Dark Disciple by Anthony Reynolds
Sep. 27th, 2009 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfish25/9/09 - 27/9/09 - House Moving
Title - Dark Disciple
Author - Anthony Reynolds
ISBN - 978-1-84416-665-7
Make no mistake; this is a good book.
The book begins with a vicious piece of foreshadowing, dropping the reader straight into a scene of Marduk being horribly tortured. This scene is written with sufficient unpleasantness that it stays with the reader for the whole book, waiting to see how Marduk will get into this nasty situation and, more, how he will get out of it. As the book progresses beyond the halfway point the reader starts to get worried; the prologue is serious business and Marduk totally unaware of what awaits him in later chapters. By the three-quarter mark it seems implausible Marduk will have time to get himself out of the mess the reader knows he must soon get into. When Word Bearers' little expedition seems to be in the clear - and therefore wholly jinxed - the tension induced by this foreshadowing reaches such a point that I found myself putting the book down every four or five pages to think of something else, before being hauled back in by the need to find out what would happen. It has been a long time since something caught my attention this much.
When Marduk finally does get himself into this horrible mess, Mr Reynolds keeps the tension high enough that putting the book down is not an option. It is damned near impossible to see how Marduk is going to get himself out of his predicament and he does it with admirable cleverness and fortitude. It is gratifying to see Mr Reynolds aware of the capacities of the Space Marine genejacking, but the presentation of Marduk's use of his body's abilities is such that the physiological trickery is secondary to the surprise.
Marduk himself does not feel as if he has changed much as a character since the beginning of the first book, although being better-written gives him deeper dimensions. He remains a ruthless visionary with an ambitious streak wide enough to drive tanks along. His comrade and general partner in killing people, Burias-Drak'shal, has not changed a great deal either, although there is a loosening of his behaviour that suggests he's going somewhere. Burias drinks on duty, acts insolent, complains sufficiently to be likened to a spoiled child by Marduk, fidgets restlessly for hours and is generally rather ill-disciplined, something that asks for a comeuppance. The improvement of writing gives a strong sense of his self-admiration [no man with waist-length perfumed hair can stand amongst the monastically shaven and not look fond of himself] and a more subtle sense that Burias simply doesn't feel that the rules apply to him.
Kol Badar has not changed much either and his lack of change is character development in itself. Beholden to Marduk now, he continues to act as Coryphaus despite having a deep hatred for the younger man. Throughout the book Kol Badar grumbles, criticizes, finds flaws and generally nay-says Marduk, yet underlying this is the simple fact that without Kol Badar, Marduk could not achieve most of what he does. Of the three Word Bearers, Kol Badar benefits the most from the improvement in style, since the amount of work he is doing - in terms of orders given, plans laid, data processed and burden of command carried - becomes clear to the reader in a way it was entirely not so in Dark Apostle. Kol Badar is very much the soldier of the three, tactically aware and probably bitterly hating Marduk for leaving him to do all the legwork if nothing else. It is rather a shame we get no scenes from his perspective as by the end of the book I had become quite fond of him despite the simple fact that he's a cold-blooded murdering bastard.
[It is interesting to note that the role of Coryphaus is more than twice mentioned as being, at least in part, to be the interlocutor between the Dark Apostle [or acting Dark Apostle in Marduk's case here] and the rest of the Word Bearers Host. That Kol Badar's constant griping at Marduk may or may not represent a more widespread feeling amongst the rest of the Host is never mentioned.]
The fourth main character is Magos Darioq, who is less of a character and more a cargo for most of the book, standing at the back and saying pretty much nothing. His few lines are, as with the example at the start of this review, example enough of a character who started well below the baseline of humanity and has continued to descend. As with Varnus in Dark Apostle the slow corruption of Darioq is tasty reading and obviously something Mr Reynolds does well. Again, Darioq is a character whose development in a third book would be of definite interest, although some assurance that he hasn't got yet more tricks up his servo-harness would be good.
There are other characters in the book: three Word Bearers champions named Namar-sin, Sabtec and Khalaxis [a painfully obscure TF joke goes here]; an Imperial citizen named Solon and a boy named Dios; a rogue trader Baranov; Dark Eldar Dracon Alith Drazjaer ... the list goes on. None of them are anywhere nearly as developed as the three main characters, and although most of them get far more lines than Darioq they are generally just there to move the plot around. The three Word Bearers champions get very few lines, although each gets a good scene or two to himself. Namar-sin particularly impresses for getting as far as he does with an arm missing. Solon gets to represent the Imperial side for most of the book, and is so inconsequential to the plot as a whole that when his scenes roll around in the last third, it is rather as if a moth flew by whilst one is watching a good movie. The final fate of Dios is no surprise to anyone who isn't colour-blind, and not very elegantly delivered.
Speaking of which concept, if there is one flaw that threatens the reader's enjoyment of this book, it is misfires of language that the author should not have written but the copy-editor most definitely should have caught. Consider the following two examples:
Given that this is a W40K tie-in novel, and W40K is built on battles, it is a pleasure to find that Mr Reynolds grip of the whole thing has improved along with everything else. Awareness of the combat environment is much better, that which goes up remembers to come down and usually hits someone when it does, tactical nous is displayed by Kol Badar if nobody else, ammunition runs out often enough, shrapnel does what shrapnel is famed for doing and Mr Reynolds manages to convey just how damned strong Terminator armour by pointing out that it's actually made of stronger stuff than the defensive fortifications. Fans of the W40K universe will probably also wish to know that at one point things turn into live-action Space Hulk, which is coincidentally one of the best bits of the book. That one of the battle sequences, which I found so lacking in Dark Apostle, is now one of the highlights of the story shows just how much Mr Reynolds has improved.
All in all this is a good read, taking three characters on a dive into a three-way ruckus with planet-wide extermination on the clock from two different sides, putting Marduk through a ringer with more spikes on than a Goth club and still manages to let Burias have far too much fun driving a submarine.
Indeed, the childlike pleasure Burias finds in messing around with the submarine controls highlights an interesting underlying theme. The Word Bearers' hatred for the Emperor, founded upon discovering that there were active and tangible gods in the universe after the Emperor assured them there were no such thing, is hatred based on the assertion that the Emperor lied to them. How this is expressed in Dark Disciple has a quiet suggestion of the betrayed rage and perhaps fear of a child who has discovered that Daddy lied, the monster under the bed is real. Add to that Burias' petulant behaviour at being told to be quiet and sit down, his guilty apology when caught messing around with the submarine's controls, the speed with which strong emotion rises to the surface in all of the Word Bearers, the way in which their discipline and self-control can be wholly overridden by their emotions despite all the training and combat experience - indeed, the way in which thousands of years of warfare have not left them emotionally deadened - and one sees the Space Marines as having what modern society would consider a lack of emotional maturity. Their emotions, especially the ones we now consider negative such as rage and hatred, are driving forces in a way modern, Western society trains out of people. The W40K universe presents in the Space Marines a way of using and training emotion that is enlightening as to the way we now think of, react to and act upon emotion.
The true goal of art is to reflect life; Mr Reynolds captures here, in a subtle and perhaps not entirely intentional way the strange, child-like emotional intensity of warriors ten thousand years old and, in doing so, shows us how too much of what we currently consider to be emotional maturity may actually be emotional death.
This book is:
* - a great improvement on Dark Apostle
* - blood, gunfire and viciousness
* - an all-round fine book
This book is not:
* - comprehensible without reading Dark Apostle
* - well proofread
* - friendly, fluffy, comforting reading
Author - Anthony Reynolds
ISBN - 978-1-84416-665-7
"'The life-systems of this flesh-unit have failed,' said the magos. 'Already its body temperature has dropped 1.045 degrees, and its cellular make-up is entering corporal decay.'Dark Disciple is the sequel to Dark Apostle and I have never seen a writer improve so much between two books. Mr Reynolds has made a giant leap in the space of a year. The prose of Dark Disciple is clean and tight, the adjectival spray contained, the pacing steady, the plot torqued and the tension actually present [the latter sensation being one I had almost forgotten the existence of].
'He's dead, magos,' said Marduk softly. 'You killed him.'
The magos looked at Marduk, and then back down at the corpse. Then, slowly, he raised his head once more to meet Marduk's gaze.
'Feels good, doesn't it?' said Marduk.
The magos paused, looking down at the corse at its feet in incomprehension. Then the corrupted once-priest of the Machine God straightened.
'I wish to do that again,' he said."
Make no mistake; this is a good book.
The book begins with a vicious piece of foreshadowing, dropping the reader straight into a scene of Marduk being horribly tortured. This scene is written with sufficient unpleasantness that it stays with the reader for the whole book, waiting to see how Marduk will get into this nasty situation and, more, how he will get out of it. As the book progresses beyond the halfway point the reader starts to get worried; the prologue is serious business and Marduk totally unaware of what awaits him in later chapters. By the three-quarter mark it seems implausible Marduk will have time to get himself out of the mess the reader knows he must soon get into. When Word Bearers' little expedition seems to be in the clear - and therefore wholly jinxed - the tension induced by this foreshadowing reaches such a point that I found myself putting the book down every four or five pages to think of something else, before being hauled back in by the need to find out what would happen. It has been a long time since something caught my attention this much.
When Marduk finally does get himself into this horrible mess, Mr Reynolds keeps the tension high enough that putting the book down is not an option. It is damned near impossible to see how Marduk is going to get himself out of his predicament and he does it with admirable cleverness and fortitude. It is gratifying to see Mr Reynolds aware of the capacities of the Space Marine genejacking, but the presentation of Marduk's use of his body's abilities is such that the physiological trickery is secondary to the surprise.
Marduk himself does not feel as if he has changed much as a character since the beginning of the first book, although being better-written gives him deeper dimensions. He remains a ruthless visionary with an ambitious streak wide enough to drive tanks along. His comrade and general partner in killing people, Burias-Drak'shal, has not changed a great deal either, although there is a loosening of his behaviour that suggests he's going somewhere. Burias drinks on duty, acts insolent, complains sufficiently to be likened to a spoiled child by Marduk, fidgets restlessly for hours and is generally rather ill-disciplined, something that asks for a comeuppance. The improvement of writing gives a strong sense of his self-admiration [no man with waist-length perfumed hair can stand amongst the monastically shaven and not look fond of himself] and a more subtle sense that Burias simply doesn't feel that the rules apply to him.
Kol Badar has not changed much either and his lack of change is character development in itself. Beholden to Marduk now, he continues to act as Coryphaus despite having a deep hatred for the younger man. Throughout the book Kol Badar grumbles, criticizes, finds flaws and generally nay-says Marduk, yet underlying this is the simple fact that without Kol Badar, Marduk could not achieve most of what he does. Of the three Word Bearers, Kol Badar benefits the most from the improvement in style, since the amount of work he is doing - in terms of orders given, plans laid, data processed and burden of command carried - becomes clear to the reader in a way it was entirely not so in Dark Apostle. Kol Badar is very much the soldier of the three, tactically aware and probably bitterly hating Marduk for leaving him to do all the legwork if nothing else. It is rather a shame we get no scenes from his perspective as by the end of the book I had become quite fond of him despite the simple fact that he's a cold-blooded murdering bastard.
[It is interesting to note that the role of Coryphaus is more than twice mentioned as being, at least in part, to be the interlocutor between the Dark Apostle [or acting Dark Apostle in Marduk's case here] and the rest of the Word Bearers Host. That Kol Badar's constant griping at Marduk may or may not represent a more widespread feeling amongst the rest of the Host is never mentioned.]
The fourth main character is Magos Darioq, who is less of a character and more a cargo for most of the book, standing at the back and saying pretty much nothing. His few lines are, as with the example at the start of this review, example enough of a character who started well below the baseline of humanity and has continued to descend. As with Varnus in Dark Apostle the slow corruption of Darioq is tasty reading and obviously something Mr Reynolds does well. Again, Darioq is a character whose development in a third book would be of definite interest, although some assurance that he hasn't got yet more tricks up his servo-harness would be good.
There are other characters in the book: three Word Bearers champions named Namar-sin, Sabtec and Khalaxis [a painfully obscure TF joke goes here]; an Imperial citizen named Solon and a boy named Dios; a rogue trader Baranov; Dark Eldar Dracon Alith Drazjaer ... the list goes on. None of them are anywhere nearly as developed as the three main characters, and although most of them get far more lines than Darioq they are generally just there to move the plot around. The three Word Bearers champions get very few lines, although each gets a good scene or two to himself. Namar-sin particularly impresses for getting as far as he does with an arm missing. Solon gets to represent the Imperial side for most of the book, and is so inconsequential to the plot as a whole that when his scenes roll around in the last third, it is rather as if a moth flew by whilst one is watching a good movie. The final fate of Dios is no surprise to anyone who isn't colour-blind, and not very elegantly delivered.
Speaking of which concept, if there is one flaw that threatens the reader's enjoyment of this book, it is misfires of language that the author should not have written but the copy-editor most definitely should have caught. Consider the following two examples:
"Kol Badar's lips curled back, and his ancient eyes burrowed into Marduk's face."
"Mothac's face was solemn, and the Dark Apostles gave him some room as he hefted it before him."These moments of unintentional comedy aside, Mr Reynolds has a tendency to use the same or similar words too close together. At one point I spotted a use of "power armour" and "powered their way" in the same sentence. This happened often enough that I came to wonder if Mr Reynolds did not think this was a stylistic choice; if so, someone should disabuse him of the notion. It is very, very easy for such things to pass below a writer's notice during the editing stages, as the writer re-reads not what he has written but what he thinks he has written. If this is the case - and it is entirely believable that it is - then the copy-editor should have seen to all these matters, and did not. Possibly Mr Reynolds submitted his book very close to his deadline. Possibly the copy-editor's changes were refused by Mr Reynolds as stylistic choice. Either way, mistyping "patron" as "patson" and thereby making Khorne sound like either a trumpet or a pastry is inexcusable no matter whose fault it was.
Given that this is a W40K tie-in novel, and W40K is built on battles, it is a pleasure to find that Mr Reynolds grip of the whole thing has improved along with everything else. Awareness of the combat environment is much better, that which goes up remembers to come down and usually hits someone when it does, tactical nous is displayed by Kol Badar if nobody else, ammunition runs out often enough, shrapnel does what shrapnel is famed for doing and Mr Reynolds manages to convey just how damned strong Terminator armour by pointing out that it's actually made of stronger stuff than the defensive fortifications. Fans of the W40K universe will probably also wish to know that at one point things turn into live-action Space Hulk, which is coincidentally one of the best bits of the book. That one of the battle sequences, which I found so lacking in Dark Apostle, is now one of the highlights of the story shows just how much Mr Reynolds has improved.
All in all this is a good read, taking three characters on a dive into a three-way ruckus with planet-wide extermination on the clock from two different sides, putting Marduk through a ringer with more spikes on than a Goth club and still manages to let Burias have far too much fun driving a submarine.
Indeed, the childlike pleasure Burias finds in messing around with the submarine controls highlights an interesting underlying theme. The Word Bearers' hatred for the Emperor, founded upon discovering that there were active and tangible gods in the universe after the Emperor assured them there were no such thing, is hatred based on the assertion that the Emperor lied to them. How this is expressed in Dark Disciple has a quiet suggestion of the betrayed rage and perhaps fear of a child who has discovered that Daddy lied, the monster under the bed is real. Add to that Burias' petulant behaviour at being told to be quiet and sit down, his guilty apology when caught messing around with the submarine's controls, the speed with which strong emotion rises to the surface in all of the Word Bearers, the way in which their discipline and self-control can be wholly overridden by their emotions despite all the training and combat experience - indeed, the way in which thousands of years of warfare have not left them emotionally deadened - and one sees the Space Marines as having what modern society would consider a lack of emotional maturity. Their emotions, especially the ones we now consider negative such as rage and hatred, are driving forces in a way modern, Western society trains out of people. The W40K universe presents in the Space Marines a way of using and training emotion that is enlightening as to the way we now think of, react to and act upon emotion.
The true goal of art is to reflect life; Mr Reynolds captures here, in a subtle and perhaps not entirely intentional way the strange, child-like emotional intensity of warriors ten thousand years old and, in doing so, shows us how too much of what we currently consider to be emotional maturity may actually be emotional death.
This book is:
* - a great improvement on Dark Apostle
* - blood, gunfire and viciousness
* - an all-round fine book
This book is not:
* - comprehensible without reading Dark Apostle
* - well proofread
* - friendly, fluffy, comforting reading
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-28 12:43 am (UTC)You make me want to read Warhammer stuff.
no subject
Date: 2009-09-29 09:11 am (UTC)Rar! I think. As said, Dark Disciple's a good read, but you need to read Dark Apostle to understand what's going on [also, Warhammer and Warhammer: 40,000 are different continuities].