The Mongoliad: Book Three (The Foreworld Saga) [Paperback]

The mongols have a vast empire, but cracks are showing. Their Khan doesn't cope well with life as an emperor, with a big court and administration, he drinks. He tries to reconnect with the spirit of his ancestors by going on a hunt for the great bear. The young warrior who suggested it was sent by his brother to help him, but can he break through court politics, intrigues, the Khan's depression, or will he be caught and ground down in this net?
A small group of the shield-brethren, a mysterious order of warrior knights, are on a lengthy journey beyond the world they know to strike at the heart of the enemy. Can they succeed against overwhelming odds?
Others of their order are trying to keep the mongols occupied to prevent them from advancing deeper into Europe by participating in gladiatorial fights in an arena. They also get in contact with fighters the mongols keep as prisoners, because there is a plan... Will this work, given the rivalries and enmity of other knight orders that are supposed to be on their side?
Then there are the binders, mediators and couriers, remnants of an old sisterhood who are relying on intuition to move nearly unnoticed through society and nature. One of them is guiding the shield-brethren through the steppes and deserts of the east, another is working as an advisor to emperor Frederik II, another is caught up in the politics in Rome, where there is a stalemate in the elections of a new pope, with the senator of Rome, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the cardinals are in a clinch for power and influence. A mad priest who gets his hands on the Holy Grail adds more complications...
They are all wonderfully well told, these stories that transport you into medieval times, making you identify with the persons struggling with difficult situations, their sense of duty and honour, their loyalties and friendships. I hope we get more.

I've been a fan of Neal Stephenson for many years, and particularly enjoyed Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, two excellent examples of his ability to skillfully weave a gripping fictional storyline in with real historical events and characters.

I was initially sceptical of The Mongoliad though, as with other collaborative projects there's the risk of too many cooks spoiling the broth. This isn't an ordinary collaboration though - it began life as a series of apps intended to create a semi-fictitious universe, unconstrained by the traditional text novel structure. Stemming originally from Stephenson's desire to create genuinely authentic combat scenes, it grew from a collection of short stories into a significant project, spanning nearly eighteen months and involving quite a list of authors, mediaeval combat experts and others.

A fascinating project, but it also raises another concern - will it translate to a traditional text novel? Fortunately, the answer is a definite 'yes'. Fans of Stephenson will immediately recognise his hand - the melding of the scientific with the mystical, the ability to bring history to life in a way that a textbook simply cannot (I've found myself regularly referring to Wikipedia to figure out which bits are real historical events and which bits are fictitious); the meticulous obsession with getting the details correct (the initial motivation for the project, after all) but it's also obvious that it's not solely Stephenson at the helm. That's not to say that the writing style is inconsistent - I never got the sense that the storyline was handed back and forth between the authors - but I think real diehard fans of Stephenson (or any of the other authors) will notice the difference.

The story itself is quite multithreaded - book three of this series picks up quite an advanced storyline, but includes enough background that you wouldn't need to have read the previous two books to quickly pick up the relevant information. As a whole, The Mongoliad obviously benefits from its origins as a much larger project - the characters are already mature, believable people and the environments and events are described in quite beautiful detail.

Overall though, I was a little surprised that there was so little interaction between the parallel threads of the story. Other reviewers have commented that the story felt a little unfinished at the end too - perhaps both symptoms of the fact that we're just viewing facets of a larger world. Without wanting to give away plot details I got the impression that there is more to come (or at least the opportunity for more) - so many of the sub-stories were not resolved (admittedly this will always be difficult when you're building around real people and events - you have to stop somewhere), but it certainly didn't finish on a cliffhanger.

One important point that hasn't really been discussed in reviews of the books is that the story may have been intentionally left partly unresolved. The project was conceived with the expectation that fans would continuously enrich the world The Mongoliad is set in ('Foreworld'), via an online community. A story with all the ends neatly tied up would discourage further writing - considering the project as a whole, that compulsion to further develop the storylines of the (surviving) characters can potentially enrich the universe much further, from a much wider pool of contributors.

As a novel on its own, there are a few criticisms one could direct at The Mongoliad. However, as an example of what's possible in a new and relatively untested creative writing paradigm, it's a really exciting example of just one of the possible outputs (according to the project website The Mongoliad is just the first story set in the Foreworld universe). I arrived a bit late, but I'm really looking forward to what happens next.

This is the third book in the `Mongoliad' sequence. The series was initially written collaboratively between the various authors, with each chapter being published individually on the internet, a sort of cross between The Lord of the Rings and Wikipedia. The text in the print editions is a slightly revised, "author's preferred" version of that originally published online. There's a large stable of writers producing chapters for The Mongoliad, ranging from debut authors through big names like Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Interestingly, it's quite tricky to guess which authors have had a hand in which chapters.

This third part of the Mongoliad is an absolute doorstop of a novel - it's roughly the size of both preceding volumes squished together. As with the previous two volumes, the reader is switched between a variety of character viewpoints. Most of these will be familiar from previous books in the series, and progress and conclude existing storylines, rather than introducing new characters or concepts.

Structurally, the text will be familiar to anyone who has read the novels that come before - bite-sized chapters from a character's viewpoint allow the reader to pick up and put down the book easily - it's harder to get tired of a character when the next viewpoint change is only a few pages away. As noted above, the authorial voices manage to merge together almost seamlessly, providing a consistent - and good - narrative experience. The short chapters also seem to work well with the hectic narrative pace, driving the reader to get through "just one more page" before putting the book down.

Some of the issues I noted in volume two are less prevalent here; the prose is generally smoother, and there are fewer `rough' chapters. Fittingly, given that this is the conclusion of a trilogy, many of the plot points are wrapped up over the course of the text, or at the conclusion, and where the reader Is left with a cliff-hanger, it's a nicely dramatic one, rather than having the impression of a forgotten loose end.

I won't spoil the plot here by indicating which arcs are resolved and how, but it's worth noting that the lack of resolution in the second volume is made up for in this third instalment. There's the usual assortment of chases, witty banter and brutal-but-technically-correct swordplay, but there's more of a structural sense to this part of the text, as each piece of action is used to drive the plot, and the reader, toward the climax and denouement.

Overall, then, this is a solid concluding entry in the Mongoliad trilogy. There's a fair amount of sword fights, some historical events, solid and often witty dialogue, and a few genuinely touching moments. Things Happen. Conclusions are provided. Characters, major and minor, live and die and win and lose. It's more of the same from the first two volumes, but turned up to eleven. If you enjoyed those, then you owe it to yourself to read this conclusion. If you have yet to read the first two parts of this series - why are you reading this review? Go and read them, instead!

A solid conclusion to an epic adventure; a few rough edges, but technically and narratively an excellent piece, very much worth reading.