 Dawnthief:
Blinding
Can someone please explain to me why I had never heard of James Barclay five days ago? If this is any evidence as to his writing ability, the man should be counted amongst the modern masters of heroic fantasy. I don't think I have been so astonished by a debut novel since David Gemmell's Legend — and I read that twelve years ago! How have I managed to miss this in the nine years since its publication?
Dawnthief is the first novel in The Chronicles of The Raven. The Raven is a band of seven mercenaries, six men and an elf mage, who have earned a reputation by the start of the book as the best in the business. After the briefest of prologues, we join them as they defend a castle, and that's about all I can say about the plot — so fast and so good are the early passages that you really have to read them yourself without having them spoiled by me. In short, whatever you expect to happen, whatever shape you think this book will take, you will almost certainly be wrong. I would go so far as to advise you to avoid the blurb on the back cover, as even that drops a spoiler.
It's really quite difficult to know where to start, so many good things are there in Dawnthief, but I think the first thing should definitely be a combination of praise and warning. Barclay throws you right into the thick of the action — the plot starts at a flat run, grabbing you by the unmentionables and hauling you along until the very end. The pace is fast — often frenetic — but he allows us a few slower, more sedate passages to compose our shredded nerves and for exposition.
This brings me on to another great thing about Barclay's writing style — he has some of the best exposition devices I have come across. There is, initially, a real sense of 'what the proverbial is going on,' and I was fearing that this would turn into the utter confusion of Malazan, but he times perfectly the moments to have his characters stop and question something they do not understand, and uses it to tell the reader exactly what he wants you to know. These moments never feel contrived as there is always a good reason for them — they don't drag on and they are delivered with style.
Which brings me on to yet another strength in the writing. Barclay trained as an actor and, my word, does that show in the strength of the dialogue — realistic, gritty, amusing when appropriate, tender when needed, and always in keeping with the character talking. I do know that some readers do not like it when fantasy dialogue is modern and colloquial, so it would only be fair to warn you that Barclay certainly does this, but it makes the whole experience much more visceral and believable, and I found that it enhanced Dawnthief immensely. Lest you think this means he sacrifices description to fill with chatter, do not worry — the descriptions are vivid and thorough, but do not drag on longer than appropriate or interrupt the pace of scenes. He will also casually interject a conversation or action sequence with a small sentence that throws light on the actions, appearances, and personalities of the characters or their surroundings to augment the purely descriptive passages.
The plot is magnificent, in my opinion — this is essentially an heroic fantasy, but it reaches a scale that borders on the epic, and the plot has more twists and turns than heroic fantasy usually entails. Every so often, I feared that it would slip into a different version of something I had seen before, but every time it veered into something unexpected, original, and quite often wonderful. Barclay sets himself traps to fall into fantasy cliché and either avoids them with aplomb, or they are such an insignificant part of the whole picture that you almost do not notice them.
Magic plays a huge part of Dawnthief, something that normally I dislike, but in this I greatly enjoyed. In Barclay's world, Balaia, it is not something totally common and therefore unexciting, but it is important in the world he creates, and he makes one of the better explanations for how it works than most authors who try to use magic on anything like this scale. It is presented as complex, difficult, and requiring great training and care, and not an inherent power that is randomly bestowed on some by birth. The world itself is not particularly large (or at least that part of it we see) but is well realised and detailed.
This is certainly an adult-only read, it should be noted — the violence is strong from the very start and there is occasionally a rather graphic sex scene. Neither elements are gratuitously portrayed (violence is very much horrible rather than glorified), and in truth the tone would be harmed should they not be there. This is certainly a dark novel.
I have to admit that I became slightly worried about three-quarters of the way through. Normally by that stage in an heroic fantasy I am enjoying, I find myself adoring one or more characters, and in this I wasn't. That is not to say the characterisation isn't good, because it is — Barclay juggles a large cast and all feel individual and largely avoid the fantasy clichés. But I simply hadn't fallen in love with any yet. In the last quarter, however, it struck me — I didn't love an individual character, but I did love The Raven, the central band of the tale. It is the combination of personalities, and their relationships with each other — so strong, so believable, and so varied and changing with events — that is unusually brilliant in Dawnthief.
The Raven is a new take on that fantasy staple, the posse. It is not a backing group for a central character, nor is it merely a device to get a MacGuffin from one place to another — it is the central character, and once I realised that I had begun to compare it to Druss the Legend, their place in my heart was secure and Barclay's position in my esteem was now very high. As much as I once wanted to stand alongside Druss on the walls of Dros Delnoch, this book made me want to be a part of The Raven.
This is not a perfect book — it has a few flaws, but they are mainly so few and of so little importance as to be not really worth mentioning. The only thing I would say in detraction is that there are some plot strands in which The Raven is not involved that I would have liked to see fleshed out a little more — they were briefly followed to fill in the events surrounding our heroes and not followed through in thorough detail. This is a missed opportunity to achieve a novel of true greatness, in my humble opinion, rather than a genuine flaw in the tale, but it did lose Dawnthief half a star.
That said, this book is a gem, and I loved it utterly. I read it in three days, not wanting to put it down unless I had something truly important to do. Dawnthief grabbed me and didn't let go until it's conclusion — and if I get the time I am desperate to read the next part of the adventures of The Raven, Noonshade. The front cover of Dawnthief has a quote from David Gemmell praising it — if James Barclay isn't careful, he could find himself unseating Gemmell himself from his throne as king of heroic fantasy. It is impossible to say on one book, but if Dawnthief is any indication, he is well on course — it is original, gripping, well-written, and The Raven is its crowning glory. Exceptional stuff. —T.D.
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