I finished The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu (Indiebound, Book Depository, Amazon) almost two months ago and have struggled to write a review. It’s not
that the book is bad or that it’s great, mostly it’s due to my own crazy
schedule and a feeling that I have nothing more to add to the many other
reviews out there. So, this is a bit different than my usual review, more of a
reflection, but hopefully it serves an ultimate outcome that is at least
similar to that of a review.
The Winds of Khalakovo is a debut novel, the first in a trilogy called The Lays of Anuskaya, and one of the many
debuts that Night Shade Books has put in the last few years by relatively
unknown authors who are doing something a bit ‘different’. With that said, The Winds of Khalakovo is a pretty
standard set-up for an epic fantasy published in the current environment: an
interesting world, a sort of elemental-based magic, politics of repressed
peoples and aristocracy, and a non-western setting. As I’ve come to expect from
debut books, the weaknesses tend to be most glaring in pacing, with the typical
trouble of balancing showing and telling, info-dumps, and the set-up for the
bigger events to come in future books in the trilogy.
Overall, The Winds of Khalakovo is quite successful – the characters are well-rounded and interesting, the Imperial Russian-inspired
culture feels fresh (even though non-western settings has become quite popular in
the past year or two), the gypsy-like culture of the indigenous Aramahn is well-done,
and the action is as much political as physical.
And it’s the
politics that I’ve kept coming back to in my almost 2-months of thinking on
this. The politics of The Winds of
Khalakovo are widely praised as the biggest strength of this book. However,
the reaction that I can’t help but come to is this: if the politics in this
book are praised as a complex addition to the fantasy genre, what does it say
about the genre as a whole? Or to put it another way, if these are good
politics, then fantasy must be full of really badly (or perhaps, simply) presented
politics. And in my opinion, that is a very sad fact.
When I use
the term politics, I’m not really speaking of the politics we are bombarded
with by media in our society today (particularly during an election year here
in the US). What I am speaking of are the complex relations of people in power,
who want to be in power, who were once in power – from the top of society all
the way down to the interactions among the least of a society. The shifting
alliances, the lies, the truths, betrayal, idealism, heroism, morality,
religion, sex, best intentions, selfishness, and flat-out evil, inhumane
actions. It’s the politics of people and their interactions. It’s what drives
our world and it’s what all too many fantasy novels completely lack. It’s what
turns a good story into a compelling novel.
In my
opinion, the politics of The Winds of
Khalakovo are not complex or particularly deep – I found them rather linear
and predictable. But, they do play a central role in the book, much more so
than in many other books which tend to focus much more heavily on individual
goals and motivations (there’s plenty of that here as well) rather than the
complex interactions of many individuals, government, societies, etc. This has
only made me realize more and more why those that are praised at the top of
genre belong there – they do the politics well. George RR Martin and K.J.Parker immediately leap to the top in this respect. Other authors I love at
least have their moments – David Anthony Durham, S.L. Farrell, and RobertJordan (for all his faults it’s the politics of that series that I enjoy the
most).
I have neither
the intention nor the inclination of diving into the reflection and going
deeper into these politics I’m envisioning and how the fantasy genre most
commonly fails to succeed in this area. I’m not sure I’m the person for it. But
it is an observation that’s been bugging me for a while now. And hell, it
probably mostly comes down to my individual tastes and what really compels me
as a reader (incidentally, the other thing that compels me the most is almost
the opposite of these politics – the mythic, almost poetic telling of an essentially
archetypical story).
OK,
back to The Winds of Khalakovo. I’m
not really intending to criticize this book on its politics – relative to the
rest of the genre it does pretty well in this regard. The book is enjoyable and
I look forward to finding the time to read the sequel, which reactions indicate
is a great follow-up and a large improvement in Beaulieu’s writing. This is yet
another promising debut from Night Shade Books, and the direction that they are
taking these days is a truly exciting development in a way that I haven’t seen
since the early days of Pyr. Knowing nothing else other than that a book has
been published by Night Shade in the past couple of years is enough to make me interested.
