Khorasan Archives, Book One: The Bloodprint. By Ausma Zehanat Khan.
Harper Voyager. $16.99.
Khorasan Archives, Book Two: The Black Khan. By Ausma Zehanat Khan.
Harper Voyager. $16.99.
It is hard not to want Ausma Zehanat
Khan’s Khorasan Archives to be good.
The sprawling series – four thick volumes that will likely total some 1,800
pages are planned – features a plethora of strong women characters, and indeed
is female-dominated in a way that fantasy epics very rarely are. And it has a
central proposition that is highly intriguing, namely that the written words of
a crucial text called the Bloodprint have power that is both religious and
magical. Books about books are always potentially fascinating, and the Khorasan Archives sequence is in large
part about the ways in which highly important books – the parallel with the
Quran is clear – can be used for purposes both good and ill.
The problem with the series,
unfortunately, is that it is so
enamored of words and language that it bogs down repeatedly in verbal oddities,
from its peculiar mixture of names to the amount of time characters spend on
word-related matters. A single example: “Sinnia was unabashed. ‘This country has
strange names. In my land, the westward river is called the Tarius. Others know
it as Arius.’ Arian nodded, resting her back against the minaret’s curved wall.
‘The people of the Aryaward, the southernmost lands, know it as the Horaya.
They say the ancient people named it for one of their gods. The people of the
Plague Lands called it the Tejen.’” This sort of discursive dialogue is
delivered along with some irritating stylistic idiosyncrasies, such as Khan’s
fondness for single-sentence paragraphs. Again, a single example:
“Arian pushed down a surge of longing.
Why
had she sought out Daniyar?
Why
had the Silver Mage come to her rescue only to ride away?
Her questions remained unanswered.
The sound of Wafa’s chattering teeth
distracted her.”
And so on, and on and on, in a manner that
is wearing after two volumes (indeed, after a portion of a single one) and is
likely to become much more so by the time this grand epic eventually concludes.
And then there are the place names and
titles of the very large cast of characters (many of whom are listed in
three-to-four-page appendices). There is some consistency, and a certain level
of reality-based exoticism, to a land called Khorasan with a region called
Hazar and cities called Hira and Marakand. But there is also a region called
Far Range, mountains called Death Run, a horn called Avalaunche, and leadership
titles including Authenticate, Commandhan, and the Authoritan and his
Augur-Consort. This mixture of terms is, at the very least, odd; it is also
distracting, making it difficult to focus on the story because of the jarring
nature of many of its elements.
The overarching plot revolves around two women:
Arian, First Oralist of the Companions of Hira, and her apprentice and warrior
companion, Sinnia. The Companions of Hira preserve the magicoreligious sacred
heritage of a scripture known as the Claim; and they stand in opposition to a
vicious, patriarchal, anti-educational, anti-woman movement called the Talisman
(yes, as in Taliban). The Talisman – led by a man known as the One-Eyed
Preacher – is determined to destroy the Bloodprint, an artifact said to contain
the entire Claim, which is generally known only through fragments (many of which
are scattered throughout the books’ pages). In The Bloodprint, Arian and Sinnia are on the trail of the manuscript
in the hope that the text will show the way to destroy the Talisman once and
for all. Their quest is complicated by, among other things, the occasional
appearance of the Silver Mage, a man named Daniyar, whose love Arian has
rejected for 10 years in pursuit of a higher duty; and by a variety of
philosophical discussions and analyses, such as one about whether a single
sacred word can mean both “peace” and “submission.” By the cliffhanger ending
of The Bloodprint, the quest for the
mystical manuscript has failed and the Talisman is continuing its drive to
destroy literacy – and, not incidentally, engaging in some rather gruesome
torture of Arian, Sinnia and Daniyar. Captured and held separately, the three
manage to escape in The Black Khan
and reunite to continue their search for the codex, which turns out to be held
by a ruler named Rukh, the Black Khan of the second book’s title. In this book,
political chicanery and machinations come to the fore, since Rukh’s entire court
is ruled by treachery and conspiracy. The brave companions must engage in some
intrigues of their own, including with Rukh, whose motivation cannot be trusted
even when he joins their cause – or seems to. It is hard to keep track of all
the changes in allegiance here, and the task is not really made easier by the
author’s inclusion of extended glossaries (five pages in the first book, six in
the second) that readers will need to consult frequently to be able to follow
what is going on and, more to the point, who is doing what to whom. Even with the glossary, that is not always
clear, since characters’ motivations shift frequently and are sometimes
self-contradictory. The intriguing place settings and sense of deep history –
based in part on some real-world events of the ancient Middle East – are at
nearly constant war with the overly complex discussion points and analyses, the
innumerable characters with little personality differentiation, and the rather
facile and simplistic notion that the foundational question of the whole
sequence is one of heart vs. duty. Again and again, readers are likely to wish
that Khan would simply get on with it, the “it” being action of some sort,
because when there is action, she
handles the scenes well. But this planned tetralogy already shows considerable
signs of bloat in its first two volumes, and it is hard to argue that it would
not be better as a trilogy, or even a two-book sequence.
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