|
The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas |
|
|
|
|
Written by Ian Banks
|
|
Friday, 26 June 2009 |
Gollancz, May 2009: ISBN 978-0-575-08374-5
Stephen Deas’s debut novel is the first of a trilogy dealing with a Byzantine set of kingdoms who share a shaky alliance based around trading in dragons. Centuries in the past there was a war between humankind and dragons. Humans only narrowly won by devising a drug that renders the dragons docile and at the same level of intelligence as beasts of burden. Unfortunately, in the early pages of this novel, one of the dragons has unwittingly won its freedom and is showing signs of sentience and memory…
The main character of this novel is Prince Jehal, a particularly unlikeable fellow who is conspiring to control as much of the world as he possibly can. He is presented on the first page as someone we can relate to and empathise with but shows us his true colours by page 2! He is a master schemer and always plays to win. In fact, he is such a master intriguer that he can turn a situation to his advantage even when he is captive in a torture chamber and filled with a truth serum!
Other characters are just as vividly drawn but are far more realistic and believable to us mere mortals. They are mostly characters who have a job keeping up with Jehal, but there those who are trying to do their bit just to survive.
The central conceit of the series – that dragons are bent to our wills only by the regular dosage of a mind-numbing drug – is terrific. Dragons are probably the best-loved of all fantasy’s megafauna and to put them in a position that you usually find human protagonists in amps up your sympathies for them. Deas portrays his draconic characters exceedingly well and I found myself cheering for them in their plight. In fact, I don’t think I’ve enjoyed reading about dragons quite so much since the first few volumes of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels or Byron Preiss and Michael Reaves’s Dragonworld.
There is a lot to enjoy in this novel but there are some weaknesses. Deas drops the reader into the middle of Jehal’s intrigues. This is a great device to jumpstart a story, but when you are dealing with as many characters as are presented here it may have been more prudent to choose just a couple and show us a gradually widening sphere of action and intrigue. As it was, I was confused by all the characters and found it hard to keep track of who was who, or who was doing what to whom and why until I was quite a few chapters into the story. There are also a few scenes that are clumsily put together: Deas tries a couple of times to put us in the position of seeing a scene from its aftermath and then going back to piece it all together. It’s a nice idea but comes off as a little distracting and confusing to the reader, especially since one of them involves a character who only exists in that particular part of the book. The other weakness is Jehal: he’s just too unstoppable a force, too big a character, with way too many back-up plans, angles and contingencies to be truly convincing. He does show a couple of signs of weakness, but on the whole, he comes across as the sort of Jacobean plotter who lusts for buckets of blood simply because it’s what the plot demands of him.
On the whole though, if you’re a fan of George R. R. Martin’s brand of intrigue-heavy plotting, or Joe Abercrombie’s style of heavy realism, or even if you just like dragons, you may well find this a worthwhile addition to your reading list.
Check out the author’s web site at http://www.stephendeas.com/ . |
|
Last Updated ( Saturday, 04 July 2009 )
|
