SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland https://t.co/xIqUGfFhjg Short Review: 8 out of 10 (1/3)

— garik16|CanesFan (@garik16) November 13, 2018

Short Review (cont): When an old travelling storyteller finds himself arrested in a foreign country on bogus charges, he relies on his only weapon to gain freedom: his stories. But his words will have a greater impact that he could've thought. Pretty funny at times satire (2/3)

— garik16|CanesFan (@garik16) November 13, 2018

A Conspiracy of Truths is an odd kind of book.  Based on its description on Amazon, it might seem like a new sort of new version of the Scheherazade-type story -  where our hero is imprisoned and threatened with death but tries to get out of the situation by telling stories to his captors.  But this book is not simply a collection of stories with a framing device, but rather a political satire in a fantasy world.

Is it a good satire?  Harder to say, as the book doesn't just pick one target to satirize, but through its five rulers and their affiliated forces and bureaucracies, it mocks quite a lot, some more effectively than others.  Still, it's a book that is easily to get into, with some pretty funny moments along the way, and is thus worth a try.

More after the Jump:

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When an old man is arrested on charges of Witchcraft in the country of Nuryevet, he's outraged to find his trial seems to be an utter farce and his advocate has seemingly no interest in speaking up on his behalf.  The old man isn't even from this country after all!  But when an attempt at apologizing to his judges for a "rude" outburst goes horribly awry, the old man finds himself having become a person of interest to the five elected leaders of the country - the four Queens and one King known as the "Primes."

But the old man isn't some ordinary traveler, but a member of an ancient and now rare order of storytellers, traveling the world to pick up stories of places from here and there and passing on that knowledge to others.  Now known only by his title of "Chant," the old man relies entirely upon his ability to spin stories to intrigue and interest the Primes to his own ends.  And as he tells these stories - some of which contain things the Primes may not want to hear - Chant finds himself not only getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble - but possibly throwing the entire country of Nuryevet into utter chaos.
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A Conspiracy of Truths is rather well written and often funny, as a satire of a country and its political structure that has some relation to such things in our world....and otherwise is just a little unique on its own.  The Country of Nuryevet is ruled by its five elected Primes: the King of Law (who makes the laws of the Country), the Queen of Order (head of the police enforcing the law), the Queen of Justice (the Judiciary), the Queen of Pattern (intelligence gathering/spying), and the Queen of Commerce/Coin (Treasury/Taxation).  Each Prime is corrupt in their own way, using their area of power for their own ends to some extent and trying to obtain power over the other areas if they can, and their doing so has resulted in a country that seems pretty miserable on its surface, even if its citizens often tell Chant they're fine with the situation because they get to choose their leaders every so often.

The result is a system that finds four of the five primes (the fifth Prime, the King of Law, is pretty much ignored in this story) scrabbling quite blatantly for power over the others and in seeing Chant as a way to do that, gives Chant a way to tell stories and lies in such a way so as to cause utter lunacy to ensue, often in pretty damn humorous ways.  Each of the four primes who get story time are interesting in their different ways, to the point where I felt for one of them who gets completely screwed over and laughed at another who gets utterly played.  Besides the Primes, the story also includes Chant's young earnest apprentice Ylfing and the hilariously irreverent Consanza, Chant's supposed advocate whose willingness to go with the flow of the stupid System around her and wit about her makes her a lot of fun.

Oddly, one of the weaker points of this book is that the stories Chant and Others tells (16 in all, all preceded by a header announcing it as the "Xth Tale") are kind of uninspiring.  This isn't really a problem in this book as the stories are just means to an end, and the clever ways they affect the characters in the overall plot is pretty well done...but the book's blurb on Amazon sort of promises that the stories will be a bigger deal than they actually are and a reader going in should not expect them to be so.

One other minor complaint which is more about ebook formatting than anything - the book doesn't contain clear chapters in any form.  So while there are places where a reader can pretty easily put the book down and resume later, the ebook doesn't provide any places for the reader to jump-to and back which is annoying if you want to reread a part you missed in light of more recent info (without the search function).

Overall though, A Conspiracy of Truths is a pretty interesting and a decently funny satire set in a world with parallels to ours despite the presence of some very minor fantastical elements.  If that appeals to you, it's worth your time.