Dragon Bones

This ought to be an awful book. Any literary agent worth their salt would have taken one glance at the synopsis and urged - begged - the author to write something different. Why so? Well, within the genre called 'fantasy' there is a sub genre which is based around the dungeons and dragon games played obsessively by pale-faced nerds in darkened rooms. Such books are generally the worst tripe imaginable.

When the hero's party camps for the night in the ancient ruins of the temple and oracle of an ambiguous god, you suddenly realise that it's composed of stock characters out of such a game. There are not one but two warrior princelings, one of them son of the Dwarven King; not one but two mages, one of them (although we don't yet know it) a part-human shape-shifter; a priestess of another ambiguous god; a beautiful temptress; a bard; an escaped slave; a virgin princess; a grizzled veteran; a mute, and an old retainer. Oh, and, I should have said, there's only seven of them. The hero is, of course (aren't they all) rightful heir to an ancient but impoverished lordship, driven out by the political machinations of evil forces. So far, so cod.

And yet, despite all that, this is very far from an awful book. Why not? Character, back story, but most important of all, story telling.

Let's start with the hero, who is also for most of the text the first person narrator. He's the eldest of three psychologically damaged children of a tyranous, jealous and sadistic father. To survive, he's learned to pretend to be someone he's not, and having played an act for so long he's now unsure of his own identity, and continues to play roles; yet through his narration we can see underneath someone entirely likeable: generous, kind, usually gentle, trusting, utterly conscientious, engaging. Ward is the kind of aristocrat who could almost give aristocracy a good name:

"I was born and bred to prevent things like this. Being Hurogmeten was more than owning land - it was taking care of the people who lived there. Responsibility was bred into my bones..."

Ward's title, Hurogmeten, means 'Guardian of Dragons', but he lives in a world where dragons are no longer seen, driven to apparent extinction by mages seeking to exploit the magic inherent in their bodies. Driven to extinction by, among others, one of Ward's own ancestors.

Fantasies are usually, also, in part, love stories. This one isn't. The core relationship of the plot is not that between Ward and a love interest (there is one, but she's a bit part), nor even that between Ward and the villains, but that between Ward and his magically bonded slave, a tortured and tormented creature who has endured thousands of years of (mostly) mistreatment. The relationship between Ward and Oreg is beautifully and subtly drawn, and makes the plot's eventual denouement all the more poignant.

Ward's quest is not a sub-Tolkien battle between good and incarnate evil. The villains are bad, but they're bad in entirely human ways: greed, cruelty and lust for power. The hero and his allies are good, too, in human ways: generosity, honesty, responsibility. But none of them is a paragon, each of them has faults.

And so does the plot. Firstly and most glaringly, the story contains chapters where the first person narrator is not present. How to cope with this? If you're going to have a first person narrator, the best solution is to avoid such passages. But if you can't avoid such passages the next best solution, it seems to me, is to switch to an alternate first person narrator: another witness who can experience that part of the tale. Or if you can do neither of these things, have the first person narrator narrate how that part of the story had been relayed to him.

But Briggs, instead, shifts mode to omniscient narrator for these sections. When she's not writing as Ward, she writes as Nineteenth Century Novelist, able to see the innermost thoughts of each character, even a character about to die, who could never have passed on their experience to anyone. There's nothing wrong with writing as the omniscient narrator, of course; it's probably the most common viewpoint in English fiction. It's just that it sits very oddly with the first person narration of the rest of the story. There is a disjunction, a dissonance, and it jars.

The other problem with the plot, to my eyes, is a slight tendency to lower a god out of the machine. This is always a risk in stories which contain magic; indeed unlimited use of magic can blow holes in any plot. At one point in the story Briggs needs to transfer a group of characters from one point on the map to another, quickly. There are lots of ways she could have done it, but what she chooses to do is to introduce a new magical mechanism, not previously shown and not apparently conforming to the same magical physics as the other magic in the book.

A final niggle for me is climate. Ward's own home in the north is cold temperate and fairly dry. The land he travels to in the south is warmer; fair enough, they're in the northern hemisphere of some world. But it's also very wet. Very, very wet, and there's no explanation of why this should be so. It's on the eastern seaboard of a continent, protected from coriolis winds by mountains to the West, so it should also be dry...

However, these faults are slight. Overall this is an excellent and engaging book, a coming of age story of a thoroughly likeable and entirely believable character set against a background of deep history and credible politics, with (mostly) internally consistent magical physics. Not a great book, but one I greatly like.