo)drama...
Hari/Caine : Dark brooding Alpha Male. Should be considered armed and dangerous at all times.
Shanna/Pallas Ril/Simon Jester : Virtuous heroine, who realizes in the end that the Alpha Male is the man for her.
Laronnar : Evil Other Man. The heroine will come to realize that he is not the man for her.
Berne : Evil Villain. Swears a lot. Kills indiscriminately, much like the Alpha Male.
Talenn : Wide-eyed loyal sidekick. Has Broken Neck and/or Broken Heart written all over her.
Kierendal : Whore without a heart of gold. No redeeming qualities.
Kolberg : Evil Villain. Hari's boss.
Majesty : King of Cant. Does not get as many lines as he should, therefore character indeterminate.
Ma'elkoth : Villain, but an interesting one.
Each of these characters gets a point of view. That's nine different viewpoints, and at times the text flips from third to first person, which is confusing. It doesn't help that Hari has a pseudonym and Shanna has two (and Simon Jester makes me think of the Saint, Simon Templar). But I've waded through convoluted books before (Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter, Richard Adams's The Girl in a Swing) and I could have gotten over this.
What I can't forget is the lack of character displayed by nearly every person who appears in this novel. Caine, for instance. How do we first meet this marvel of modern mayhem?
Hari, who also goes by the name Caine (for obvious reasons) breaks into a palace somewhere to assassinate someone. No problem, I write about assassins myself. And the guards outside the bedchamber (bedchamber? Hm.) knew what the risks were when they accepted the job.
Caine wakes up his target, an old man. He lops the man's head off, splashing blood everywhere. My stomach twists; this is not what I want to read about in the very first chapter.
The dying man's bowels and bladder empty. Caine thinks, this is a reflex action of many animals; it makes the meat less palatable to the predator. But that's all right. I'm not going to eat him.
That did it.
When you put your audience into a character's mind, they will leap out if the character's thoughts are too alien. And Hari's thoughts took him way beyond Alpha Centauri. I can't understand a hero thinking something so contemptuous. Maybe I could get over his killing an unarmed old man, but making a joke about it? Never. Dean Koontz, in Writing Bestselling Fiction, said that a hero couldn't feel good about killing someone, even someone who deserved to die. I wasn't asking Caine to weep over the death, but his cold, flippant remark was unforgivable.
Well, the novel just went downhill from there. If you can't identify with the main character, if you don't have a hero to cheer for, what can you do? I loved Matthew Woodring Stover's Iron Dawn and its sequel, Jericho Moon, and the heroine, Barra, opened up too many crania to count. But all the people she killed were threatening her life, or the lives of her friends and family. And she never made jokes about their dead bodies.
Anyway, I kept reading, hoping that maybe Caine would die. I should have remembered the title.
Caine turns out to be Hari's alter ego in another world. On a dystopian future Earth, entertainment consists of human actors fighting their way through Ankhana, which also exists, but which uses magic whereas Earth uses science and technology. Hari and Shanna are actors, as is Laronnar. Shanna is Hari's estranged wife; she takes the name Pallas Ril in Ankhana (Pallas = Athene, goddess of wisdom and war), so we know she's a symbol of good and light just as Caine is a symbol of evil and darkness. She wants to help the downtrodden masses of Ankhana, which actors aren't allowed to do, on pain of contract breach, and then no other studio will hire them. No, I'm kidding, since the book (other than that one memorable quip) has no humor.
When Hari met Shanna they were apparently young and idealistic but he grew less so over the years. We don't know, because the book starts out with them separated. She's in Ankhana teaching the workers of the world to unite because they have nothing to lose except their Caines. He's on Earth, making videos (the entertainment comes from the videocamera somewhere on his person that lets the eager audience see what he does and hear his narration. Even if that's why he made the joke, it's still a callous thing to say. Getting back to the point, Shanna is AWOL and if she doesn't get back to Earth in a certain number of hours she'll die. Hari has his hands full with his nasty Earth boss Kolberg but he runs to rescue Shanna from the narcisstic Emperor Ma'elKoth and his invulnerable sidekick Berne. Got all that?
I don't remember much of the plot, which was complex. At one point, Caine burst into Kierendal's brothel, at which point she did some magic to perceive his Shell (aura, I suppose). His Shell was dark as obsidian. I was unsurprised. There were several fight scenes, choreographed well by the author, and it certainly seemed realistic enough. Especially the part where Caine puts on a steel-cupped jock strap. I always wondered how men protected their sensitives.
Anyway, Caine breaks into a prison and rescues Talenn, at which point she bubbles over with hero-worship for him. I knew she was dead meat, and the coffin lid fell during a fight with Berne, who apparently stole a Subtle Knife from Laronnar. Of all the characters, I liked Talenn the most. She was the most real, neither a bleeding-heart nor Conan's love child by Xenia Onatopp.
Shanna and Laronnar are lovers, but Lar's in cahoots with Berne. How does Caine find out? Berne's favorite swearphrase is, "Fuck me like a virgin goat!" and at some point, Laronnar repeats the same phrase. In those six words, Caine saw a lifetime of treachery and betrayal. I compared this to the clever non-curse in Mr. Stover's Iron Dawn and couldn't believe he'd resorted to this. Firstly, the phrase was crass at best and silly at worst. Secondly, was the phrase itself so unique that only Berne went around saying it? Finally, if that was indeed the case, Laronnar would be an absolute idiot to pick up the phrase and use it in Caine's hearing. It's usually more admirable for the hero to succeed due to his intelligence, as opposed to succeeding due to the villain's abject stupidity.
Anyway, at that point I was no longer looking for anything sensible. On with the story.
Ma'elKoth is obsessed with Caine, because he (Ma'elKoth, not Caine) is building a sculpture of his face, but it's turning out like Caine's face. What... ever. He's also curious about the actors infiltrating his land, though they have implants that kill them if they reveal their true occupations to the inhabitants of Ankhana. That was the one detail that rang true.
Caine gets help from Majesty, the King of Cant (Cant is a very poor part of Ankhana). I like Majesty. He reminds me of a rat. Hell, maybe he is. If the story had focused more on Cant (and maybe Kierendal's brothel with its treetoppers) I would have been contented. But no, we go to Berne attacking Shanna/Pallas Ril/Simon Jester who for some reason has bonded with the River Goddess, and she survives. Laronnar gets to spend a Weekend at Berne's, until he's ready to take the title role. Shanna/Pallas Ril/Simon Jester decides that Laronnar is like an Easter egg, pretty on the outside but soft and chocolately on the inside. Okay, I added that last part. And Caine, under his homicidal exterior, is really a nice guy. See you in the homeless shelter, babe.
Caine attacks Berne and wins. He gets Shanna back to Earth, while Ma'elKoth follows them. The villainous Kolberg, who's been cooking up another subplot, is despatched. Ma'elKoth says he might like it on Earth. Shanna tells Hari she'll give their marriage another chance (the chapter began with a recollection of their marriage vows, so I suppose this was coming). Hari thereby gets what he deserved for the headless corpses and spilled blood in his wake. The End.
God, where to start?
Let's begin with the setting. The future Earth that Hari and Shanna inhabit is dystopian and miserable, although the technology to enter another world exists. Ankhana, with its "kingdom-within-a-kingdom", its elves and treetoppers and sentient River, its foul dungeons and strange magic, is another complexity, and could have filled a book by itself. To cram both of these into the one novel is asking for disaster. The narrative flip-flopped between the two worlds, and while I love fantasy, I'm less thrilled by dystopias. Brave New World, Animal Farm, The Handmaid's Tale... I've been there. I wanted to read more about Cant, about the nature of magic in Ankhana, about the sentient races. I got Kolberg nursing his subplot. Kolberg is not an interesting character.
Which brings me to...
Too many characters and too many points-of-view (eleven, if you count the one- and third-person flip-flops). The sad part is that this needn't have happened. We don't need Kolberg. Ankhana's problems are big enough without adding Earth's problems to the mix. And we don't need Laronnar. The Other Man serves only two functions : (1) make the hero jealous (2) be so evil and wretched that the heroine realizes the hero's not so bad in comparison.
As for the rest of them, Shanna was a waste of time, and the supposed love between her and Hari is like Bigfoot. They'll tell you time and time again that it exists, but you can never find any proof. How can two people so different fall in love? And Hari's pursuit of her seemed more like the Alpha Male's subvocal growl of "She's MY woman! No one lays a hand on her except me!" He constantly thinks of Shanna as "his wife". Not as Shanna, not as a person in her own right, but as something that belonged to him. It was very possessive and faintly creepy. If their roles were reversed, this would be Fatal Attraction.
As for Shanna, I wish to the heavens that the author hadn't given her the name "Simon Jester". I kept having Saint flashbacks that interrupted the narrative, and once I lost the plot, it was gone forever. Too many names, too many places, too much of everything except the good things... like original characters. Shanna Good. Berne Bad. What happened to people like Kheperu, the wonderfully perverted, quick-thinking Egyptian sorceror from this author's first novel, Iron Dawn?
Part of the reason I'm disappointed is that I loved Mr. Stover's first two novels. In Jericho Moon, Kheperu came this close to child molestation, yet he has a great sense of humor and is loyal to his friends. Caine is humorless and has no friends. Barra is a mercenary, but she loves her children. Caine is a mercenary and doesn't seem to love anyone. Don't even get me started on Leucas, Barra's other partner. I have visions of him picking Caine up between thumb and forefinger and depositing him in the nearest trash receptacle.
With no hero to cheer, the book was a chore to wade through, and since it was crammed full of characters and details, it became a conglomeration of jostling events; before you could make sense of one thing, the narrative leaped to another. I don't mind books where I'm unclear on how everything worked. The Iron Dragon's Daughter is like that, but its protagonist is halfway sympathetic, and the action focuses on one world. Heroes Die was too confusing and tedious, and why the general fascination with Caine? Fascination with Ender Wiggin, I can understand, but this guy? He wasn't even a hero. Because heroes die. Ah yes, the bleak, cynical title finally makes sense.