koilungfish | Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett

14/11/09 - 17/11/09 - Ill
18/11/09 - Art: Dark Redemption profiles
19/11/09 - Art: Dark Redemption profiles
20/11/09 - Art: Dark Redemption profiles
21/11/09 - Day Off

Title - Ghostmaker
Author - Dan Abnett
ISBN - 978-1841540320

"Caligula, after the Imperial liberation. Night as bright as day, lit by burning hive cities; day as dark as night, choked by the petrochemical smoke. Soot, like fat, black snowflakes, fluttered down everywhere. Even out here, in the deadlands." - That Hideous Strength

Contents:

Ghostmaker
A Blooding
Sound and Fury
The Hollows of Hell
The Angel of Bucephalon
That Hideous Strength
Permafrost
Blood Oath
A Simple Plan
Witch Hunt
Some Dark & Secret Purpose

Ghostmaker is the second of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels, although it's hard to call a novel what is actually a collection of character vignettes. Ghostmakeris broken up into ten short stories strung together with framing scenes that set up the eleventh. Each story showcases one of the titular Ghosts.

The eponymous Ghostmaker, unsurprisingly, is Commissar Gaunt's piece. As in First and Only, the readers are not privy to Gaunt's feelings on anything [sometimes one might think he has no feelings at all], and are therefore walked through the fall of Tanith and a brief how-people-got-promoted scene. This is the start of an undercurrent that runs through the book - a combination of excessive competence and blindness to logical consequences. Gaunt promotes Corbec and Rawne from rank-and-file soldiers to colonel and major respectively and expects them to be able to fulfil those roles. They manage. They, in all probability, shouldn't be able to. Neither of them is trained. Neither of them has any reason to know how to do those jobs. The assertion seems to be that both men are born leaders, which is acceptable, and so able to lead as senior officers, which is not. To ask two privates to act as senior officers without any form of adjustment to the responsibility, any form of training or initiation, takes an axe to the cables suspending my disbelief. Yes, the Tanith First-and-Only have no officers. Yes, the Tanith First-and-Only need officers. No, making someone an officer because you need officers does not automatically install the knowledge of how to do the job directly into their brains.

A Blooding covers mostly Gaunt and Corbec, and the start of the Tanith First-and-Only's feud with the Volpone Bluebloods. Events feel suspiciously like they've been recycled from First and Only. More to the point, Gaunt has what can only be called an attack of conspicuous incompetence. At the point where the Tanith First-and-Only are being hit by friendly fire, in an army which - later in the very same book - is shown to be using orbital uplinks to track every squad in the field, in which the orders to start the misdirected bombardment were delivered by radio, and in which every platoon has a trooper carrying a communications device, nobody radios and asks the artillery to kindly stop shelling them. No explanation for the absence of radio contact is made.

Sound and Fury is probably the best story in the book. It follows scout sergeant Mkoll into an archetypal-feeling setup involving a monster and some sound-sensitive scenery. The reader doesn't get a lot of insight into Mkoll's thoughts, but the story is well-written and satisfying. One gets the feeling this story could stand alone, even outside the W40K universe.

The Hollows of Hell follows Corbec in dealing with something horrific whilst Gaunt's off elsewhere, doing other things. I can only describe this story as unremarkable. Nothing unexpected happens. Nothing painfully cliched happens. Nothing particularly original happens. The point of the story seems to be about Corbec learning to stand on his own two feet as colonel, rather than following Gaunt's orders, but he's only out on his own for a few hours. The undercurrent continues - one again, the Tanith First-and-Only Save The Day. Corbec seems to be both too competent for what he is - an untrained soldier acting as a regimental colonel - and not competent enough - face with a leadership decision without Gaunt's assistance, his response is more a panicked appeal to a higher authority than genuine tactical nous.

The Angel of Bucephalon is maddening. This is less a story, more a dialogue, between "Mad" Larkin and one of his hallucinations. That Larkin hallucinates seems well known amongst the Tanith First-and-Only. The description given of his 'mad fits' - visual and auditory disturbances, seizures, blackouts and convulsions - suggests some form of neurological disorder. Add to that the little matter of Larkin being emotionally unstable to start with and, bluntly put, this man is not fit for active service. He should not be in any armed force. He should not have been recruited. Why Larkin was ever allowed to joint the Imperial Guard at all is a mystery; why he, a man prone screaming convulsions, is considered fit to serve in a unit that specialises in stealth operations, is utterly bizarre. The Angel of Bucephalon continues to annoy in that the voice of the story - Larkin's conversation with his hallucination - is a painfully dry, technical one. At points it feels more like reading a military textbook that has been rewritten into prose fiction.

That Hideous Strength is, at front, about Bragg, a large man with a large gun. At back, it's about how Bragg's brain is bigger than it looks, and that Gaunt knows it. The story, in and of itself, is all right - like The Hollows of Hell it simply doesn't make much of an impact. The plot is nothing particularly new. The battle scenes are no better and no worse than any others in this book. Perhaps what lets this and some of the other stories is that they rely on battle scenes, and battle scenes have an innate stasis about them. Much like sex scenes, they do very little to advance the plot on their own. As That Hideous Strength has very little plot of its own, and as Ghostmaker has no plot overall, the battle scenes begin to feel like an exercise in filling space.

Permafrost takes us back to the annoying side of things. This story belongs to Rawne, the man who pays Gaunt's piano taxes and unsurprisingly wants to kill him as a result. The "character gets saved by someone appearing unannounced from offscreen" trick from First and Only gets another outing here, although for once it's Gaunt doing the saving and not being saved. Rawne, having spent most of the story looking for opportunities to off Gaunt, takes a step out of character and saves his life at the end. This irks me considerably. Such sentiments as "I want to be the one to kill you" and "I hate you but I respect you enough to give you an honourable death" can work, albeit these days they feel hackneyed, but it's hard to see them as part of Rawne's character, given that this is the man who was a hairsbreadth from knifing Gaunt in his sleep pages earlier. The "I will save my enemy so I can kill him later" trick can work ... but it doesn't here.

Blood Oath deepens the annoyance. This story belongs to Dorden, the Tanith First-and-Only's medic, who is of the pacifist do-no-harm vein. This seems weird on two levels; firstly, that Dorden would join the Imperial Guard when his oath as a doctor binds him to preserve life; secondly, that he'd be allowed to join when he's twenty years older than everyone else. Dorden is an enlisted soldier. How the hell does an enlisted soldier, in an army where political officers are placed in every regiment to shoot the cowardly, the disobedient and the dubious, get a choice in whether or not he uses a gun? Dorden is a grandfather, in his late forties at the absolute youngest, perhaps closing on sixty at the eldest. What the hell were the recruiters thinking when they let him in? As a civilian auxiliary he might make sense, but as an actual serving soldier, he strains credibility just as much as Larkin does. If both of them volunteered, someone in the assessment department wasn't doing their job. Even if they were drafted this is pushing probability.

Matters continue to irk from there. Dorden insists on staying behind after the retreating army to tend to a number of injured soldiers left behind by the Volpone Bluebloods. Why the Volpone Bluebloods left them is never explained [has nobody in the Imperial Guard heard of triage?]. Apparently the reader is to accept that, since the Tanith First-and-Only are feuding with the Volpone Bluebloods and the Tanith First-and-Only are the heroes, therefore the Volpone Bluebloods must be deep-dyed bastards. Why Gaunt accedes to this is beyond me. Why he lets his second-in-command stay behind, along with his senior scout sergeant, on what is assuredly a suicide non-mission, is utterly inexplicable.

Ever more inexplicable is the survival of all concerned. Dorden and company weather an assault that, mathematically, should have seen them overwhelmed. At most twenty men spend a night being assaulted by hundreds, perhaps some thousands, of enemy troops. Half of them are injured. Some are dying. Yet not one enemy makes it across their lines. Whilst combat favours the defender, this is out the other side of impossible, and yet another cable of my sagging disbelief is severed.

At one point it is mentioned that the Volpone Bluebloods have been using a small shrine as a latrine. This, in itself, should probably be enough for the Tanith First-and-Only to report the Volpone Bluebloods for blasphemy - certainly Gaunt, of all the Tanith First-and-Only, has the most reason to hate the Volpone Bluebloods and, as a commissar, has the authority to execute men on the spot for such desecrations. However, Mr Abnett apparently forgot he'd put that line in, as later in the story Corbec and Dorden go into the shrine to pray ... without noticing the latrine matter at all.

The Volpone Bluebloods themselves raise questions. Their moniker of "Bluebloods" comes from the preponderance of nobility in their ranks. Regiments of the Imperial Guard, the reader is specifically reminded in Blood Oath, never go home. They just serve until they die or conquer a world to settle [how they do this when most regiments are all male is another question]. How then does one end up with a regiment full of landed gentry? What incentive caused such a proportion of the nobility to join an infantry regiment? Frankly, the backstory of the Volpone Bluebloods intrigues me more than most of these characters.

A Simple Plan belongs to Caffran, whose line seems to be "young potential officer". Why he'd be officer potential eludes me. In this story the Imperial Guard recreate the Normandy landings with flying troopships in order to cause minimal damage to the facility held by the enemy. After the assault is royally bodged, Caffran and company are ordered to fall back. They disobey this order. They sneak into said facility and, rather accidentally, make an enormous mess of it.

I repeat: they disobeyed orders and directly caused severe damage to structures the whole assault was planned to avoid damaging.

After this, Gaunt gives Caffran the opportunity to execute the enemy leader. Caffran refuses. The enemy leader is a Chaos cultist. Gaunt is both commissar [political officer] and commanding officer to Caffran's regiment. Caffran is a private and the youngest soldier in the regiment. So ... Caffran refuses a direct order from a man who has both moral and military authority over him, in front of members of another unit [who have good reason to hate them both and no reason not to report this incident], to execute a man who is both enemy leader and a spiritual abomination.

He got away with this how?

Caffran mentions here how many of the Ghosts worship Gaunt as their "own private Emperor". If this doesn't pay off in the First-and-Only being hauled over the coals for heresy sooner or later, I shall be bitterly disappointed, not only because it would be amusing but also because, by the laws of the universe in which this book is set, they are heretics. Not only do the Tanith First-and-Only treat Gaunt in this way, but they constantly and openly swear with the word "feth". Used in First and Only to replace any swearword stronger than "damn", it is mentioned in Ghostmaker that Feth is a Tanith tree-god. In fact, Gaunt mentions this directly to an Imperial Inquisitor, who doesn't bat an eyelid at the mention of this - by in-universe standards - false idol. How the Tanith First-and-Only haven't been done for heresy already also eludes me.

Witch Hunt improves matters by finally showing some acknowledgement of just how dubious the Tanith First-and-Only must look to outsiders. This story rests on Brin Milo, Gaunt's teenaged psydekick, who gets pounced by an Inquisitor for suspected witchcraft. Both Ghostmaker and First and Only have made it clear so far, and indeed as it continues to be clear later in this book, that Milo is some form of psyker. He's blatantly precognitive, something Gaunt is clearly aware of and, as both colonel and more especially as commissar, should have turned Milo in for months if not years ago. His faith in Milo, both here and in Some Dark & Secret Purpose, seems alarmingly strong for its lack of a reasonable foundation.

Milo gets out from under suspicion with some clever talk and guilelessness. The reader may be left feeling that the Inquisitor got played for a fool. It seems bizarre that this character, who shortly afterwards we are told is a conspicuously powerful psyker herself, assessed Milo only by a brief verbal interview. Once again one cannot help but feel that the Tanith First-and-Only are being allowed to get away with things they shouldn't get away with because they're the heroes of the story. The Inquisitor came to see if Gaunt was shielding an unsanctioned psyker. Gaunt is shielding an unsanctioned psyker, although neither of them are acknowledging this. She didn't catch this. Either she's incompetent or Milo tricked her. Either way, the whole thing feels rotten.

Some Dark & Secret Purpose is what the framings scenes between vignettes have been building up to, and it is here that the book stops being annoying and starts being good fun. All throughout there has been an uncomfortable disparity between the plots and the prose - the former dull, the latter lucid - but with the introduction of an actual plot the whole matter resolves into cohesive, coherent, readable prose. Mr Abnett is considerably prone to sentence fragments for description, something that seems to fall off in this story, but which he manages to get away with most of the time. It is interesting to note that much of Mr Abnett's descriptive prose feels disjointed and unnecessary in the character vignettes, but feels part of the whole in this last piece.

It has been suggested that Mr Abnett is in fact quintuplets working as one man. If so, I suspect one of them wrote most of this book and another one wrote Some Dark & Secret Purpose. Unlike the vignettes, which turn one corner for one character if that, this story has an actual plot, which is tied in with Witch Hunt and continues the use of the Inquisitor. The Volpone Bluebloods reappear, and actually get a balanced treatment. The plot moves, which is quietly impressive given that the story is mostly fighting. The style remains the same but the underlying structure has changed. Very strange.

There seems to be some unwritten rule of W40K fiction that all novels must end on either necrons or eldar. I'm getting very bored of this rule. This time at least we don't get dark eldar, who must be murder to write in anything but one-dimensional sadism, but the ending balances on a fine line between being impressive and being lame. It feels impressive, but the underlying structure involves Gaunt pulling vital information out of his arse at the absolute last moment and the Tanith First-and-Only working alongside people they should really be inclined to kill on sight. One cannot help but notice that the Volpone Bluebloods vanish into the background at this point.

All in all, Ghostmaker contains three good short stories - Some Dark & Secret Purpose, Sound and Fury and Witch Hunt [which entertains me if only for the reason of someone finally calling Gaunt out on how dodgy his relationship with Milo looks]. Of the rest, some are missable and some are outright irksome in their underlying premises. The Tanith First-and-Only act like the rules don't apply to them, escape scrutiny that should flay them, are treated as heroes when they're disobedient and martyrs when they're stupid ... and yet, oddly enough, I'm more than willing to read the next book in this series.

This book is:
* - a collection of character vignettes
* - technically well-written
* - two-elevenths good reading

This book is not:
* - particularly fun
* - contained of enough plot
* - nine-elevenths good reading