A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

To quote smillaraaq: "Some wildernessy survival, absolute BUCKETS of Noble Warrior Guys bonding and being Reluctant Honor-bound Noble Frenemies, outnumbered ragtag bands involved in desperate pursuits and hopeless last stands...all that good stuff."

A historical novel set in Britain, as the Roman Empire is beginning to fall apart. Young commander Alexios gives the order to abandon his fort and pull out all his troops when it's attacked; when it turns out to be the wrong decision, he's disgraced and sent off to command the Frontier Wolves, in the icy middle of nowhere, where Roman soldiers rub shoulders with British tribespeople... some of whom become Frontier Wolves themselves.

Alexios feels (and is) completely out of place, but slowly learns the ways of the Wolves, with help from Hilarion, his wry second-in-command, and Cunorix, the son of a British chieftain. Yes, these can certainly be read as slashy, as can his more fraught relationship with Connla, the chieftain's wild second son. Alexios earns his wolfskin cloak and his command, witnesses and partakes in training and rituals, and comes to fit in... only to be once again faced with the same terrible choice that led him to the Wolves in the first place.

This is in the same continuity as Eagle of the Ninth: Alexios has the dolphin ring. These books build on each other, though they can be read in any order, displaying the whole brutal tapestry of history, as colonizers and conquerors march in and take over, only to be conquered and colonized in their own turn. The books are intimate, but the series gives you the wider picture.

Like Sutcliff's other books, it's very well-written and well-characterized, slowly paced (up to a point) but incredibly atmospheric. This one, with its emphasis on learning a new culture, reminded me a bit in theme, pace, and tone of Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, though it has no magic. However, while it does have a basically happy ending, it gets darker along the way than the other Sutcliff novels I've read. I liked it a lot, in part because of the darkness, which concerns heroic last stands and tragic matters of honor rather than random grimdarkess.

Finally, standard Sutcliff warning for those sensitive to animal harm: animals are neither inherently doomed nor inherently safe. There is non-gruesome hunting and war-related animal death.

Only $4.90 on Kindle! Frontier Wolf

Owain, a young Roman-Briton boy, is the only human survivor of a battle between his people and the invading Saxons. He and the hound he finds on the battlefield, whom he names Dog, head out in search of some place where they might belong. This turns out to be even more complicated than one might imagine, as Owain discovers when he comes to the abandoned city of Viriconium and takes up with a beggar girl, Regina.

Like The Shield Ring, this is a start-and-stop book, alternating sequences of intense emotion and suspense with lengthy time-skips and slow interludes of daily life. I liked many individual scenes very much and was very satisfied by the story, but it was not exactly a quick read – even less so than The Shield Ring.

I liked how Owain’s virtues are the ones generally considered passive and feminine: his courage and battlefield prowess are present but largely elided, while his endurance, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice are the focus of the story.

Now that I’ve read three of the books in the “Dolphin Ring” sequence, which I think encompasses about a thousand years of history, it’s fascinating to see how conquerors become the conquered, and each culture in turn mourns its fall to “barbarians.” It’s one of the best examples I’ve ever read of a God’s-eye-view of history, in which the reader gets both the inexorable sequence of events and the length of time, and a sense of how every sparrow that falls is important, if only to itself.

Though the book is not particularly full of startling plot twists, the overall shape of the narrative was surprisingly difficult to predict. In case that’s a common reaction, I’ll put the rest of the plot behind a cut.

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Warning: This is by no means a “dead dog” book, in which animals are slain by the hand of the author for cheap tears and life lessons (“Kids! Being a man means shooting your own rabid dog!”) However, there are major animal characters in this book, and it takes place over a long period of time, which means that they don’t all make it to the end of the book.

Other Warning: There is a villainous character who limps, and one line in which the limp and villainy are equated. This is the opinion of the character and not representative of Sutcliff in general, who often writes very sensitively and realistically about disability.

Dawn Wind

Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan.

In parallel stories which eventually mesh, a tale of parallel courts closely joined unfolds. In London, an ambitious courtier tries to uncover a mysterious influence affecting Queen Elizabeth, and in the Faerie Onyx court, a disgraced faerie courtier tries to win back her position by impersonating a human woman in the court above. This seemed very well-researched, and the politics are laid out so clearly that even I could follow them. It's interesting but a bit meandery at first, but becomes quite gripping about halfway through. There are sequels but the conclusion is satisfying and feels conclusive.

My big nitpick was that the main relationship in the story, between the human and faerie courtiers, begins as one of deception and then grows into something real. But the deceptive relationship, which lasts a year and is very intense, occurs almost entirely off-page, and so the change from fake to real loses much of the power it could have had. We also miss Lune manipulating the man she will eventually love, and watching him fall in love with her human front. Nor do we get to see much of what her human persona is like, and get to judge for ourselves how congruent it is with her real self. I would have liked a longer book that spent some time on that missing year, rather than simply skipping it.

Overall though, I enjoyed it a lot, even though faeries are a very hard sell to me nowadays.

First Light, by Rebecca Stead. Extremely readable and quirky middle-grade sf with parallel stories (again) following a boy who goes with his scientist parents to Antarctica, and a girl living in an underground world beneath the ice. Clever and compelling, but suffers a bit in comparison with Stead's own When You Reach Me, which uses some similar plot devices better, and also has better characterization. Still well worth reading.

The Cats of Seroster (Piccolo Books), by Robert Westall.

Again with the parallel stories! An old British fantasy, in which sentient cats in a medieval human kingdom embark upon a complex plot to restore the deposed king (who will treat them well) to his throne, and get rid of a usurper (who hates cats.) The story threads follow the cats from own point of view, and also the hapless traveler magically forced into the role of the legendary savior of the kingdom. Very readable, with excellent battle sequences and an unusual perspective in general, but marred by casual but persistent and creepy misogyny: rape, rape threats, the only major human female is unnamed and does nothing but have sex with the hero, etc.

The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff.

Beautifully written historical adventure set in Roman Britain, which reminded me a bit in prose quality, atmosphere, emotional and political complexity, and characterization of A Wizard of Earthsea, though there's no magic. Roman soldier Marcus is severely wounded in a battle with the native Britons and forced into a very early retirement. When he sees a terrified young man his own age forced to fight as a gladiator, Marcus buys him as a slave. The young man turns out to be a captive British warrior, Esca. The two young men end up traveling in search of the lost legion of Marcus's father. Lots of warriorly bonding ensues, along with adventure and a complex look at the colonialism of the time.

I am a complete sucker for Noble Warrior Guys bonding and adventuring and "He was such a great fighter, I was honored to kill him," and this book is all about that. (Slash fans, don goggles now.) I loved the language, the vivid setting, and basically everything about this book. I wish there were more women, though the ones we do meet are interesting and non-stereotypical. The very beginning was a little slow and heavy on historical detail, but I was soon grabbed and thereafter didn't put the book down till I had finished it.