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A review by timinbc
Mother of Lies by Dave Duncan
3.0
I read this almost back-to-back with volume 1, and I'm glad I did.
Credit to Duncan for starting out this time with a list of the key players and where we left them at the end of the previous book. I wish more multi-volume authors would do that.
The story ripped along, meticulously structured and self-consistent as always. But in the end it just didn't leave me with even a little bit of "Wow, that was good!" Maybe I grew tired of a world in which life is cheap and most people are subjugated by violence or magic or both, and rape and killing are casual. Oh wait, that's most fantasy books, isn't it? (Recent exception: Re-reading Stardust, thank you Neil Gaiman!)
Maybe Saltaja just became too much Cruella de Vil, or the witch from Snow White, or the Ice Queen from Narnia, or whatever. Stock character, really, nyah-hah-hah. OK, she had to be EEE-villll so we could wonder what would happen to Fabia, but really ....
Coupla times I stalled and thought "Huh?" over simple things, like a troop of warriors disappearing in quicksand. In our world, at least, quicksand is rarely more than a few feet deep and can be dealt with. Duncan might have just left it as very deep fine dust, which can indeed swallow people (happens in grain silos, for example).
Another that was just NOT acceptable was
The whole dodec thing seemed unnecessary. A mountain range would have sufficed. And in the end notes Duncan says Nardalborg Pass would be 600 miles above sea level. Lookit, Olympus Mons on Mars is 16 miles high. The Pass would be more than twice the height at which the International Space Station orbits. Duncan admits the dodec's infeasibility, but I can't really accept that it could be so different from our planet that any humanoid species could breathe even at a fortieth of the height given. Was it important to have 12 faces, 12 gods? There was no hint of one-god-per-face, or any other reason to create Dodec.
Also, if we're going from sea level to +600 miles, we must have some serious hills. Paddling up the Milky (you don't row a canoe, Dave, unless you put oars in it, and as a Vancouver Islander you should know that!) must have been arduous, even for strong paddlers, which they weren't.
Benard and Dantio were believable, Wales good, Chies execrable (if this were a movie, people would boo whenever he appeared). Speaker Ardiel was irritating until it became apparent that we was actually comic relief. Heth and Horth were good too (I kept expecting a "hearth" joke).
You have to admire Duncan's plot-building, because everything follows from what he gave us earlier, and few details are just abandoned. And the details of what the Werists, Seers and Witnesses could and couldn't do were well worked out (not so much the Chosen).
Also good was the idea that if you train your warriors to be fiercely loyal to their unit leader, then they will likely be more loyal to him than to the top officers ...
But from mid-book on I felt a growing sense of here comes A, who's immensely powerful, and suddenly B is all shazam, I've got power too! This happens several times, in between episodes where opposing forces are carefully weighed and military analyses made. By the end, whenever tension built, I was left wondering which character would go Ka-blam! and zap everyone in sight with his or her or its magic.
The plot-resolving scene was admirable, because Duncan had carefully set up who couldn't be the next doge. That almost made up for the rushed feeling I got as Duncan quickly ran through the major confrontations that had to be dealt with before we could close.
Credit to Duncan for starting out this time with a list of the key players and where we left them at the end of the previous book. I wish more multi-volume authors would do that.
The story ripped along, meticulously structured and self-consistent as always. But in the end it just didn't leave me with even a little bit of "Wow, that was good!" Maybe I grew tired of a world in which life is cheap and most people are subjugated by violence or magic or both, and rape and killing are casual. Oh wait, that's most fantasy books, isn't it? (Recent exception: Re-reading Stardust, thank you Neil Gaiman!)
Maybe Saltaja just became too much Cruella de Vil, or the witch from Snow White, or the Ice Queen from Narnia, or whatever. Stock character, really, nyah-hah-hah. OK, she had to be EEE-villll so we could wonder what would happen to Fabia, but really ....
Coupla times I stalled and thought "Huh?" over simple things, like a troop of warriors disappearing in quicksand. In our world, at least, quicksand is rarely more than a few feet deep and can be dealt with. Duncan might have just left it as very deep fine dust, which can indeed swallow people (happens in grain silos, for example).
Another that was just NOT acceptable was
Spoiler
killing Marno off on the Altiplano, then a couple of chapters later doing the old pulp-fiction thing of "after his last-minute rescue by Vespa-something, ..." I refer you to thisThe whole dodec thing seemed unnecessary. A mountain range would have sufficed. And in the end notes Duncan says Nardalborg Pass would be 600 miles above sea level. Lookit, Olympus Mons on Mars is 16 miles high. The Pass would be more than twice the height at which the International Space Station orbits. Duncan admits the dodec's infeasibility, but I can't really accept that it could be so different from our planet that any humanoid species could breathe even at a fortieth of the height given. Was it important to have 12 faces, 12 gods? There was no hint of one-god-per-face, or any other reason to create Dodec.
Also, if we're going from sea level to +600 miles, we must have some serious hills. Paddling up the Milky (you don't row a canoe, Dave, unless you put oars in it, and as a Vancouver Islander you should know that!) must have been arduous, even for strong paddlers, which they weren't.
Benard and Dantio were believable, Wales good, Chies execrable (if this were a movie, people would boo whenever he appeared). Speaker Ardiel was irritating until it became apparent that we was actually comic relief. Heth and Horth were good too (I kept expecting a "hearth" joke).
You have to admire Duncan's plot-building, because everything follows from what he gave us earlier, and few details are just abandoned. And the details of what the Werists, Seers and Witnesses could and couldn't do were well worked out (not so much the Chosen).
Also good was the idea that if you train your warriors to be fiercely loyal to their unit leader, then they will likely be more loyal to him than to the top officers ...
But from mid-book on I felt a growing sense of here comes A, who's immensely powerful, and suddenly B is all shazam, I've got power too! This happens several times, in between episodes where opposing forces are carefully weighed and military analyses made. By the end, whenever tension built, I was left wondering which character would go Ka-blam! and zap everyone in sight with his or her or its magic.
The plot-resolving scene was admirable, because Duncan had carefully set up who couldn't be the next doge. That almost made up for the rushed feeling I got as Duncan quickly ran through the major confrontations that had to be dealt with before we could close.