I read this book twice from cover to cover.
Before you head out to pick up your own copy, let me elaborate on that previous sentence by adding that this is by far the worst book that I have ever read twice and that the reason for the reread was in part the fact that I disliked this book so thoroughly that I wanted to know exactly why.
I will begin by getting the easy things out of the way. This book was written to accompany the 2008 Magic: the Gathering card set Shards of Alara. Doug Beyer, the author, does a couple of things well. The backbone underlying the plot is sensible. I could envision a nice book being built upon it. This structure is mostly what one could gather just from looking at the text and art of the cards in the Alara block, so Beyer does succeed in meeting the expectations set up by the cards (unlike several previous Magic books).
For reference, the basic plot is as follows:
Alara split into five separate worlds due to some catastrophic event in the past and now those five worlds are colliding back together. That might seem like enough climactic calamity, but things are further exacerbated for the residents of Alara by the presence of the power hungry planeswalker Nicol Bolas who plans to take advantage of the planar collision by feeding off the magical energies that are its byproducts.
The energies from the collision itself are not enough though. To accumulate further swaths of magical power, Bolas spends generations (Bolas himself is thousands of generations old) sowing seeds of hatred and xenophobia between the different shards of Alara so that war will break out across the plane once the former neighboring shards are reunited.
How exactly the worlds broke apart and reconnected, what effect this had on mana, how spent mana can be channeled and stored for reuse, how five worlds could be manipulated enough to each launch wars on two fronts against neighboring cultures appearing literally out of thin air without any attempt at diplomatic contact – none of this stuff is explained.
From a literary perspective, the shortcomings of Alara Unbroken are far-reaching, touching upon likely any aspect of literature that could be chosen as an axis on which to judge a novel. I think the best way to summarize the book is draw attention to the absence of joy on the author’s part.
Usually the force that drives a good fantasy work is the author’s sense of enthusiasm for the world he is creating, a sense which is usually conveyed so strongly that it compels the dig in for large helpings at a time or inspires games and fan fiction. With Tolkien, one feels as though the stories were crafted to give a world to the language’s the author had invented and loved so much; it is the struggle of man against himself, of honor against passion, law against chaos, power against justice that makes George R. R. Martin spin his tangled web; love and loss, dealing with death and finding one’s place in the world drive J. K. Rowling to tell her tales.
Other than contractual obligations, I can’t give any reason why Doug Beyer wrote Alara Unbroken.
For all the work that went into crafting a consistent set of styles for the five shards of Alara depicted in the game, the world Doug Beyer presents is cold, nearly lifeless, mostly empty. Basic setting descriptions are almost entirely absent from the book.
At least three of the shards are depicted as possessing rich cultures with complex civilizations to judge by the presentation on the cards. The book’s offerings are disappointing by comparison. Cultural traditions and societal structures are presented only in passing and thus are reduced to the stock caricatures typical of pulp fantasy.
Bant, a highly tiered society known for its foundation in order and justice, is reduced to one woman known as “the Blessed” and a bunch of soldiers and healers. Its religion is seemingly based upon one prayer, with natives of Bant throwing out concepts like hell and archangels without any context.
I am not trying to espouse the view that a book needs to present a logically sound system of some kind to be successful. However, the lack of even the hints of one can be detrimental, especially to a work of fantasy.
At one point, Rafiq, a Knight-General of Bant and one of the main characters, travels all the way across the shard of Esper into the shard of Grixis and back. This entire journey, interspersed with scenes from other parts of Alara, consists of only a few inconsequential scenes in the sand dunes of Esper and rot-land of Grixis. No sense of the passage of time is given. Esper, for hundreds of years the only world that entire civilization of people knew, is reduced to little more than “they walked through it.” In general, sizes, distances, and times are not specified with an even descriptors.
The crux of the plot hinges on a similarly unstable foundation. Bolas’ aforementioned plot to incite wars waged by battling mages and then to channel this spent mana through mysterious obelisks into a maelstrom of magic at the heart of Alara suffers from the presence of too many unanswered questions. A good portion of the early part of the book is spent “activating” the obelisks so that they will channel all five colors of mana properly. Yet the origin and mechanics of the obelisks is given no space. For magic use to be impressive and memorable in fantasy fiction, it needs to be used sparingly and to follow a rigid system of rules. When no guidelines are given, magical powers come across as arbitrary and unsatisfyingly unpredictable. That is what happens in Alara Unbroken (which is a bit unfortunate for a book based on a game called “Magic”).
Sometimes I find it hard to tell why I dislike a book. The simplest explanation is that the book has nothing in it which I consider valuable. It is quite possible that the litany of faults outlined above could all be forgiven if the book had some other aspect to latch onto, but it does not. I believe that strong story could have redeemed all of the structural problems I have detailed. Unfortunately for Alara Unbroken, the poor handling of the book’s characters is what I’d like to discuss next.
The cast of characters employed in Alara Unbroken is quite impressive, and thus it is perhaps more impressive still that in the entirety of the book only one relationship between two characters develops any depth. Some of the main characters like Ajani, Elspeth, Kresh, Sarkhan, Nicol Bolas, Malfegor, and Gwafa Hazid exist almost entirely in inner monologue.
The one exception to this is doomed friendship of Rafiq and Mubin. The camaraderie as a dynamic duo of traveling do-good knights of Bant is given about five or six pages in the book before it begins to unravel (with Beyer trusting that the reader knows what a stock pair of adventuring buddies is like so that he can focus on tearing them apart). Mubin is perhaps the most likeable character in the book (with Kresh giving him the fiercest competition). He is both brave and intelligent (though his intelligence is mostly developed through his solving a riddle in the prayer of Asha – the text of which is never even given in the book). Sadly, Mubin dies when, after being crippled by Rafiq in an unfortunate battlefield situation, he allows Rafiq to pressure him into undergoing a completely untested and ultimately fatal cure brought back from Esper without anyone from Esper present at its implementation.
Mubin and Rafiq are not the only characters betrayed by the plot. Nicol Bolas is tied to a convoluted plot spanning multiple worlds and requiring generations of preparation, which nonetheless requires several late, haphazard adjustments. In his final scene, the cerebral dragon planeswalker, who would rather snuff out goblins’ souls than eat them any other self-respecting dragon would, is reduced to a mindless, feral beast at the blink of any eye when Ajani summons forth “his essence.” Elspeth, another planeswalker protagonist, helps to defend her homeland from the initial assault brought by Grixis and Esper (a war which never actually ends in the book) and then suffers psychotic depression of the loss of Bant’s purity, leaving the plane in a manner that could only be described as cowardly.
The story of the planeswalker Ajani gives the book is best opportunity for redemption; however, the opportunity is squandered on a meandering coming of age story in which the protagonist does not actually grow or come to any meaningful sense of greater awareness. Ajani spends the novel tracking down the being responsible for the death of his brother (ultimately Nicol Bolas). Along the way, he learns to planeswalk and to stand up for himself (at one point, he attempts to drop a childhood bully off a cliff for his suspected involvement in his brother’s death – not atonement for this cold blooded attempted murder is ever presented). In the end, Ajan’s rite of passage consists of recognizing that his true enemy is in fact Nicol Bolas (rather than Zaliki, his only friend, who had been pressured and tricked into aided Bolas’ scheme) with whom he has no contact and thus no chance to develop any chemistry with as a hero battling a villain and then admitting to his brother in an inner monologue that he is giving up because Bolas is too strong before being prompted by his brother’s spirit to “listen to the voices of Alara” and enact a completely unanticipated Deus ex Machina to vanquish Bolas. For me, this story arc just didn’t cut it.
Part of the blame for the weak character development can be assigned to the atrocious dialogue that permeates the book. Some examples:
I’m so sorry. I’ll understand if you want to kill me, or never see me again. But you have to know.
--Zaliki
It isn’t my fault. The prayer should have worked. This boy is an abomination!
--Rafiq (to the parents of a zombie-boy he tried to help save)
Look…Ajani…I should go. I need to be alone. You go back and enjoy the hadu. I’ll talk to you again later.
--Zaliki
No time to do this fancy. Let’s just bring the pain.
--Rakka Mar
There’s a war on. I need every planeswalker I can get, to ensure my victory.
--Nicol Bolas
You’re our pole star. You’ll sway fate’s favor in what I’m sure will be a mighty battle.
--Kresh
Finally, no review of Alara Unbroken would be complete without mentioning the structure and syntax. The story is told through the perspective of over ten characters with each chapter presenting a different point of view. Most of the chapters are two or three pages in length, and several are under a page. It seems to me like Beyer leans on the choppiness to build up suspense – in lieu of actual dramatic tension, action sequences are broken up over three chapters with the reader left hanging during the gaps. Some of the chapters are clearly out of sequence such as the chapter “The Blind Eternities” describing the conflux of the shards long after the physical incursion of the shards upon each other’s borders has already had significant impact upon the plot, while others break up a contiguous block of time with action clearly spanning a much greater duration.
The use of commas and periods is consistently incorrect with conjunctions often starting new sentences at some points while unnecessary commas appear at others. I have noticed this kind of grammatical anomaly in other books in the past without being bothered by it, so I can only assume that my fixation with the grammar in the book to be a byproduct of my lack of serious interest in the other elements present.
Overall, I was thoroughly disappointed by this book, and hopefully I have managed to convey why.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Agents of Artifice by Ari Marmell
Agents of Artifice is a fun, clever story about one mage’s struggles to find his place in a multiverse of worlds inhabited by all manner of strange and wonderful treasures and ambitious men and women with penchants for manipulating all those within their reach. The book is best approached a rollicking adventure of narrative twists and turns rather. At times, it hints at being something more but only to disappoint later.
The basic story is pretty simple. Jace Beleren is a gifted slacker who uses his mind reading powers to blackmail the wealthy for a living as he mostly drifts aimlessly through life. His drifting comes to an end when Tezzeret forces him to join his Infinite Consortium – an interplanar cartel whose only real goal is to wrest wealth and power from others and consolidate it in Tezzeret’s hands. Jace’s skills improve as his moral center disintegrates.
Eventually, Jace reaches a breaking point and flees the consortium, taking his friend Kallist with him. At this point, Liliana, another planeswalker, enters Jace’s life, appearing as a fellow consortium fugitive. In actuality, Liliana has her own agenda which involves controlling the consortium for herself. For that, she needs a mindreader.
It takes a while, but Liliana eventually manipulates Jace into confronting Tezzeret (unfortunately Kallist had to die along the way). In the process of vanquishing Tezzeret, Jace learns of Liliana’s deceit and makes sure that the consortium dissolves rather than fall into her hands. Jace finds himself almost at the same point he was at at the beginning of the book, though with a new goal – to find out who Liliana really is and what he can do to help her achieve her goals (which involve paying off a few demons she made deals with) in a different way.
The best feature of this book is the vivid, back and forth feeling of the many magical duels that are described. The dynamics don’t quite match what it feels like to play a game of Magic, but they do create a sense of a battle of wits where the winning mage’s ingenuity is rewarded. The best fights are probably the two between Jace and Tezzeret towards the end of the book. The first feels like a series of haymakers with Jace pummeling Tezzeret but ultimately coming up short as Tezzeret uses his familiarity with the surroundings to outmaneuver Jace. In the second, Jace turns the tables on Tezzeret in dramatic fashion by appearing to waste his resources battering harmlessly against Tezzeret’s defenses, when in actuality he was distracting Tezzeret as he called on Tezzeret’s other enemies to come to his aid.
Great descriptions of magic use in Agents of Artifice are not confined solely to the fights. Magic is used in other situations in various clever ways that make it feel as though there’s more to magic than just creating a jar of water when you’re thirsty or a fire when you’re cold. When Jace is trapped inside a magic denying cage and poisoned with a magic poison that will become potent as soon as he leaves the cage, he has Liliana summon a vampire to drain his blood and then uses healing magic which he learned from his elf friend Emmara to regenerate himself. When Jace is injured and too weak to make it to Emmara’s for healing, Liliana summons a specter to possess him and thus move his limbs for him.
At times, the magic use feels a bit too clever. Jace and Liliana find Tezzeret’s secret hideout by planting the specter inside a box bound for Tezzeret. Liliana then summons the specter back and has it possess Jace. The Jace-specter then planeswalks back to Tezzeret using the specter’s knowledge and Jace’s abilities. The rules of planeswalking are not explicitly laid out in the book, but this feels a bit like cheating. The defenses of Tezzeret’s sanctum are somewhat laughable – Jace simply tricks the guards to open the door and then uses mind control to compel a guard commander to grant him and Liliana permission to enter the stronghold without setting off any alarms. There is another planeswalking situation involving “infinity globes” and breaking the traditional rules of the Blind Eternities (a place without really any rules), but let’s just say that again it feels like cheating.
On the topic of the Blind Eternities, another great feature of the writing is the quality of physical description. Ravnica and Grixis are given exiquisite detail, being provided with imagery that makes them easy to visualize as well as plausible explanations of the mechanisms which allow the worlds to exist as they are (eg the fungus farms of Avaric, the rich mana of the sea beneath Favarial). The Blind Eternities are dizzyingly psychedelic; the detailing of alternate realities rippling off of Tezzeret and Jace as they fight inside the Blind Eternities is a nice touch.
Lastly, I want to touch on the writing of the characters. I really like the way the story is set up with Jace as the slacker mage thrust into the crossfire of the ambitions of planeswalkers Tezzeret, Baltrice, Liliana, and Nicol Bolas as well as thugs like Semner and Paldor. The struggle for Jace’s soul has the potential to be a great, inspiring story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one told in Agents of Artifice.
Jace faces two dilemmas while working for the consortium: Tezzeret’s demanding demeanor which will inevitably destroy all those around him if given enough time and remorse at the evil acts he is required to perform in Tezzeret’s service. Jace is forced to weigh his growing magical abilities and his comfortable life against his fear of Tezzeret and his moral center. I found the resolution of these conflicting forces to be disappointing given my estimation of their potential.
Part of my problem with Jace’s development is that it is left in ambiguity to some extent. Jace leaves the consortium after he fails to complete mission which involved taking over the mind of the August Quest of the Chuch of the Incarnate Soul. Jace gives two reasons for his failure: he can not go through with manipulating a mind as pure as the August Questor’s and he can not trust Tezzeret with the power he would gain from the church. It’s not clear which of these motivations is primary. Because he did not fulfill Tezzeret’s commands, he has no choice but to flee or be killed by Tezzeret. There is no cathartic moment of choice really (Jace only recounts the moment with the August Questor after he returns).
The lack of character development for Jace is further reinforced by the fact that he kills far more people of varying levels of innocence after leaving the consortium than he did while a member. At least, as described in the text he does. Another weak point of the book that the passage of time is not demarcated clearly. Because none of the characters undergoes any evolution (except perhaps Tezzeret growing more ridiculously intolerant of failure as the story progresses), there’s no way to distinguish between the large and small jumps in time. While Jace works for the consortium, he only participates in murder under duress – wiping out one man’s mind that Tezzeret threatens to kill otherwise and crushing nezumi shogun’s in self defense.
At some points, the description does not seem to go far enough, especially as regards Jace’s mind magic. Jace appears horrified by the way he treats the minds of Tezzeret’s man and the shogun, but the description of Jace’s experiences does not match this level of intensity, which I feel Marmell is capable of.
Jace’s mental anguish is well articulated in one scene in a market place in Favarial though. In this scene, Jace makes a mental link with everyone in the market place, forming a loose web of awareness to alert him to danger as he tries to elude the consortium’s forces. Jace summons a steam drake to protect him and is forced to call on it for help at one point when he is attacked. The drake responds with a blast of steam that takes out twenty bystanders, flooding Jace’s mind with final thoughts of many innocent people simultaneously. Only the presence of Kallist which Jace can sense in a way that is beyond physical brings Jace back from the catatonic state he is reduced to following the drake’s blast. Unfortunately, Jace continues to kill with abandon after this point and never questions the nature of his friendship with Kallist or Liliana, both of whom also kill with regularity.
The character of Baltrice provides a nice foil to Jace – she has all the ambition within the ranks of the consortium and loyalty to Tezzeret that Jace lacks. However, this foiling is hampered by the lack of any depth to her character. At times, the antagonism between Jace and Baltrice feels strained, especially at their first meeting, where the dialogue is just awful.
Perhaps it’s time I addressed the dialogue more directly. It’s mostly terrible and is probably the biggest real detractor from the quality of the book. While I can quibble about the moral quagmire that Marmell slogs into, the book would be a great adventure story if not for the stock, often juvenile (think MTV’s Real World in the later years) exchanges between characters which drag the whole effort down to merely “good.” There’s one joke Jace makes about what’s in his pocket that’s just ridiculous. Those errants remarks aside, it’s mostly the clunky wordiness that weakens the dialogue.
The dialogue does have a few bright spots. Nicol Bolas is spot on as an ancient demigod who has seen everything before but doesn’t really have anything better to do now any way. Tezzeret waffles between a badass ripping Jace with awesome jibes and a cartoon caricature of a supervillain. Liliana has her moments – one of my favorites being when she responds to Jace by saying that she does not do anything like a man.
Lastly, I’d like to address the nature of Jace’s friendships. Jace’s relationship with Kallist begins well with a great set of scenes infiltrating a local merchant’s manor. The chemistry between the two complementary operatives, fighter and mage, is right on. Unfortunately, the story drags when they flee the consortium and hide out in Favarial. The strain actually begins when Jace convinces Kallist to leave the consortium with him because Kallist was Jace’s friend and would be punished in place of Jace. Tezzeret is vindictive, but Kallist is so opportunistic and such a valuable agent that I don’t buy that Paldor and Tezzeret would really feel compelled to waste him out frustration with Jace. I’d like to think that Jace’s arguments were really just a pretext and that the real reason Jace asked and Kallist consented was the bond of the friendship between the two, which neither wanted broken. After this decision though, Kallist becomes worried about money to the point of ruining the friendship with Jace. This break feels totally forced by the need of the narrative for Jace and Kallist to be driven apart.
Sadly, the Jace and Kallist friendship ends with another Marmell’s clever moments. Jace attempts to save Kallist from his life of mediocrity by taking Kallist’s mind into his own. Unfortunately, Jace realizes too late that he can not hold two minds in his head at once, and the end result is that two switch minds. Everything before the mental exchange is actually told through an extended flashback after the story begins by following Kallist who turns out to be Jace.
Marmell is asking a lot from the reader with this conceit. It really threw me off the first time I read the part about Jace and Kallist swapping minds back. It was not just my confusion in trying to work out the plot that was my problem. It does not make any sense for two people to switch minds and not notice it – what exactly is swapped and what retained? Marmell takes the easy way out of just not making any effort to explain it other than Liliana saying that Jace’s soul did somehow tricked his mind into noticing the switch.
Despite screwing up the Jace/Kallist friendship with the mind swap, Marmell does allow the Kallist to be well remembered at the end of the book. In his last battle with Tezzeret, Jace uses the fighting skills he learned from Kallist to mask his weakened magical state as he communicates with the nezumi through telepathy to ensure their aid. I like how Marmell brings this element back into the story at the end and likewise how he brings Emmara back in Jace’s use of her magic to heal himself from his vampire bite. This expression of the power of friendship is one of the few positive moments in the book (from a spiritual perspective).
Overall, Agents of Artifice is a good fun book. It was challenging for me to read because I wanted there to be more to it than there was. I felt there were the makings of a great book here, but it was not to be. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and is looking for an entertaining casual read.
The basic story is pretty simple. Jace Beleren is a gifted slacker who uses his mind reading powers to blackmail the wealthy for a living as he mostly drifts aimlessly through life. His drifting comes to an end when Tezzeret forces him to join his Infinite Consortium – an interplanar cartel whose only real goal is to wrest wealth and power from others and consolidate it in Tezzeret’s hands. Jace’s skills improve as his moral center disintegrates.
Eventually, Jace reaches a breaking point and flees the consortium, taking his friend Kallist with him. At this point, Liliana, another planeswalker, enters Jace’s life, appearing as a fellow consortium fugitive. In actuality, Liliana has her own agenda which involves controlling the consortium for herself. For that, she needs a mindreader.
It takes a while, but Liliana eventually manipulates Jace into confronting Tezzeret (unfortunately Kallist had to die along the way). In the process of vanquishing Tezzeret, Jace learns of Liliana’s deceit and makes sure that the consortium dissolves rather than fall into her hands. Jace finds himself almost at the same point he was at at the beginning of the book, though with a new goal – to find out who Liliana really is and what he can do to help her achieve her goals (which involve paying off a few demons she made deals with) in a different way.
The best feature of this book is the vivid, back and forth feeling of the many magical duels that are described. The dynamics don’t quite match what it feels like to play a game of Magic, but they do create a sense of a battle of wits where the winning mage’s ingenuity is rewarded. The best fights are probably the two between Jace and Tezzeret towards the end of the book. The first feels like a series of haymakers with Jace pummeling Tezzeret but ultimately coming up short as Tezzeret uses his familiarity with the surroundings to outmaneuver Jace. In the second, Jace turns the tables on Tezzeret in dramatic fashion by appearing to waste his resources battering harmlessly against Tezzeret’s defenses, when in actuality he was distracting Tezzeret as he called on Tezzeret’s other enemies to come to his aid.
Great descriptions of magic use in Agents of Artifice are not confined solely to the fights. Magic is used in other situations in various clever ways that make it feel as though there’s more to magic than just creating a jar of water when you’re thirsty or a fire when you’re cold. When Jace is trapped inside a magic denying cage and poisoned with a magic poison that will become potent as soon as he leaves the cage, he has Liliana summon a vampire to drain his blood and then uses healing magic which he learned from his elf friend Emmara to regenerate himself. When Jace is injured and too weak to make it to Emmara’s for healing, Liliana summons a specter to possess him and thus move his limbs for him.
At times, the magic use feels a bit too clever. Jace and Liliana find Tezzeret’s secret hideout by planting the specter inside a box bound for Tezzeret. Liliana then summons the specter back and has it possess Jace. The Jace-specter then planeswalks back to Tezzeret using the specter’s knowledge and Jace’s abilities. The rules of planeswalking are not explicitly laid out in the book, but this feels a bit like cheating. The defenses of Tezzeret’s sanctum are somewhat laughable – Jace simply tricks the guards to open the door and then uses mind control to compel a guard commander to grant him and Liliana permission to enter the stronghold without setting off any alarms. There is another planeswalking situation involving “infinity globes” and breaking the traditional rules of the Blind Eternities (a place without really any rules), but let’s just say that again it feels like cheating.
On the topic of the Blind Eternities, another great feature of the writing is the quality of physical description. Ravnica and Grixis are given exiquisite detail, being provided with imagery that makes them easy to visualize as well as plausible explanations of the mechanisms which allow the worlds to exist as they are (eg the fungus farms of Avaric, the rich mana of the sea beneath Favarial). The Blind Eternities are dizzyingly psychedelic; the detailing of alternate realities rippling off of Tezzeret and Jace as they fight inside the Blind Eternities is a nice touch.
Lastly, I want to touch on the writing of the characters. I really like the way the story is set up with Jace as the slacker mage thrust into the crossfire of the ambitions of planeswalkers Tezzeret, Baltrice, Liliana, and Nicol Bolas as well as thugs like Semner and Paldor. The struggle for Jace’s soul has the potential to be a great, inspiring story. Unfortunately, it’s not the one told in Agents of Artifice.
Jace faces two dilemmas while working for the consortium: Tezzeret’s demanding demeanor which will inevitably destroy all those around him if given enough time and remorse at the evil acts he is required to perform in Tezzeret’s service. Jace is forced to weigh his growing magical abilities and his comfortable life against his fear of Tezzeret and his moral center. I found the resolution of these conflicting forces to be disappointing given my estimation of their potential.
Part of my problem with Jace’s development is that it is left in ambiguity to some extent. Jace leaves the consortium after he fails to complete mission which involved taking over the mind of the August Quest of the Chuch of the Incarnate Soul. Jace gives two reasons for his failure: he can not go through with manipulating a mind as pure as the August Questor’s and he can not trust Tezzeret with the power he would gain from the church. It’s not clear which of these motivations is primary. Because he did not fulfill Tezzeret’s commands, he has no choice but to flee or be killed by Tezzeret. There is no cathartic moment of choice really (Jace only recounts the moment with the August Questor after he returns).
The lack of character development for Jace is further reinforced by the fact that he kills far more people of varying levels of innocence after leaving the consortium than he did while a member. At least, as described in the text he does. Another weak point of the book that the passage of time is not demarcated clearly. Because none of the characters undergoes any evolution (except perhaps Tezzeret growing more ridiculously intolerant of failure as the story progresses), there’s no way to distinguish between the large and small jumps in time. While Jace works for the consortium, he only participates in murder under duress – wiping out one man’s mind that Tezzeret threatens to kill otherwise and crushing nezumi shogun’s in self defense.
At some points, the description does not seem to go far enough, especially as regards Jace’s mind magic. Jace appears horrified by the way he treats the minds of Tezzeret’s man and the shogun, but the description of Jace’s experiences does not match this level of intensity, which I feel Marmell is capable of.
Jace’s mental anguish is well articulated in one scene in a market place in Favarial though. In this scene, Jace makes a mental link with everyone in the market place, forming a loose web of awareness to alert him to danger as he tries to elude the consortium’s forces. Jace summons a steam drake to protect him and is forced to call on it for help at one point when he is attacked. The drake responds with a blast of steam that takes out twenty bystanders, flooding Jace’s mind with final thoughts of many innocent people simultaneously. Only the presence of Kallist which Jace can sense in a way that is beyond physical brings Jace back from the catatonic state he is reduced to following the drake’s blast. Unfortunately, Jace continues to kill with abandon after this point and never questions the nature of his friendship with Kallist or Liliana, both of whom also kill with regularity.
The character of Baltrice provides a nice foil to Jace – she has all the ambition within the ranks of the consortium and loyalty to Tezzeret that Jace lacks. However, this foiling is hampered by the lack of any depth to her character. At times, the antagonism between Jace and Baltrice feels strained, especially at their first meeting, where the dialogue is just awful.
Perhaps it’s time I addressed the dialogue more directly. It’s mostly terrible and is probably the biggest real detractor from the quality of the book. While I can quibble about the moral quagmire that Marmell slogs into, the book would be a great adventure story if not for the stock, often juvenile (think MTV’s Real World in the later years) exchanges between characters which drag the whole effort down to merely “good.” There’s one joke Jace makes about what’s in his pocket that’s just ridiculous. Those errants remarks aside, it’s mostly the clunky wordiness that weakens the dialogue.
The dialogue does have a few bright spots. Nicol Bolas is spot on as an ancient demigod who has seen everything before but doesn’t really have anything better to do now any way. Tezzeret waffles between a badass ripping Jace with awesome jibes and a cartoon caricature of a supervillain. Liliana has her moments – one of my favorites being when she responds to Jace by saying that she does not do anything like a man.
Lastly, I’d like to address the nature of Jace’s friendships. Jace’s relationship with Kallist begins well with a great set of scenes infiltrating a local merchant’s manor. The chemistry between the two complementary operatives, fighter and mage, is right on. Unfortunately, the story drags when they flee the consortium and hide out in Favarial. The strain actually begins when Jace convinces Kallist to leave the consortium with him because Kallist was Jace’s friend and would be punished in place of Jace. Tezzeret is vindictive, but Kallist is so opportunistic and such a valuable agent that I don’t buy that Paldor and Tezzeret would really feel compelled to waste him out frustration with Jace. I’d like to think that Jace’s arguments were really just a pretext and that the real reason Jace asked and Kallist consented was the bond of the friendship between the two, which neither wanted broken. After this decision though, Kallist becomes worried about money to the point of ruining the friendship with Jace. This break feels totally forced by the need of the narrative for Jace and Kallist to be driven apart.
Sadly, the Jace and Kallist friendship ends with another Marmell’s clever moments. Jace attempts to save Kallist from his life of mediocrity by taking Kallist’s mind into his own. Unfortunately, Jace realizes too late that he can not hold two minds in his head at once, and the end result is that two switch minds. Everything before the mental exchange is actually told through an extended flashback after the story begins by following Kallist who turns out to be Jace.
Marmell is asking a lot from the reader with this conceit. It really threw me off the first time I read the part about Jace and Kallist swapping minds back. It was not just my confusion in trying to work out the plot that was my problem. It does not make any sense for two people to switch minds and not notice it – what exactly is swapped and what retained? Marmell takes the easy way out of just not making any effort to explain it other than Liliana saying that Jace’s soul did somehow tricked his mind into noticing the switch.
Despite screwing up the Jace/Kallist friendship with the mind swap, Marmell does allow the Kallist to be well remembered at the end of the book. In his last battle with Tezzeret, Jace uses the fighting skills he learned from Kallist to mask his weakened magical state as he communicates with the nezumi through telepathy to ensure their aid. I like how Marmell brings this element back into the story at the end and likewise how he brings Emmara back in Jace’s use of her magic to heal himself from his vampire bite. This expression of the power of friendship is one of the few positive moments in the book (from a spiritual perspective).
Overall, Agents of Artifice is a good fun book. It was challenging for me to read because I wanted there to be more to it than there was. I felt there were the makings of a great book here, but it was not to be. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy and is looking for an entertaining casual read.
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