Hugh Cooks Chronicle of an Age of Darkness; Books one to Five
It was an age undreamed of…
Between 1987 and 1992, Hugh Cook released a ten volume Science-Fantasy simultaneous-chronology epic series which absolutely did not sell well, at least after the third book. Originally intended to be a 20-book series, the first series of three, It was a glorious and doomed project, ultimately he only completed ten, in six years. He was writing them only a little slower than I can read them, but I have read the first five; 'The Wizards and the Warriors', 'The Wordsmiths and the Warguild', 'The Women and the Warguilds', 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and 'The Wicked and the Witless'. Yes every single one of this series was titled in the same way. The man knew how to vibe.
This is my review of the Chronicle of the Age of Darkness, (Part One). It’s pretty great! Might be a niche taste.
The Chronicle, (books 1 to 5) is set across the fantastic A4-shaped, America-sized continent of Argan and its surrounding seas and isles. Its northern reaches feel Canadian, its middle bit has Mediterranean grain nations, south of them is a Rice Empire and south of them is Drangsturm: the Castle of Controlling Power, a huge flame trench dug into the isthmus with a castle full of wizards at each end. South of that is the swarmlands, an area controlled by a possibly-hive-mind utterly incomprehensible and deeply inimical to humanity, insect species ruled by the semi-mythical ‘Skull of the Deep South’.
Book One - The Wizards and the Warriors
This book holds many wonders. Since it is our introduction to Argan and the entire world, it’s about everything, - but the main through-line is that it’s about love, the plot driven by the friendship between two warriors (who read like the villains of a previous series of books we never got to see), and the agony of their moral development. That's interesting because Book 5, Walrus and War-Wolf, is also driven by love and by the slow moral development of a teenage piece of shit and also has a theme of unrecognised friendship between two dangerous badasses. Book Two is about a boy in love growing up and Book Five is about a boy not growing up.
Love, friendship, growth and the meaning of a life.
But first! Heenmor, a Wizard of Argan has gone rogue and stolen a wonder-weapon ‘Death Stone’! The Confederation of Wizards sends one of their finest; Phyphor (old, powerful, smart), one of their sanest; Miphon (low power, kind, reasonable) and Garash (powerful, an utter dick).
The three chase Heenmor and run into the two Rovac Warriors; Elkor Alish, (Napoleon-level strategist) and Morgan Hearst (arguable and actual Dragon-slayer). The Rovac Warriors hold an age-old hatred for Wizards, but the Death Stone threatens the whole world. To get it back these enemies will have to team up to stop Heenmor and return the stone. Can they do it? No. Or at least, mainly no, but eventually yes, but by then the end of the world may be in the offing regardless.
One axis of this sprawling story is the relationship between Elkor Ailish and Hearst; both could be villains of a previous unseen tale. Coming down from the cold north where they made terrible war, they are best friends, or at least Morgan Hearst thinks they are, after all, he saved Elkor Alish from the bewitchment of a mysterious sorceress who kept him captive in her frozen city.
In fact, Elkor Ailish, who had intended to infiltrate the frozen city and open it from the inside, was actually in love with the Sorceress, though he realised this too late, just after he had already opened its doors and let in the army outside. He was still processing his terrible mistake when Morgan Hearst turned up with the severed head of his one true love and a beaming smile. Now Elkor Ailish hates himself, and hates Morgan Hearst. Morgan Hearst has no idea about any of this, he just wants his friend to like him again.
The Cynicism and the Sincerity
Cook writes his world with great cynicism and seemingly anarchic indifference but he writes the human heart with great sincerity.
This is a key difference to Vance, in some ways a close equivalent of Cook, in invention and prose-joy. Vance write worlds and hearts with ironic distance, which makes him cold to read too-long-a-while. Cook is an eternal anglo; the core emotions are seen side-on and held tacitly, rather than occupying the central field and main narrative drive of the scene, chapter or story. But still they rule. All deeds in this cold world are leaves and vines of dreams of yearning hearts.
It’s no wonder normal people didn't really like these books because that is not how popular art is meant to be made. It might be how literature is done, or comedy and satire, but if you want a big audience for an heroic tale then the emotions of the story-drive are the emotions of the scene, or at least only one or two layers deep. To be clear; I really like Cook but he is an odd one and I am not surprised he didn't really strike a chord with others.
The Worldbuilding and the Wainscoating
The bones of Cooks Dark World are buried deep in Vance, Dungeons and Dragons, and perhaps Wolfes Book of the New Sun. A skin of magic over the skeleton of a post-post-post apocalyptic world, with extra species, strange interdimensional tech and apparent magic being degraded forms of super-science.
There are tunnels and forgotten black site research dungeons everywhere. The languages and ethnogroups have been turned over a bunch of times. Fragments of the magical speech are the old scientific speech. ‘Rovac’ sounds like a military term and later on the ‘command language’ of the northern Colloson Empire is called ‘Ordur’. Ethno-groups have curious turns of phrase to show they have migrated and changed a lot within the last 5,000 years. (If I don’t make a comment on Cooks brief Ethnographic and Linguistic excursions before the end, let me know). In book five Drake just straight up finds an abandoned space ship.
Not just the background of the world, but the precision of the power distributions; what powers various people have, their qualities and how these interrelate in the scene of immediate action - all of these REEK of Dungeons and Dragons and of either a deliberate importing of its core concepts or a second hand assumption of them through some other medium.
Some cases in point relating to extra-natural powers;
Wizard Powers vs Warriors; the first Wizards we meet, the Wizards of Arl, are potentially incredibly destructive and can hurl fireballs about, but in-effect, over the long term, not that great, and very vulnerable. They have to store up capacity over time, can burn it all quickly, and once this is done they go back to being just an old man - so their power as direct damage dealers is somewhat crappy. In military situations they blow their load, kill a bunch of guys and then are useless. They can also be stabbed in the back, poisoned, tricked and imprisoned etc, relatively easily. Their greatest power is the threat of their destructive potential, not its use. Like a politician, their power lies in what they might do.
The 'Death Stone' – {“Whoever holds the Death Stone could rule the world” says anyone who gets their hands on it}, - has hard limitations on the conditions of use, recharge, range, etc, that actually strongly limit it in many real life circumstances. It would actually be very hard to take over the world with this stone, its powers are incredibly dangerous but, like the wizards, highly conditional and limited.
Godlike spirits exist and can do miracle-like things, but they are highly focused to particular locations and are difficult to manage (they also seem pretty fucked up).
In terms of natural arrangements;
The personal qualities of the main cast balance out so neatly you can nearly feel the stats whirring behind them.
The economies, agricultural bases, populations, cultures, power systems, trade routes etc, are all carefully organised and invented, not improvised - everything fits together. The great salt road exists because pirates decimate nearby shipping, because there are handy pirate islands here and here, so... There are big population centres growing grain along the Nile-like velvet river. South of that is a coastal Rice Empire, north are more pastoral lands, sheep farmers, then steppe, then tundra.
While the objects of the world-plan can be whimsical, the logic of their working-out is not. Mountains may walk but if they do, agriculture will be destroyed.
All of this crafts the world towards a very un-naturalistic sense of dramatic functionality. Power systems and methods interrelate, but everyone is vulnerable somewhere and has reason to be afraid. Plans fail and fools betray, chaos ensues Wizards guard their backs. This schema would function both as an RPG, (no wonder China Mieville did an intro for 'Walrus and War-Wolf'), but also serves as a means of generating and sustaining story for everything has a knock-on effect somewhere, or some-when else; characters are consistently dealing with the downstream effects of others actions and creating more themselves.
The Pointillism and the Pretension
In Cooks modernist or seemingly absurdist plotting, vital and dramatic moments are always swinging out of left field, or happening in the wings, or we are being informed of them as happenstance. in a way this absurdism is more true to life.
(His Grand Battle scene is more like an actual Grand Battle than most I have read in fantasy; a scene of careful and relentless planning and politicking and persuasion and perception, agonising organisation, then a grand contest of mistakes and limitations, of who can make the fewest mistakes and who can exploit the others mistakes first and best.)
More true to life in some ways, but there is a reason popular authors do not write that way - where the core emotional strand of the story is like a thread running through the background, foreground, off-screen, subtext or overtext of each individual scene, where the question of 'what exactly is the core of this story about' is very highly up in the air or at least not completely obvious for large parts of the book.
I can only really say 'The Wizards and the Warriors' is about love and moral growth because I have read 'The Walrus and the Warwolf', and by the end of the story, that is about love and moral growth. If I read more and different books in this series then I might suddenly realise that 'Wizards and Warriors' was about something completely different.
Cook is a highly intelligent planner, but still I don't read this harum-scarum bouncing around of characters, scenes and points of view, the time-skips and crime-skips, the leisurely fishing scenes with demi-relevant monster sightings, as pure planning. Its.. just his vibe. It just seems to be how he thinks and how he is happy addressing and imagining things; like a big bird or mad mosquito, racing around the 'plot' and diving at it from this direction and that before racing away to come at it again from another, stranger point of view.
The Intelligence and the Interlacement
Ahead of its time... or BEYOND IT! A key element of the Chronicle (One to Five), is that it is a simultaneous and interlaced story. All of the narratives take place across roughly the same ten years. Tough none of the chronologies start or end in exactly the same place, the protagonists consistently interact in the same events, often from different sides and different perspectives, showing up in each other relations.
So, in the dying years of the Age of Darkness, before Drangsturm falls and the Swarms invade, the City-States of Selzirk and Andromarphos go to war over the ownership of the mysterious ‘Death Stone;
In Book One we see events first from the perspective of Morgan Hearst, Rovac Warrior recruited as the general of Selzirks forces, his feud with his former best friend Elkor Ailish, the usurper of Andromarphos now exploded into a war between states
In Book Two the protagonist Togura, having survived life in a mongol-esque horse clan, is recruited as cavalry onto the side of Androlmarphos, but falls sick and spends the whole time nearly dying on a hospital ship, only being ‘rescued’ by a character from Book Three and running into Drak Deldragon Douhey, protagonist of Book Four.
In Book Three we hear about the battle distantly, but run into Morgan Hearst much later, after the events of Book One.
In Book Four, the protagonist Drake interacts substantially with the ‘Wizards and Warriors’and makes an enemy of Sean Sarazin, protagonist of Book Five in Selzir. He is then is sent to Andromarphos and is imprisoned there before the battle, escapes during it and meets up with Togura from Book Two.
In Book Five, the protagonist Sean Sarazin is the son of Farafella, Kingmaker of Selzirk, who recruits Morgan Hearst as its general. Sean makes an enemy of Drake (from book Four), in Selzirk, and annoys Morgan Hearst during the final battle with irritating advice about cavalry formations. (Which we remember from Book One).
Has anyone done or imagined anything like this on such a scale?
Other reviewers have mentioned; Cook just missed the internet. If his stuff had been coming out a decade later it would have had a House-of-Leaves style fandom dedicated to tracking and tracing all the character interactions across this scene and that, from this timeline to that. (The D&D-esque powers and tools add to and utilise this - the bottles and death stones and magic swords being like bookmarks or hyperlinks that show one plot bounding into another.)
The Grand Plan surely is the most obvious thing you are selling here and the most notable achievement, but it isn't really sold. People are dumb and don't understand what to look for unless you very explicitly say LOOK FOR THIS HERE. I dream of a re-issue of the series with massive notes, maps, footnotes, indexes, timelines etc. This ridiculous complexity is part of the art and should be framed.
(The covers for the re-named and re-arranged American versions have almost nothing to do with the actual text, at least in many cases, but they are much more fun images!)
Book Two - The Wordsmiths and the Warguild
"'History is what we understand. The rest is a waking nightmare. History is the explanation of who holds the knife. Without this explanation, all we understand is the pain.'"
Cook said they made him write Book Two as the original Book Two, now Book Three, ‘The Women and the Warlords’ was about a Woman and for a variety of reasons might not appeal to the standard fantasy reader. (We will look into this later). So now Book Two is an ‘extra’ book, not part of the original plan, but woven into it.
Some call this a parody or a subversion of a classic hero story. It doesn’t seem so to me. Though it is quite a bit more ridiculous than Book One, Cook is always somewhat ridiculous, at least on the surface.
Our story is about a lone male adolescent hero on a quest. This makes it one of a trio with Book Four Walrus and Warwolf, about Drake Deldragon Douhey, and Book Five, Wicked and Witless, about Sean Sarazin.
Who then is Togura Poulaan? Son of Baron Chan Poulaan, first of the Warguild of Sung?
He is an actual, normal, well-meaning early-teenage boy with an IQ of 100 who ends up on an adventure and acts pretty much as an actual teenage boy would act. The difference in character between Togura and the she sheer MAX PROTAGONIST energy of people like Drake Dedragon Douhay or the Wizards and Warriors of 'Wizard and Warriors', being a sometimes remarked-on part of the books theme. What if a protagnist has enough heroic luck to throw him into wild and crazy situations, but is just a normal boy?
Like ‘Wizards & Warriors’, 'Wordsmiths and Warguild’ has a piece of ancient hypertechnology at its centre’ the Odex, a floating mirror into which anything can be flung. Myth and legend say the Odex is a physical encyclopaedia of a forgotten world, a placeless, timeless place filled with literally everything, (or at least everything that will fit the mirrors girth), and that, in theory, anything placed within can be summoned forth, whole and timeless, from the point it was sent in. The key to do this is the even-more mythical Index, an artefact hidden somewhere in the world, but long lost to the Wordsmiths who currently control the Odex. In fact the main thing the Wordsmiths do is charge people money to use the Odex as a dumping ground for rubbish, dead bodies, old cheese etc. They also regularly shout random words at the Odex as it seems to respond to sound, but apart from some extremely random objects, all they have gotten so far are curious flying probability-monsters who pop up but who can usually be banished by shouting questions at them.
Due to various complex inciting incidents, the Lady Day Suet, Toguras one-true-love, is hurled into the Odex and the only thing that can get her out is the Index. The Wordsmiths have a few leads on possible locations; all of them insanely dangerous to reach. Our story follows Togura as he is bounced about Argan, often being an idiot, still managing to survive and grow up.
The Ode and the Onomatopea
Because it’s mainly about a normal guy dealing with a chaotic world, the book is more of a petri-dish for extremely Cook-ish qualities. If you liked them in other books you will like them here; worldbuilding, (or revealing), through discursion and wild digression, a cynical, perhaps more tragic, worldview with an empathic heart, deep and amusing interlacements which make the chronicle.. well a chronicle; one big story, and lovely, odd, goblin-mode onomatopoeic prose. This is most beautiful when Cook is most inspired and Cook is most inspired by nature, sex and dreams.
Trying to escape from a nightmarish ruined city and the Post-Apocalyptic cult that rules it, Togura is lost in a colourful swamp, and sleeps;
“Togura slept, dreaming of Day Suet asleep in a bed of turquoise, jacinth and ligure. She woke, a sultry melon-light glimmering in her eyes. Giff-gaff said an insect, eating her nose. He tested her jymolds. She was hot. He was swollen. A sheep pushed him to one side. He plucked mint and ate it, gnawing the sheep. He watched his mother, now perissodactyl, walk across water lilies. I raped her, said Cromarty. Not so, said Togura; you’re just saying that because this is a dream. He closed with Cromarty. His swelling spat. Hot. As birdsong sang.
Togura woke and heard the birdsong. There was something wrong with it. True birdsong should not be like that. He was hearing people talking. They were hunting him. Hunting me, said Togura. His words took flight, becoming shovels of goldleaf; with relief, he realised that he was still dreaming. Sleep on, said Togura to Togura. He did, but his dream soon became a nightmare.”
Later, he nearly dies trying to cross a mountain range whole on crutches;
"'Zaan', said the sun.
The ice-white light ran through his blood in splinters.
It was fading.
'Clouds,' he said.
A frog answered him. He spoke. It answered again. His teeth hurt. Then came the rain, drenching away the last of the sunlight. The skiring wind fladdered and scooped, outpacing his eyesight; it came in rents and buffets, sending the shimmy-shimmy leaves stappering and plattering from down to around. Some dead at his feet. He kicked them from ventral to dorsal.
'Tog, he said.
Asking for someone.
He couldn't remember who.
His legs went balder-shalder-tok through the rain perhaps autumn or winter. His third leg was a gnarled and unyielding strake padded with moss and wort where it jammed home to his armpit. The music of a flute cut closer than a knife; hard, high, unyeilding, it lacerated his heart. He felt his pulse-beats bleeding through his body. The wind blew furnace-hot; he shivered, his teeth tok-tok chin-cha-chattering."
Togura is threatened by his evil half-brother, nearly married to an Ogreess, runs into the Colloson Empire as they besiege the ‘Wizards and Warriors’ of Book One, is lost in the wilderness multiple times, becomes a pseudo Mongol Horse-Archer, meets Drake Deldragon Douhey multiple times, fights an unutterable evil in the ruins of an ancient city, rides a sea-serpent and makes his way home.
The Wilderness and the Word-Hoard
Because in the Age of Darkness, State Power is breaking down, armies are marching and invading, mountains are moving and swarms of alien bug-things are advancing, everyone spends a fair amount of time either at sea, or yomping through the northern mountains. Often they are yomping to their doom as, being Pirates, Oracles, pseudo-Mongols or random teenage boys, they are not well prepared for wilderness exploration.
I'm not sure if I have a point here other than; there sure is a lot of wilderness travel in the Age of Darkness and Hugh Cook must have really liked Hiking. The travel, techniques, environments, wildlife, and in particular, the deep and well-painted sense-impressions of wilderness travel and survival all resound with the ring og truth and subtle perception. If he is just making this stuff up from books he is doing very well. I suspect northern Estar bears a lot of resemblance to New Zealand in its geography and environment. Though every area does have its own distinct feel. The Ravilish Lands in book two feel a LOT like the Cumbria of my youth.
Book Two is a pleasant dalliance. Unplanned from the start, it carries little conceptual weight of the world and bears up little of the interlacement. Because of this, it is a ramble, a wander through the garden of Cooks prose and invention, with a protagonist who, while he is less thrilling and competent than some, is still more likeable and sympathetic than many.
(Let me say again, the book is ALMOST NOTHING like this incredibly cool and cheesy US cover!)
Book Three - The Women And The Warlords
Now we encounter perhaps the most intelligent protagonist of the Age of Darkness; Yen Olass, high-status slave of the Colloson Empire, is allowed her own room, but not a door.
She is a Seer, or prophetess, of a shamanic sisterhood. Perhaps the only form of direct female power allowed in the Colloson Empire, all other women being property, the occasional high status noblewoman, or ‘Raklosh’; a word for baby-withering witches which encompasses any form of ‘outer’ woman who falls from societal safety.
As our story starts, Yen Olass has already had her culture destroyed by the Colloson Empire, has suffered rape and genital mutilation, and through cunning and relentless scheming, has gotten into the ‘Sisterhood’, who have a somewhat protected status, and from there has schemed her way into the service of the foreign born Lord Algrace and her own room.
While the other heroes of the Age of Darkness quest to save the world, for True Love, or for their princely fate, Yen Olass desperately wants safety, a family and freedom.
The Mutilation and the Misogyny
This is less brutal than I expected it to be, but maybe I am just a cold and unmoving person.
Lots of terrible things have happened to Cooks male heroes so far, but only one, a young teenage boy, has had to worry about sexual assault. The story of Yen Olass is not entirely about the fear of rape and physical dispossession, but it’s the major, fuming dragonlike antagonist. Living in an extra-misogynist empire which views women as slaves, in a pseudo-early modern setting with no state power and general chaos everywhere, Yen Olass is working harder than a Questing Hero just to stay afloat and safe. Her Dragon is society and the greatest period of safety she gets is when she can be as far away from it as possible, surrounded by frog-men.
Yen Olass does achieve her 'Hero's Journey' by the end of the book, having quite literally regained her womanhood via a suspicious wishing machine, experienced a (reasonably) loving relationship in safety, at least for a while, having carried and birthed a daughter who seems happy and healthy, (though she may be alien psi-child), and ending up with some kind of husband, not the one she wants because she would prefer none, but he seems to actually like her and she has persuaded him to bathe. She also gets to absolutely brutally murder a would-be child rapist and outwit, (with a fair amount of luck), imprison and exploit a would-be child murderer.
The Story and the Slices of Time
A Hugh Cook character is either the protagonist and a callow youth, in which case they emerge fresh from the pupae, or they are an adult, and they walk onto the scene as if exiting another. This is an adult story, really a middle-aged story, and everyone in it feels like they begin the book after the end of a deep sequence of tales we don't get to see.
This has a good effect on character because absolutely everyone in a Hugh Cook story feels like a real, specific person with a distinct, strong personality and a complex set of motivations which spring from particular circumstances. When they turn up as a side character in a future book, or as a deuteragonist in a book after that, or a villain or sage in a book after that, the continuity and distinctness of their personality will still be present - clearly the same person, not frozen in time, but growing and changing with their circumstance.
This is good for character, and good for the world and the story-sequence as a whole. (As I read more it becomes clear that the main life of the series is in the world and the sequence, not any individual book). But it is not necessarily great for single individual books, as, just as in life, nothing ever ends. Yen Olass begins the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire and ends the book being dragged into the Dynastic dramas of the Colloson Empire. Of course now she is the mother of a prospective Empress, and possible alien miracle child, and possibly the wife of a freshly-scrubbed Pope of the Horse Cult, and she managed to magically grow her clitoris back, so definitely not exactly the same.
In a Hugh Cook story the only real and satisfying ending for a character is in death. So unless we follow someone all the way to their death, their story is not done, and does not feel done, and that can be a little frustrating.
The Coldness and the Care
There are lines in many long books or series where it seems like the author is talking to us directly or describing themselves. This quote stuck out to me;
"Though Yen Olass had never entirely lost the ability to play like a child, there was nothing childish about her appreciation of power, sex and the manipulation of one human being by another."
That describes the 'Chronicle of and Age of Darkness' pretty well. A D&D-esque, carefully made post-post-post collapse exquisite sandbox of a world, with an extremely cold and "realist" view of power dynamics, individual ambition, greed and desire, and international and ethnic relations.
Despite this, Cooks work is almost never cynical, though many of its characters are cynics within themselves. There are very few utterly evil people, not do his characters exist across the scales of 'fall' and redemption that we might see in more Manichean paracosm. Instead their souls and motivations act more like those in a 19C social novel, but one set in an age of catastrophe and violence, where heroic natures of both light and dark tones are needed to survive and to carve out brief moments; a year here, a year there, of safety and comparative freedom. If a character remains "on-screen" for a reasonable period of time, Cook will usually find something interesting about them, perhaps not a "sympathetic element" but a particular and distinct inflection of humanity that could make them, in some circumstances, the "villains" of a chapter, and in others, the "heroes" of another.
That said, in 'Women & Warlords' - the Emperors Sons are fucking evil and stupid, or evil and civilised.
I get why Cooks books didn't sell. It’s not just because the third book was a feminist epic about a woman avoiding rape, it’s because the complexity, tonality and morality of his stories is all slightly 'off', (or very 'off') from popular taste and from the way normal people like their stories told. You can tell a story about a wise prophetess, enslaved from her destroyed people, who is threatened with rape and child murder by the sons of a dark emperor, who is also carrying the child of that dark emperor, having teased from him before his death, a few moments of humanity, and who avenges herself violently on those whom wouldst destroy her and her sacred child, destined to be Empress! And those events do technically happen in this book, but Cook is morally sly, always asking us to view things askance from the (arguable) main moral thrust of what would, in other hands, be a melodrama, and he is historically cheeky, showing is what feels like a bunch of unpredictable catastrophes with characters desperately trying to survive and adapt - more like history feels as you are living it, than as it is presented in the legends afterwards.
But legends are what people want to read for fun.
I am not saying Cook is wrong to do this. I have a huge amount of sympathy for him. But I am saying his books didn't sell big numbers because of it. As many other reviewers have pointed out, much worse writers at the same period, with much less ability than Cook, sold much bigger numbers and are still talked of, while Cook is nearly forgotten.
I cannot tell what is right or wrong for an artist to do but only how things are.
(This cover is from one of the original non-US versions.
This scene does nearly happen in the book!
Though not with a dragon, but a giant insect-creature of the Swarms
{there are dragons in the other books though})
Book Four - The Walrus And The Warwolf
(There is no map in the Paizo version of Book Five. If there was ever a series which needed maps, and ideally, footnotes, end-notes, timelines etc etc, it’s this one. The original Corgi versions do have maps and it makes the read a LOT easier.)
The Audacity and the Amphetamines
This book did about three lines of speed in the toilets just before it got on a bus and cornered you in a back seat. Now it’s going to tell its tale. The bus trip will be long and The Walrus and the Werewolf is sitting right next to you and there is actually no-one else on the bus, including a driver. The bus is out of control!!!! This book is like speedy Gonzales is trying to give the Tasmanian devil a colonoscopy on a Ferris wheel and its being animated by chuck jones. It goes pretty hard is what I'm trying to say.
The most interesting thing about the Walrus and the Werewolf is trying to work out how morally serious it is, because it has very strong, but very tacit themes, of moral challenge and historical and moral development, but is also an utterly manic text which races along at the pace of a re-cut cartoon, or like a rubber ball bouncing around in a small room, and while it has a lot of morally consequential things happen, it often views them, at the time they are occurring, through a cynical, absurdist or simply an unnervingly morally neutral tone.
Added to this is the utter mania and primordial moral chaos of its protagonist. Is he a good man? Certainly not, but a bit? Not at the start at all. Is he an evil man? A bit, especially at the start, but not a lot and rarely with sadism. Is he any worse than any other 16 year old boy, or person of whatever age he is in each part of the book, in the crazed and chaotic world he is from? Honestly probably not.
Drake Deldragon Douhey is as much a trickster spirit as a main character. He lies like Bug Bunny disguised as Odysseus. He lies when he doesn't have to lie. He lies even when it would be a bad idea to lie. Even when telling the truth he embroiders, adds and fantasises, even when speaking to people he respects. He lies to his good friends for no reason. By our standards he is probably mentally ill. He spends a lot of time in jail.
In his defence the society of the world and the plot of the book don't want him to tell the truth and won't trust him when he does. The one time he tries to tell the truth the people asking for it (Sean Sarazin, of Book Five), try to saw off his feet, he needs to use all his desperate skill and invention to devise lies they actually will believe.
The Chaos and the Chronology
I was going to compare the story-to-travel chronology of Walrus to something like O'Brieins Aubrey/Maturin tales, with their social dramas extending across long voyages and then spurts of rapid action, but to be honest that doesn't come close.
If you tried to make a chart of the time compression, dropped chapters, ("oh the crew had a pretty crazy adventure here, anyway), long prison and slavery stints simply danced across with a few words, that time Drake became a King for a year or so, (one chapter in third person historical record form), well the chart would look like a seismograph during an earthquake, or two earthquakes going different directions at the same time. If you tried to draw a map of his travels, enslavements, imprisonments, flying castle trip, teleport gate incident, mysterious tunnel travel and many, many sea voyages, shipwrecks and abductions, then it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Very likely a number of these wild journeys are to bring Drake into contact with various other characters from the previous four, and later six, (and possibly planned ever later FIFTY), books who are all interlaced.
The Disgust and the Development
Drake does actually slightly morally develop. He goes from a teenage attempted rapist, driven by obsessive lust, to someone who actively tries to value the object of his affections as something more than the object of his affections, and eventually into something more like adult love.
While the text skates madly over incidents, or arrantly informs us of vital matters in passing, and while its main group of piratical characters remain generally relentlessly self-interested, they are still coherent characters. They are not jokes, though the story makes jokes about them. The 'storyteller' part of the story might leap hither and yon over important events but the characters are affected in full depth, as they should be. A crime, abandonment, act of violence or of mercy might happen and be shown in a chaotic way, lightly, but if the characters involved pop up again in the roiling broth of the story, they will remember and be affected by these acts. The fears of a neurotic pirate might be played for laughs or plot convenience in one moment, but over time, they will have reasons for their existence and will not be forgotten or overwritten to make a new or better joke.
Its beyond curious that while many of these characters enter as parodies, they are not parodies of themselves.
This feels like a book founded on deep thought and careful planning, and then merrily painted over and scrawled over as if it were graffiti, but as you look closer it seems the graffiti was planned all along.
The Subtlety and the Stupidity
This book should have been a hit! Its tremendous fun!
Still, it seems ridiculous. People like simple blocky morality as the base, with a lot of very deep and serious language and self-consciously writerly and morally-instructive and dramatically perceptible Events.
Walrus does this the wrong way round; the base, the world and its morality, are complex, but hidden, or at least not self-consciously or deliberately described by the writer who in engaged in a kind of mad folk dance over the blocks of their story.
It’s impossible for me to tell if this is a cynical book, or a tragic one. It seems like a tragic book in disguise as a cynical one, or perhaps the two things are in equipoise.
(Has NOTHING TO DO with book five
Great cover though!)
Book Five - The Wicked and the Witless
Sean Sarazin is a Son of a Bitch.
Actually, that’s an insult to his mother, Farafella, the Kingmaker of Selzirk. But of Sean, what can be said? He's just a bad guy. Certainly my least favourite of the first five of 'Chronicles of an age of Darkness'. It lives in parallel.
Cook has already done two versions of the singular young male point of view hero. In 'Wordsmiths and Warguild' we got Togura Poulaan, a sometimes slightly dim, or, more fairly, just a normal young teenage boy, while in 'Walrus and Warwolf' we met the literal incarnation of chaos; Drake Deldragon Douhey, an absolute fireball of manic energy, crazy schemes, relentless invention and Big Protagonist Energy. 'Wicked and Witless' is built around Sean Sarazin, firstborn child of the Kingmaker Farafella, of Selzirk, sun-worshipping ruling city of the Harvest Plains.
So who is Sean Sarazin? Aka Sarazin Sky, aka ‘WATASHI!’?
The Delusion and the Dickheadedness
A somewhat occasionally clever, not especially cowardly, pompous, pretentious, status-obsessed, lonely deluded dickhead.
There are some excuses for this; Sarazin was raised as a hostage in a southern, vaguely Chinese/Japanese coded Kingdom, as the distaff "Son" of its ruler Lord Regan. His closest companions are his weapons tutor Jarl Theodric, his scholastic tutor Epelthin Elkin and the prostitute Jaluba.
It’s not clear if anyone involved in the raising of Sean Sarazin actually likes him in any way. Lord Regan plans to use him as a weapon against his mother the Kingmaker of Selzerk, and every else he knows is in the pay of Lord Regan. True, Sarazin isn't actually that likeable, but this may be something of a chicken and egg situation as his entire life has been one of manipulation and carefully deluded dreams. Regan fills Seans head with vaguely Nietchien/Randian philosophy about the great individual being able to shape their own fate and conquer all.
"'Remember, we create ourselves. Always remember that. We have free will so we are entirely responsible for ourselves. Everything happens t us by our own choice. Never forget that.
'I never will, my lord,' said Sarazin.
'In the final analysis,' said Lord Regan, 'you can have whatever you want. You can be whatever you want to be. You can win whatever you want to win.'
'I believe it my lord,' said Sarazin.
'Some people become victims,' said Lord Regan. 'This only happens because they have a victim mentality. Feeling themselves to be victims, they behave in a way which makes them just that.'
'My lords wisdom is all-encompassing.' said Sarazin, truly impressed by the depth of Lord Regans philosophy."
It's not clear if Regan is doing this because he actually believes it, or because it will hopefully turn him into a guided missile of crazed ambition aimed directly at his mothers not-Queendom.
Seeds and fertile soil. Sean Sarazin decides right at the start of the book that he is absolutely destined for some kind of great and/or heroic role of command and glory, and that he can achieve this largely by his own efforts. From that point on he becomes a problem for absolutely everyone else in the book, primarily his mother, who exerts insane amounts of energy and political cunning trying to keep him alive.
The book is an exercise in seeing the world from the point of view of someone who understands less about what is going on than most of the intelligent characters, and usually less than the reader, who is misinformed, but still less deluded than Sean Sarazin. It’s also an exercise in viewing a deep and complex world, full of deep and complex characters, from the point of view of a shallow and self-interested person.
The Contempt and the Comparisons
The comparison to the two other young, questing male heroes, explain why this is the least of the five;
Togura Poulaan - sometimes a dingus. Relatively unambitious for a Prince. 'Memorises' the one magical word needed for his quest and then forgets it. Fails to notice that he has, by luck, actually found the object of his quest once he has it. Broadly good-natured, genuinely wants to save his girlfriend from a magic circle and puts in a fair degree of effort to do so, does actually achieve some quite heroic things; in particular being captured by pseudo-Mongol steppe riders and managing to move from slave and the lowest status person there to actual tribe member; his notable deed is surviving an ambush and dragging himself a lot of miles over broken ground with broken legs to get back. Wins some degree of respect from at least one father figure. Crosses a mountain range on his own. Survives capture, disease, war. Fights for his life in a Nightmare City against an ancient evil and manages to defeat it. Does, in the end, manage to free his GF from the magic circle and defeat his evil half-brother. Honestly he does pretty good for a teenage boy!
Drake Deldragon Douhey - raised in a bizzaro sex cult, dissolute and scheming, survives attempted drowning, convinces an ogre king to make him his heir, becomes a pirate, defeats a crazy bug-monster and saves the ship, performs several high-risk secret missions and manages to survive, crosses most of the continent of Argan at one point or another, may have dived into alternate realities, falls in love, tries to commit a rape, is made the antichrist figure in a new religion, becomes less of a rapist, fights an entire religion for his beloved, discovers works of an ancient poet and sells them, is given a semi-immortality health parasite, becomes master swordsman and skivamareen player, briefly a king of the Chennaming Gate, kills Par Plovey the extremely evil misogynist bastard, goes to extreme and ridiculous lengths to save his one true love from illness. Honestly I have barely even sketched the surface.
Sean Sarazin; you get involved in a lot of stuff but are largely as competent as extensive education and experience make you, and not much more. Sean why can't you be cool like these guys? Why can't you learn?
The Sadness and the Stasis
The agonising thing about Sarazin is that, even though by the end he has a mother and a father who love him, and a small kingdom, and a pretty cool Dwarf servant he's still an utter tit! He sentences Jaluba to death! (She survives). He consistently does things almost as bad as that and seems to gain almost no self-knowledge or depth. He remains, almost and perhaps even to the end, a big believer in 'noble blood' and the grace and natural will to power of the nobility, despite being not of noble blood himself, and being reminded of that multiple times.
The Glimmers and the Shimmers
Competence - after being exhaustively trained by a very good mercenary, educated by a possibly-evil wizard and having experienced the complexity of court intrigue in Selzirk, and having been part of and somewhat-lead, several at-least-not-disastrous military expeditions and actions, Sarazin does seem to get actually better at basic protagonism. He can fight and war and organise and plan, to a degree, and is not always crap at it, though he would still lose to most other protagonists.
“'Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?'
'It’s not what you do,' said Jarl, ' it’s how you justify it when you get back to Selzirk. I've seen a lot of famous victories which were actually no more than draws - a couple of them were in fact defeats!'
'We'll worry about Selzirk when we get back there alive,' said Sarazin.
'No!' said Jarl. 'Start writing your history now. This is what happened. By a skilful forced march you took the enemy by surprise. you seized Eagle pass. You established a base on the heights. Then you yourself led a reconnaissance in force while your subordinates were busy bringing up the supplies necessary to support a determined thrust deep into enemy territory.'
'Why,' said Sarazin, in admiration, that sounds really good.'
'Of course it does,' said Jarl. 'With the right line in storytelling, you can make the worst defeat into a triumph of courageous, dynamic soldering.'”
Dwarf - after being roofied and sexually assaulted by a witch, Sarazin ends up with an evil Dwarf manservant, the Dwarf: Galbrax! Galbrax is great, partly because he consistently gives Sarazin shit, and partly because he is openly and nakedly a petty, awful, lying, thieving little shit and owns it. He is on the outside what Sarazin is on the inside and that makes him much more palatable. He also sticks by Sarazin and never betrays him, (maybe once or twice), becoming the closest thing Sarazin actually has to a friend, (though of course Sean, being a dick, remains largely oblivious to this).
Some Friends - after being not-a-prick to at least some people, Sarazin does end up with some friends, or at least friend-like relationships, which is all he deserves.
Loving Parents - Raised in a palace of manipulation and more and more aware that everyone around him only wants to manipulate and use him, Sarazin is honestly crushed when he thinks he has accidentally killed his own father, and is genuinely thrilled to see him alive again. His time spent with his actual father running around preparing to be a revolutionary insurgent, his efforts to protect him and willingness to put aside his crazy Randian politics to spend time with him, make Sarazin, for once, almost likeable. Here, the reader starts to think; "Damn, maybe if he was raised right he wouldn't necessarily have been that bad."
Sarazins Mother; Second-best female character in the series so far, the Kingmaker Farafella, also genuinely loves him and tries hard to keep the dumb bastard alive. If only she had met Yen Olass from Book Three, they would have had a lot to talk about. Sean does actually manage to save her at one point with some magical ooze he got from an evil Druid.
Flickers of Decency - after being interrupted in an absolutely horrible crime by his father, Sarazin experiences something like.. momentary shame? Near self-awareness? Once utterly bamboozled and defeated by Drake Deldragon Douhey, who Sarazin had previously tried to saw the legs off, he bows in supplication to the grand tragedy of Drakes noble (and imaginary) kingdom and blood curse. This is all nonsense but for Sean Sarazin its nearly character development.
The Miscellaneous and the Mysterious
Many fragments of world-lore are found within the book, including much that may come to pass, (or would have, if Cook had lived).
Elpeth Elkin; the mind-controlling Wizard of Ebber. Is he good or bad? Certainly the only other wizard of Ebber has proven to be quite bad previously. Now he has access to his ancient city, what will he do next?
The mythical 'Tectonic Lever' of the Deep South. Fated to drop all of Southern Argan into the sea. Previously pulling this thing would be genocide, but with the Swarms invading, pulling that dang lever is starting to look like a pretty good idea actually.
The Prose and the Drowse
Because Sarazin is the way he is, much of the pleasure of the book is provided by the world and the side characters. This being Cooks AoD, the world is more than up to the challenge, and the co-stars are customarily, complete, interesting and compelling. As always - every single named person is clearly on their own complex journey and adventure all of the time.
Perhaps because of Sarazin, Cooks lovely inventive, euphonic sometimes ridiculous onomatopoeic prose is lesser here than in the first four AoD books, though there are bits here and there.
The political and personal complexity remains, and the hearts are still genuine, but again, due to Sarazin, the natural cynicism becomes more dominant than it was in other books, making this one 'darker' but in a low, grimy way, rather than a magisterial tragic way.
For a 'Cook' story I give this three out of five, or even maybe two-relative. For a normal fantasy, I give it a four out of five, as it is still Cook.
‘Zaan’ said the sun
I muse occasionally on how to produce Cooks Age of Darkness in a way that will actually sell books. At least enough so that he finally gets his much-deserved spot in the Fantasy Hall of Fame.
First we must re-name the series; too many things are called things like ‘Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’. Google it and see.
‘Zaan said the Sun’ should be the title, or just ‘Zaan’.
Next we must sell it as something else – Mievelles ‘Weird fiction’ would be a good choice. Even though it ‘seems like, and maybe is, fantasy on-top, its really a distinctly strange and odd thing underneath, almost its own genre.
Next, we Front the Interlacement; do an encyclopaedic version. Put together a cast list, with individual articles showing where and when they come into each tale. Have maps with the crazy journeys of the protagonists. Have an index and footnotes whenever someone shows up in someone else’s story.
What more? Illustrations certainly, but who could possibly illustrate tales of such remarkable tonality. The Corgi covers are competent fantasy scenes, but have almost nothing to do with the feel or meaning of the actual books.
The American Questar ‘Wizard War’ covers are utterly insane and sell the stories as things they absolutely are not, but they do have a certain energy to them. Yann Olass would probably be amused by her interpretation on the cover of ‘The Oracle’ at least.
We are not done with Cook, there are, after all, five more books to go, and apparently, they get weird.
I shall return, in due time, with a review of the second half of ‘Zaan’, and with more thoughts on how it might be adapted and recreated in living visual form, and perhaps on the meaning of the whole massive thing, a meaning which may well have changed totally based on the content of the next five books; The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers, The Wazir and the Witch, The Werewolf and the Wormlord, The Worshippers and the Way and finally, The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster!
