Firesong

After the superb Slaves of the Mastery, this book had a lot to live up to. Unfortunately, it falls far short. The Manth people begin their journey to find their ‘homeland’, which means that the elegant simplicity of the plot of Slaves gives way to the clumsy episodic nature of book one. While it’s more serious in tone than The Wind Singer, this final instalment lacks its charm, and cannot come close to the sustained flow and driving climax of the second. There are some good ideas, but all underdeveloped, giving the impression of a sad nest of unhatched eggs: the Manth people slaughter a whole tribe of thieves for trying to steal their young women, but this is never treated as reprehensible. Just when the reality of travel across a snowy wasteland seems to be taking a realistic toll, Kestrel walks a few feet and finds a valley that has tropical weather – a daft resolution to a crisis if ever there was one. Once the powers of the Singer people are revealed, the heroes go Super Saiyan and start flying about, which was rubbish in Dragonball Z, rubbish in The Matrix and is rubbish here.

It’s meant to be epic, but it’s just naff. Albard, formerly known as The Master, and his companion Jumper are both non-characters, the passages concerning them hurried and unconvincing. But worse, the major characters don’t develop at all. Love is presented so clumsily, as so direct and unproblematic – someone says they love someone else, and that’s that – although people seem to be able to change the objects of their desire quite easily. Kestrel’s sacrifice seems contrived just so that Bowman can happily marry Sisi, making a nonsense of all the actual training Bowman undertakes, and the idea that embracing death freely gives ultimate happiness is frankly not a very good message. Ultimately, the book was shallow and unsatisfying, and rather a chore, which is a great shame considering how I loved the predecessor. But while that was a feast for the reader, this one seemed to barely have been cooked.