Wednesday, March 27, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold



The Hallowed Hunt is the last novel (so far) in Lois McMaster Bujold's ongoing "World of the Five Gods" fantasy universe, which began in "The Curse of Chalion" and "Paladin of Souls" and has been continuing in her Penric novella series.  Like its predecessors, it's a stand-alone novel - taking place prior to all the other stories and in a different country - so it would work perfectly fine as an entry point to newcomers in the series.  And as I enjoy the Penric series and really liked the two prior novels, I had high hopes for The Hallowed Hunt.

For those who are new to this world, it features a fantasy counterpart of circa 1200-1500s Europe (though never named as such), and each book involves the interactions of human heroes, guided by a set of five gods who control the spirit world but need help from mortals to affect the "world of matter," as they deal with conflicts caused by curses, demons, and other supernatural phenomena, which affect both the physical world and the afterlives of those caught up in them.

 Anyhow, The Hallowed Hunt is rather enjoyable, even if I think it's the "worst" of the trio of novels Bujold has written in this universe - Bujold always sets a high bar.  Its main characters are solid, but not quite as great as prior heroes Cazaril and Ista (who are fantastic), but the side characters are excellent and Bujold's dialogue remains amazing as usual.  And I greatly enjoyed how the stakes of this novel, while still grand, were of a more personal/theological level than in the prior books, using the particularities of the setting to create a rather different sort of villainous scheme, which kept things fresh.  I'd probably recommend you read the prior books first before this one, but this is still a very solid novel even if you start here.

Note: As with much of Bujold's work, I read this as an audiobook.  The reader is not the same as in the prior W5G works, but she's still very good so it's not a bad choice for that format.  
------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Ingrey Kin Wolfcliff had a disastrous childhood - a forbidden magical ritual killed his father and resulted in Ingrey being possessed by a spirit animal (a wolf) that resulted in his disinheritance and one-time exile - but has since carved out a life for himself as the right hand man of an important politician in the Weald.  Yet when he is thrown off his axis when he is sent to investigate the killing of the second son of The Hallow King, by one lady Ijada Kin Badgerbank.  For not only did Ijada do the killing in self defense to stop a rape, but also to stop a similar ritual to that of Ingrey's past, and now Ijada also has a spirit animal, a leopard.

And as Ingrey attempts to bring Ijada back to the capital in order to await justice, he begins to uncover more and more evidence of the supernatural, from other spirit animals to the acts of the Gods, with roots in the days hundreds of years ago when the Weald was ruled by clans of Shamans,e each with their own spirit animals.  And so, Ingrey finds himself in the middle of a conflict between immortal forces, with the only one he can trust being the woman he was sent to bring to justice, a woman he is ever more and more beginning to fall for.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Each book in this series has taken Bujold's original concept of this world and its five gods and elaborated on it further, using the interplay between the gods and the mortal realm to create interesting situations and conflicts.  The first book dealt mainly with the goddess known as Daughter, with the Bastard in a supporting role; the second book dealt firmly with the Bastard, and this book deals with the Son of Autumn, with the other four gods (again, particularly the Bastard) in a supporting role.   Whereas the last book dealt with the complications caused by the Bastard's demons, this book introduces the magical powers granted by spirit animals and Shamans (seen later in the Penric stories as well), which keep things fresh, and pose new questions on both the physical and metaphysical levels.  I'm making it sound more bland that it is, but it does what a lot of good fantasy/scifi books do, in create logical problems for our heroes to deal with and conflicts that are rather interesting and fresh.

Like its predecessors, The Hallowed Hunt is told entirely from the perspective from one character, in this case, Ingrey.  Ingrey isn't quite as good a character as our prior heroes - he doesn't quite have the same interesting trauma and reactions to same as Ista or the quick thinking and interesting tricks up Cazaril's sleeves, and is much more reactive of a hero than either of those two.  But he's still a very easy character to root for and his powers make him quite interesting as he discovers them and tries to figure out what they can do.  The secondary main character, Ijada, is a solid love interest who, as usual for the love interests in this series, is much more than just a passive observer, always looking to act even when she's constrained by her position.

I should point out that the side characters here are particularly great - we have a somewhat batty temple sorceress who shows up here and there and is fun and quirky as well as her straightlaced husband, a barbarian prince (or a pirate, it's not quite clear) with a polar bear who's kind of hilarious, and even the nobles involved here have impressive depth and ability for the little screen time they get.  And the villain is excellently done - you'll figure out he's the antagonist fairly early as soon as he arrives, but his actual intentions and plans are very hard to guess and yet make perfect sense, and are of a scale that is surprisingly both small and big at the same time, in a really interesting way.

Again, despite the above, I think this book is my third favorite of the three since its main characters can't compare to the leads of the prior tow.  Ingrey is fine and interesting to a certain extent, but his reactive nature means that it very much feels like the plot is happening to him rather than the other way around, and it makes him a lot less fun.  The book also has some weird pacing, seeming like it's paced quickly for the first act, slowing down quite a bit in the second act (20 minutes in an audiobook of the hero getting drunk on a pirate ship is kind of a bit much, even if it's a funny scene!) before picking up the pace quite a bit in the last act.

Again, as with pretty much everything Bujold writes, this book is pretty good, and it just has a high bar to clear due to the author.  So it's still recommended and I expect most will enjoy it.


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)