I’d heard good things about Anthony Ryan’s Blood Song, so when I found TOWER LORD: A Raven’s Shadow Novel at the library, I snatched it up. It’s good enough I wish it had been better, but it certainly did give me food for thought.
(Cover by Judith Lagerman, rights with current holder). Unlike the last two entries in this series, the person posing on the cover is actually doing something, so that’s a little improvement).
The Setting: Fantasy world filled with warring kingdoms. It appears to be very low-magic: outside of some body-jumping immortals and the Blood Song (apparently an ability to read where destiny is headed), there’s almost none. In addition to kingdoms, it’s also full of clashing religions and belief systems, several of which appear to be atheist (or at least rejecting the existence of deities). That’s a view you don’t run into often in epic (or epic-ish) fantasy.
The Story: There’s actually several, running more or less independently. Legendary warrior Vaelin becomes the tower lord of the title, fighting for the realm. The scholar Verniers witnesses an evil conqueror conquering things. Reva is a religious assassin sent to kill Vaelin. Lyrna is a king’s sister engaged in diplomacy, Frentis a warrior being mind-controlled by one of the body-jumpers. Their stories come together at the end, but it’s more like several short books than an epic.
What did I learn?
Exposition Isn’t Essential. I know I’ve frequently complained about books with lots and lots of exposition, but Ryan runs in the other direction. We learn nothing about the backstory of the different warring kingdoms, the faith, what the bloodsong wants or is.
It’s not something I see much in epic fantasy, and Ryan proves you can get by without a lot of explanation. Kingdom A fights Kingdom B while Lord C rides to the rescue—how hard is that? That said, I do think I lost something by not knowing the players or how much the fights matter in the grand scheme of history. I definitely lost something by not getting more detail on the religion. It’s a constant backdrop to what’s going on, and it’s sufficiently removed from real-world faiths that I can’t make much sense of it. Does any one sect know the truth? Are any of the sects good guys? Still, I find too little background preferable to the info-dumping I often get.
I Do Like a Narrative Spine: The thing I liked least (second least, see below) about Tower Lord was that I didn’t feel it has one. Some of the individual stories are great (Reva and Frentis) others are routine. But they don’t weave together well—even though they come together at the end, it feels more like several random encounters than a climax. I found that very unsatisfying.
V Is Not For Victory: The worst thing about the book is that Ryan can’t stop with the V names. There’s Vaelin. Verniers. Veliss. The Volurian Empire. The Varinshold. They clogged my brain. Not having names that all run together is basic, and I can’t believe neither Ryan nor his editor thought about it. Worst of all, one tribe’s name for their outcasts is the “varnish”—that’s right, their outcasts are furniture polish (I thought it was a typo at first).
My Takeaway: I can get by without heavy exposition (though possibly not as little as I sometimes include. And I really need to see that Southern Discomforts, which also has a good-sized cast and multiple POVs, has a strong enough spine to hold it together. On the plus side, Ryan shows it is possible to have a multi-POV book with no clear protagonist (everyone’s pretty much equal) and not leave the reader floundering (even given the spine issues).
Now I’m caught up to September—October’s to follow soon.
