Igenlode Wordsmith's Reviews > When True Night Falls

The first book of this fantasy trilogy was good but not great; this sequel still falls slightly short of 'great', but it is definitely better. I wasn't nearly so conscious of technical issues with the writing, and this volume turns out to focus directly on one of the things that had bothered me about its predecessor -- the fact that Damien supposedly serves a Church that bans the use of the fae to affect the planet, yet proceeded to spend the entire story doing just that, while the whole Church business, having been introduced at the start for local colour, was basically ignored as soon as it became inconvenient.

The entirety of "Black Sun Rising" was in effect a side-quest undertaken for motives that don't seem wholly adequate (and with various elements, like Tarrant starting to teach Ciani 'mechanical' sorcery to replace her lost inborn abilities, that don't seem to come to anything); in "True Night Falls" Damien the paladin is dealing with an actual threat to the Church he serves, even if he is doing so without the authority or permission of his superiors. And we get an insight into *why* the Church opposes the use of 'sorcery', not out of blind religious prejudice but for very practical reasons, and are given a vision of what can be achieved thereby... before Damien discovers at what cost.

As an atheist, this was one element I liked a lot about these books: the author hasn't gone for the all-but-standard modern fantasy trope of "evil patriarchy oppressing the (female) magic-users", but explores the potential effects of organised religion -- a religion which we are more or less told was calmly and intellectually *designed*, in large part by Tarrant of all people, to serve a purpose, rather than being a Divine Revelation --in a world where belief genuinely does affect the environment. The Church of the "One True God" (ironic, in a world where godlings are seemingly created in their myriads simply by people believing in them) bases its ritual in large part on Christianity, because that was the archetype on which its designers drew, but it clearly *isn't* Christian, with no concept of Trinity, Christ the Saviour and so on... and the intriguing idea is that on a world like Erna humans could theoretically be the creators of a God in their own image, rather than vice versa. (And the fact that this God never produces any actual miracles is neatly explained by the religion being designed to avert any such manifestations of human desires upon their surroundings, as opposed to the horrors spawned by the unfettered subconscious!)

I was taken aback but not jolted into incredulity by the relevation at one point in this book that Damien's non-interventionist One God apparently does exist as an entity external to human rituals -- on this planet, after all, if enough people believe in something it can be brought about.

It would have been very easy to make Damien simply an annoying paladin-stereotype and the Church a rip-off of mediaeval European prejudice. What the book does is much more intellectually interesting, in constructing a world where aiming for this sort of thing serves an arguably valid purpose... and yet is still vulnerable to all the normal weaknesses and abuses of organised religion. The Church is neither good nor bad. It is opposed to most of what Damien is actually doing, it is a genuine threat, it has been known to perpetrate horrors, and yet it is also a creative force for survival in the face of a planet hostile to the human psyche, and a visionary project of which even --crucially-- the self-damned Tarrant can be proud.

"When True Night Falls" takes the classic path of the fantasy sequel in sending the protagonists off into a new location, and the author has created a promisingly nuanced set-up: a continent settled by pioneering expeditions, none of which ever managed to send word back (which makes me wonder just why anyone would believe that there was a successful civilization there -- but the expedition is funded by merchants prepared to risk anything for profit), and where humans under the unifying power of Damien's Church, functioning among these isolated people as it was designed to do, have managed to suppress their vulnerability to the surrounding fae power sufficiently to regain access to technology such as firearms. The dark side of this is that this immunity is maintained by slaughtering in infancy any one of their children suspected of being born an adept, with the natural ability to see and control the fae... and that, in order to guard the sanctity of their society, they attempted to kill the members of subsequent expeditions, the surviving members of which ended up founding a new colony to the south, with which they are now at undying war.

It has to be said, however, that the author doesn't actually do very much with the moral conflicts of this set-up. Pretty much all we see of the southern continent is a barren desert and a standard Citadel of Evil, and the plotline where the Undying Prince's subjects are potentially in rebellion against him and the one explaining what Jenseny's father was actually doing in the early chapters of the book are dealt with in such a cursory fashion as to be practically glossed over. Like the first novel, this is in effect simply a quest-journey story, in which the protagonists must travel through a succession of dangerous locations in order to defeat a figurehead of evil, only to find a further threat beyond.

But it's an effective one, in which more and more is revealed in the course of their travels, with each new discovery being convincingly horrible. Unfortunately what I think was intended to be the main twist of the story had been inadvertently 'spoiled' for me, through no fault of the author's own, as a result of my reading reviews of the first book in the series -- and not even the reviews, but the comments on the reviews, in which one disgruntled reader ended up complaining about the author's attitude to a character in the third book in a way that told me nothing at the time, but turned out to rob the misdirection in the second book of its impact when I reached that point :-( So I can't say how that would have come across otherwise; with considerably greater force, I imagine...

The main element that irked me about this book was the author's insistence on using multiple epithets for the character of Gerald Tarrant; Damien Vryce is variously 'the priest' and 'Damien', which is unobtrusive enough, and where the text is content to alternate between 'Tarrant' and 'the Hunter' I don't find it a problem. But there are places where Tarrant is referred to by three or four different epithets on the same page, with none of them having any relevance to anything he is doing or saying at that moment -- at one point he is "Tarrant", then "the tall man", then "the Hunter", then "the Neocount", with "the adept" subsequently added in, and as a stylistic mannerism it really starts to jar.

I got a bit tired of Damien's constant thoughts about how stubbled and sweaty and bad-smelling he himself must be, too. I understand that the author is trying to make a distinction between the burly and very human priest and the abnormally clean and elegant Tarrant, who uses his powers to keep himself well-groomed under all circumstances, but I feel that realistically a seasoned traveller like Damien would simply have become oblivious to the conditions, like the Polar explorers who lived in the same set of clothes for six months at a time!

I was left confused by exactly how old Jenseny is intended to be. Damien explicitly describes her as "thirteen or fourteen at the most, probably younger" at their first meeting, but the text constantly goes on about how small she is and the grip of her "tiny fingers", refers to her as "the little girl" and describes her generally acting and thinking in a way that makes me picture her as more like six to eight years old: (Sometimes he was sad, and she could see the sadness, too, a thick gray stuff that clung to him like muck. Or black, like when her mother died/ One of the men had picked Jenseny up and was carrying her to a boat[...] she wriggled free of him and splashed down into ankle-deep water.) Compared to the self-reliant schoolchildren -- constantly having adventures without the intervention of adults -- with whom I was familiar from early 20th century novels, she is depicted as very babyish indeed, even though the text emphasises her courage and endurance, and I can't help feeling that the author probably had only a generic idea of how to write 'children' without any clear idea of age differences :-(

I was also struck by what seemed like one definite inconsistency with the previous book; when we first know him, Tarrant's power is said to come from the 'dark fae' that exist in the world where neither the moons nor the galaxy's hub cast any light after sunset, and he requires darkness to heal himself. But in this book he is using the same 'earth fae' as Damien himself, making him equally vulnerable to seismic activity, and apparently unable to heal himself if he goes too far underground, however dark it may be -- we hear no more about the dark fae, and the special beauty of the night. And the author gives us what felt like a ret-con where the powers of the Iezu from the original novel are concerned: they are now super-special demons that are immune to all compulsion and summoning by human sorcerers, and the fact that they were previously shown submitting to summoning and threats gets handwaved away as being mere pretence because the demon happened to feel like it...

But it's still a fascinating magic system, based on the idea of an alien planet whose ecosystem is balanced around the needs of its native organisms -- and which gets messed up by the human settlers' capacity to hold multiple contradictory desires and beliefs, creating demons that physically embody their weaknesses and feed upon them to sustain their existence. And the quest is genuinely gripping, with the stakes suitably ramped up from those of the first novel; it is no longer an ever-escalating attempt to restore one woman's magic powers, but a matter of trying to save an entire continent not just from conquest but from the corrupting effects of vengeance and hate, with the characters prepared to sacrifice their own lives if necessary.