The Steel Remains [Paperback]

If you are a fan of the likes of Steven Erikson and Joe Abercrombie then you will enjoy this `dark fantasy' title by Robert Morgan.

Many previous reviews have mentioned the graphic sex scenes, especially the gay scenes, so let's get that out of the way first then. The main character does work as a bitter and ostracised gay warrior, but I don't personally think that the main character, Ringil would have worked half as well if he was heterosexual. His very nature and mentality seems to be shaped on how he has been treated, so it works well. However had he been straight, it would be hard to have any sympathy for his callous attitude to sexual partners. In fact he would be very hard not to despise. The sexual scenes are a mix of all gender preferences and at times feel like pointless fillers, but there is only one real strong scene that might put off the homophobic readers, especially as it added very little to the plot.

The book is well written and the story fairly good, but it did feel like it should have been part of a series, with the ending seeming very rushed.

The other main characters seem to have little to do with the plot until the last hundred pages of the book, feeling a bit divorced from the main plotline until then. It is almost as if the story was edited very heavily and all the other main characters are sadly a bit disjointed from the main story as a result.

I'd be surprised if this isn't the start of a series as it was very enjoyable despite the points previously mentioned.

Well worth a read if you want something a bit more gritty in your fantasy genre reading.

Richard K. Morgan is a British fantasy/sci-fi author known for his succesful dystopian cyberpunk-type novels. In "The Steel Remains", he has made a first successful foray into fantasy, while maintaining the usual 'noir' elements and the political cynicism of his works. The result is a highly readable, exciting and compelling work. It is in particular interesting because he takes, as fantasy after all to some degree inevitably requires, a number of clichés from the genre; but he manages to subvert them quite effectively. The reader often recognizes certain elements in the book as typical fantasy tropes (the nomadic barbarians, the Imperial City, the elf-type ethereal creatures, etc.), but the function they have in the story is almost always vastly different from the usual approach, and in this rests Morgan's cleverness. Moreover, despite the young and often educated readership of fantasy books, it is still very uncommon to have a gay protagonist or prominent homosexual themes in a novel. At least, such novels rarely go on to become successful in the mainstream as well.

"The Steel Remains" however manages to do this and in a way that in turn avoids the clichés and tropes of the genre of 'gay fiction', being much darker and much less gratifying than the usual 'gay novel' is. Nonetheless, it is to be expected that the petty, the unimaginative, the closed-minded and the neurotic would make a big deal out of the theme itself playing any role at all in what is mainly a swordfighting book, despite the prevalence of homosexuality and homoerotic elements in real life (especially in virtually all-male settings like armies). But any straight person who prejudges the book as uninteresting for this reason is depriving himself as much as if a gay person were to refuse to read "Romeo and Juliet" because it has straight themes.

Since the book is to be the first of a trilogy, the exact world in which it plays and the setting is not explained much, and the reader has to discover the rules of the world mainly on the go. This keeps the book fast-paced. The plot itself is easily enough explained: it traces the actions and interactions of the three main characters, a barbarian chieftain, a cynical war hero shunned for his sexuality, and a female warrior-vizier to the Emperor who is a last descendant of an ancient race. All are, as the book's cover says, "damaged veterans of the war against the Lizard Folk". Despite the silliness of this concept itself, the actual psychology is worked out very carefully and in great detail in their 'careers' since the last battle of that war, so that the book is already very far underway when the plot target eventually becomes visible. It turns out a strange power seems poised to invade the world from an unseen dimension, and through a great number of plot twists and turns, these three must reunite to stop them. It is difficult to say more without spoiling it, but suffice to say that despite the somewhat clichéd impression such a description might give, it is really quite refreshing, at least for a genre flooded with second-rate imitations and epigonism.

The book is fairly heavy on violence and sex, so this has to appeal to you to some degree for it to be worth reading - but then again, all evidence seems to show that most people do in fact enjoy this. Morgan's writing is fast, to the point, and believable, and his characters compelling. Fans experienced in reading fantasy will enjoy the noir take on the tropes, which (as is to be expected) suggest the atmosphere of the better kind of cyberpunk sci-fi. People interested for whatever reason in gay themes or at least some psychological real-world realism and originality of that kind inserted into a typical fantasy world will also do well to read this book.

I had a hard time deciding whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars. I eventually elected to give it three, because much as I loved Ringil who is a deserving five-star character, the story just wasn't enough to give it the final push to 4 stars.

Graphic sex scenes and extended combat descriptions do not put me off a book, unless badly written, and Richard Morgan is an experienced writer who is well able to handle these with aplomb. But I'm a girl who likes a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory ending in books, though I don't much mind in what order they occur as long as they are present. So much of The Steel Remains gave the impression that this is an epilogue, and the real story took place ten years before. Which would be an interesting plot device, were the previous story ever explained, but the "epilogue plot" itself struggles to demonstrate to the reader why this is more significant, and deserving of a book, than "what happened at Gallows Gap", and struggles to maintain the tension necessary to stimulate interest in the direction of the story - the "what happens next?" factor. There's plenty of scope to fill in the gaps in later novels though, so I can see that this is a good grounding for further books, but as a novel in its own right this just isn't strong enough.

Another reviewer has commented on the implausibility of the three lead characters meeting up at the end of the book, and I fear I have to agree - it's not really a likely coincidence, and jars slightly.

Now for the really really positive bit: Ringil. He really is the star of the show. Being out and proud, right from page 1, does not make him any less macho - but in a sense gives depth to his mental toughness, as he is of a society which does not tolerate homosexuality, and his relationships with family are tainted by their dismay at his unrepentant man-loving ways (his being an unrepentant cut-throat bastard seems to trouble them much less). The other two seminal characters are well drawn, of course, but departing from Ringil's thread in the plot line always felt a little flat - he is so lively and wickedly entertaining a character I felt disappointed each time the book departing from his storyline.

But I have great hopes for Richard Morgan's foray into fantasy. I confess, I didn't read his sci-fi works until after The Steel Remains, but seeing what he has done with Takeshi Kovacs (a character with no definite physical appearance, and no fixed setting in time or place to ground him) I have ridiculously high hopes for more. Characterisation is definitely Morgan's strong point; the three leads stand out as almost shockingly three-dimensional, larger-than-life people in a shadowy world and rather vague story.

It's a bit of a conundrum for me - it's the first time I've read a book which was a pretty average and unsatisfying read, but desperately wanted more!