It’s been a while since I’ve approached any new ‘traditional’ fantasy series: I got sick of reading through cookie-cutter series that had been padded to turn what might have been a decent single book into a trilogy (or five-parter, or seven-parter, or, lord help us all, more). But Friedman’s Magister Trilogy looks to be a welcome stand-out, if this first book is anything to go by.
It opens briskly (after the de rigueur prologue, which does a good job introducing the sacrifices witches must make to work power), with dark-hearted Magisters summoned by a ruthless king to discover the illness killing one of his sons, Andovan. But the Magisters already know – the Wasting is the secret heart of their power.
It continues apace with the introduction of the central female character, Kamala, as she forces a Magister to take her on as apprentice – she is not prepared to sacrifice her own life like witches must, so wants the Magisters’ version of the power – and finds out first-hand that secret. Now, plenty of fantasy books would waste a good deal of time on milking this apprenticeship and revelation of the secret, but here it’s done by page 40 and we can get on with the rest of the story (and therefore I’m not trying too hard in this review to hide the secret), as the dying prince and the new Magister set out on their adventures.
That makes for a satisfying, though dark, story in itself, but there’s also the bigger story arc for the trilogy: legends come back to life to destroy the world, ancient Magisters keeping secrets, twisted alliances…it’s all set up for nicely for the next two books.
It’s decently written – there’s a few clangers, my pet hates, like “he thought to himself” (who else is he going to think to?) and “in her chest, her heart pounded wildly” (where else is it going to be pounding?), and an annoying amount of typos and errors (my tolerance for this is lower than most; this is your cue to point out the errors in this post). Otherwise, it’s mostly clean prose, and only rarely did I feel like I was being beaten over the head with too much description. The characters, too, are well-drawn.
The only real problem I had was with the treatment of men – normally it’s the treatment of women that drives me nuts in fantasy fiction, so it was quite funny to start feeling uncomfortable on behalf of men instead. But the vast majority of the men in this book are evil.
The Magisters are evil by definition, the source of their power makes them so (and it is clearly contrasted with the behaviour of one of the few good men, Andovan). Within that, they’re varying degrees of callous and cruel, but as a body they are self-selected to be without sympathy, compassion, or remorse. But they’re all men – women, supposedly because of their innate compassionate natures and life-giving blah-blah, can’t handle it. Of course, Friedman promptly disproves that with Kamala, whose hard life has stripped sympathy from her.
But this is also a world where every freaking secondary/background male character is or has the capacity to be a rapist, murderer, ruffian, robber, pimp, child molester etc (whereas the background women are almost all either nice or morally neutral). It’s an uncivilised age, so perhaps it’s relatively realistic – but in a world like that, would it really take 1000 years to produce a woman unfeeling enough to be a Magister? If your choices were victim or whore, would you care that your way out doomed others, the very people who abuse and molest you at every turn? I am hoping that as the series goes on, 1) we will see a better reason for why women don’t become Magisters (most, if not all, physical or mental ‘reasons’ why women can’t do something turn out be social or cultural) and 2) the nameless background male characters will be a little less uniformly immoral.
There’s a few other hard-to-swallow bits – that Andovan is really the first prince/wealthy person ever to fall ill who has the resources to make things difficult for the Magisters – but this was the one that bothered me. Otherwise, this was a good read, and I look forward to reading the next two.
Friedman’s website is here. The next book, Wings of Wrath, is out now – as in, literally, it is released today on Amazon.
Interested? Buy it from Fishpond.com.au
