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language: English
country: USA
year: 1996
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Nightrunner, #1
dates read: 22.5.25-1.6.25
Lynn Flewelling’s Luck in the Shadows is the first book in her Nightrunner series. I read it for the first time early in 2010, on the recommendation of one of my best friends at the time, who pitched the series to me on the grounds that “the slash is canon” (although, in point of fact, while one of the main characters is clearly not straight the romantic/sexual relationship between the two male protagonists doesn’t actually begin until later in the series). at the time I liked it well enough but wasn’t moved to continue reading the series. I’d been thinking about rereading it for a while, in part to see if I thought my partner would enjoy it; prior to actually picking it up a few weeks ago I could not have told you anything about its content except that there was a weird age gap between the characters I knew ended up in a romantic relationship eventually.
that was correct, and it is, I think, the novel’s biggest flaw, though I enjoyed the book enough this time around that I do plan to read more of the series and see where things go. the novel follows two main characters, with bits and pieces from other perspectives. the bulk of it is focalized through the sixteen-year-old Alec of Kerry, recently orphaned, who has been imprisoned and (relatively lightly) tortured for trespassing. when a new prisoner helps him escape, he finds himself following this man — Seregil — across the continent, through an attempted assassination and the effects of a cursed amulet, to the city of Rhíminee, the capital of the Queendom of Skala, where they become entangled in a plot to overthrow and replace the current queen. there are hints of an overarching plot — the cursed amulet is connected in some way with a centuries-old evil once thought defeated — but mostly this is a novel about the political intrigue and about Seregil teaching Alec to be what he is — a gifted spy — and then Alec putting that training into practice.
the age gap is not good (notwithstanding the fact that Seregil is an off-brand elf and ostensibly still considered an adolescent by his people; since he’s the only Aurënfaie we see in the book and every human treats him as an adult this conceit falls rather flat), but otherwise the characterization and narration are lively and engaging, though I have to say that I found some of the action sequences a bit confusing. I had to go back and reread some of them to try to make sense of what was going on, and in a few cases it still felt like there was a missing sentence or two such that what was being described didn’t quite make sense.
the bulk of the novel is written in a close third person in what seems to be a pretty immediate past tense, rather than a narrator looking further back. the narration doesn’t ever seem to know (much) more than the characters, in other words. then the beginning of chapter four happens:
Wolde—largest of the isolated trade centers scattered across the northlands—owed its prosperity to the Gold Road, a narrow span of the Gallistrom River, and a tiny yellow flower.
The Gold Road began to the north in the foothills of the Ironheart Mountains, where gold had been mind from time out of mind. At Kerry, the precious metal was smelted and molded into round, flat ingots called baps and sewn into square sheepskin bales stuffed with wool. This wool, shorn from the mountain sheep native to the region, was especially soft and fine and had since become another source of wealth for the region. The original purpose of the bales, however, was merely to protect the gold, for the road was fraught with hazards, not the least of which were bandits. Weighing as much as two men, the bales were difficult to steal but floated if they were lost in one of the many rivers that crossed the route. Loaded onto ox-drawn wagons, the bales were carried on to Boersby, where they were packed onto flatboats and taken down the Folcwine to the Mycenian seaport of Nanta.
The country between Kerry and Boersby was desolate except for a few settled districts. The caravaneers traveled in large groups with hired swordsmen and archers to protect them. The last safe refuge between Blackwater Lake and Boersby was the town of Wolde on the banks of the Gallistrom River.
Unlike the placid Brythwin, the Gallistrom was dangerous, deep, and broad. From its source in the Ironheart, it swept down through the great Lake Wood into Blackwater Lake. Originally the only safe crossing was a slow, precarious system of ferries. Wagons waiting on the shore for the next raft across were easy prey for bandits. Many others were lost to the river itself when strong spring currents overturned the rafts, sweeping away men, oxen, and gold.
At last a wide stone bridge was constructed and the tiny settlement that had sprung up around the ferry site grew into a village. The area had riches of its own, as it turned out. Dye-yielding plants of many sorts grew in profusion between the lake and the forest, among them the yellow wolde from which the town took its name. With these plants nearly any color could be produced, many in rich hues superior to anything produced in the south. Dyers, weavers, fullers, and felters set up shop there and suddenly the wool of Kerry was in great demand. Bolts of soft, lustrous “Wolde cloth” were now sought almost as eagerly in the south as the golden baps. By Alec’s day, Wolde was a wealthy guild town centered around the bridge and protected by a stout wooden palisade.
now, notwithstanding the unexamined fantasy bandits ([eyeroll emoticon]), as world-building information goes I don’t hate this — Flewelling is more attentive than many fantasy authors to the economics of her setting — including the importance of water transportation for trade in a premodern context — and I particularly appreciate the emphasis (here and elsewhere) on shifts in commodity production and exchange.
the problem is that last sentence, which I think is emblematic of one (potential) problem with “infodumps” more generally: now, for the first time, in the middle of its narration, the book is signaling to the reader that it is a self-conscious document of a particular (fictional) time period produced in a later (but still fictional) time period. “By Alec’s day” means that this passage cannot be historical knowledge filtered through Alec, nor can it be through Seregil’s perspective (he simply would not refer to this point in time as “Alec’s day”). instead, this suddenly becomes an in-world text, like the Red Book of Westmarch in The Lord of the Rings: there is a particular narrator, rather than an omniscient one, and the narrator is addressing a particular audience.
this could be fine in and of itself — if the novel embraced this conceit, as Tolkien did. unfortunately — and this, I think, is a core problem of this kind of “infodump” — it does not. instead, it immediately returns to the ostensibly “direct” close third-person narration and does not deviate from it for the remainder of the novel, with other historical information of this kind largely provided in-character by Seregil or others speaking to Alec, or else in narration where it flows from the focalization.
it also does, uh, present a world where the divine right of queens is literal and actively enforced by gods to the tune of crop failure and plague when a man tried to take the throne. one wonders what would happen if the monarchy were abolished altogether, rather than just squabbling over who should exercise divinely ordained monarchical power.
in addition to the ideological questions, the pacing and structure of this book are just…very weird. the book begins with a prologue from the perspective of some Bad Guys, and they show up again in a few interludes over the first half of the book, doing necromancy and mass murder and being generally extremely unpleasant. then Alec and Seregil get to Rhíminee and they completely disappear from the narrative. this makes the second half of the book feel like kind of a letdown — the question of Who Should Be Queen is simply a lot less interesting than necromancers, and the stakes in the second half of the novel never feel particularly high, even when Alec and Seregil are notionally in life-threatening danger. I assume the necromancy and pseudo-Carlism plots will prove to be related in later books, but for now it just felt like an abrupt about-face away from an engaging plot.
adding to this is the extent to which Seregil’s boss, the wizard Nysander, functions as a deus ex machina. at one point Seregil is thrown in prison, accused of treason. this could have been a point of genuine tension, with Alec forced to operate alone (or as the primary spy, at least) for the first time, but instead Nysander and his apprentice show up and Seregil switches bodies with the apprentice so that he can continue doing cool spy stuff uninterrupted. this stands in sharp contrast to the first part of the novel, where Seregil is incapacitated by the cursed amulet and Alec has to navigate unfamiliar country with a delirious, sometimes inexplicably murderous, and also rapidly weakening companion. the stakes felt genuinely high, and this undercut the extent to which the book is a quite standard quest narrative by removing Alec’s mentor/guide and making him explore the world on his own rather than simply being led through it (even if Seregil set their destination).
still, in spite of these flaws, the book is engaging. I would give the first half a solid 4.5 stars even if the second half is more like 3.5, and while I do feel a bit disappointed by the second half I also still intend to read at least the second book in the series (anything more will depend on how that one goes).
moods: adventurous, horny, lighthearted, tense