Dragon Bones (Hurog Duology) [Mass Market Paperback]

And this is just how the book gets going! There's a lot in here, and yet it is not one of the doorstoppers - the story is concisely written, but for all that we really get to know Ward, his motivations, his troubles, his reasoning behind his actions. As the perspective shifts, usually to show the reader what is happening at a location where Ward is not present, we also get to see how others perceive him. Ward undergoes a great deal of growth, as he views his own character as pieces of the roles he tries on. His own personal development is brought on well as the story unfolds, without being the centerpiece of the tale it is never neglected.

Ward is only 19 here, and seems very mature for his age, which I attribute to the façade he has successfully presented to the world at large for seven years. He has long protected his brother and sister, and certainly wants to protect his people, from the band that travel with him to those in Hurog itself, to the people he meets on his journey. He takes any failures very personally, and is altogether someone I'd love to know in real life - a solid gold character. The others in his band we get to know well too, and his cousins and some of the people at court. Briggs is not afraid of dramatic action - the betrayal is not just by one person, is political and personal, and is core to the development of the story.

Briggs has successfully woven a tale of many elements together and has come up with a sterling tale, skilfully told. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

When the hero's party camps for the night in the ancient ruins of the
temple and oracle of an ambiguous god, you suddenly realise that it's
composed of stock characters out of such a game. There are not one but
two warrior princelings, one of them son of the Dwarven King; not one
but two mages, one of them (although we don't yet know it) a
part-human shape-shifter; a priestess of another ambiguous god; a
beautiful temptress; a bard; an escaped slave; a virgin princess; a
grizzled veteran; a mute, and an old retainer. Oh, and, I should have
said, there's only seven of them. The hero is, of course (aren't they
all) rightful heir to an ancient but impoverished lordship, driven out
by the political machinations of evil forces. So far, so cod.

And yet, despite all that, this is very far from an awful book. Why
not? Character, back story, but most important of all, story telling.

Let's start with the hero, who is also for most of the text the first
person narrator. He's the eldest of three psychologically damaged
children of a tyranous, jealous and sadistic father. To survive, he's
learned to pretend to be someone he's not, and having played an act
for so long he's now unsure of his own identity, and continues to play
roles; yet through his narration we can see underneath someone
entirely likeable: generous, kind, usually gentle, trusting, utterly
conscientious, engaging. Ward is the kind of aristocrat who could
almost give aristocracy a good name:

"I was born and bred to prevent things like this. Being
Hurogmeten was more than owning land - it was taking care of
the people who lived there. Responsibility was bred into my
bones..."

Ward's title, Hurogmeten, means 'Guardian of
Dragons', but he lives in a world where dragons are no longer seen,
driven to apparent extinction by mages seeking to exploit the magic
inherent in their bodies. Driven to extinction by, among others, one
of Ward's own ancestors.

Fantasies are usually, also, in part, love stories. This one
isn't. The core relationship of the plot is not that between Ward and
a love interest (there is one, but she's a bit part), nor even that
between Ward and the villains, but that between Ward and his magically
bonded slave, a tortured and tormented creature who has endured
thousands of years of (mostly) mistreatment. The relationship between
Ward and Oreg is beautifully and subtly drawn, and makes the plot's
eventual denouement all the more poignant.

Ward's quest is not a sub-Tolkien battle between good and incarnate
evil. The villains are bad, but they're bad in entirely human ways:
greed, cruelty and lust for power. The hero and his allies are good,
too, in human ways: generosity, honesty, responsibility. But none of
them is a paragon, each of them has faults.

And so does the plot. Firstly and most glaringly, the story contains
chapters where the first person narrator is not present. How to cope
with this? If you're going to have a first person narrator, the best
solution is to avoid such passages. But if you can't avoid such
passages the next best solution, it seems to me, is to switch to an
alternate first person narrator: another witness who can experience
that part of the tale. Or if you can do neither of these things, have
the first person narrator narrate how that part of the story had been
relayed to him.

But Briggs, instead, shifts mode to omniscient narrator for these
sections. When she's not writing as Ward, she writes as Nineteenth
Century Novelist, able to see the innermost thoughts of each
character, even a character about to die, who could never have passed
on their experience to anyone. There's nothing wrong with writing as
the omniscient narrator, of course; it's probably the most common
viewpoint in English fiction. It's just that it sits very oddly with
the first person narration of the rest of the story. There is a
disjunction, a dissonance, and it jars.

The other problem with the plot, to my eyes, is a slight tendency to
lower a god out of the machine. This is always a risk in stories which
contain magic; indeed unlimited use of magic can blow holes in any
plot. At one point in the story Briggs needs to transfer a group of
characters from one point on the map to another, quickly. There are
lots of ways she could have done it, but what she chooses to do is to
introduce a new magical mechanism, not previously shown and not
apparently conforming to the same magical physics as the other magic
in the book.

A final niggle for me is climate. Ward's own home in the north is cold
temperate and fairly dry. The land he travels to in the south is
warmer; fair enough, they're in the northern hemisphere of some
world. But it's also very wet. Very, very wet, and there's no
explanation of why this should be so. It's on the eastern seaboard of
a continent, protected from coriolis winds by mountains to the West,
so it should also be dry...

However, these faults are slight. Overall this is an excellent and
engaging book, a coming of age story of a thoroughly likeable and
entirely believable character set against a background of deep history
and credible politics, with (mostly) internally consistent magical
physics. Not a great book, but one I greatly like.