The Shadowmarch series has taken a number of different shapes over the years. Initially conceived as a kind of fantasy Hill Street Blues, the story was chosen to form part of Williams’ abortive experiment in online publishing.
Williams wrote the first few chapters, put them online and then charged readers a subscription fee in the eventuality that they should want to find out what happened next. This forced Williams to turn his original high concept fantasy series into a more broadly commercial work better adapted to the risks inherent in the experimental mode of distribution. However, the project proved unsuccessful prompting Williams to re-invent the series again, this time as a more traditional trilogy.
The result is a book which, while clearly a piece of commercial mainstream fantasy that places an onus on accessibility of theme and immersion as a focus for engagement, still manages to contain a number of nice ideas and clever attempts to subvert traditional fantasy tropes. given this, it is unfortunate that the book suffers seriously from the kind of structural problems that you would normally associate with the second volume of a trilogy.
The Shadowmarch trilogy began with the King of Southmarch disappearing, leaving his eldest son Kendrick as regent supported by his twin siblings Briony and Barrick. Unfortunately, the king’s disappearance comes at an unfortunate time as the crown of Southmarch is under pressure both from within in the shape of the nefarious Tolly clan and from without as the Fairies who once rules the lands of Southmarch decide to press their claim to the human lands. The result at the end of Shadowmarch was that Kendrick was dead, the Tollys had the throne and a disastrous defeat in battle resulted in the twins taking flight in different directions.
As we pick up the action Briony is fleeing Southmarch with her father’s old master at arms, the southerner Shaso. Before long, Briony and Shaso have found refuge in the house of a wealthy southern merchant who, unexpectedly, treats both Briony and Shaso as the royalty they are. However, just as Briony finds her feet in the new environment she is betrayed, forcing her to join up with a troupe of actors just to stay alive. Meanwhile, Barrick is under the spell of a Fairy queen and is travelling through the mist-shrouded lands of the fairies with the former captain of the royal guard. The pair are soon joined by an injured Fairy who guides them through the mists only for them to be captured by a demigod attempting to gain access to the palace of the god of the dead. As the book ends, the gods are clearly awakening and war is afoot as the tyrannical Autarch of the southern continent lays siege to a city of the south as he begins his conquest of the northern continent.
Given this, intentionally, long plot synopsis, you could be forgiven for thinking that Shadowplay is a book that is full of epic action and spectacle. It is not.
While I did not read the first book in this series, the reviews I have read added to my impression of a book full of intrigue and with a huge battle at the end of it. This impression mainly comes from the fact that the bulk of the first half of Shadowplay is spent tidying up the various plot strands left hanging by the end of of the first novel in the series. For someone who has not read the first volume this is something of a boon as it means that the book spends so much time discussing what happened in the first book that before long you find yourself caught up with the various plot lines and in no great need of reading Shadowmarch. However, for someone that actually did bother to read the first book, this decision will result in a distinct impression that the wheels on Williams’ plot have come off. Indeed, as Briony learns more and more about Southern cultures and Barrick struggles with his sanity in the mists of the Fairy lands, nothing much actually happens.
In fact, it is not until the Autarch launches his invasion and lays siege to a great city of the South and Barrick learns of the true plans of preposterous ogre Jack-in-Chains that the book acquires any real energy or drive. This is due to the fact that the book is not so much a second act as an interlude between the Earth-shaking events of books one and three.
The focus of the second book seems mainly to be upon the twins learning the world after their protective royal childhood. So Briony learns that the religious and cultural attitudes she picked up in her childhood were largely false and Barrick not only makes friends with the Fairies (no, that’s not a euphemism) but discovers a far greater threat to the world of men that that posed by his old enemies. Clearly, this is setting up some epic confrontation featuring men from the North and men from the South as well as gods and Fairies and Williams is trying to establish that the alliances and old assumptions present at the beginning of the series will not be those that ultimately save the day (shades of Lord of the Rings’ “man in the ascendancy” vibe I’m sure you’ll agree). The reason why this change of gear feels so clumsy is partly because it is so obvious, this comes from the nature of the challenge posed by writing a trilogy composed of three long books.
In my review of Tamara Siler Jones’ disappointing fantasy police procedural Valley of the Soul, I mentioned the trade-off between writing a book that is self-contained (and therefore more fun and accessible in its own right) and writing a book that develops plot-lines and characters from an earlier book and sets up elements to be used in a later part of the series (adding depth to those plot-lines and encouraging existing readers to keep buying future books). The result of Williams’ favouring the latter approach over the former for this particular novel means that Shadowplay is a novel where nothing much seems to happen for the first five hundred pages despite the characters clearly being busy doing things.
While this will most likely prove less of a problem to people who actually read the whole series, it does suggest a certain degree of textual superfluousness. Indeed, if it is possible to slip into the series without reading the first book and Shadowplay itself feels more like a long interlude than a second act then one might hazard that one of these books is surplus to requirements and that the story might have better been served by two slightly longer books or three more ruthlessly edited books. In fact, it Is easy to see in this book why the great Clute described Williams as a man who writes bad sentences but gets better the larger and larger the block you consider. for while the book undeniably makes for an easy read, Williams is prone to producing stunningly clunky sentences. Consider :
“Vash was all too used to seeing his master naked, but he had never quite grown unused to it” [page 384]
From the context, we know that Williams is trying to say that while seeing the Autarch naked was no longer an unusual aspect of Vash’s life, it was still an unsettling experience, but Williams manages to lose track of such a simple sentiment through a fog of negations. “Never quite grown unused to it”? is that not the same thing as “had grown used to it”? Williams’ sentence implies that Vash had never stopped being used to seeing the Autarch naked... clearly this is in direct contradiction to the intended meaning? while this problem is little more than the standard issue of an editor being overly hands-off with an established writer, it is unfortunate for Williams is a clumsy stylist whose prose never quite keeps pace with the quality of his ideas. Consider the appearance of the Ogre Jack-in-Chains. Supposedly terrifying with his huge size and severed heads hanging from chains, Jack comes across as little more than Santa as a mean drunk, this impression is not helped by Williams’ decision to have the Demigod SPEAK ALL IN CAPITALS and say things like :
“WELCOME MORTALS - AH, AND ONE OF THE HIGH ONES TOO, I SEE. WELCOME TO THE UNDERWORLD. I PROMISE I WILL GIVE YOU A USEFUL DEATH, AND AFTERWARD I MAY EVEN SHOW YOU THE MATCHLESS HONOR OF WEARING YOUR SMALL BUT SHAPELY HEADS!” [page 248]
Supposedly sinister and terrifying this is absurd and cartoonish villainy that clashes violently with the low-key of the rest of the book. If anything, the Ogre comes across as slightly camp and silly “HOHOHO... MERRY CHRISTMAS! WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE A DEAD BODY?”. Clearly Williams is an accomplished plotter but as a writer of prose he leaves a lot to be desired, a more robust approach to editing would have made all the difference in the world.
These problems aside, Williams shows himself to be quite adept at characterisation. Barrick and Briony are, in many ways, the standard Campbellian Christ figure protagonist destined to save the world. However, working within this trope, Williams chooses to split the Christ child into two.
Briony is the warm-hearted, idealistic princess who loses her naiveté through a number of encounters with demigods and members of other cultures and loses her prissiness through a series of hardships and humiliations. She also serves as the focus for much of the story’s immersive and aspirational aspects as she lives through unpleasantness only to emerge stronger and wiser while tumbling into such fantasised about lifestyles as being an Arab princess and an actress. Meanwhile, Barrick is a much darker figure who struggles with death and insanity in the process of discovering not only a great power within himself but also the role he must play in coming events (said struggle is quite perfunctorily symbolised by the "otherworldliness" of the fairy lands, making them resemble a journey by Barrick through his own insanity). Between them the twins have a yin-yang thing going on which, when combined makes them the archetypal fantasy hero. Quite a clever literary conceit, this move is only hampered by the fact that the book takes nearly six hundred and fifty pages to walk a couple of teenagers through very standard buildungsroman fare, there’s nothing really new or interesting about either of the twins beyond their yin and yang nature.
Williams introduces a number of secondary characters seemingly designed either as foils to the principle characters (as with the captain of the royal guard) or in order to provide running commentaries on events going on at a number of politically important places. However, while the problems of the likes of Tinswright, Chaven and Quinnitan keep the pages flicking by, they have so little import to the main narrative that they feel like make-weights when compared to the twins (though a few, including Quinnitan are clearly sleepers destined for larger roles in the third book).
Williams spoke out in a recent interview about the failings of many books in the mainstream of the fantasy genre and one can see that he is at his happiest when he is subverting established genre tropes (lest we forget, the series that made his name was a fantasy story set in virtual reality). Shadowmarch featured dark-skinned Southerners portrayed as violent barbarians but Shadowplay reveals those “barbarians” to in fact be not only noble but astonishingly courteous and brave as well as custodians of a vibrant and colourful culture. Clearly this is Williams taking a sly pop at Tolkien and Lewis who both famously featured dark-skinned races who waged war on the “nice white folk” from whose ranks the heroes are inevitably drawn. Here we see Williams intelligently taking a traditional trope from fantasy’s politically dubious past and turning it on its head as part of a lesson about tolerance and not swallowing everything your parents teach you.
Williams also does well in his depiction of the Fairy Storm-Lantern who is telepathic and has a featureless face. Initially a deeply Other and strange character, over time the Fairy’s true noble and heroic character shines through helping Barrick and the captain to realise that while the Fairy may look and think differently, they are not necessarily the enemy.
The problem with these nice moments of subversion and innovation is that they are relatively few and far between in a book that is ultimately incredibly conventional. In a book where so many aspects of the plot and characters are traditional symbolic formulation and where there’s such an oppressive feeling of dead time before the events of the third novel, it would have been nice to see Williams stretch his wings a little further and take on a few more of those sacred cows. Not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, Shadowplay has little value beyond being the middle book of a trilogy, and even this is a role it struggles to fill. The plots tick over, old plot-lines are resolves and new characters and plot-lines are set up for the final novel but there’s really very little here that is likely to add to the value of the trilogy as a whole.
UPDATE : Those that are interested can also take a look at the articles on the Aesthetics of Fantasy (Part One and Part Two) that were spawned by my reading of this book. There's also a large associated debate taking in Hal Duncan's blog (of Vellum and Ink fame) and if you look at the comments you can see me being shouted at by noted fantasist R. Scott Bakker.
You mention that this is a trilogy? What is the third book, as having read "Shadowmarch" and "Shadowplay", I realize it is unfinished. The second book ends off w/ the autarch taking King Olin back to Southmarch and saying they will "be friends" for a while, Briony reveals her disguise after being captured by the Syanese guard to save her playmaking friends and try to make an alliance to win back her family's throne, Barrick escapes Jikuyin, Ferras Vansen comes back to the living world in the Fundrling's Guildhall, etc. It seems as though there IS a third book that continues off of that, but I can't seem to find the name of it so I can read it??!!
Help please.
Thank You,
Amber
Posted by: Amber | June 04, 2008 at 09:48 AM
Hi Amber,
The third book in the series (yet to be published) is apparently called Shadowrise. No idea when it is doe out though.
Posted by: Jonathan M | June 04, 2008 at 10:16 AM