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.

Drenai: Short But Sweet Tales of Violence and Humanity

There's a sort of grim appropriateness about David Gemmell dying in the course of writing his own account of the Trojan War. Gene Wolfe is of the opinion that all writers should see themselves as successors to Homer; this might not be true of all of them, but it was certainly true of Gemmell, whose novels are almost all heavily influenced by the Iliad: they're essentially all about using violent situations as a vehicle for characterisation and philosophising. Although Gemmell frequently writes about war, fighting, and conflict, a battle is never just a battle in a Gemmell story: it's normally a metaphor for something. It's a reasonably successful formula: what better way to make a character show their true colours than by throwing them into a violent situation? What more important subjects are there to address than death, mortality, war, patriotism, culture, the demands of one's ancestors and the needs of the future - all of which can be highlighted through violence and war?

Gemmell's primary work remains the Drenai series, a selection of modestly-sized fantasy novels, most of which stand alone perfectly happily. Let me emphasise that, actually, because this is one respect in which Gemmell should be praised unto the highest heavens: just about none of his novels break the 400 page mark, and many of the Drenai stories can be read on their own perfectly happily (although readers will probably get the most enjoyment out of the series if they read it in order of publication).

The flipside of this, of course, is that while since in most cases each book presents a self-contained story, there's no need to read the less interesting ones - one may as well stick to the best of the best and leave the rest of the series behind, unless you particularly want to read the entire thing. What better subject for the Reading Canary?

Legend

According to Gemmell, he wrote the first draft of Legend in the midst of a cancer scare. He wrote a story about a fortress, Dros Delnoch, representing his body, threatened by the armies of the Nadir, representing his cancer, and defended by a cast of heroes, including characters inspired by his stepfather and himself. Then he put it aside for a while when he turned out not to be dying, only to return to it later on and rewrite it at the urging of a friend. Although Gemmell acknowledges that the published version of Legend is a significant rewrite of his original story, it's not difficult to see where his experience with his mistaken cancer diagnosis has influenced it: at its heart, Legend is a meditation on death, presenting a variety of characters faced with slow, nigh-inevitable destruction and the ways in which they ultimately come to terms with their mortality.

But before I get into that, I should talk about how Legend established a formula that persists throughout the next few Drenai books. There's a set of elements which first show up in Legend which are restated, explored more deeply, and generally exploited to the hilt in the early Drenai series; they are as follows:

• The Drenai are always on the verge of extinction. The Drenai Empire has been likened to the Holy Roman Empire, but the resemblance is vague at best at its best, represents the sort of qualities that modern-day readers can support - it's kind-of a democracy (but only in the same way that the Holy Roman Empire was a democracy - the ruler is elected by the nobility), situated in kind-of Europe, with a few kind-of European neighbours as well as a big old steppe to the north where sort-of Mongols - the Nadir - hang out and do their thing. At its prime, the Drenai Empire was an expansionist outfit, conquering hither and thither and propagating its ideas of civilisation, but the Drenai novels (or at least, those I've read so far) are never set during the Drenai's prime, for good reasons: Gemmell wants us to cheer for the Drenai because they're the underdogs, their existence threatened by foreign invaders who would snuff out their civilisation, not because they are ass-kicking conquerors snuffing out other people's civilisations.
  
  In Legend, a weak ruler has left the Drenai armies heavily depleted, while the Nadir warlord Ulric has achieved what was previously considered an impossible feat: the unification of all the Nadir tribes under his rule. Having stomped all over his other neighbours, Ulric has now begun the march south to conquer the Drenai lands; to do so, though, he must break through the six-walled fortress of Dros Delnoch, which guards the major mountain pass into the Empire, and the fortress is hopelessly undermanned, its Earl dying of cancer, its military leader - Gan (general) Orrin - has more talent for logistics and planning than battle and leadership, and the townspeople are unco-operative at best, treacherous at worst.


• There are always Heroes, with a capital H, usually several. The action of the Drenai novels always hinge on the actions of heroic figures. Normally there will be one particularly obvious hero and a few other characters who may qualify as heroes by the end of the novel; sometimes it will be unclear precisely who is meant to be the protagonist of the novel until the end.
  
  The primary hero of Legend is Druss the Legend, a well-known hero of the Drenai people, who is in his sixties and is invited to Dros Delnoch by its Earl, who knows that Druss's presence will provide a vital boost in morale, and who respects Druss's experience with siege warfare. Druss is well aware that his fighting powers are failing him, and is terrifying of growing old, useless and senile; he occasionally hears Death talking to him, but it's not clear whether this is real or simply the beginnings of senility. The protagonist of the novel is not really Druss, however - it's Rek, an ex-soldier who saves the Earl's daughter as she journeys south to enlist the aid of the mysterious Thirty, and who soon comes to Dros Delnoch despite himself. Rek is apparently suffering from something like post-traumatic stress disorder, is scared of the dark, and terrified of his own death - but in instances where he can break past his fear he can fight like a demon.


• The Source will be with you, always. Magic is relatively sparse in the Drenai novels; what magic exists is tied in closely with the mystical side of various cultures' religious beliefs. The Nadir have their shamen, who interact with spirits in their own way; on the Drenai side, there is the Thirty, the warrior-monks of an ancient order from the early days of the Drenai Empire (which appears to have no state religion, and indeed little in the way of widespread religion after all). The Thirty follow the Source, which seems to be a vaguely Platonic conception of God as the ultimate reality, which calls on us to do what's best despite every urging of our nature otherwise; Gemmell plays a very clever shell game throughout Legend and the later novels, however, and never makes it clear whether the Source is actually real or merely a manifestation of the psychic powers inherent in the Thirty and their deceased predecessors (it's vaguely possible, in fact, that "the Source" isn't so much a thinking entity so much as it is a living set of principles adhered to by a certain faction of humanity, a sort of postmortem federation of the kindly dead). Gemmell's cosmology is, in fact, distinctly human: what spirits and gods exist, if any, act through human beings, and many apparently magical powers could simply be the expression of natural psychic powers.
  
  In Legend, the Thirty have chosen to aid in the defence of Dros Delnoch, but do not relish the task; they dislike killing and fighting, and only get involved in battle when they feel that there is an overwhelming moral imperative to do so, and even then are riddled with doubts - in fact, it's part of their doctrine that doubt is important: if you are absolutely certain that the cause you are fighting for is just, then you are far more likely to cross a terrible line in the name of that cause.


• There's also a blind seer guy. Blind seers pop up towards the beginning of all of the Drenai novels I have read, normally to give some information (directly or obliquely) to the protagonist in such a manner as to poke him in the right direction. In the later books, there's some hints as to the nature of these old coots, but the old bird in Legend just arrives, gives Rek a riddle, and leaves.


• Always with the sieges. There's always a siege, and it's always important: the future of the Drenai people hinges on it. In the three books I've read to this point, Gemmell has done a good job of avoiding making this repetitive - when you think about it, medieval warfare was all about sieges, castles commanding territory, and all that jazz, so it sort of makes sense. In Legend, the siege is the defining crisis of the book from beginning to end: if Dros Delnoch falls, so too will all of the Drenai Empire.


• Quests are important, but they're always for a higher cause. There's usually a party of heroes off on some quest or other, usually experiencing a fat chunk of character development along the way, and always in the name of relieving the siege; in Legend, the quest consists of Rek rescuing Virae, the Earl's kick-ass warrior daughter, and helping her locate the Thirty and getting them to Dros Delnoch before the siege begins.

Legend is excellent. It's always about fighting to survive, rather than about fighting to kill; when the siege begins in earnest, Gemmell immediately switches viewpoint to the Nadir attackers and makes us feel sorry for them when they are splattered all over the walls as a gruesome sacrifice to Ulric's expansionistic plans, which is a good trick when most of the earlier potion of the book has been devoted to showing us how the Drenai consider the Nadir a faceless horde who exist only to kill Drenai and take their stuff. Like I said earlier, the main theme of Legend is how people deal with their own mortality, Gemmell's thesis being that you get the real measure of a man when he believes he will die tomorrow. It's a book about heroes, but there aren't really any villains: we even get some insight into Ulric's motivations, his dreams of transforming his people from the poverty-striken infighting poor cousins of the world to a global power. At the same time, Gemmell presents war as a terrible thing; even if neither side ever commits anything we'd consider a "war crime", there's still a colossal waste of life on both sides. Legend is an exercise in stirring the blood and exciting the spirit while at the same time honouring the dead and condemning the folly that is war: as far as imitations of Homer in fantasy literature go, it's a downright excellent effort, especially for a first novel.

The King Beyond the Gate

The advantage of reviewing a formulaic novel series is that once you've identified the formula you can use it to format your reviews. Therefore, without further ado, here's an introduction to The King Beyond the Gate based on how it handles the various cliches of the Drenai series:

• The Drenai are always on the verge of extinction. It's a few generations after the events in Legend - long enough that everyone involved and their children are long dead, but short enough that everyone in the Drenai Empire knows the story of Dros Delnoch as if it is recent history, not an ancient legend - say, a century or so. This time, the Drenai are being brought low by their own: Ceska, a mad Emperor, has seized power, aided by his command of the Joinings, strange fusions of beast and man created using ancient magical artifacts that Gemmell carefully keeps offstage.


• There are always Heroes, with a capital H, usually several. Apparently, Gemmell was having trouble finding inspiration for this one, the publishers rejecting two complete novels and beginning to think that he might be a one-hit wonder. They asked him to give them submissions in 10,000 word chunks so that they could see he was following the advice they were giving him. In the introduction to The King Beyond the Gate in my compilation, Gemmell talks about how he was sat watching TV trying to come up with a protagonist for his third attempt at a second novel, when he saw a movie about a martial artist called Tanaka Ken. "That's a good name," he thought to himself, "I'll copy it."
  
  Tenaka Khan (see what he did there?) is the major hero of The King Beyond the Gate. Due to various political marriages, he is a descendant of both Ulric and Rek from Legend, and as a mixed-race man in an unenlightened era in the midst of tense relations between the two nations his parents hail from he is, as you can imagined, a man who has not had an easy life. Plucked out of his Nadir upbringing to go become a good Drenai soldier, Tenaka (in flashbacks scattered throughout the book) joins the Dragon, an elite force founded to defend the Drenai against the Nadir. Irony! A little while later, Ceska orders the Dragon to disband, and some officers argue that they should rebel and overthrow the clearly mad Ceska, but Tenaka and the Dragon's leader persuade them otherwise because they don't want to be responsible for overthrowing the constitution, thus squelching the coup and leaving Ceska free to overthrow the constitution. IRONY! Later, Tenaka Khan feels guilty about this and about not joining a later rebellion staged by some veterans of the Dragon (including the Dragon's old leader) and sets out on a mission to stir up a rebellion and overthrow Ceska, realising partway through that the best way to do that would be to open the gates at Dros Delnoch and bring a big Nadir army through to kill the Emperor, a bit like one of his ancestors tried to do and another one of his ancestors tried to stop the other ancestor from doing. IRONY!!!
  
  Tenaka Khan isn't alone, of course: he quickly accrues to himself a bunch of secondary heroes, some of whom end up being quite interesting but others of whom fizzle. There's Rayvan, the peasant housewife who claims to be a descendant of Druss (but isn't sure whether she is) and who ends up leading a popular rebellion against Ceska, whose pragmatism and determination leave her looking more heroic than the actual trained warriors much of the time. There's Renya, Tenaka Khan's love interest who is secretly a Joining and who doesn't really do much of importance beyond being secretly a Joining and killing a few dudes. There's Pagan, a token black guy who, because he's a token black guy, is clearly awesome and acknowledged as such by everyone he meets. "You're such a good warrior, Pagan! And so good with children!" There's Scaler, the thief who is in fact the runaway heir to the Earldom of Dros Delnoch who Tenaka slaps upside the head and sends to Dros Delnoch so that Gemmell can gently write Scaler out of the main action because he's actually kind of a bitchy bitch bitch boy. And finally, and most convincingly, there is Ananais, a former colleague of Tenaka from the Dragon, a powerful warrior who must go about masked because a Joining mangled his face. The most interesting thing about Ananais is the romantic subplots he is involved in: namely, the fact that his romances end up going a little wrong and that he never quite finds the true love he yearns for, despite several valiant attempts.


• The Source will be with you, always. Oh yes, and there's the Thirty, as usual. Gemmell embellishes his cosmology here with the introduction of the Chaos Spirit, the worldly, debased counterpart of the transcendent Source, which in this book is served by the Dark Templars, stooges of Ceska whose sinister magics are fuelled by drugs, rape, and murder. They are cacklingly evil in a way which the Nadir in Legend never were, and are very obvously there because Gemmell's publishers asked for cackling villains. Although Gemmell would salvage the Chaos Spirit concept somewhat in Waylander, the Dark Templars fall flat.


• There's also a blind seer guy. He turns up, gives Tenaka an important riddle, and then dies. He is transparently a plot device, and not a very effectively deployed one. Oh well.


• Always with the sieges. OK, so after a few chunks of 10,000 words Gemmell was let off the leash, at which point he says "thank fuck for that" and drops an army and a siege on Tenaka. The army is that of Rayvan, who is valiantly leading a peasant rebellion against Ceska, and the siege is of Rayvan's headquarters in the settlements of the Skoda mountains.
  
  Wait, Skoda mountains?
  
  Yes, Skoda mountains.
  
  The siege of Skoda (what's next, the Raid of Renault?) is transparently Gemmell scrambling to write the sort of story he actually wants to write, which is apparently a retread of Legend where the Nadir are the relieving cavalry riding over the hill as opposed to the horrid threat. It's also the point where The King Beyond the Gate gets really good.


• Quests are important, but they're always for a higher cause. There's two quest segments in this book. The first is the early part of the novel, where Tenaka is wandering around the map collecting companions like every other protagonist in every other sub-Terry Brooks fantasy knock-off of the early 1980s. It's the boring part of the book. Then the publishers give Gemmell his head and he starts writing the sort of story he wants to write, and the quest part involves Tenaka going off to reunite the Nadir tribes, which leads to the really interesting dimension of the novel: the growing hints about the special destiny of the Nadir. It is suggested that Ulric, while a good man, fell short of the Source, but that Tenaka might be able to fulfil Ulric's frustrated destiny, truly forging the Nadir into a true nation as opposed to balkanised, eternally warring tribes. It is also hinted that this unification under Tenaka, who is full of Drenai ideas about civilisation, will lead to a fundamental transformation of the Nadir from a confused, destructive rabble to a genuine force for good in the world. It is possible, in fact, that the continued existence of the corrupt Drenai Empire is a bad thing (it made Ceska's excesses possible, after all), and that from the point of view of the impersonal force the greatest good for the greatest number may be served by tearing the whole edifice down. But does Tenaka actually have the right to do so? Despite our affection for the Drenai and mistrust of the Nadir Gemmell succeeds in leaving this reader, at least, thoroughly confused - in a good way - about whether Tenaka should tear the vain palaces of the Drenai down or leave well alone and let the Nadir rot in isolated, sidelined irrelevance for yet further centuries.

The King Beyond the Gate humanises the Nadir and shows the poorer qualities - the elitism, the corruptibility - of the Drenai, putting the events of Legend in a more complex and nuanced context. It has an extremely poor beginning, due in part to the circumstances of the writing, but it manages to pull a moderately satisfying conclusion out of this inauspicious start. At the end of the day, though, I'd only go for it if you feel especially inclined to read the entire Drenai series, as opposed to the best of the best.

Waylander

• The Drenai are always on the verge of extinction. This time, we're jumping back to the foundation of the Drenai Empire in its current form. The Drenai Kingdom has fallen, and cruel Vagrian warlords - prime amongst whom is the Machiavellian Kaem - are pillaging the countryside, following a slash-and-burn policy designed to reduce the Drenai nation to an uninhabitable wasteland.


• There are always Heroes, with a capital H, usually several. The King of the Drenai was assassinated by one Waylander, an assassin who made a profession out of murder after his family were killed by bandits - he hunted down and slowly killed each and every one of the men in question, but deriving no pleasure from it found himself emotionally dead, and took to assassination for pay simply because that's the sort of life he was leading. Fleeing both the Drenai authorities and the Vagrian forces that paid him (and double-crossed him), Waylander comes across Dardalion, a simple priest of the Source, who is about to be tortured and killed by bandits. Waylander finds himself moved to save the priest, who in turn manages to reawaken Waylander's long-dormant conscience.


• The Source will be with you, always. Dardalion, incidentally, turns out to be the founder of the order of the Thirty - the establishment of many of the traditions depicted in Legend and The King Beyond the Gate is depicted in Waylander. Source priests in this era tend to be pacifists, but it is implied that this order of priesthood ends up wiped out in the course of the Vagrian Wars. Dardalion's constant misgivings about the course he finds himself on, and his struggle to decide when it is appropriate to stop turning the other cheek and start defending oneself, provide some of the most believable characterisation in the book, as well as well as a surprisingly sensitive treatment of issues surrounding pacifism for an author whose output mainly revolves around violence. (Gemmell also finds time to elaborate on the Chaos Spirit a little more, making the dualistic aspects of his metaphysic a little more engaging - but making sure that the only time the Chaos Spirit itself shows up is when Waylander is in a drug-induced haze, so it might simply be a personification of all that is base and low about mankind.)


• There's also a blind seer guy. And this time we see something of his origin: the blind guy who shows up, gives the hero a message, and dies in this one is King Orien, who had abdicated to become a mystic and knows full well that Waylander killed his son, but charges Waylander with retrieving the fabulous armour of the Earl of Bronze - not a magic item, but a powerful propaganda item - from the sacred mountain of the Nadir, where Orien hid it for safekeeping. It is hinted, in fact, that Orien might be all of the different blind seers that have appeared in previous volumes of the series, returning from the dead time and again to be give mysterious (or, in this case, absolutely direct) instructions to the protagonist, which I thought was a decent justification for the plot device.


• Always with the sieges. So there's this dude called Karnak besieged somewhere called Dros Purdol, he's basically doing it to waste the Vagrians' time - the longer Dros Purdol stands, the longer the Vagrian troops are bogged down dealing with it, and the more time Earl Egel off to the south has to raise an army to kick out the Vagrians. The siege is OK, and doesn't take up too much time in the book: the emphasis is on Waylander's quest.


• Quests are important, but they're always for a higher cause. Never more so than in this book, the first one where the quest actually seems more important than the siege. Waylander's rediscovery of self-worth is a pleasure to behold. Many fantasy authors find themselves depicting assassins as being cool and sexy; Gemmell depicts Waylander's career as an assassin as being suitably sordid and degrading. The murders Waylander commits are not just crimes against his victims; they are almost crimes against himself, a nasty compromise with forces that Waylander knows that he really ought to fight rather than give in to.

Gemmell said that he found that Waylander, like Druss, almost wrote himself, and I can tell that Gemmell is having more fun with this story than with The King Beyond the Gate. As a story of redemption and of learning to feel when you've convinced yourself that emotions are a weakness goes, Waylander is pretty damn excellent.

The Canary Says

I read these three novels in the context of Drenai Tales, Volume 1, a compilation of the first three books in the Drenai series. It's worth picking up if you can find it cheap, but if not you're not missing much - all that's added are 2 pages of introductory notes to each novel by Gemmell, giving an occasionally surprisingly honest description of the genesis of each story. (I can't imagine many other authors saying "yeah, I saw a movie on TV that night and I took the name of my protagonist from it", for example.) If you're buying them separately, grab Legend and Waylander as soon as you can, and leave The King Beyond the Gate until you've decided you definitely want to read the entire series.