[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: UK
year: 2010
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Warhammer 40,000: Path of the Eldar, #1
dates read: 25.1.25-1.2.25
Gav Thorpe’s Path of the Warrior is the first in a trilogy of Warhammer 40,000 novels focused on a trio of eldar (= space elves) whose destinies are intertwined, or whatever. right off the bat: I will not be reading the other two books. the only reason this isn’t getting a flat 0 stars is because one thing about it that is conceptually excellent, but it also contributes to a central narrative failing of the novel, so. my expectations for Warhammer 40k are extremely low, but even with that calibration this failed to meet them.
there are three big flaws here, one stylistic/editorial, one narrative, and one ideological. the stylistic/editorial is the easiest: the writing is bad. it’s not exactly badly copyedited — there aren’t typos everywhere, at least, though there are some — but Gav Thorpe simply cannot write. this is most egregiously evident in his dialogue, which is overflowing with extremely clunky comma splices (and misplaced commas generally). a few examples (not connected to each other) just to illustrate how irritating this is:
‘This fire indeed burns brightly, a feast of Kurnous, would not satiate his need.’
‘I cannot make a war, if that is my desire, it is the council’s choice’
‘Ready your weapons, battle will soon be at hand, Khaine’s bloody playfield.’
‘The warlord comes out, now it is time to strike swift, and bring down the beast!’
if it were just once or twice it would be whatever, but basically every conversation has at least one, if not multiple, line(s) like this. I hate it. beyond that, Thorpe is just not a good stylist. the dialogue is all trying to be stylized and archaic, but he’s simply not good at writing that, so it all just feels stilted and flat. the non-dialogue passages are simply profoundly forgettable.
the narrative flaw is that this novel is ostensibly about Korlandril, an Artist who finds himself overcome with rage and driven/required to become a Warrior instead. I’ll talk in a second about the ideological underpinnings of this move, but fine, whatever, sure. two-thirds of the way through the book, however, when we should be moving towards the climax, Korlandril “loses himself” on the Path of the Warrior and becomes unable to remove his (metaphorical) war-mask and reenter civilian life between battles. this means he has become an “exarch”, the warrior priest — effectively — of a shrine dedicated to training soldiers in a particular ritualized style of combat.
here’s the cool part: when Korlandril finds himself drawn to an abandoned shrine and puts on the exarch’s armor for the first time, his soul (the eldar have souls) is subsumed into the essence of all the previous exarchs, who make up a single composite being, Morlaniath, with memories from all of them but a single, distinct identity that asserts itself completely after a day or two. conceptually, this governs! at the end of the novel, Morlaniath encounters the damaged armor of an ancient warrior and is in turn subsumed utterly into the being known as Karandras, the founder(-ish; it’s complicated) of the order of warriors Morlaniath and Korlandril belonged to. again, this governs, conceptually.
unfortunately, narratively the effect of this is that the protagonist of the novel is summarily replaced by another entirely unrelated character 70% of the way through the book, and then at the climax of the novel that character is in turn replaced by another entirely unrelated character about three pages before the end. any emotional impact that the last 30% of the book could have had is completely negated by the fact that I have no reason to care about Morlaniath beyond the conceptual coolness of how exarchs work. now, I already didn’t particularly care for Korlandril, but where Korlandril was off-putting Morlaniath was simply nothing. the highlight of the book was probably the last four pages when we got a glimpse of Karandras, who I’ve been fond of since I was an impressionable eleven-year-old encountering 40k for the first time.
now. ideologically. obviously the big flaw with 40k is the fascism baked into the world-building, despite Games Workshop’s insistence that they’re not fascists. rather than engaging critically with this in any way, Thorpe enthusiastically embraces it in this book. this is perhaps most egregiously foregrounded in a conversation between Korlandril and several of his fellow warriors:
Korlandril pondered this for a time, trying to imagine a universe without the touch of Khaine [the eldar war god]. […] He pictured Alaitoc free of bloodshed, free of the iron beast at its heart, the pulsing blood-wrath fragment of Khaine that dwelt inside every eldar just as it lay dormant in its chamber at the centre of the craftworld.
He then pictured Alaitoc overrun, by orks perhaps, or maybe humans, or some other upstart race. Little enough remained as echoing vestiges of their great civilisation. Without anger and hate, they would be wiped from the stars.
‘It is a dream without hope,’ he said eventually. ‘Peace is merely an illusion, the momentary absence of conflict. We live in an age of bloody war, interspersed with pauses while Khaine catches his breath. I think I understand Kenainath [an exarch] a little better now. It is right to wish that the universe was otherwise, but it is foolish to think that it ever will be.’
this betrays the underlying fascism of 40k’s conception of history: as an endless series of race wars, where peace is only possible if one race eradicates all others (or comes close to doing so). there’s also a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand here, where what is, in fact, a specific narrative conceit of 40k’s in-universe history (cf. the franchise tagline: “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war”) is presented as if it were a Fundamental Truth and not the narrative basis of a wargame. this is without even touching the specifically fascist narrative of “degeneracy” and “perversion” that is the eldar backstory.
beyond this general issue with 40k, Korlandril’s character arc, such as it is, is the arc of an incel: the thing that pushes him over the edge into unmanageable anger (the touch of Khaine) such that he ends up drawn to the Path of the Warrior is…the woman he likes turns him down when he asks her out. he’s straight-up just an incel avant la lettre (this was published in 2010). now, to be fair to Thorpe, it seems like he was at least vaguely cognizant of this, because he tries to have Korlandril acknowledge that he’s not actually mad at Thirianna, specifically, but it doesn’t really succeed. and once he’s on the Path of the Warrior it’s basically unmitigated space racism; Korlandril regards orks as vermin to be utterly exterminated and humans as only slightly better (he accepts that killing a human might be a kind of murder, but explicitly says it would be a “lesser” kind than killing another eldar).
the one upside of the incel aspect is that, presumably unintentionally, Thorpe has also written Korlandril as in love with his male best friend. a small part of me is tempted to read the third book in the trilogy, which is about Aradryan, to see if that goes anywhere on his end, but I know it won’t, and so it won’t be worth it.
more generally, Korlandril’s arc has — ironically, given that Thorpe is English — a very American takeaway of “if only those conceited Artists understood what Our Heroic Troops go through in order to protect their Freedom! then they wouldn’t be so mean to soldiers and veterans”. it’s very bad!
there are a bunch of other small things, too, like a little chapter epigraph vignette about Eldanesh (the first eldar) fighting a “nightmarish horde” of enemies called “Autochtinii”, clearly derived from “autochthonous”, a synonym for “indigenous”. basically everything about this book left a bad taste in my mouth when it wasn’t simply boring. but I am committed to finishing books and I was morbidly curious. at least now I know to avoid Gav Thorpe if I ever read any other 40k novels. (I will likely read at least Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine, because I do love space necromancy.)
if for some incomprehensible reason you, like me, are driven to read a 40k book, do not read this one, or probably any other of Gav Thorpe’s books.
moods: adventurous, dark, grimy