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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hillariously funny, 4 Jun 2003
As you can guess this is a send up of your conan the barbarian kind of book. A black skinny street wise barbarian, an alcoholic shabby womanising side kick only good for mixing life threatening cock-tails. And the star of the book, a psychopathic man meat eating donkey with an acid wit.
I laughed out loud repeatedly reading this book, the sequels where a disappointment but this one Rocks !!! Upon first seeing knights in armour the donkey says "Hmmm canned food, anyone got a can opener?" And he only follows the ronan and his side kick as he figures he can eat them later if nothing better comes along. Truely a book worthy of anyones collection. A must if your a Pratchett type fan, or even hard core fantasy fiction. You just can not help but laugh at this book as you recognise comedy parady after parady of the well recognised formulaes.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
An up and coming post-Pratchett humorist, 7 Jan 2001
By A Customer
There are so numerous authors in the comic fantasy- science fiction- fiction genre these days that it is difficult to keep up; because ever since such eloquent bards like Aristophenes to the contemporaries like P.G. Wodehouse the genre has seen fit to develop increasingly. James Bibby is a new contemporary humorist with a gift-like mastery at honing and whetting passages involving the most ludicrous and absurd jokes; gags you would acquire if you listened to Billy Connally or Lenny Henry for a while--the latter of which makes a poignantly punny comment on the back cover of "Ronan the Barbarian." How someone could be so outrightly bold to make a parody of one of the foundation figures of fiction, Conan the Barbarian, is almost unspeakable, certainly when there are authors abounding these days acting as successors to the Conan chronicles, eg. Robert Jordan; yet Bibby has the knack to spawn ineruditely hilarious jokes, awful yet sympathetic puns, absurd satire and strong characterisations--surely someone as perseverent as Bibby could oust the likes of Andrew Harman off the contemporary comic fantasy throne. "Ronan the Barbarian" is a delightfully irreverent novel, albeit is is not as fine as its scintillating successors, primarily "Ronan's Rescue" which is mayhap one of the ultimately funniest novels ever written, excluding "Good Omens" and "Red Dwarf: Backwards." "Ronan the Barbarian" is a meltingpot of endearing yet repulsive insights which adheres to one's humanness with little ado about anything; and the reader is lured into wishing to read further on, although the paciness of Bibby persuades one to want to repeatedly put the novel down just to reattain one's breath. Tarl and Puss are exceedingly amiable and charismatic characters despite their being fallible, which makes them so much more accessible. Some of the parodying is surely in lack of taste--who would thumb their noses at Tolkien, for instance--but his bawdiness is substituted, and thusly redeemed by Bibby's strong, almost barbarous strength at dragging the reader along for a heck of a ride. The current Ronan sequels, admittedly, are rather similar and dolloped with the same agreeable slapstick, but Bibby has left his footprint in literature--if we can appellate it as such--and his succeeding novels have all the Bibby hallmarks. Midworld is indefinitely Middle-Earth meets Discworld; and although I do not presume that Bibby's protagonists better the likes of Rincewind or Rimmer as "Ronan the Barbarian"'s back cover proclaims, nothing stopped me from reading further "Ronan's Rescue", "Ronan's Revenge" and his majestic short-story "Fall'n Into the Sear". Now all I have to anticipate is his next novel "Shapestone" which I hope will prove to be even more delightful.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lighter look at fantasy. Very funny indeed., 17 Sep 1999
By A Customer
While I don't doubt that in part this book is a parody of so many other fantasy novels, unlike many books in the same genre it carries with it a genuinely interesting story line. The humour comes thick and fast but the story does not subordinate itself to cheap jokes and easy gags. Rather there exists a happy and hugely successful union between laugh-out-loud comedic passages and the book's own ludicrous but fun plot line.I have read this book several times and highly recommend it. The passage about the drums in the deep (a tribute to Tolkien's trapped group in Moria) is worth the cost of the book itself. The sequels are not quite as good but still, well worth a read. If you enjoy light hearted comedy you will not be disappointed.
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