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Paladin of Souls
Monday, August 20th, 2007
I realized that I haven’t posted anything recently; this is due largely to lack of funds prohibiting my perusal of the live scene … such as it is. So here’s a review thing I did for my Master’s course.
The week’s question was interesting; though I have an extensive library of my own that I have invest over $1000 worth into building, I realized that I didn’t have any “prize winners.” I guess I just don’t like being told by some committee that the book they think is great is any better than the one I’m reading.
So, I brought up a list of prize winners to search for something I had read. To Kill A Mockingbird came up, but I had only seen the film, which was enthralling I admit. Then I found it - Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold. It’s the only one in my collection that is a prize winner, and it’s a double whammy - it has picked up both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and well deserved in my opinion.
When I received the book as a gift for my birthday I wasn’t expecting much; to my delight, it was a page-turner, completely enthralling, sucking my life force from my legs and leaving me glued to my chair.
The story opens with the death of the protagonist’s mother, whom we quickly learn was a matriarch of iron will and iron fist. The protagonist, a royal dowager in middle life, is no spring chicken or naive heroine. She has a murky and sinister past, half-remembered in tones of the madness that once gripped her. She has a powerful daughter, but herself is recluse and over-protected by her servants, who all remember the time she was not herself, and treat her accordingly.
Before I knew it I was feeling stifled and cloistered and found myself urging the protagonist on to adventure. Well, she gets it alright. In a land beset by war there is another, deeper threat - that of demons, which is where Bujold won me over. Her handling of creation myth smacked of deep study of the classics but also rendered with originality. Her demons were not lummox-type war-mongering redskins but sinister, ethereal cyphons of life, possessing mortals and bestowing sorcery - for a price.
In the realm of fantasy, using the much-worn tools of demons and magic and war can make an author faceless and the book humdrum. Bujold’s world, however, is a stroke of inspiration and thoroughly engaging. She is able to re-create the intimacy of power, lust and war and pull her readers into the fears and hopes of her characters.
If that’s not enough, the mythology is not passive - the gods in this world are active, untrustworthy and manipulative. The protagonist comes under the scrutiny of not one but two of these immense beings, as Bujold has tied our heroine both spiritually and physically to her tasks. Truly, this is one instance where changing the gender of the protagonist would have altered the entire course and quality of the story. Yet, she is written in such a way that male readers can also empathize with her struggle.
In typical fantasy settings, the gender of the author also dictates how the opposite gender is handled in the novel. For instance, in David Gemmel’s books, women are either subservient, Amazon, or hardly seen. In Katherine Kerr’s books, heroes are effeminate and villains drawn in the cliche of bad men doing bad things. Bujold holds neither to be true and represents both sexes in their roles convincingly and without favoritism.
This is truly a masterwork fantasy novel. The prose and pace are intuitively laid out; you cannot turn the pages fast enough. Descriptions are clear and uncomplicated; personalities so vivid you’d swear you’d met them before, and the ethereal magic of storytelling compliments the ethereal nature of magic in this world. As fantasy novels go, this one steps beyond its genre limitations and could easily be accepted in mainstream.
Highly recommended.
Please note individual items are the those of the autor, not Pith Records. Don't blame us.
This entry hereby entered into our archives by lansirlot at the hour of 8:14 am
on this very Monday, August 20th, our year of 2007.
Duly filed under Literary Reviews, in accordance with standard practices.
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