Dark Apostle by Anthony Reynolds
Sep. 24th, 2009 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfish18/9/09 - 24/9/09 - House Moving
Title - Dark Apostle
Author - Anthony Reynolds
ISBN - 978-1-84416-507-0
Dark Apostle's main characters are without a doubt the Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines [and if you think that's a lot of capitals this universe is not for you]. Although Imperial characters are presented they are mostly hi-and-die characters, appearing only to present their viewpoints on their own death-scenes. The few others - Acting Colonel Laron and Brigadier-General Havorn - are there to guide the other side of the story, presenting the enemy's thoughts and plans. Whilst their thoughts are detailed, there is little beyond the concerns of the current battle and there is nothing to really connect the reader to them. This does not exactly encourage the reader to root for the Imperial side, leading to that lack of tension that often arises in two-sided narratives in which one does not particularly care how things fall out for one side. This is not necessarily bad, as this leaves the reader with attention and curiousity for Varnus and Mechanicus Magos Darioq, the more interesting Imperial characters.
Mechanicus Magos Darioq manages, despite being in a cast that contains daemons, giant lunatic cyborgs and mass-murdering fanatics, to be the most disturbing and inhuman character in the story. Darioq embodies very much the depths to which the W40K universe can lower the human condition; he is mostly machine and despises the parts of him that aren't, talks like the bastard offspring of Spock and Hal, a deceiving schemer with the biggest gun in the book, winner of the "nastiest thing done to human corpses by a character in this book" award despite what the Word Bearers are up to and, oh happy day, gets a lovely little comeuppance.
Varnus is, at first glance, entirely extraneous to the plot, and during his early scenes one wonders why the hell he's there. However as one reads it becomes clear that he is more important than his own characterization. Varnus role is dual; firstly to show the conditions in which the slaves of the Word Bearers live and work, and secondly to show through his own painful experiences and slow corruption both the growth of the Gehemahnet and also its effects on those around it. By the later stages of the book I had come to like Varnus quite a lot and was enjoying his progressive degeneration when Mr Reynolds served him a short, sudden and rather unsatisfying end. It is a conservative moment in a book built on excess and feels weak for it.
The meat of the characterization is in, as said, the Word Bearers. Dark Apostle Jarulek's main characterization is "cunning bastard"; he spends most of the book off-screen working on the Gehemahnet. His Coryphaus, Kol Badar, spends much more time stomping around killing people and being an angry, humourless bastard. Kol Badar is a terribly long way from being sympathetic, or even particularly interesting, but he's not supposed to be. He's helping fill out the general area labelled "antagonist", alongside Havorn and Laron, in opposition to the protagonist Marduk.
Marduk - First Disciple of Jarulek and all-around nasty, ambitious bastard - spends a lot of the book treading water [blood, actually] waiting for the plot to turn up, much like the readers. He has a slow-burning blood-feud on with Kol Badar that rises towards a climax that, apparently, is only going to happen in the sequel.
Marduk is accompanied by his partner in being a nasty, ambitious bastard, Icon Bearer Burias, host to the daemon Drak'shal and apparently also the Word Bearers' collective sense of humour. Jokes only happen in his presence, usually from him or Marduk at the other's expense, up to and including a moment when Marduk joshes Burias for having been run over by an enemy tank.
The relationship between Marduk and Burias highlights one of the problems with Dark Apostle; its lack of humanity. There is little human contact between the characters bar Marduk and Buries - no casual conversation, no friendliness, no enlightening angle cast upon one character by another who knows him very well. This has the knock-on effect of making Marduk and Burias look like they're a lot closer than the author probably intended.
The main plot of Dark Apostleis The Siege, although more properly I should say The Battle, as the book is one battle scene after another. Whilst it is the author's clear intention to portray the assault of the Imperials on the captured city of Shinar, and the Gehemahnet in construction there, the battles blend together until one feels like one is reading one endless fight scene interjected with odd fragments of might-be-a-plot-one-day.
Whilst there are no battle scenes that strike me as gratuitous or unnecessary, all of them are very long and none of them are particular different from one another. The Imperials advance with massed manpower and the Word Bearers shoot, burn and otherwise slaughter them, until the Imperial numbers force them to fall back. Repeat ad nauseam. The battle scenes are at one point enlivened by the appearance of some cunning tactics on the part of Kol Badar, but rapidly return to chop-shoot-kill-rinse-repeat. The Word Bearers are supposed to be super-soldiers of great intelligence as well as physical power, and Kol Badar a cautious but excellent commander, so the lack of tactical activity on his part is a shame. One could argue that there is not a lot a commander can do when being asked to defend a very large construction site form an enemy numbering in estimation somewhere around a third to a quarter to a million when he has only some hundreds, maybe thousands at most, at his disposal. I would argue that this is exactly where Kol Badar and the Word Bearers should have started showing what they're made of in the military sense, rather than in the intestinal sense.
We are likewise asked to accept that Burias is gunning for Kol Badar's job and is capable of doing it despite displaying absolutely no tactical nous whatsoever. He runs in, kills things merrily and that's that. Maneuvering, situational awareness and force control seem a bit beyond him. It doesn't help that it is hard to take seriously a commander who has trouble communicating in battle due to being possessed by a daemon. How is Burias-Drak'shal to give orders as Coryphaus when he cannot speak around his own teeth?
Along the course of the story the reader is often gently reminded that the Chaos Space Marines are, as a rule, seven feet tall, painfully good at killing things, and made of angry muscle. The reader either accepts this, it being rather an important part of the W40K universe, or leaves. We are, at first, asked to accept that the Word Bearers are capable of slaughtering tens of times their own number with not very many casualties. All well and good. However, later in the book the Chaos Space Marines begin suffering higher casualties for lower kill ratios, despite being in better positions and with even stronger motivation than before. This little inconsistency is rather irksome.
One could argue that this is a W40K novel and battles are what the audience are here for, but this is still a book and a book needs a plot, no matter what the literary avant-garde are doing this year. Dark Apostle's plot is slow to arrive and sums up to "rocks fall, everyone dies, see you in the sequel". On the one hand complaining about how a W40K novel has too much fighting in it feels exactly like complaining that sailing ship spends too much time at sea, but it is more that the battle scenes are unenlightening. The reader is not surprised by the clever tactics of Kol Badar or Burias [except perhaps once], nor left wondering how the Word Bearers will extricate themselves from a cunning enemy trap. If a writer is not going to focus on the strategic elements of battle in a war novel then the characters must carry the weight, and Kol Badar is too uninteresting, and Marduk not around quite enough, for that to work.
Some things, especially towards the end, seem to happen simply because the plot requires them. Doors open for no reason beyond "Because the book wouldn't end well if they didn't". Marduk is touched by the gods for no apparent reason beyond "Because the book wouldn't end well if he didn't". There is no particular moment of faith or devotion, no stimulus event, simply "Oh, it's time for this to happen".
This problem is made much worse by the prose. As with Lord of the Night the prose is heavily adjectival. Mr Reynolds attempts to convey grand scale by checking the thesaurus under "big". There is no literary grace, no flow of words. I do not recall a single metaphor in the book, and if there were similes they were precious few. Kol Badar and Marduk spend the whole book throwing the same two insults at each other. As much as the prose of Lord of the Night seemed wadded and bland, Dark Apostle is even less good. Words are used like plaster, adjectives trowelled on in one long, endless wall of samey writing. There were points where I found myself stopping to rephrase sentences for better effect.
This lack of grace shows also in the Word Bearers' faith. They are an organization of religious zealots who have turned from venerating the immortal Emperor of Mankind to revering Chaos - present, active gods and daemons of an immaterial world that can be brought into the material. Yet their religious structure is wholly Catholic - epistles, disciples, scriptures, apostles, eunuchs, catechisms and a lot of shouting about hating the enemy in the name of the true gods. That one could replace Chaos with any deity one choses to name does not speak well of Mr Reynolds writing. The Word Bearers are fanatics and one could argue that all fanatics sound alike, just the names of the gods are changed, but this again strikes me settling for the lesser of two options. The Word Bearers' thoughts and actions should have been ennobled and enlightened by their faith, a part of their conversations - of their idioms - indeed, the constant presence that it is written as being. Giving some shape to what the Word Bearers believe, rather than leaving it blank beyond "we believe in Chaos, kill the Imperials", would have given much more life to the novel as a whole.
At one point the following exchange occurs:
Added to this is the problem of the death of millions as a backdrop. The killing is constant throughout the book, with a death toll that is, at a guess, somewhere around three million. Not one character gives a damn. The Word Bearers consider it a necessary sacrifice when their own die and don't give a blind damn about anyone else. The Imperials pour men on the Word Bearers as if trying to drown them in their own blood. The Mechanicus are best not spoken of. As with Lord of the Night almost all of the cast, especially the extras, are there to die messily and painfully, and it lets the story down that such human suffering is not realised with emotional impact. I do not ask that Jarulek weeps for the Word Bearers who die to bring his vision into reality, only that he have some response beyond "It is necessary".
This, in turn, highlights another problem with the prose. Thousands die in battle, yet nobody ever slips on blood, steps in guts, stumbles over severed limbs or has to climb over several hundred dead bodies to get to or away from the enemy. At one point it is damn near raining dead men [there are no women in this book, or at least none who are mentioned for more than a sentence] and nobody gets hit by one, nor has one fall anywhere near them. Aeroplanes are shot down and nobody has to worry about running into the wreckage. Tanks explode and nobody is flayed by the shrapnel. Tens of thousands die but not a single fly buzzes by. This suggests to me a painful lack of visualization of the environment on the part of the author.
The final problem is the proofreading. Whilst better on the technical level than The Terror, someone was clearly asleep at the wheel. There are many, many limp phrases. Possibly the worst phrase I found was "the driving winds drove", although at one point Marduk manages to put his hand on Burias' shoulder twice. That this happens on the same page as he calls Burias "dear" whilst they reaffirm their loyalty to one another does nothing for the aforementioned unintentional impression as pertains to their relationship.
This is not to say that Dark Apostle does not have its good points. It is quick reading, and the ending is compelling enough to keep me reading past midnight [all the End Boss was a bit on the "put some effort into it, you lazy bastard!" side]. The Gehemahnet is an impressive piece of kit, rescuing itself from plot device status by having something of a personality, which is always a good trick for a building. The slow effects of Chaos on Varnus are thoroughly good reading. Marduk and Burias have some fun conversations, and it's always good reading to see a character enjoy himself as much as Burias-Drak'shal clearly does. Small touches, such as the glimpse inside a Chaos Dreadnought's sarcophagus, or a quiet laugh from Burias at a daemon's mockery, add a visceral depth to the universe.
All in all this is a good story let down by unimaginative, graceless writing. The characters have much potential, there are excellent touches, but it is not as good as it might have been.
This book is:
* - very slow in the plot
* - mostly battle scenes
* - bland despite the slaughter of untold thousands
This book is not:
* - well thought-out by the author
* - graceful
* - as good as it could have been
Author - Anthony Reynolds
ISBN - 978-1-84416-507-0
"A blast of energy knocked him from his feet, and all the Guardsmen within a radius of twenty metres of the departing daemon spirit were thrown to the ground. The Chaos Space Marines were buffeted, but retained their feet, and they fired into the prone Elysians, executing them mercilessly with head shots."Dark Apostle is another Warhammer: 40,000 tie-in novel. Like Lord of the Night it concerns an Imperial law-enforcer and the almost-but-not-quite-head bastard of one of W40K's many showers of bastards, but beyond that the resemblances are superficial. Where Lord of the Night has two highly developed main characters, Dark Apostle spreads the wealth to half a dozen; where Lord of the Night has one extremely tough bastard fighting against insurmountable odds, Dark Apostle has several hundred extremely tough bastards fighting against apparently infinite enemies; where Lord of the Night has high piano taxes, Dark Apostle has a blood-feud.
Dark Apostle's main characters are without a doubt the Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines [and if you think that's a lot of capitals this universe is not for you]. Although Imperial characters are presented they are mostly hi-and-die characters, appearing only to present their viewpoints on their own death-scenes. The few others - Acting Colonel Laron and Brigadier-General Havorn - are there to guide the other side of the story, presenting the enemy's thoughts and plans. Whilst their thoughts are detailed, there is little beyond the concerns of the current battle and there is nothing to really connect the reader to them. This does not exactly encourage the reader to root for the Imperial side, leading to that lack of tension that often arises in two-sided narratives in which one does not particularly care how things fall out for one side. This is not necessarily bad, as this leaves the reader with attention and curiousity for Varnus and Mechanicus Magos Darioq, the more interesting Imperial characters.
Mechanicus Magos Darioq manages, despite being in a cast that contains daemons, giant lunatic cyborgs and mass-murdering fanatics, to be the most disturbing and inhuman character in the story. Darioq embodies very much the depths to which the W40K universe can lower the human condition; he is mostly machine and despises the parts of him that aren't, talks like the bastard offspring of Spock and Hal, a deceiving schemer with the biggest gun in the book, winner of the "nastiest thing done to human corpses by a character in this book" award despite what the Word Bearers are up to and, oh happy day, gets a lovely little comeuppance.
Varnus is, at first glance, entirely extraneous to the plot, and during his early scenes one wonders why the hell he's there. However as one reads it becomes clear that he is more important than his own characterization. Varnus role is dual; firstly to show the conditions in which the slaves of the Word Bearers live and work, and secondly to show through his own painful experiences and slow corruption both the growth of the Gehemahnet and also its effects on those around it. By the later stages of the book I had come to like Varnus quite a lot and was enjoying his progressive degeneration when Mr Reynolds served him a short, sudden and rather unsatisfying end. It is a conservative moment in a book built on excess and feels weak for it.
The meat of the characterization is in, as said, the Word Bearers. Dark Apostle Jarulek's main characterization is "cunning bastard"; he spends most of the book off-screen working on the Gehemahnet. His Coryphaus, Kol Badar, spends much more time stomping around killing people and being an angry, humourless bastard. Kol Badar is a terribly long way from being sympathetic, or even particularly interesting, but he's not supposed to be. He's helping fill out the general area labelled "antagonist", alongside Havorn and Laron, in opposition to the protagonist Marduk.
Marduk - First Disciple of Jarulek and all-around nasty, ambitious bastard - spends a lot of the book treading water [blood, actually] waiting for the plot to turn up, much like the readers. He has a slow-burning blood-feud on with Kol Badar that rises towards a climax that, apparently, is only going to happen in the sequel.
Marduk is accompanied by his partner in being a nasty, ambitious bastard, Icon Bearer Burias, host to the daemon Drak'shal and apparently also the Word Bearers' collective sense of humour. Jokes only happen in his presence, usually from him or Marduk at the other's expense, up to and including a moment when Marduk joshes Burias for having been run over by an enemy tank.
The relationship between Marduk and Burias highlights one of the problems with Dark Apostle; its lack of humanity. There is little human contact between the characters bar Marduk and Buries - no casual conversation, no friendliness, no enlightening angle cast upon one character by another who knows him very well. This has the knock-on effect of making Marduk and Burias look like they're a lot closer than the author probably intended.
The main plot of Dark Apostleis The Siege, although more properly I should say The Battle, as the book is one battle scene after another. Whilst it is the author's clear intention to portray the assault of the Imperials on the captured city of Shinar, and the Gehemahnet in construction there, the battles blend together until one feels like one is reading one endless fight scene interjected with odd fragments of might-be-a-plot-one-day.
Whilst there are no battle scenes that strike me as gratuitous or unnecessary, all of them are very long and none of them are particular different from one another. The Imperials advance with massed manpower and the Word Bearers shoot, burn and otherwise slaughter them, until the Imperial numbers force them to fall back. Repeat ad nauseam. The battle scenes are at one point enlivened by the appearance of some cunning tactics on the part of Kol Badar, but rapidly return to chop-shoot-kill-rinse-repeat. The Word Bearers are supposed to be super-soldiers of great intelligence as well as physical power, and Kol Badar a cautious but excellent commander, so the lack of tactical activity on his part is a shame. One could argue that there is not a lot a commander can do when being asked to defend a very large construction site form an enemy numbering in estimation somewhere around a third to a quarter to a million when he has only some hundreds, maybe thousands at most, at his disposal. I would argue that this is exactly where Kol Badar and the Word Bearers should have started showing what they're made of in the military sense, rather than in the intestinal sense.
We are likewise asked to accept that Burias is gunning for Kol Badar's job and is capable of doing it despite displaying absolutely no tactical nous whatsoever. He runs in, kills things merrily and that's that. Maneuvering, situational awareness and force control seem a bit beyond him. It doesn't help that it is hard to take seriously a commander who has trouble communicating in battle due to being possessed by a daemon. How is Burias-Drak'shal to give orders as Coryphaus when he cannot speak around his own teeth?
Along the course of the story the reader is often gently reminded that the Chaos Space Marines are, as a rule, seven feet tall, painfully good at killing things, and made of angry muscle. The reader either accepts this, it being rather an important part of the W40K universe, or leaves. We are, at first, asked to accept that the Word Bearers are capable of slaughtering tens of times their own number with not very many casualties. All well and good. However, later in the book the Chaos Space Marines begin suffering higher casualties for lower kill ratios, despite being in better positions and with even stronger motivation than before. This little inconsistency is rather irksome.
One could argue that this is a W40K novel and battles are what the audience are here for, but this is still a book and a book needs a plot, no matter what the literary avant-garde are doing this year. Dark Apostle's plot is slow to arrive and sums up to "rocks fall, everyone dies, see you in the sequel". On the one hand complaining about how a W40K novel has too much fighting in it feels exactly like complaining that sailing ship spends too much time at sea, but it is more that the battle scenes are unenlightening. The reader is not surprised by the clever tactics of Kol Badar or Burias [except perhaps once], nor left wondering how the Word Bearers will extricate themselves from a cunning enemy trap. If a writer is not going to focus on the strategic elements of battle in a war novel then the characters must carry the weight, and Kol Badar is too uninteresting, and Marduk not around quite enough, for that to work.
Some things, especially towards the end, seem to happen simply because the plot requires them. Doors open for no reason beyond "Because the book wouldn't end well if they didn't". Marduk is touched by the gods for no apparent reason beyond "Because the book wouldn't end well if he didn't". There is no particular moment of faith or devotion, no stimulus event, simply "Oh, it's time for this to happen".
This problem is made much worse by the prose. As with Lord of the Night the prose is heavily adjectival. Mr Reynolds attempts to convey grand scale by checking the thesaurus under "big". There is no literary grace, no flow of words. I do not recall a single metaphor in the book, and if there were similes they were precious few. Kol Badar and Marduk spend the whole book throwing the same two insults at each other. As much as the prose of Lord of the Night seemed wadded and bland, Dark Apostle is even less good. Words are used like plaster, adjectives trowelled on in one long, endless wall of samey writing. There were points where I found myself stopping to rephrase sentences for better effect.
This lack of grace shows also in the Word Bearers' faith. They are an organization of religious zealots who have turned from venerating the immortal Emperor of Mankind to revering Chaos - present, active gods and daemons of an immaterial world that can be brought into the material. Yet their religious structure is wholly Catholic - epistles, disciples, scriptures, apostles, eunuchs, catechisms and a lot of shouting about hating the enemy in the name of the true gods. That one could replace Chaos with any deity one choses to name does not speak well of Mr Reynolds writing. The Word Bearers are fanatics and one could argue that all fanatics sound alike, just the names of the gods are changed, but this again strikes me settling for the lesser of two options. The Word Bearers' thoughts and actions should have been ennobled and enlightened by their faith, a part of their conversations - of their idioms - indeed, the constant presence that it is written as being. Giving some shape to what the Word Bearers believe, rather than leaving it blank beyond "we believe in Chaos, kill the Imperials", would have given much more life to the novel as a whole.
At one point the following exchange occurs:
'Is it the lure of Slaanesh, your endless desire to raise yourself, to better yourself?'I admit that I am not world expert on the W40K canon but last I checked Slaanesh was the lord of desire, embodying and fuelled by the longings and needings of mortals. Perfection is also in his remit, as are passion and pleasure. This little exchange strikes me as counter to the concepts of the Chaos gods - that here they are presented as embodying one thing and one thing only, whereas all that I know of the canon shows that they are changeable [as Chaos should be] and multifaceted.
'It is not perfection I seek, First Acolyte, as you know. I don't need perfection to attain that which I desire.'
Added to this is the problem of the death of millions as a backdrop. The killing is constant throughout the book, with a death toll that is, at a guess, somewhere around three million. Not one character gives a damn. The Word Bearers consider it a necessary sacrifice when their own die and don't give a blind damn about anyone else. The Imperials pour men on the Word Bearers as if trying to drown them in their own blood. The Mechanicus are best not spoken of. As with Lord of the Night almost all of the cast, especially the extras, are there to die messily and painfully, and it lets the story down that such human suffering is not realised with emotional impact. I do not ask that Jarulek weeps for the Word Bearers who die to bring his vision into reality, only that he have some response beyond "It is necessary".
This, in turn, highlights another problem with the prose. Thousands die in battle, yet nobody ever slips on blood, steps in guts, stumbles over severed limbs or has to climb over several hundred dead bodies to get to or away from the enemy. At one point it is damn near raining dead men [there are no women in this book, or at least none who are mentioned for more than a sentence] and nobody gets hit by one, nor has one fall anywhere near them. Aeroplanes are shot down and nobody has to worry about running into the wreckage. Tanks explode and nobody is flayed by the shrapnel. Tens of thousands die but not a single fly buzzes by. This suggests to me a painful lack of visualization of the environment on the part of the author.
The final problem is the proofreading. Whilst better on the technical level than The Terror, someone was clearly asleep at the wheel. There are many, many limp phrases. Possibly the worst phrase I found was "the driving winds drove", although at one point Marduk manages to put his hand on Burias' shoulder twice. That this happens on the same page as he calls Burias "dear" whilst they reaffirm their loyalty to one another does nothing for the aforementioned unintentional impression as pertains to their relationship.
This is not to say that Dark Apostle does not have its good points. It is quick reading, and the ending is compelling enough to keep me reading past midnight [all the End Boss was a bit on the "put some effort into it, you lazy bastard!" side]. The Gehemahnet is an impressive piece of kit, rescuing itself from plot device status by having something of a personality, which is always a good trick for a building. The slow effects of Chaos on Varnus are thoroughly good reading. Marduk and Burias have some fun conversations, and it's always good reading to see a character enjoy himself as much as Burias-Drak'shal clearly does. Small touches, such as the glimpse inside a Chaos Dreadnought's sarcophagus, or a quiet laugh from Burias at a daemon's mockery, add a visceral depth to the universe.
All in all this is a good story let down by unimaginative, graceless writing. The characters have much potential, there are excellent touches, but it is not as good as it might have been.
This book is:
* - very slow in the plot
* - mostly battle scenes
* - bland despite the slaughter of untold thousands
This book is not:
* - well thought-out by the author
* - graceful
* - as good as it could have been
