Necropolis by Dan Abnett
Dec. 18th, 2009 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koilungfish16/12/09 - 18/12/09 - Ill
Title - Necropolis
Author - Dan Abnett
ISBN - 978-1-84416-006-8
The story of Necropolis is one of the big archetypes, The Siege, which encompasses everything from Beowulf and the Iliad to Dead Snow and Halflife. When I first reached for the closest parallels to Necropolis, I found my hand resting upon Brian Jacques' Redwall series, a curious and yet somehow automatic likening. Mr Jacque's Redwall stories are - or were, when I stopped reading around about the eighth book - standard medieval-style fantasy with talking animals. Mr Jacques has two plots - The Siege and The Quest - and generally uses both in each book. The plots are not original, nor are they particularly innovative, and yet I find I can remember many scenes from Redwall and Mossflower ten years after I last saw either book. Disturbing, since I doubt I will be able to say the same about Necropolis.
Necropolis is repetitive on two different levels. The first is in terms of style; all of the combat scenes have a sameness about them. Mr Abnett does not vary his vocabulary much, and his prose here is very simple and clean - indeed, the number of similes seems to have dropped compared to earlier books, and I don't recall seeing a single metaphor - so all the combat scenes are rendered in the same five-hundred-some words. Combat is difficult to write, and Mr Abnett's utilitarian prose means that all the combat scenes blur into one. Not too brilliant given that the book is something like three-fifths combat.
The other level of repetition is that of the devices and events used. Necropolis feels familiar, even down to the actions. The Volpone Bluebloods reappear and look down their noses at the Ghosts, just like they did in Ghostmaker and just as the Jantine Patricians did in First and Only. The Face Punch of Angered Authority returns, although for once it's not Gaunt delivering it. Gaunt himself proves that he must be descended from Horatio Caine by appearing behind people without their noticing about a dozen times. Apparently either the people in the W40K universe are deaf to the sounds of doors opening or Gaunt can phase through walls, since he manages to enter rooms without people noticing in order to dramatically interrupt conversations. In one scene he does this and is then interrupted by someone else who came in unseen. Apparently nobody in this universe has peripheral vision either.
This leads into the problem with Necropolis that's put me off reading any more of the Gaunt's Ghosts books: Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt. The attitudes and responses of the characters to Gaunt display precisely their value relative to Good Guy or Bad Guy status. Only a very few characters - Gilbear and Croe, basically - manage to fall somewhere in the grey zone. Everyone else either agrees with Gaunt and is therefore right, or disagrees with Gaunt and is therefore a moron. Gaunt is never wrong. Whenever Gaunt walks into a room, he is immediately the most important thing there, and everyone must pay attention to him. This comes out most strongly in a scene where Gaunt along with Grizmund and Nash, his peer commanders of other regiments, tour the fortifications of Vervunhive. Grizmund and Nash agree with Gaunt that some fancy awnings, put up for Sturm, should be taken down. Grizmund then suggests a plan which Gaunt supports; they are then informed that Sturm has already gone ahead and done something else entirely. From the attitude of the writing Mr Abnett is making it clear that Gaunt is right [after all, Gaunt is always right] and the reader should therefore be cued that Grizmund and Nash are Good People because they agree with Gaunt, and Sturm is Bad People because he disagrees with Gaunt and, worse, is rich.
The theme of common soldier versus posh soldier has run for three books now and is both tired and tiring. That it's crosscut with common soldier versus posh civilian and/or rigidly bureaucratic military police does not make it any better. One gets the urge to shout at the book that yes, we get it, the Tanith are awesome compared to the Vervunhive Primary because they're experienced and also awesome compared to the Volpone Bluebloods because they're not rich tossers and, in short, are the best things ever, and we're tired of being told that, thank you Mr Abnett.
Gaunt continues to annoy me by being right all the time, in such a fashion as to make it clear that the author is on his side and expects the readers to be as well. Gaunt's aura of rightness extends to his troops; in the above-mentioned scene, two of Gaunt's men address Grizmund and Nash [both generals] and show off how awesome their knowledge of matters infantry is. One problem: Nash is an infantry commander and ought to know these things already.
This leads to the moment where one of the two Ghosts, Mkoll, estimates that the enemy infantry number about a million by listening to the noise made by their lasguns firing. This strikes as impressive at first until one wonders, what are these million troops firing at? All the Imperial troops are inside the walls; the enemy are outside. Are they all firing simultaneously? If so, why? If not, how is Mkoll estimating a million men from what may be only ten thousand guns firing at any one time?
Secondly, paragraphs earlier Grizmund estimated the number and placement of the enemy armour by pointing out the muzzle flashes from their cannons. Lasguns, as implied by the name, are some form of laser weapon, and indeed in a later scene one Ghost observes the muzzle flash of another's lasgun. So Grizmund can pick out the muzzle flashes from thousands of tanks ... but cannot see the muzzle flashes of a million lasguns? This part is clearly supposed to highlight how keen Mkoll's senses are, but just makes everyone look a little silly, straining to catch a sound barely audible in the artillery bombardment and forgetting about the aforementioned phenomenon of muzzle flash.
Moments of such accidental ridiculousness continue. It is noted that Larkin is in his early fifties - a bit old for a man to be joining the army - but back in Ghostmaker it was mentioned that Dorden was twenty years older than the next-eldest Ghost, making Dorden in his early seventies at least! That a man who must have been sixty-eight at the absolute youngest was put in the army is ridiculous. This is the final cap on two characters I found implausible in the first book and annoying in the second. I will not be able to read another Gaunt's Ghosts novel until someone explains plausibly how these two men got into the regiment.
Third on the list of implausible characters is Colonel Corbec, an officer whose competence I have been doubting for quite some time. Early in the book he, the ranking officer present, stands around smoking a cigar whilst his men establish their billets. He takes no part in this. I have to wonder what sort of command structure the Ghosts have that their senior officer doesn't need to do anything. Who is making the decisions? Apparently not Corbec. I have a vicious suspicion that someone under him is doing all the actual work for him; it's probably poor bloody Rawne. Corbec's competence continues to be questionable. Later, he and his men dig in to a position outside the city walls and Corbec manages to forget that the thousands of men on the walls behind them have better vantage and a lot of big guns. This lack of awareness of his surroundings does not speak well of his understanding of the tactical situation. Corbec then spends the rest of the book fighting on the front lines like a common soldier, giving few orders and vague ones at that. It is not until Gaunt stops doing something else and starts shouting that Ghosts stop being tactically incoherent.
However, it is Gaunt himself who causes more problems. At one point Gaunt is busy pulling everyone's arses out of the fire so fast you'd think he'd grown an extra pair of hands to do it, which is in itself a set of plausible scenes. The part where a minor character steps outside to converse with a bit-part character - written in solely for scene - about how awesome Gaunt is and nothing else is gag-worthy. This scene has no other purpose than to laud Gaunt. Remove it and the story would lost nothing, except some nauseated noises from the reader.
The weirdness continues with Gaunt's coats. Sometimes he is wearing a full-length leather overcoat. Sometimes he is wearing a short jacket. He changes coats two or three times. At one point he is given a plot device which he pins to the front of his coat. Later on it is still there. The only problem is that he was wearing a long coat when he pinned the device on, an "overcoat" when the device is mentioned again to remind the readers that it's there ... and "short jacket" when it gets used. Gaunt had neither time nor opportunity to change coats, and yet somehow does so, for no obvious reason. Either that or he's been wearing two coats for most of the book.
The jewel in the crown of the ridiculous comes when Gaunt takes a break from saving everyone's arses to catch some sleep. This is plausible; everyone is dead on their feet from fatigue at this point. He goes for a kip in a chapel, which makes sense in the context. He gets a visit from a young lady, who provides him with a plot device, which is necessary. Then they cop off. This is not wholly implausible, given that humans apparently have a tendency to get shag-happy when in dangerous situations. What is implausible is that they're having it away in a consecrated chapel, under the watchful eye of an eight-foot-tall golden statue of the God-Emperor of Mankind, which is exactly the sort of blasphemous desecration that it is Gaunt's job to shoot people for. This is compounded by yet another irritating reminder from the previous book. In Ghostmaker it is observed that the Volpone have been using a small farmstead's homemade shrine as a latrine, which makes them bastards ... and yet in Necropolis it is just dandy for Gaunt to use a sanctified chapel for a quick shag?
Gaunt aside, there are other problems with Necropolis, and the main one is the rest of the cast. There are at least twenty characters who have POV scenes, all who whom crop up four or five times, with their own little plot threads to follow. The problem is that there's too many. It is uncomfortably difficult to remember who's supposed to be who, who was where last and what they're supposed to be doing. Add to this the occasional character who turns up, has one scene and then dies, and the cast list extends further. The obvious thing that Mr Abnett's editor should have suggested was to cut all the scenes for characters who have no impact on the plot. The problem is that this would have been most of the Ghosts.
Brin Milo, who seems to have inherited Caffran's role from Ghostmaker, has no impact on the plot whatsoever and yet gets several combat scenes that could have been dropped entirely. Larkin gets four or five scenes of which only two are of much relevance. Several more of the Ghosts get combat scenes and, whilst complaining that the title regiment getting combat scenes in a military action book is a case of complaining about Nelson spending too much time at sea, most of them do nothing to move things along. Run, shoot, run, shoot, grenade, fall over, repeat. Many of the non-Ghost characters have more important scenes. Indeed, the root cause of the lack of plot relevance in the Ghosts' scenes is that there is barely a plot. The Ghosts and other Guards sit inside a fortress and get shot at. Sometimes they shoot back. People die. This is not a plot; it is a setting. Beowulf gave us Grendel's mother and the dragon; the Iliad gave us the burning of the Greek ships and the duel between Achilles and Hector; Necropolis gives us run, shoot, run, shoot, grenade, fall over, repeat.
I find myself automatically comparing Necropolis to Redwall. The latter had scenes in which Cluny the Scourge worked out his plan for invading the abbey, trained his troops and/or built siege engines, then put his plan into work and the abbey-dwellers foiled it by one means or another. This worked; it broke the siege down into distinct events, discrete problems to be solved in different ways, and exhibited Cluny's character as evil warlord. In Necropolis the enemy remain faceless, voiceless, motiveless and numberless. No hint of their intentions is given; they have the characterization of a million sacks of potatoes.
The forces of the Imperium are essentially passive in Necropolis. No recon is done. No scouts are sent out. No plans other than "sit on our arses and shoot back" are put into action. This is daft to start with, but when one considers that the Ghosts are a specialist stealth regiment, and that two of the three people in overall command of the forces at Vervunhive hate Gaunt personally and his regiment as a whole, that not only did the Ghosts never go out scouting but not only was it never even suggested is utterly ridiculous. It's like the Siege of Kut with laserguns.
Necropolis comes in four parts - introduction, first battle, second battle and third battle. The introduction presents the incoming enemy and all the civilian and Vervunhive military characters. Then Gaunt's Ghosts turn up and, shortly afterwards, we get the first battle. These two sections, most of the first half of the book, are a stagnant morass of character introductions, most of them irrelevant to the plot because there isn't one yet, and a slew of disorganized combat scenes. The second battle is better written, with greater cohesion and coherency of writing. The third battle, where all goes to hell in a rocket-propelled handbasket, is less cohesive, but then everything is coming apart at the seams and the plot has finally showed up. Mr Abnett likes to tell battles in a manner cribbed from Bernard Cornwall - subjective scenes for the main cast and an omnipresent overview of the entire action. The problem is that Mr Abnett's omnipresent view of the battle is written almost as a summary, without linguistic grace, making one feel as if story is being fast-forwarded. These omnipresent views make up a considerable portion of the battle scenes, which make up most of the book, so having what feels like a fifth of the book told in fast-forward is not rewarding reading.
It occurs to me, rather late, that automatically comparing Necropolis to Redwall is a bit silly when there is another book, much closer in setting, to which it could be likened: Warriors of Ultramar. Both feature previously developed Imperial characters fighting off a numberless horde of inscrutably horrible enemies from within a besieged city. Differences snap into highlight. Captain Ventris makes plans to prevent the destruction of Tarsis Ultra, most of which involve taking the fight to the enemy. Gaunt does not do this. He does not even volunteer to send out scouts. When Ventris' plans go not-so-well, he makes new ones. Gaunt makes no plans at all. One of the things that drives Warriors of Ultramar is Captain Ventris' characterization as a man who is flawed and is aware of his flaws. Captain Ventris' flaws mean that he makes mistakes, and the reader trusts Mr McNeill to carry those mistakes to repercussion. Commissar Gaunt has no flaws. Without flaws he cannot make mistakes, without mistakes he cannot interact with his peers as peers, only lord over them, isolate and inviolable. It is ironic that Ventris - a genetically engineered, surgically enhanced, two hundred year old member of the Ultramarines, who are generally held to be so squeaky-clean that shit wouldn't stick to their shoes and so straight-laced that you could use them as rulers - is more fallible, more flawed and therefore more human that the purely human, often called common, wholly unenhanced Gaunt.
It should not be taken from this that Necropolis is a bad book. It has many bad parts, this is true, but it makes for an entertaining read - certainly any book I can sit down and read for five hours straight can't be wholly bad - and Mr Abnett's prose, whilst utilitarian and perhaps a little over-simple, is clear, concise and free from errors of bad choice. Overall, the story is satisfying in that all present get the ends they deserve, more or less. If one is facing a long journey, or a dull day with little to do, one could pick a worse book to read than Necropolis ... but one could also pick so many that are better.
This book is:
* - better than the sum of its parts
* - better than Ghostmaker
* - an okay read
This book is not:
* - made of very many good parts
* - better than First and Only
* - more than okay
Author - Dan Abnett
ISBN - 978-1-84416-006-8
"Gaunt looked out of the cage door as they ascended and he saw a flickering procession of empty halls, then some thick with screaming habbers beating on the cage bars. They rose past fire-black levels and ones where twisted skeletons, baked dry by the heat of incendiaries, clawed at the lift doors."Necropolis is the third of the Gaunt's Ghosts books and about the last one I'm willing to read. First and Only was an uneven story introducing many characters, most of them interesting, kept moving by a plot that engaged the curiosity of the readers. Ghostmaker was a mess of character vignettes that raised a lot of questions about the validity of several of the characters. Necropolis is a morass of homogenous combat scenes, its underweight plot weighed down by too many characters.
The story of Necropolis is one of the big archetypes, The Siege, which encompasses everything from Beowulf and the Iliad to Dead Snow and Halflife. When I first reached for the closest parallels to Necropolis, I found my hand resting upon Brian Jacques' Redwall series, a curious and yet somehow automatic likening. Mr Jacque's Redwall stories are - or were, when I stopped reading around about the eighth book - standard medieval-style fantasy with talking animals. Mr Jacques has two plots - The Siege and The Quest - and generally uses both in each book. The plots are not original, nor are they particularly innovative, and yet I find I can remember many scenes from Redwall and Mossflower ten years after I last saw either book. Disturbing, since I doubt I will be able to say the same about Necropolis.
Necropolis is repetitive on two different levels. The first is in terms of style; all of the combat scenes have a sameness about them. Mr Abnett does not vary his vocabulary much, and his prose here is very simple and clean - indeed, the number of similes seems to have dropped compared to earlier books, and I don't recall seeing a single metaphor - so all the combat scenes are rendered in the same five-hundred-some words. Combat is difficult to write, and Mr Abnett's utilitarian prose means that all the combat scenes blur into one. Not too brilliant given that the book is something like three-fifths combat.
The other level of repetition is that of the devices and events used. Necropolis feels familiar, even down to the actions. The Volpone Bluebloods reappear and look down their noses at the Ghosts, just like they did in Ghostmaker and just as the Jantine Patricians did in First and Only. The Face Punch of Angered Authority returns, although for once it's not Gaunt delivering it. Gaunt himself proves that he must be descended from Horatio Caine by appearing behind people without their noticing about a dozen times. Apparently either the people in the W40K universe are deaf to the sounds of doors opening or Gaunt can phase through walls, since he manages to enter rooms without people noticing in order to dramatically interrupt conversations. In one scene he does this and is then interrupted by someone else who came in unseen. Apparently nobody in this universe has peripheral vision either.
This leads into the problem with Necropolis that's put me off reading any more of the Gaunt's Ghosts books: Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt. The attitudes and responses of the characters to Gaunt display precisely their value relative to Good Guy or Bad Guy status. Only a very few characters - Gilbear and Croe, basically - manage to fall somewhere in the grey zone. Everyone else either agrees with Gaunt and is therefore right, or disagrees with Gaunt and is therefore a moron. Gaunt is never wrong. Whenever Gaunt walks into a room, he is immediately the most important thing there, and everyone must pay attention to him. This comes out most strongly in a scene where Gaunt along with Grizmund and Nash, his peer commanders of other regiments, tour the fortifications of Vervunhive. Grizmund and Nash agree with Gaunt that some fancy awnings, put up for Sturm, should be taken down. Grizmund then suggests a plan which Gaunt supports; they are then informed that Sturm has already gone ahead and done something else entirely. From the attitude of the writing Mr Abnett is making it clear that Gaunt is right [after all, Gaunt is always right] and the reader should therefore be cued that Grizmund and Nash are Good People because they agree with Gaunt, and Sturm is Bad People because he disagrees with Gaunt and, worse, is rich.
The theme of common soldier versus posh soldier has run for three books now and is both tired and tiring. That it's crosscut with common soldier versus posh civilian and/or rigidly bureaucratic military police does not make it any better. One gets the urge to shout at the book that yes, we get it, the Tanith are awesome compared to the Vervunhive Primary because they're experienced and also awesome compared to the Volpone Bluebloods because they're not rich tossers and, in short, are the best things ever, and we're tired of being told that, thank you Mr Abnett.
Gaunt continues to annoy me by being right all the time, in such a fashion as to make it clear that the author is on his side and expects the readers to be as well. Gaunt's aura of rightness extends to his troops; in the above-mentioned scene, two of Gaunt's men address Grizmund and Nash [both generals] and show off how awesome their knowledge of matters infantry is. One problem: Nash is an infantry commander and ought to know these things already.
This leads to the moment where one of the two Ghosts, Mkoll, estimates that the enemy infantry number about a million by listening to the noise made by their lasguns firing. This strikes as impressive at first until one wonders, what are these million troops firing at? All the Imperial troops are inside the walls; the enemy are outside. Are they all firing simultaneously? If so, why? If not, how is Mkoll estimating a million men from what may be only ten thousand guns firing at any one time?
Secondly, paragraphs earlier Grizmund estimated the number and placement of the enemy armour by pointing out the muzzle flashes from their cannons. Lasguns, as implied by the name, are some form of laser weapon, and indeed in a later scene one Ghost observes the muzzle flash of another's lasgun. So Grizmund can pick out the muzzle flashes from thousands of tanks ... but cannot see the muzzle flashes of a million lasguns? This part is clearly supposed to highlight how keen Mkoll's senses are, but just makes everyone look a little silly, straining to catch a sound barely audible in the artillery bombardment and forgetting about the aforementioned phenomenon of muzzle flash.
Moments of such accidental ridiculousness continue. It is noted that Larkin is in his early fifties - a bit old for a man to be joining the army - but back in Ghostmaker it was mentioned that Dorden was twenty years older than the next-eldest Ghost, making Dorden in his early seventies at least! That a man who must have been sixty-eight at the absolute youngest was put in the army is ridiculous. This is the final cap on two characters I found implausible in the first book and annoying in the second. I will not be able to read another Gaunt's Ghosts novel until someone explains plausibly how these two men got into the regiment.
Third on the list of implausible characters is Colonel Corbec, an officer whose competence I have been doubting for quite some time. Early in the book he, the ranking officer present, stands around smoking a cigar whilst his men establish their billets. He takes no part in this. I have to wonder what sort of command structure the Ghosts have that their senior officer doesn't need to do anything. Who is making the decisions? Apparently not Corbec. I have a vicious suspicion that someone under him is doing all the actual work for him; it's probably poor bloody Rawne. Corbec's competence continues to be questionable. Later, he and his men dig in to a position outside the city walls and Corbec manages to forget that the thousands of men on the walls behind them have better vantage and a lot of big guns. This lack of awareness of his surroundings does not speak well of his understanding of the tactical situation. Corbec then spends the rest of the book fighting on the front lines like a common soldier, giving few orders and vague ones at that. It is not until Gaunt stops doing something else and starts shouting that Ghosts stop being tactically incoherent.
However, it is Gaunt himself who causes more problems. At one point Gaunt is busy pulling everyone's arses out of the fire so fast you'd think he'd grown an extra pair of hands to do it, which is in itself a set of plausible scenes. The part where a minor character steps outside to converse with a bit-part character - written in solely for scene - about how awesome Gaunt is and nothing else is gag-worthy. This scene has no other purpose than to laud Gaunt. Remove it and the story would lost nothing, except some nauseated noises from the reader.
The weirdness continues with Gaunt's coats. Sometimes he is wearing a full-length leather overcoat. Sometimes he is wearing a short jacket. He changes coats two or three times. At one point he is given a plot device which he pins to the front of his coat. Later on it is still there. The only problem is that he was wearing a long coat when he pinned the device on, an "overcoat" when the device is mentioned again to remind the readers that it's there ... and "short jacket" when it gets used. Gaunt had neither time nor opportunity to change coats, and yet somehow does so, for no obvious reason. Either that or he's been wearing two coats for most of the book.
The jewel in the crown of the ridiculous comes when Gaunt takes a break from saving everyone's arses to catch some sleep. This is plausible; everyone is dead on their feet from fatigue at this point. He goes for a kip in a chapel, which makes sense in the context. He gets a visit from a young lady, who provides him with a plot device, which is necessary. Then they cop off. This is not wholly implausible, given that humans apparently have a tendency to get shag-happy when in dangerous situations. What is implausible is that they're having it away in a consecrated chapel, under the watchful eye of an eight-foot-tall golden statue of the God-Emperor of Mankind, which is exactly the sort of blasphemous desecration that it is Gaunt's job to shoot people for. This is compounded by yet another irritating reminder from the previous book. In Ghostmaker it is observed that the Volpone have been using a small farmstead's homemade shrine as a latrine, which makes them bastards ... and yet in Necropolis it is just dandy for Gaunt to use a sanctified chapel for a quick shag?
Gaunt aside, there are other problems with Necropolis, and the main one is the rest of the cast. There are at least twenty characters who have POV scenes, all who whom crop up four or five times, with their own little plot threads to follow. The problem is that there's too many. It is uncomfortably difficult to remember who's supposed to be who, who was where last and what they're supposed to be doing. Add to this the occasional character who turns up, has one scene and then dies, and the cast list extends further. The obvious thing that Mr Abnett's editor should have suggested was to cut all the scenes for characters who have no impact on the plot. The problem is that this would have been most of the Ghosts.
Brin Milo, who seems to have inherited Caffran's role from Ghostmaker, has no impact on the plot whatsoever and yet gets several combat scenes that could have been dropped entirely. Larkin gets four or five scenes of which only two are of much relevance. Several more of the Ghosts get combat scenes and, whilst complaining that the title regiment getting combat scenes in a military action book is a case of complaining about Nelson spending too much time at sea, most of them do nothing to move things along. Run, shoot, run, shoot, grenade, fall over, repeat. Many of the non-Ghost characters have more important scenes. Indeed, the root cause of the lack of plot relevance in the Ghosts' scenes is that there is barely a plot. The Ghosts and other Guards sit inside a fortress and get shot at. Sometimes they shoot back. People die. This is not a plot; it is a setting. Beowulf gave us Grendel's mother and the dragon; the Iliad gave us the burning of the Greek ships and the duel between Achilles and Hector; Necropolis gives us run, shoot, run, shoot, grenade, fall over, repeat.
I find myself automatically comparing Necropolis to Redwall. The latter had scenes in which Cluny the Scourge worked out his plan for invading the abbey, trained his troops and/or built siege engines, then put his plan into work and the abbey-dwellers foiled it by one means or another. This worked; it broke the siege down into distinct events, discrete problems to be solved in different ways, and exhibited Cluny's character as evil warlord. In Necropolis the enemy remain faceless, voiceless, motiveless and numberless. No hint of their intentions is given; they have the characterization of a million sacks of potatoes.
The forces of the Imperium are essentially passive in Necropolis. No recon is done. No scouts are sent out. No plans other than "sit on our arses and shoot back" are put into action. This is daft to start with, but when one considers that the Ghosts are a specialist stealth regiment, and that two of the three people in overall command of the forces at Vervunhive hate Gaunt personally and his regiment as a whole, that not only did the Ghosts never go out scouting but not only was it never even suggested is utterly ridiculous. It's like the Siege of Kut with laserguns.
Necropolis comes in four parts - introduction, first battle, second battle and third battle. The introduction presents the incoming enemy and all the civilian and Vervunhive military characters. Then Gaunt's Ghosts turn up and, shortly afterwards, we get the first battle. These two sections, most of the first half of the book, are a stagnant morass of character introductions, most of them irrelevant to the plot because there isn't one yet, and a slew of disorganized combat scenes. The second battle is better written, with greater cohesion and coherency of writing. The third battle, where all goes to hell in a rocket-propelled handbasket, is less cohesive, but then everything is coming apart at the seams and the plot has finally showed up. Mr Abnett likes to tell battles in a manner cribbed from Bernard Cornwall - subjective scenes for the main cast and an omnipresent overview of the entire action. The problem is that Mr Abnett's omnipresent view of the battle is written almost as a summary, without linguistic grace, making one feel as if story is being fast-forwarded. These omnipresent views make up a considerable portion of the battle scenes, which make up most of the book, so having what feels like a fifth of the book told in fast-forward is not rewarding reading.
It occurs to me, rather late, that automatically comparing Necropolis to Redwall is a bit silly when there is another book, much closer in setting, to which it could be likened: Warriors of Ultramar. Both feature previously developed Imperial characters fighting off a numberless horde of inscrutably horrible enemies from within a besieged city. Differences snap into highlight. Captain Ventris makes plans to prevent the destruction of Tarsis Ultra, most of which involve taking the fight to the enemy. Gaunt does not do this. He does not even volunteer to send out scouts. When Ventris' plans go not-so-well, he makes new ones. Gaunt makes no plans at all. One of the things that drives Warriors of Ultramar is Captain Ventris' characterization as a man who is flawed and is aware of his flaws. Captain Ventris' flaws mean that he makes mistakes, and the reader trusts Mr McNeill to carry those mistakes to repercussion. Commissar Gaunt has no flaws. Without flaws he cannot make mistakes, without mistakes he cannot interact with his peers as peers, only lord over them, isolate and inviolable. It is ironic that Ventris - a genetically engineered, surgically enhanced, two hundred year old member of the Ultramarines, who are generally held to be so squeaky-clean that shit wouldn't stick to their shoes and so straight-laced that you could use them as rulers - is more fallible, more flawed and therefore more human that the purely human, often called common, wholly unenhanced Gaunt.
It should not be taken from this that Necropolis is a bad book. It has many bad parts, this is true, but it makes for an entertaining read - certainly any book I can sit down and read for five hours straight can't be wholly bad - and Mr Abnett's prose, whilst utilitarian and perhaps a little over-simple, is clear, concise and free from errors of bad choice. Overall, the story is satisfying in that all present get the ends they deserve, more or less. If one is facing a long journey, or a dull day with little to do, one could pick a worse book to read than Necropolis ... but one could also pick so many that are better.
This book is:
* - better than the sum of its parts
* - better than Ghostmaker
* - an okay read
This book is not:
* - made of very many good parts
* - better than First and Only
* - more than okay
