panguitch's Full Review: Greg Keyes - The Briar King
It is the forest dreaming of death. The shocked gaze before the eyes roll up. The maggot wriggling from the wound.
I criticized Tad Williams's The Dragonbone Chair for its pretentious introductory matter. Greg Keyes delays the start of his own epic fantasy, The Briar King, in much the same fashion. A dedication. An introductory quote. A Prelude, a prologue (with its own introductory quote), and two more introductory quotes before chapter one begins. But for Keyes it works. Instead of telling about his story, or about how great it's going to be, he simply begins telling it.
Granted, the framing devices do not begin the novel proper. But the story of this world, its mood and flavor, are introduced through narrative rather than exposition. And the prose! Keyes can turn a phrase when the mood takes him, and can give a character a distinct dialect without overexerting himself like so many authors. "Low thunder rumbled distant, bright coppery claps nearer. Chariot wheels and whipcracks, his father had once told them, when Aspar was very young. He couldn't remember his father's face, his name, or almost anything else, except for that phrase and the smoky smell of tanned buckskin."
The sky cracked and lightning fell through its crooked seams.
The great kingdom of Crotheny has enjoyed a generation of peace, more or less. Now a dispute between one of its allies and an ally of Hansa threatens to escalate, embroiling Crotheny and Hansa and spreading war across the world. It's the last thing King William wants, but he's at a loss to prevent it. Intrigue is his younger brother's forte, so he makes clever Robert his Prime Minister and turns his attention back to the women in his life: his wife, his mistresses, and his daughters.
One of William's daughters, Anne, is a particularly vexing problem. Willful, deviant, and at times indecorous, she drags her maid-in-waiting along on a graveyard adventure. She finds the tomb of a mythical ancestor and meets a dashing young lord with whom she begins holding rendezvous.
In stark contrast to this girlish nonsense, Aspar White, the rugged officer of the King's Forest, seems to consider romance in the same category as the stories people have been telling of strange happenings deep in the woods. His skepticism suffers when he investigates some mysterious killings and comes face to face with a monster out of legend: the greffyn. Poison and death flow from the creature, but it is only an emissary. One of the old gods is stirring, and when the Briar King wakes Crotheny and all the world will shatter.
The evening star was a jewel on velvet.
The Briar King is an epic tale of a kingdom facing its doom. But Greg Keyes always keeps his focus on a small scale. He begins with portraits of widely disparate characters: the king and queen, their renegade daughter, an aspiring squire, a crotchety forester, a naive monk, and a roguish swordsman. It's quite some time (perhaps too long) before these threads are woven together and lowborn Neil MeqVren's struggle for knighthood becomes connected to the Queen's annoyance at the King's philandering, which echoes the pain that explains Aspar White’s brusqueness, or how Aspar and the monk he rescues in the King's Forest, Stephen Darige, prove to be traveling the same road after all.
These viewpoint characters are diversely interesting. They run the gamut from honorably rigid Sir Neil to Cazio da Chiovattio, who uses wordplay to shame a man into a corner where he can humiliate him with swordplay. "You seem an honest sort, or at least you will be, as a corpse, for all the dead are stiffly honest. They lie, but they cannot lie, if you understand me." It reminds me of the opening of Romeo and Juliet, and it's a sure thing that Cazio will later cross swords with the opposite sex.
Yet both Neil and Cazio are sympathetic, and even caustic Aspar and bookish Stephen are likable. And as a reward for being a self-obsessed twittering teenager Anne is given some real drama. Unfortunately some of the non-viewpoint characters are less consistent in their quality. Winna, for example, never seems real. On the other hand, Robert, the King's brooding and maligned younger brother is a fascinating and twisted character, more surprising than he at first appears. He and William make an interesting comparison to the two royal brothers in Tad Williams's Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy. Another dark character, the bully-monk Desmond Spendlove, is surprising not because of his depths but because of his breadths, and he provides moments surprising for their dispassionate candor.
In an ironic nod to the genre, it begins in a tavern.
With its bloody assassinations and disturbingly dysfunctional royal family, The Briar King reminds me of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, only less vicious. And in some ways better, not least of which its being less vicious. Don't get me wrong. I suspect an analysis would show that over half of the named characters in The Briar King die unpleasantly by book's end. But while this narrative often demands violence, it never becomes a vehicle for violence—violence is not one of its purposes.
Instead, Keyes is telling what is, at heart, a traditional fantasy tale of prophesied catastrophe looming over the kingdom and the characters. But there is nothing staid about The Briar King. It takes its time coming together, but when the pieces snap into place it moves as magically as the sleek greffyn. It launches a significant series in the fantasy landscape, The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, and I'm intensely eager for volume two, The Charnel Prince.
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