Reading Books

[tacticslion]

So, recently, I've been enjoying Glen Cook, specifically, his Instrumentalities of the Night series, even more specifically, Lord of the Silent Kingdom.

It's quite good! I'd previously enjoyed The Tyranny of the Night several years back, and I'd like to add Surrender to the Will of the Night, and Working the Gods' Mischief to my library at some point.

It's effectively a re-imagining of (and renaming of) the 13th Century world around the Mediterranean... if said world was infested with night monsters spawned from peoples conscious and unconscious terrors, genuine wells of power that sorcerers can use to create more, and all the myths and fairy-tales of all people everywhere were, in fact, real, because of these things (and also most active during the night time).

To sum the books up in a spoiler-free kind of way (well, spoiler-free beyond the first, like, two chapters): a Praman* soldier-slave Else Tage, on a raid for mummies ordered by his chief of Sorcerers**, faces down a foe, a surprise manifestation from a minor Instrumentality of the Night*** (let's call it a "Baron"). Using a new device called a "falcon"^ and his quick wits as a soldier, he loads the thing with silver and iron and successfully manages to kill Baron. Eventually, he gets back home, but barely has a chance to see his wife and son before the Marshal - effective ruler of the local Praman kingdom/empire/country - sends him as a spy north into the Brothen**** lands with an impossible mission: make it so that the Brothen Crusade against the Praman lands doesn't do real or lasting damage. And so Else Tage takes a new name and heads into the corrupt heart of the western world... and those two events haunt him ever since, including a plot to assassinate him that was initiated two hundred years before he was born.

Oh, yeah. And Else Tage has absolutely no talent whatsoever with the Night.

It's... good. If there was one flaw with the writing, though, it's that a couple of the auxiliary "protagonist"-type characters^^ seem to come to the "right thinking" (as seems defined by the author) on (this world's) religion for no real discernible reason. It's not a major flaw, but since we're not with them consistently to see where that idea came from, the fact that they are suddenly making those presumptions is a little jarring, especially since most everything else flows extremely well.

It's a very dense book, highly political, and sure to potentially ruffle feathers if you're at all religious... presuming you don't accept the premise that "this world is fundamentally extremely different from my own, no matter what the apparent similarities". There's some thinly-veiled criticism of ancient religious and social elements, true, and a general tend for the author to "prefer" certain religious principles and ideologies over others. But it's still well-written, and enjoyable.

Anyway, I over-all recommend it.

* Think a generic, loosely-similar Arabic/Islamic reinterpretation
** Yes, they have those, yes, it's against all religious law, yes, everyone does.
*** This is basically the source of all religious/mythical/etc thinking in this world. There are "Wells of Power", and whatnot, but if it's supernatural, it'll be an Instrumentality of the Night, or related to one or more of the Instrumentalities in some way. The Instrumentalities are shaped by collective faith and reasoning... and nightmares and emotions... so, you know, not really good things, at large.
**** Think a generic, loosely-similar European/Roman Catholic reinterpretation.
^ It's a cannon. I don't know why "Falcon" was chosen. I'd have called it a Dog, or Lion, or something, but they went with "Falcon", so...
^^ The book shifts to certain characters' viewpoints and you're generally presumed to side with said characters. I tend to, over-all.

NOTE ON FAITHS AND PEOPLESNOTE ON FAITHS AND PEOPLES: I've yet to see any sort of genuine Messiah figure mentioned, however, or anything similar to Eucharistic Rites or Mass. There does seem to be a "Founder Figure" named "Aaron", but I'm left unsure of how similar he is to anything Christian. There's also a group similar to Jews (Deves) and other major faiths of the time. I have not seen anything directly related to genuine Islam, either, other than the literally broadest strokes possible to paint in (Monotheism, similar social set-up, historical inheritance of religious ideology from the Deves, etc), and the primary similarity to Brothe and Christianity comes from the combination monotheism and hierarchy based in Brothe (a clear Rome-analog). There is one faith I'm really unsure of, called the Dainshaus, which seems to be the greatest form of divergence from real-world anything, which the Deves supposedly inherited their monotheistic ideas from. I'm honestly not sure which real-world religious/social/racial/etc group, if any, this relates to - certainly not the dualistic Zoroastrianism, as the Dainshaus are, from what I can tell, just as fiercely monotheistic as the others... so, I dunno. Certainly nothing listed under the Abrahamic faiths, and nothing I know of ancient Sumerian, Chaldean, Canaanite, or the like would fit. Not the Egyptian Aten, either. My guess is that it's just a purposefully fake "cruel progenitor" religion for the monotheistic faiths to follow for the purposes of story flow.

In any event, while the faiths and ideologies are obviously related to the faiths I mention above, they are, at best, loose and vague imitations thereof. I'm reasonably certain, based on elements mentioned within Lord of the Silent Kingdom, that there was never a Messiah/God-Incarnate figure, for example, for the "Christian-like" religion to attach itself to. So don't let that bother you.