Blood Song

This book falls into a category that I particularly despise, which I describe as ‘the ordinary life of an extraordinary guy'. It starts by describing how incredible famous and bad ass the protagonist is in the first 1-2 pages, and it proceeds by telling how he came to be that way through the rest of the book.

And being a typical fantasy book, there is usually no much creativity in that aspect: the hero went to an isolated fighting/magic/assassin school when we was still a boy, and there he trained every hour of every day. And his teachers were cruel. And nobody liked him. And he hated that place. But slowly he began to understand the teachers better, make some friends and overall, liking the place.

Still, I really made an effort and the story did have some interesting events along the way. The problem is it's SO TERRIBLY SLOW! I can get past reading about how he put his shoes one foot at a time, then washes his face, then have breakfast, and every other insignificant detail of his everyday life. Just DON'T MAKE IT TAKE PAGES TO DESCRIBE THAT! REALLY!

I stopped reading soon after have read a few pages regarding how they learned how to make weapons.

Read 5:34/23:08 24%

First off, I highly enjoyed this. It is another coming of age tale, so fits with a lot of the fantasy tropes, but it is told in such an engaging way with such good world building that any derivation in the story fades into the background. Our protagonist has been sent to join some martial order, and we follow his progression through the school and eventual appointment by the king to lead his armies.

There are some really clever and unusual literary stylisations here. The chronicler style of story telling is increasingly popular in speculative fiction. Blood Song opens with that chronicle style - we meet our narrator and get him introduced to our protagonist. Blood Song however subverts this. You begin to realize that although there is an apparent narrator, the voice telling the story is actually the protagonist, and the narrator himself is only hearing part of what is being written. An interestingly meta situation where we now have an unreliable narrator, yet the story is being told is complete. This is the first book in a trilogy and yet feels remarkably complete - all the plot items alluded to in the chronicle do come to pass in this first book. It will be interesting to see how this is continued in the second book.

This story falls into the Grimdark category by my reckoning. There is a large degree of moral ambiguity and a lot of violence. The politics portrayed here are interesting - the Machiavellian manipulations of the political actors are well thought through.

A very promising first book. I have read several of Anthony Ryan's short stories before but this is the first of his full novels. I look forward to the rest of the series!

Review to come.