I’m reading this in the
omnibus edition, entitled ‘The Deed of Paksenarrion’, but I’ll review
each of the the three volumes separately, for convenience. The series
tells the story of Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir, or Paks for short, who
runs away from her humble home to join Duke Phelan's army as a way of
avoiding a marriage being forced on her by her father. This first book
is about her training, her first battles and her involvement in the
Duke's various military enterprises, and although it starts slowly with a
lot of detail about training regimes and the like, it builds in time to
a much pacier level. From the middle onwards I found it completely
absorbing.
The author doesn't shy away from the realities of
military life. There are plenty of details about the privations of life
on the march, the difficulties inherent in a mixed-sex army and the
chaos of the battlefield. There are plenty of deaths, too. But on the
whole, this isn't in the gritty realism school of fantasy; there is
little gore or graphic descriptions of injuries, for example. I did
wonder sometimes just how this particular army would work. It's a
wonderful idea to have women fully integrated and treated identically,
and although I squirmed every time Paks had to strip off alongside the
men, I daresay that's just a cultural issue. But I did wonder how they
coped with periods on those long, mud-filled marches.
It's
traditional in this type of story for the main character to become a
hero - acquiring unusual skills with weapons, for instance, or showing
improbable levels of strategic thinking, and rapidly graduating to a
leadership role. This book avoids that cliché. Paks is exactly what she
seems - a sheepfarmer's daughter who simply wants to be a good soldier.
She makes mistakes, she has weaknesses and prejudices, and in tricky
situations she often depends on others more experienced than her, such
as during the flight with Canna and Saben. She’s good at what she does,
but it comes from determination and intense training rather than special
abilities. She does heroic deeds, but again, it’s not because of some
unusual quality or because she seeks out risky missions, but rather that
she doesn’t shy away from such situations when they arise, seeing them
as just a part of her job. I liked Paks very much. Her self-effacing
quiet bravery and unwillingness to stand out from the rest of her cohort
are not just admirable qualities in themselves, but rare in fantasy,
where every main character these days seems brash and opinionated. And
then there’s her unquestioning loyalty to the Duke, her employer, even
when she discovers that his soldiers are not quite the heroic idealists
she aspired to but something much more pragmatic, being simple
mercenaries.
I very much liked the way the world is revealed
slowly, in small increments, with names and places and even religions
tossed into conversations without explanation. It’s hard to grasp what’s
going on, sometimes, and even with the map I couldn’t always follow the
journeys, but it gave the world an unusual depth. There’s not a great
deal of magic in view, but it clearly permeates all the various
societies, and where it does turn up, it’s used very effectively. I
found the Marshall and the paladin, with their beliefs which so
disturbed the Duke, absolutely compelling, and I would have liked to
know more about them. Every scene with the Marshall was dynamite, in
fact. This aspect is something Moon does brilliantly - weaving a complex
mesh of religion and magic and a variety of belief systems into the
story without ever resorting to dry infodumps.
Some grumbles. The
names are difficult. I applaud the author’s efforts to demonstate the
social and cultural diversity of the Duke’s soldiers and the various
others they encounter by having a range of different types of names, but
it made it very difficult to work out who was who. Neither rank nor
gender was obvious from most names, and I constantly forgot whether a
character was a captain or a private or from a different band
altogether. More than once I was startled to find that a long-running
character was not the gender I had assumed (shame on me, I suppose, for
making assumptions at all, but I do like to know, as a minimum, whether a
character is male or female). The sheer number of characters made this
problem worse. And if character names were tricky, places and groups
were even worse. Occasionally, when discussing who might turn up for the
next battle, I’d see something like this: A and B have to stay home
because they’re threatened by C, and D has to defend E, but F and G have
said they’ll come, but then after what happened at H they may not, and
you can never count on I and J... Without taking notes, it’s just
impossible to follow this sort of thing. One other grumble: I liked that
events were seen through Paks’ eyes, which meant gaps and missing
information and changes without explanation, but there were times when a
little more information would have been nice. We never did learn, for
instance, what punishment, if any, was handed out to Stephi (or if it
was mentioned, I missed it).
The ending is wonderful. Yes,
there’s a dramatic series of battles, but ultimately it’s about Paks and
her beliefs, and about right and wrong, and being true to your ideals,
and I can’t fault it. This is a terrific story of one person, a humble
and very likeable woman, just doing a job she enjoys, and finding
herself by no choice of her own drawn into bigger and more important
matters. I liked the details of her life as a soldier, which was never
sugar-coated, but also never resorted to overly-graphic grimness. I
liked that she didn’t want marriage or a lover, and that was accepted
without question (too often authors think a female protagonist has to
have a sex life). This was very close to five stars for me, but the
confusing number of characters and names, which made some events hard to
follow, and the slow start, keep it to a very good four stars.
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