Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Having found myself with an extra two hours to spare over the weekend after my train got diverted through South Wales, I've also manage to finish The Sapphire Rose, the last in David Eddings' Elenium Trilogy, which follows on directly from the second novel. Queen Ehlana is still in a coma back in the Elenian capital of Cimmura but Sparhawk, her champion, now has Belliom, the all-powerful gemstone of the title, with which to cure her.

Leaving troll country for the Emsat, dodging a couple of would-be murderers on the way, Sparhawk retrieves Talen from Stragen, the Thalasian capital's master thief, and his strange criminal court. With Stragen, Sephrenia, Kurik and Talen in tow, Sparhawk return to Cimmura where he cures his Queen and accidentally gets engaged to her after mixing up the rings linking their houses. With Annias, the Primate of Cimmura, fled to the sanctuary of the basilica in Chyrellos, Sparhawk follows with a limited number of Church Knights — the majority are still caught up in King Wargun's attempts to liberate Arcium. After some serious political chicanery, Sparhawk's faction are eventually able to prevent Annias from getting the votes he needs to become Archprelate. But just at they are about to celebrate, the Holy City finds itself surrounded by a pair of armies, one a mercenary force led by Martel, a rogue Pandion and Sparhawk's nemesis, and the other a force of Eshandist Rendors led by Martel's underling Adus. After a short siege, during which Sparhawk and Patriarchs Dolmant and Emban are able to gather enough information to comprehensively discredit Primate Annias, Ehlana manages to manipulate the Hierocracy of the Church into electing her candidate for Archprelate.

The novel starts well with the introduction of the new and intriguing plot about a group of people who seem to want to assassinate Sparhawk closely followed by Stragen's amusing Court of Crime, while Ehlana's recovery finally allows Eddings to insert another female character into what has been a very male dominated trilogy. I have serious problems with the whole marriage mix-up thing — although I can see why it serves the plot — partly because pushes Sparhawk into doing something he strongly suspects is wrong, which feels very out of character, and partly because his role as her tutor makes the whole thing feel uncomfortably incestuous. But the political chicanery in Chyrellos is fun and it's good to finally get a chance to spend some time with Martel, who is every bit as suave and egotistical a villain as one might wish.

Having learnt that Martel is heading to Lamorkand to meet up with the invading armies of Zemoch who crossed the border shortly after the recover of Bhelliom, Sparhawk and his group of companions heads off in pursuit, pausing only to allow him get married. With the dubious magical assistance of the Sapphire Rose and the troll gods, the company steadily close the gap with Martel, Adus, Annias, Princess Arissa and her son Lycheas. Sneaking through the Zemoch capital — also, confusingly, called Zemoch — Sparhawk arrive at the complex that contains both the Imperial Palace and the Temple of Azash mere minutes after his prey, forcing them to flee into the labyrinth that lies behind Otha's throne room. Eventually reaching the temple itself, Sparhawk has a dramatic duel with Martel; Sephrenia and Otha bombard each other with magic; and Bhelliom deals with the Elder God Azash once and for all. Rather downcast, despite their victory, the party travel back to Chyrellos, pausing only for a lucid dream in which the Goddess Aphrael has Sparhawk through Bhelliom into the depths of an unknown ocean.

Rather than rush toward the conclusion, we instead get an account of a long and rather depressing — intentionally so — journey across the continent. One of the features of Eddings' novels is that his characters spend a great deal of time travelling, although I suspect he may have become frustrated with it at some point because in later books — The Tamuli and the only borderline readable Redemption of Althalus — he comes up ways to skip over the travelogue bits, jumping straight from one bit of plot action to another. Here though, the journey cranks up the tension, not merely that of the chase, but also of the sinister cloud and the bout of despondency that hits the normally sanguine group of knights. Although the results of the finale are somewhat inevitable, the details along the way always come as a bit of shock and Martel's demise is nicely handled, underscoring the love-hate super-villain relationship he has with Sparhawk and with Sephrenia.

Having avoided the temptation to treat the fall of Azash as moment of glory, Eddings adds a coda which shows the next few years as a time of great hardship and famine as the gods struggle to deal with the death of one of their own. During this time, Sparhawk and Ehlana have a daughter, Danae; Sephrenia and Vanion vanish overnight; King Wargun succumbs to alcoholism; King Obler of Deira slips into his dotage; and the Eshandist Heresy seems to be flaring up in Rendor once again. Eventually Aphrael tires of the general depression of the gods, gathers her friends to her and, in the final act of the trilogy, dances spring and new hope back into the world.

In the end I think it's a fitting conclusion to an enjoyable trilogy albeit one with definite weaknesses. There are some annoyances especially in the first book's tendency to combine as-you-know-bob's with an equally unsuitable casual familiarity between people who haven't seen each other for a decade, or Sparhawk's endlessly repeated account of daybreak in Rendor, or Sephrenia and Flute aside, the almost total lack of female characters. But if you can overlook these failings, Eddings' broad-brush, fantasy catholicism and mystical Judaism versus Unspeakable Evil, is certainly worth considering.

Having seen off David Eddings first two big fantasy series, I've decided to carry on and read The Diamond Throne, the first of his Elenium novels. These are set in a new fantasy world, much darker than that of Garion and friends, where crime is a normal fact of life, every city has a squalid underbelly, and racial intolerance is a fact of life for large numbers of people.

The world principal divisions are religious, although some of these also fracture along racial lines. The majority of the book's characters are Elenes, a group whose monotheistic, hierarchical, universal catholic church is clearly modelled on Roman lines. A few of the characters, including Sephrenia, the Pandion Knights' tutor in the arts of magic, and Flute, a young foundling, are Styrics; polytheistic followers of the Younger Gods who form a distinct racial group, living in their own villages, following distinctive cultural practices — including eschewing pork — and who also suffer from some of the other distinctive forms of anti-Semitism in the form of blood libels and racially motivated attacks at the hands of their Elene neighbours. The third group to feature are the Zemochs, who are combination of Elenes and Styrics. Like the Elenes, they are monotheists; but unlike the Elenes, whose god is good if remote, the Zemoch god is the capricious and vengeful Azash, one of the Styric Elder Gods, who rules his country through the ruthless hand of his disciple, the Emperor Otha.

As ever with Eddings, the book opens with a spot of mythological world-building. In this case we get the story of how Gwerig the Troll carved a huge sapphire, which he named Bhelliom, into the shape of a rose and instilled it with great magic which he was able to control with a pair of rings. When the rings wer stolen by the Styric Goddess Aphrael, Gwerig left his cave to search for them, making it possible for King Adian of Thalasia to slip in and steal the sapphire. The gem, installed in the Crown of Thalasia, was lost hundreds of years later when one of the king's decedents was killed in a skirmish on the way join a huge army assembled to repel an intruding force of Zemochs, who had themselves invaded the west in order to claim Bhelliom for Azash.

The story proper opens some five hundred years later with Sparhawk, a Pandion Church Knight, returning home to the city of Cimmura after ten years in exile. Upon arrival he learns that the young Queen Elana, once his pupil, is at the point of death with her life maintained by a great diamond enclosure — the result of a spell cast by Sephrenia, the Pandions' tutor in Styric magic, and sustained by the lives of twelve knights, one of whom will die for every month the enchantment continues. Almost immediately Sparhawk finds himself confronting Annias, the corrupt and ambitious Primate of Cimmura, who has wasted no time setting up Elana's bastard cousin as regent in order to embezzle enough from the royal treasury to buy his way on to the archprelate's throne. Following up on a chance lead — a siting of Krager, an underling of a renegade Pandion called Martel — Sparhawk discovers that the Primate has come up with a convoluted scheme to discredit the Pandion order and, with a bit of fast footwork, he and his colleagues are able to turn things round to their advantage.

The opening is a succinct bit of world building, establishing both the object of the question — Bhelliom, the sapphire rose — and the ultimate antagonist in the from of the god Azash. It also gives us a world of trolls and Nordic heroes, while the disposal of the Crown of Thalasia in the lake is positively Arthurian. With the arrival of Sparhawk in Cimmura, see a detailed medieval world populated by unscrupulous clergymen, foolish princes, and honest thieves. Both Sparhawk and his squire Kurik are cut from the same cloth: hard as nails on the outside, but with large, compassionate souls within. Kalten's happy-go-lucky nature balances Sparhawk's seriousness, Preceptor Vanion is the perfect soldier and the tough mentor who has turned into a solid friend, while Sephrenia, the Pandions' tutor in magic, manages to balance wisdom and mysticism without the know-it-all attitude of some of Eddings others sorceresses, and Talen, the young thief Sparhawk encounters in underworld den, both adds comic relief and acts a proxy from reader by providing a reason for the others to explain some of the more obvious bits of world history.

Primate Annias' complex plot to discredit the Pandion Order also does a lot of heavy lifting, not least by showing his willingness to murder his way to the top of the church hierarchy. The plan turns on Count Relgan's willingness to offer hospitality to a group of armoured men without every doubting their genuineness, underscoring the importance of chivalry in their aristocratic society, while the execution of the plan provides a natural way to inject both Krager and Adus, Martel's two underlings, into the story. The aftermath allows for the introduction of the various Elene monarchs, the Preceptors of the three other Militant Orders — Cyrinics, Alciones and Genidians — and Patriarch Dolmant, the acceptable face of the ruling conclave.

Recognising the danger of Annias ambitions and realising that they can be stymied by restoring Queen Elana to health, the four preceptors agree to a show of unity: a group composed of members from each order with the goal of finding a cure for the queen's illness. Travelling to Chyrellos, where Patriarch Dolmant does a careful job of putting Annias' scheme before the church hierarchy without actually naming names, Sephrenia and Sparhawk realise that the Styrics who have travelled to the Holy City claiming to seek instruction in the Elene faith are actually Zemochs, there to teach the worship of Azash to those willing to sell their souls for power. With the arrival of the knights from the three other orders, the party — Sparhawk, Kalten, Sephrenia, Bevier the Cyrinic, Tynian the Alcione, Ulath the Genidian, Talen, Berit, a Pandion novice, and mute founding Styric child nicknamed Flute — go to the University of Borrata where Sephrenia eventually discovers that the queen has been given a lethal Rendorish poison.

Chyrellos is very clearly modelled on the Vatican, with the huge marble basilica standing in for St Peters; while the hierarchy are essentially a conclave of cardinals and the Archprelate is the Pope in all but title. The city's cosmopolitan nature and the Elene desire to convert the Styrics, whom they see as heathens, has blinded them to the fact that some of their visitors are teaching corruption to the faithful rather than learning redemption for themselves — while the worshipers at the Zemoch house serve to set up plot elements that are expanded later on.

The three knights from the different militant orders are an interesting and talented bunch: no bad thing given the amount of time we're going to spend in their company. Bevier is just under thirty, socially conservative — the others initially worry about putting him on edge — very religious, extremely accomplished with the Lochaber axe, and, perhaps, slightly under characterised; Tynian is easy-going, massively armoured, good at necromancy, and extremely talkative; while the towering Ulath is almost silent, often restricting himself to single words, but with a deep knowledge of trolls and ogres — both of which are native to Thalasia — and the most thoughtful of the three.

Realising that Kurik, Sephrenia and Flute are likely to be able to pass as native Rendors, Sparhawk tells the others to locate Adus and Krager while he pursues a cure for the poison. Suspecting that someone may be watching their departure, Sparhawk cooks up a plan that involves changing ships in mid-river; a plan that turns out to be sadly necessary when a powerful supernatural entity — Sephrenia identifies it as a Damork — uses a waterspout to sink their original vessel. Arriving in the port of Cippria, Sparhawk gets confirmation of the poison, learns that only one doctor has every effected a cure, and finds evidence to suggest that Annias is behind the attempt on the queen's life. Travelling deep into Rendor in search of Doctor Tanjin, Sparhawk finds himself in a city ruled by a man called Arasham, the current leader of the Eshandist Heretics. Having learned from Tanjin that only a magical talisman can cure the queen, Sparhawk and Sephrenia risk a meeting with Arasham in an attempt to determine whether his amulet might do the trick, only for the old man to ask for another guest to join them; the other guest, of course, being Martel.

Returning to Rendor where he spent a decade masquerading as a shopkeeper called Mahkra, Sparhawk discovers that he now knows enough to draw some new conclusions about his previous experiences in the country. Having learnt that Martel is working for Annias, he realises that the almost-fatal ambush Martel arranged for him shortly after he went into exile might also have been at the Primate's orders; not least because the ambush occurred while he was on his way to see the Elenian consul, who just happens to be Annias' cousin. He and Sephrenia also realise, with the help of some information from an Arcian abbot, that the Damork has been around for much longer than anyone suspected, having been seen wandering around the city of Cippria questioning the locals shortly after Martel's botched murder attempt.

Rendor itself comes across as a mixture of post-classical North African and Arab influences, with the desert cities dominated by the influence of zealous Eshandists — a heretical, anti-hierarchical splinter from the main Elene Church — and the coastal towns adhering to a less heretical and more eccentric version of the Elene faith. Although Eddings largely avoids CS Lewis' mistakes with Calormene, the Church knights Sparhawk encounters are universally rude about the intelligence, consistency, and personal hygiene of most Eshandists; although I believe this is balanced somewhere else in the text when someone, possibly Patriarch Dolmant, acknowledges that Eshandism arose at a time when the church hierarchy was notoriously corrupt and implies that their initial grievances may have had a certain legitimacy.

I can't leave without saying quite how much I like Martel's initial appearance: having made the reader wait and wait, Eddings finally introduces Sparhawk's nemesis in a situation where neither can actually do anything to each other and so they're forced to sit opposite one another and pretend to be polite. Physically the description of Martel as tall, deep voiced and well spoken, self-confident to the point of arrogance, with white hair even though he is under forty — I've just realised that Martel, Sparhawk and Kalten are my age! — reminds me of no-one quite so much as Magneto. Given the emphasis that Vanion puts on the Sparhawk and Martel being the two very best knights of their generation and the whole friendship-turned-to-animosity thing, they're worth nemeses for each other.

All things considered, I think Diamond Throne marks a solid start to the trilogy. I like the new world that Eddings has built for himself. I like the darker tone, I appreciate the way he has learnt from his past problems — especially that of having made his characters so powerful from the get-go that he has to introduce all sorts of slightly inconsistent constraints to prevent them from storming across the world in a tornado of sorcery — and how he sets the clock ticking in the very first chapters. I think his fantasy version of the medieval church works rather well — right down to the massive corruption of its hierarchy! — especially because its almost completely absent central god contrasts strongly with the tangible, living presences of the rest of the world's gods.