City of Ruin

Earlier this year when recovering from surgery I had a bit of time on my hands and read a few books. One of those books was Mark Charan Newton’s Nights of Villjamur. I had actually wanted to read Nights of Villjamur for a while before getting my hands on it, but found it difficult to obtain down here. After having read it I kind of resented the book’s scarcity as I thought it was a cracking great read.

It took me a while to get a copy of the sequel; City of Ruin, but I did and it lived up to the heights reached by it’s predecessor, in some cases superceded them.

I liked the world Newton built in Nights of Villjamur, but felt that it needed more to make it truly come to life and in City of Ruin he adds some flesh to the bones. The world still has the people, the rumels and the garudas, but the mysteries of the dawnir and the okun are better explained in City of Ruin. I was able to make much greater sense of the cultists as well. I never really understood them in Nights of Villjamur. In City of Ruin they’re presented as a combination of priest, magician and scientist, and they appear to have much greater function in the lawless frontier city of Villiren than they did in the capital; Villjamur.

City of Ruin reacquaints readers not only with the strange, and often terrifying world of the Boreal Archipelago, but also with some of the main characters from Nights of Villjamur. After the events in that book; the albino Night Guard Commander Brynd Lathraea, and the rumel Investigator Jeryd have relocated to Villiren. Lathraea has orders to hold that city at all costs against the advancing okun. The theory being that if Villiren is lost then so is the Empire. Jeryd had to leave Villjamur, and having mended his relationship with his beloved Marysa, is trying to establish himself in Villiren. The other principals from Nights of Villjamur: smooth talking swordsman Randur, rightful heir to the throne; Rika, and her naïve younger sister Eir, are elsewhere, trying to get to Villiren so Rika can attempt to take her birthright back from the usurper Urtica. City of Ruin also introduces Malum; a brutal gang leader making a play for control of Villiren.

I felt Villiren was better drawn and had greater depth than Villjamur. Villiren is outwardly controlled by the Portreeve and forces loyal to him. The reality is that the criminal gangs, like the one Malum has working for him, are the real rulers of Villiren, they also control the most powerful of the cultists, and often use them and their creations to exert their control over the general, mostly down trodden, populace.

The story is, strangely enough, split into three parts. One is the investigation undertaken by Jeryd at Brynd’s behest to track down exactly what is making members of his guard disappear. Another story is the journey taken by Randur and the two royal ladies to Villiren. The third story, which brings everyone together, is the desperate battle for Villiren.

I was about a third of the way through the book before I realised that not an awful lot was happening, but I truly didn’t care. I had been so caught up in the world building and the characters themselves that the inertia didn’t matter, about then it also picked up considerably. In Nights of Villjamur I liked Randur, and I still do, but with City of Ruin Jeryd became my favourite character. Throughout most of the book he insisted he was on a diet, yet every time readers saw him he seemed to be either eating or thinking about food. His slightly unusual hit and miss method of investigation reminded me of 70’s TV detective Columbo.

One criticism I have relates to Mark Newton’s habit of giving characters modern speech patterns, leaving out certain key words (such as ‘the’) at the start of sentences. It’s not enough to ruin the book, but it does alter the flow and pull me out of it from time to time.

Whilst I know the author has written a 3rd book in the series and I believe that there is a 4th due out in 2012, City of Ruin would work quite well as the final book in a duology. There’s more story, but it does wrap some storylines up quite neatly.

This is a series that has it’s hooks into me and City of Ruin is, in some ways, even better than Nights of Villjamur, which was already one of my favourite reads in 2011.

Nights of Villjamur

I first heard about Nights of Villjamur when it was published in 2009 and wanted to give it a go then, but for reasons that I’ll never understand I couldn’t get a copy of it down here until late in 2010 and with my ever growing TBR pile it’s taken me until now to actually read it.

Damn! I enjoyed this book. It’s hands down my favourite thing to read in 2011 so far.

To me, there was something almost hypnotic about the book, I became immersed in it very early and remained so until I turned the last page to find that there were no more.

Most of the criticism that I’ve seen has been positive, with the exception of one scathing review over at Strange Horizons.

A lot of the comparisons that have been made have tried to pigeon hole the book as either part of the New Weird movement or as part of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth milieu, as I haven’t read anything classified as New Weird (think China Mieville) or The Dying Earth (both Mieville and Vance are on my to read list) I can’t comment on the validity of those comparisons. As I read two names kept cropping up in my mind. One was Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora) and the other was Joe Abercrombie (The First Law trilogy). Not really surprising as Lynch’s best known work came out in 2006 (I read it in 2008) and Abercrombie hit the scene in the same year, and I also read the opening book of The First Law (The Blade Itself) in 2008. I kept comparing Newton’s city of Villjamur with Lynch’s Camorr. There are similarities, although Camorr is far more detailed and complex, to me it was this extra character in The Lies of Locke Lamora, whereas Villjamur, while alien and atmospheric, is merely a setting. Newton and Abercrombie share a rather bleak outlook, but I found Newton’s characters more rounded than Abercrombie’s. Joe’s characters spend a lot of their time fighting and fucking or talking about fighting and fucking. Mark’s do both, but far less often and with more style for the most part. It’s rather like Joe’s people flunked out of high school and Mark’s went on to complete university. The other huge variance is the type of character they write. Beyond his Neanderthal zombies I’ve never see Abercrombie introduce any truly magical being. In Newton’s opening to his Legends of the Red Sun series people rub shoulders with Garudas (flying soldiers based on a creature from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, the Garudas in Nights of Villjamur seem to owe more to the Buddhist version than the Hindu one), there are Banshees who call out at the moment of a person’s death, a prostitute can create art that comes to life and then we have the Rumels, bipedal creatures that have tails and seem to be rather lizard-like, they also live 3 – 4 times as long as a human and I haven’t even mentioned the tusked Dawnir, creatures that seem ageless and whom for time has no real meaning. We have zombies called Draugr (he got that one from Norse mythology) and something that sounds like a cross between a lobster and a person that they don’t even have a name for yet. I was completely caught up in the breadth and brilliance of Mark Charan Newton’s creation.

There are 3 separate stories running in Nights of Villjamur, all largely centred around the coming ice age that is engulfing the archipelago and forcing people to flee to the city. Events are set in motion when the mentally unstable Emperor Johynn kills himself and puts his totally unprepared daughter Jamur Rika on the throne. The 3 stories running through the narrative concern 3 characters and are different in style, two of them do converge towards the end of the book, though.

Brynd Lythraea is a hard bitten career soldier, he’s also an albino and a homosexual (I’m not really sure why the decision was made to make him gay as it didn’t impact in any way, shape or form on the rest of his story), he takes his commandoes to a far flung island and finds himself in an unwinnable fight against a terrifying enemy. Brynd does other things in the course of the book, he’s the one who returns the new Empress; Rika, to Villjamur, but this struggle formed the bulk of his story. It had the feel of a typical knights and swords quest combined with a WW II action story.

The world weary rumel Jeryd works as an investigator for the Inquisition (a job that their extended lifespan makes them ideal for) and he’s investigating the mysterious deaths of highly placed civil servants. He doesn’t know that he’s being betrayed from within and that it could have consequences not only for himself and his wife Marysa, but the Empire itself. At times I had to check and ensure that the book in my hands wasn’t written by Martin Cruz Smith.

My personal favourite narrative was that involving the dashing swashbuckler Randur Estevu, he came to Villjamur looking for a way to extend his dying mother’s life and wound up winning the heart of a Princess. Randur is a dab hand with a sword and an accomplished dancer, he’s also a charmer, but he gets a lot more than he bargains for when he agrees to teach Eir (Empress Rika’s younger sister) how to dance and fight at the same time. This particular storyline became a bit Boys Own towards the end, but it was fun to read.

If you like Joe Abercrombie, then give Mark Charan Newton and his Legends of the Red Sun a try. I’m going to look for a copy of City of Ruin.