Roz Kaveney: Resurrections (Raphsody of Blood 3) (Book Review)
The third volume of a fantasy saga is fiendishly difficult to review without giving away spoilers. And in this particular case, being unspoiled really pays off, as Resurrections delivers on a number of mysteries built up through the previous volumes. I reviewed the beginning of the saga here, if you missed it. Short version: this is a brilliant series of fantasy novels with a cast almost exclusively consisting of LGTB characters, which somehow manages to walk the tightrope between mythic/epic and intimate/modern. There are two distinct narrative threads through the entire story: one set in present day, told in third person, with Emma Jones and her girlfriend and partner Caroline as the main characters, as they become embroiled in supernatural shenanigans ranging from having to play bodyguard at an annoying elf/vampire wedding to full scale battles between deities and master the challenge with an ongoing refusal to be impressed and a tendency to quip, not to mention compassion for the victims of all these events. (Of whom Caroline is one; she dies at the start and is a ghost from then onwards. This makes her love life with Emma somewhat tricky, but not impossible.)
The other narrative thread is told in first person by Mara, aka the Huntress, and moves through the millennia, not in chronological but in thematic order. Mara, as opposed to Emma and Caroline, doesn't have much of a sense of humor, but what she has is dedication to one specific goal: hunting down and making short work of any being who made themselves into a deity by using "the rituals", blood sacrifices, and protecting the people suffering from the fallout, but note she's called "Huntress" not "Protector". Quite how the two narrative threads are intertwined (beyond the fact that at the start of the saga, Mara shows up in the present a bit too late to save Caroline, dispatches the entity who killed her, kisses a distinctly unimpressed Emma and disappears again) becomes more and more clear as the story goes on, and here we get into the trickiness of spoiler territory and not wanting to ruin the careful build up. I'll try my best.
Mara is such a force of nature that one of the most impressive feats is that our author manages to keep her sections suspenseful because she's more or less undefeatable in combat. But she can be tricked and incapacitated (something Robespierre manages in volume 2, for example), she can make errors of judgment (happens several times, with the most long term consequences happening in vol.1. and vol.3.), and above all, the people she cares for through the millennia are vulnerable. Moreover, some of the opponents the story gives her are truly impressive (every hero needs some good villains), and the friends she makes very endearing, so one desperately fears for them and is incredibly relieved about those who end up well (not all do).
In Resurrections, the Mara parts of the novel focus on Alexandria, with a dash of Jerusalem and a last section set in Paris. Alexandria is irresistable if you're writing about the ancient world, and our author gives us not one but two different eras of that most multicultural and magical of cities: Alexandria shortly after the Romans have taken over, only a few years after the defeat of Cleopatra, and Alexandria at the time of Hypatia centuries later. En route to Alexandria the first time around Mara battles a leviathan, because of course she does (the method is one of those Chekovian guns which are important in later sections both in the Mara and the Emma parts of the novel) and befriends two young Jews who are on their way to learn. These two will also be her allies when she fights with one of the most gruesome villains of the saga, Simon the Magus, who specializes in rebuilding himself with stolen bodyparts (and trying that out on slaves first) and is after aquiring the most prominent dead body residing in Alexandria at that point (and the knowledge of same, because if you're a megalomaniac in the ancient world, you definitely want to be the next Alexander the Great; see also various Romans who had that idea in rl).
Meanwhile, in the present Emma has finally met her and Caroline's mysterious employer, who is the most prominent new character in this volume and one on whose believability in characterisation depends a lot, so I'm happy to say this person won me over immediately, and not just because she gets introduced in very Sarah-Connor-esque fashion: "Come with me if you want to live." Not that Emma at this point isn't already an old hand at survival herself, mind you. Which is useful because the narrative, among other things, throws a lot of non-Caroline ghosts at her (my favourite is her duel with Cesare Borgia). And the challenge which a lot of epics usually forego or leave to others (as do, ahem, many current day politicians) - the clean-up operation once you've deposed a power, requiring, because this is a saga which for all its gruesome parts has a lot of heart, above all compassion and wisdom and the belief despite all, that the majority of people won't, given more than one choice and opportunity, go for the hurting-others-option.
While a lot of events come to a head in this volume, and a lot of mysteries, as I said, are revealed (from the major to the minor, such as where the Faun whom Emma and Carollne rescue early in volume 1 came from) , there are at least two still waiting to happpen. One of them is lead into by the ending, which had me biting my nails and very worried indeed for one of our heroines. Never mind G.R.R. Martin: this is the mullti volume fantasy saga which has me on tethers between books! As I require fellow sufferers, I can only reccommend aquiring all three existing volumes and reading them at once. Then we'll talk further. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1029208.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The other narrative thread is told in first person by Mara, aka the Huntress, and moves through the millennia, not in chronological but in thematic order. Mara, as opposed to Emma and Caroline, doesn't have much of a sense of humor, but what she has is dedication to one specific goal: hunting down and making short work of any being who made themselves into a deity by using "the rituals", blood sacrifices, and protecting the people suffering from the fallout, but note she's called "Huntress" not "Protector". Quite how the two narrative threads are intertwined (beyond the fact that at the start of the saga, Mara shows up in the present a bit too late to save Caroline, dispatches the entity who killed her, kisses a distinctly unimpressed Emma and disappears again) becomes more and more clear as the story goes on, and here we get into the trickiness of spoiler territory and not wanting to ruin the careful build up. I'll try my best.
Mara is such a force of nature that one of the most impressive feats is that our author manages to keep her sections suspenseful because she's more or less undefeatable in combat. But she can be tricked and incapacitated (something Robespierre manages in volume 2, for example), she can make errors of judgment (happens several times, with the most long term consequences happening in vol.1. and vol.3.), and above all, the people she cares for through the millennia are vulnerable. Moreover, some of the opponents the story gives her are truly impressive (every hero needs some good villains), and the friends she makes very endearing, so one desperately fears for them and is incredibly relieved about those who end up well (not all do).
In Resurrections, the Mara parts of the novel focus on Alexandria, with a dash of Jerusalem and a last section set in Paris. Alexandria is irresistable if you're writing about the ancient world, and our author gives us not one but two different eras of that most multicultural and magical of cities: Alexandria shortly after the Romans have taken over, only a few years after the defeat of Cleopatra, and Alexandria at the time of Hypatia centuries later. En route to Alexandria the first time around Mara battles a leviathan, because of course she does (the method is one of those Chekovian guns which are important in later sections both in the Mara and the Emma parts of the novel) and befriends two young Jews who are on their way to learn. These two will also be her allies when she fights with one of the most gruesome villains of the saga, Simon the Magus, who specializes in rebuilding himself with stolen bodyparts (and trying that out on slaves first) and is after aquiring the most prominent dead body residing in Alexandria at that point (and the knowledge of same, because if you're a megalomaniac in the ancient world, you definitely want to be the next Alexander the Great; see also various Romans who had that idea in rl).
Meanwhile, in the present Emma has finally met her and Caroline's mysterious employer, who is the most prominent new character in this volume and one on whose believability in characterisation depends a lot, so I'm happy to say this person won me over immediately, and not just because she gets introduced in very Sarah-Connor-esque fashion: "Come with me if you want to live." Not that Emma at this point isn't already an old hand at survival herself, mind you. Which is useful because the narrative, among other things, throws a lot of non-Caroline ghosts at her (my favourite is her duel with Cesare Borgia). And the challenge which a lot of epics usually forego or leave to others (as do, ahem, many current day politicians) - the clean-up operation once you've deposed a power, requiring, because this is a saga which for all its gruesome parts has a lot of heart, above all compassion and wisdom and the belief despite all, that the majority of people won't, given more than one choice and opportunity, go for the hurting-others-option.
While a lot of events come to a head in this volume, and a lot of mysteries, as I said, are revealed (from the major to the minor, such as where the Faun whom Emma and Carollne rescue early in volume 1 came from) , there are at least two still waiting to happpen. One of them is lead into by the ending, which had me biting my nails and very worried indeed for one of our heroines. Never mind G.R.R. Martin: this is the mullti volume fantasy saga which has me on tethers between books! As I require fellow sufferers, I can only reccommend aquiring all three existing volumes and reading them at once. Then we'll talk further. :)
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1029208.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.