Heartstone #3: Flamebringer. By Elle Katharine White.
Harper Voyager. $16.99.
It is a truth universally acknowledged
that as fantasy sequences progress, they will inevitably begin to sound more
and more like each other. And thus, although Elle Katharine White’s Heartstone trilogy opened with a novel
that was balanced (somewhat uneasily) between traditional fantasy tropes and
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and
its tropes, her second series entry, Dragonshadow, began to lean more heavily
on standard fantasy-world elements. And the final book in the group, Flamebringer, moves even more strongly
in that direction.
This is not necessarily bad. White’s
original concept, although clever, made the opening book less attractive to
lovers of sword-and-sorcery novels than it might otherwise have been – it was
really aimed at people who, like White herself, enjoy such fantasies and
Austen’s work in equal measure. Dragonshadow
moved further from Austen and more toward the innumerable other post-Tolkien
heroic fantasies of recent decades, giving up some of its conceptual
originality but making for a more tightly structured and convincing adventure
novel. In Dragonshadow, White really
started to develop her characters within their own world, with fewer references
to the one from which she originally brought them forth.
And in Flamebringer,
the separation from Austen is even more evident. The intense attraction between
heroic protagonists Alastair and Aliza remains as strong as ever. Here, though,
White engages in the redoubtable task of bringing forth all sorts of
fantasy-novel traditions and grafting them onto the Heartstone story. There is, for example, a secondary character who
practically steals every scene in which he appears through both his appearance
and his name: Mephistrophomorphinite Ignaat. He is a gargoyle with “a grinning,
malformed head with goblin ears and a nose like a bat’s” and, perhaps
inevitably, eyes that “burned like live coals.” Of course he is hostile to
Alastair and Aliza when they first meet him as they seek the help of dragons to
counter a burgeoning evil that threatens the world – and of course he later
becomes helpful as well as amusing. Readers will likely wish White had included
more scenes with him.
As for that growing evil, Alastair and
Aliza get hints of it from the usual-in-fantasy isolated, keep-to-themselves
characters who are unendingly hostile to outsiders but who accept the
protagonists in their midst temporarily, just long enough to provide a key to
the book’s plot: “The Eskatha came
from the first things the gods shaped from emptiness, the four great guardian
spirits bound to the world at its birth. We call them Elementari, for their
true names were banished in the breaking…” But these things cannot be, protests
Alastair, for if they existed, those of all species who preserve knowledge of
times long past would know of them. Ah, but this is heroic fantasy, in which when
nothing is known, that indicates truth: “Telling, this silence, is it not?
…[D]ragonkind has chosen to forget. …Humans are no different. The Oldkind who
do remember do not speak of them anymore, for the Elementari rose against their
makers, and for that, they were unmade. Broken without remedy, their sundered
spirits faded into the wood and water, stone and storm.”
Well, not quite, for if that were true,
there would be no overarching evil for the heroics of Flamebringer to overcome. But there is, and it appears in the form
of the mysterious Silent King of Els, who has gone unseen outside his own land
for hundreds of years and who, it turns out, has spent all those centuries
accruing power and evil that, wonder of wonders, are overcome by Aliza in the
space of a few minutes. The climax is, in fact, a bit of a disappointment, for
although some cared-for characters meet their end and suitable tears are
suitably shed, the notion that an essentially all-powerful, essentially eternal
being that has brooded and nourished its evil and grown its power for many
centuries can be vanquished so quickly (if admittedly painfully) is somewhat unsatisfying.
A little more apocalyptic terror would have been helpful.
And there are some inelegances in White’s
writing and plotting that may distract readers from her main points. On the
writing side, for example, the slight humor involving the gargoyle is
intentional, but amusement is not the aim when, in the midst of Aliza’s deadly
battle with a fearsome ghoul, White writes that the ghoul’s “mouth fell open in
a ghoulish grin.” Well, yes…what other sort of grin would you expect? More
significantly, the plot makes much of the reactions, or lack of them, of the
actual gods of this world, which seem curiously impotent not only to stop the
great evil that they themselves created but also to provide any clear guidance
or direction to the good and righteous characters. The very end of Flamebringer is the only time that a god
actually does anything, and what it does is so minor in the grand scheme of the
trilogy that it seems almost laughable, despite the seriousness with which
White paints the scene and the neat-wrapping-up element that the occurrence
represents. Flamebringer is true to
the world building and character development of the Heartstone trilogy, and readers who stayed with the first two books
will find it a mostly satisfactory wrapup, with even a few Pride and Prejudice reminiscences and echoes at the end. So as a
genre novel within a delimited genre trilogy, Flamebringer is just fine. It is, however, missing most of the
Austen-derived elements that originally made it seem as if White would push the
boundaries of heroic fantasy a bit harder than she actually pushes them.
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