Shadowheart by Tad Williams

The armies of the Qar and the Autarch of Xis have converged on Shadowmarch Castle, which now stands siege from enemies attacking by sea, land and underground. Ferras Vansen leads a desperate fight in the subterranean depths under the castle, trying to hold back the Xixians from the mysteries which the Funderlings have sworn to protect for generations. Briony Eddon is also heading home with a small Syanese army, but her resolve to help her people is challenged when she learns that her father is a captive of the Autarch...


Shadowheart is the fourth and final novel in the Shadowmarch sequence, the third major series by American author Tad Williams. The series is a slow-burner, with a pace that can best be called 'relaxed'. Empires may be forged, armies may clash and ancient secrets may be unveiled, but it all happens at a leisurely, chilled-out rate. This is epic fantasy at its cosiest and most predictable. Which is not to say the series is unenjoyable. Williams has saved the best for last here, with a plethora of battles and a smattering of intrigue to digest before the grand finale (complete with the villains all receiving appropriate come-uppances) and the long, 100-page epilogue in which the characters' fates are all neatly wrapped up and explained.


As with the previous books, the best moments are reserved for Ferras Vansen and Chert the Funderling, who are now leading the subterranean war as the Funderlings try to hold back the invading Xixians with the extremely reluctant help of the Qar. These underground battle sequences go on for a bit too long, but for the most part are exciting and tense. This is more than can be said for the scenes involving Barrick Eddon. Having spent two enormous books travelling beyond the mystical Shadowline in search of his destiny, his abrupt return to Shadowmarch smacks of plot convenience at its most blatant. Whilst his character arc was formerly one of the most interesting in the series, as he left behind his life as a crippled royal to embrace an alien culture, here it ends in a damp squib as Barrick becomes more enigmatic and dull.

Despite these issues, Williams ties together a large number of plots, character arcs and ideas that he has established over the preceding 2,500 pages and fuses them into a reasonably good ending. There's nothing too surprising here, but Williams' solid writing skills make it all readable enough. However, the feeling remains that Williams has been wheel-spinning with a series that seems to be more of a tribute to other fantasy works (glimmers of A Song of Ice and Fire and the works of Jack Vance can be detected) and also a call-back to his own earlier (and rather more impressive) Memory, Sorrow and Thorn sequence rather than exploring fresher ground (as he did so successfully in Otherland).

Shadowheart (***½) ends the series in an effective enough manner, but, despite its immense length, this remains a minor work from an author capable of a lot more. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Shadowrise by Tad Williams

The Eddon family is divided and scattered. King Olin is a prisoner of the mad autarch of Xis, whilst Prince Barrick is lost beyond the Shadowline, searching for the fabled Qar capital. Far to the south, Princess Briony is a reluctant guest of the Syannese court. The Qar continue their siege of Shadowmarch, but Hendon Tolly is more interested in unearthing the ancient secrets of the castle than in resisting the invaders. That job falls to the Funderlings, who must mount a stalwart defence of the tunnels and passages below the castle.


Shadowrise is the third novel in the Shadowmarch series. Originally planned as a trilogy, the final book in the series grew too large to publish in one volume, so was split in half (though each half is almost as long as the first two books in the series by themselves). Williams has form on this, as this also happened with the paperback edition of the final volume of the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series.

As with the first two books in the sequence, Shadowrise is well-written with some interesting characters. Williams has always had an enjoyable prose style, and that remains true here. Unfortunately, that can't quite overcome several problems. One is that the story unfolds with all the verve, vigour and energy of a particularly lazy sloth on sleeping pills. Chapters seem to endlessly pass which, whilst individually well-written, seem to consist of characters doing little but sitting around and talking about the plot, the backplot and what might happen next, often introducing little to no new information the reader needs to know.


Quite a few of Williams's characters are reactive, spending most of their time wringing their hands and agonising over what to do next. Notably it's those characters who actually make plans and enact them who carry the book, most notably Ferras Vansen and Chert the Funderling. Barrick's journey beyond the Shadowline has an unusual, weird tone to it that is rather different to the rest of the book and features some genuinely unsettling fantastical moments, but is undermined by Barrick's total lack of agency in the storyline. He has no idea about what's going on, neither does the reader, and this makes following that subplot rather tiresome. Worse still is Briony's storyline in Syan, in which it appears that Williams was setting up some rich court intrigue, realised halfway through he couldn't be bothered, and simply ejected Briony from that storyline rather abruptly. Whilst it's good to get this part of the story out of the way, it does render Briony's entire storyline in the last two books somewhat pointless. Also pointless is Qinnitan's subplot, which feels like makework as Williams tries to find something for her to do rather than simply getting her from Point A to Point B.

As the book continues, it starts to pick up some energy towards the end as important plot revelations take place and we actually get some energetic action sequences, rousing the narrative from its lengthy torpor. Naturally these are just in time for the inevitable cliffhanger ending into the final novel in the sequence, Shadowheart.

Shadowrise (***) is readable enough, but so long-winded that it's hard to muster the enthusiasm to carry on at times. Williams has just enough good ideas and interesting characters to make it worthwhile, but unfortunately this novel does little to dispel the impression that Shadowmarch is his weakest major work to date. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Shadowplay by Tad Williams

Shadowmarch Castle is in crisis. Barrick Eddon is missing, presumed killed in battle, whilst his sister Briony has also vanished from the castle, leaving it under the redoubtable stewardship of the ambitious and scheming Hendon Tolly. An army of the Twilight Folk has occupied the landward side of the fortress but not besieged the castle proper, but far to the south the great city of Hierosol is under attack by the armies of Xis, threatening the safety of both the fugitive Quinnitan and King Olin Eddon, a captive of the city's rulers.


Shadowplay is the second volume in the Shadowmarch quartet and carries the series past its halfway point. As with the first volume it's a competently-executed, traditional secondary world fantasy, but as a novel it's even slower-moving and more badly-paced than the first book.

The book is divided into several widely-separated narratives: Barrick and Ferras Vansen's adventures beyond the Shadowline, Briony on the run with a bunch of theatrical players, Olin as a captive in Hierosol, Chert the Funderling trying to help his amnesiac, adopted son and various characters in Southmarch living under the new regime. Unfortunately these narratives aren't really tied together well. They also vary wildly in quality and execution. The autarch's assault on Hierosol is tense and well-handled, but Briony on the road with the travelling players is dull. Even worse is Barrick's adventures beyond the Shadowline, where Williams aims for a kind of surreal mysticism and ends up with turgid boredom (though a few moments are genuinely unsettling). Chert, the most interesting character from the first book, is also hugely reduced in importance and gets little to do here.


The book's biggest problem is that whilst we have some big battles, some ominous scenes and some intriguing (if sometimes soap opera-ish) developments, the overall storyline doesn't develop very far. For only the second in a four-book series, it feels like Williams has far too many balls in play and is only able to move each of them forward a very small amount rather than the whole thing forward decisively (probably a reason why this trilogy expanded to four volumes).

The book is somewhat frustrating as Williams is still a good writer and some storylines and characters are well-handled, but overall the book's pace feels misjudged and there are no real surprises here.

Shadowplay (***) is a competently-executed fantasy novel, but the plot is slow to develop and there are too many storylines which feel extraneous or badly-handled to be really satisfying. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

Shadowmarch by Tad Williams

Tensions wrack the court of Southmarch Castle. King Olin has been captured by the bandit rulers of Hierosol in the distant south and is being held for ransom, but raising the money is beggaring the kingdom. Olin's heir Prince Kendrick is trying to hold the country together whilst his younger twin siblings, Barrick and Briony, have their own problems to face.


Meanwhile, in the far north, beyond the enigmatic Shadowline, the Twilight People are raising fresh armies to return to the March Kingdoms and avenge their defeat in a war three centuries ago. Far to the south, on the continent of Xand, a common girl is taken to wife by the Autarch, the god-emperor of Xis, for reasons utterly unknown to anyone. And far below Southmarch Castle, ancient secrets wait to be discovered...

Shadowmarch is the first book in the four-volume series of the same name, and is epic fantasy at its most straightforward. Tad Williams made his name with Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, a big series which arguably helped establish the modern fantasy paradigm (Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire followed in the trail it blazed) before switching to the far more original SF cyberfable Otherland. With Shadowmarch, Williams has returned to his roots, going once again for that big fat fantasy sweet spot.

This is a questionable choice for those who are familiar with the genre, since there are elements of Shadowmarch which recall not only other big fantasy series, but Williams' own prior work. With the best will in the world, it's hard not to feel that Shadowmarch Castle is a rebuilt Hayholt, a feeling enhanced by the presence in both works of sinister faerie folk and a race of diminutive good guys. Echoes of A Song of Ice and Fire can also be detected, from the barrier stretching across the northern border of the kingdom to the misadventures of a princess (well, almost) on another continent, although the details are rather different.

Oddly, despite being pretty traditional, Shadowmarch remains an engrossing read. Williams is an accomplished-enough writer that in his hands even the most familiar of plot twists feels fresh and interesting. His ability to juggle moments of genuine menace alongside ones of amusing whimsy (the Funderlings and Rooftoppers initially feel incongruous but become a more intriguing subplot as the book develops) adds a sparkle to the sometimes plodding political intrigue and the somewhat vague menace from the Twilight People (whose motivations and goals are not so much under-developed as left completely unexplained). The vast Shadowmarch Castle may feel a bit close to the similarly Gormenghastian edifice of the Hayholt (from Memory, Sorrow and Thorn), but it's also an atmospheric and rich setting for the story.


The characters are an interesting bunch, although again we are treading familiar waters here, with Briony as the tomboy-princess-who-wants-to-mix-it-up-with-the-boys and Barrick as the crippled-prince-who-harbours-a-dark-secret, not to mention the innocent-young-girl-who-becomes-a-major-power-unexpectedly and the soldier-on-a-mission-to-prove-himself. Again, Williams uses some nice elements of characterisation to bring these archetypal figures to life and make the reader care about what happens to them, but their familiarity may be an issue to some readers. The most interesting character is probably Chert, simply because dwarves get short shrift in most fantasy (to the point why you wonder authors bother to include them) and it's good to see one not only at the centre of the action, but also as the most well-developed character in the book. Unfortunately, a few side-characters are less complex, and a few are downright cliches (particularly some of the "Get this peasant out of my sight!" nobles).

Ultimately, Shadowmarch (***½) is the epic fantasy novel as remade by Blizzard Entertainment: totally unoriginal, very comfortable and somewhat predictable, but polished to a terrific sheen and enjoyable for all its familiarity. At the same time, that familiarity does make it impossible to recommend unreservedly. The foundations are solid, however, and certainly I'll be checking out the next book. The novel is available in the UK and USA now, along with its sequels Shadowplay, Shadowrise and Shadowheart.

Cover art and update

This is the UK cover for Tad Williams' Shadowheart, the concluding volume of the Shadowmarch quartet, due in November (courtesy of Jussi at Westeros):


Nice.

Reading: Helliconia Spring by Brian W. Aldiss.
Reading Pile: I have Helliconia Summer and Winter by the same author standing by, along with City of Ruins by Mark Newton, The Dervish House by Ian McDonald and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi as high prority reads.
Watching: Ashes to Ashes Season 3 and Lost Season 6.
Playing: Actually, nothing at the moment.

News on Tad Williams' SHADOWHEART

As reported a while back, the final book in Tad Williams' Shadowmarch Trilogy, Shadowrise, had become too big to publish as one book, so was split in two volumes. Shadowrise, the first half, will be published in the UK and USA next month, but the fate of the second half was less clear.


According to a Tweet from Tad Williams' wife, Deborah Beale,the second volume, Shadowheart, will now be published in November alongside the paperback of Shadowrise. It's unclear if that is in both territories, but I imagine it will be the case.

Author Profile: Tad Williams

Tad Williams is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Born in 1957 in San Jose, California, Williams has held a huge number of jobs in his time, working in theatre and television production, singing in a band and hosting his own syndicated radio show for a decade among them. In 1985 he published his first novel, Tailchaser's Song, and has been a fixture on the speculative fiction scene ever since, publishing twelve additional novels, numerous short stories and several comic series. He currently has two more novels about to hit the stands and five more books planned.


Tailchaser's Song is an animal fantasy which depicts cats as a race of intelligent beings who consider themselves the dominant species of Earth, with humans a generally untrustworthy nuisance. The book garnered some (generally favourable) comparisons to Watership Down and marked Williams as an author to watch.

For his next project Williams decided to directly tackle the epic fantasy genre with a full-on, Tolkien-esque epic meant to rival (and in some cases redress) The Lord of the Rings. Whilst acknowledging that the earlier work was a substantial masterpiece, Williams felt that Tolkien let some implicit suggestions of racism slide through unchallenged in the earlier work, with its depiction of the purely good elves and the purely evil orcs, not to mention the fact that all of the dark-skinned peoples in the book were allied to Sauron. Tolkien himself had noted these facts and struggled with them in various post-Lord essays trying to explain these issues, but reached no satisfactory conclusion before his death (although The Silmarillion did expose the ancient history of the elves in a somewhat less flattering light).


Williams' answer was to craft the vast fantasy landscape of Osten Ard, centred on the immense castle of the Hayholt, a Gormenghast-esque warren of kitchens and halls from where King John the Presbyter (also called Prester John, in a nod to the legendary figure) rules over the unified races of humanity. Upon his death, his sons quarrel for the crown and the land falls into civil war at the same time an ancient force of destruction, the Storm King, returns.

In comparison to many of the post-Tolkien fantasy potboilers, Williams attempts in Memory, Sorrow and Thorn (the names of the three swords at the centre of the story) to create a mythic epic punching at the same weight as Middle-earth. In that he falls short (Osten Ard being the work of a few years, not the decades poured into Middle-earth by Tolkien), but it remains a noble effort. The trilogy is gargantuan - the final book, To Green Angel Tower, is commonly split into two smaller volumes, Siege and Storm - and steeped in rich atmosphere, but to deliver that atmosphere Williams utilises a huge amount of words. The result is a somewhat straightforward narrative which doesn't really need the immense page-count the series spans. The result is a series that divides critics. Those who love it really love it, whilst a lot of other critics are unimpressed with Williams' somewhat needless verbosity. Also, Williams fails at the last hurdle in challenging some of the conceits of the genre. Whilst giving the Storm King and his minions a logical rationale for their actions, the epilogue to the trilogy is somewhat cloying and invokes several of the key cliches of the genre that Williams was supposed to be subverting. As a result, the trilogy leaves the reader feeling somewhat dissatisfied, although sporadically entertained along the way.

But for all its faults, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn did break through the barrier that had hitherto suggested that epic fantasy was solely a kid's genre, completing the work begun by Donaldson's Thomas Covenant a decade earlier. Williams' trilogy can thus be seen as a late but key progenitor of the modern doorstopper fantasy epic, coming as it did just a couple of years ahead of Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World. It also had an inspirational impact on other writers, as George RR Martin, who had previously been sceptical of the genre as a setting for adult stories, but read Williams' books, was fired up, and began writing A Game of Thrones in 1991.


Despite the immense pressures of writing the trilogy (Williams has said the third book in particular demanded vast amounts of sweat, blood and tears), Williams found time to expand his short story, Child of an Ancient City, into a novel with the help of fellow writer Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Whilst different to the trilogy - it's a historical vampire story - it didn't find as large an audience.

In a similar vein was Caliban's Hour. Having just finished a colossal trilogy taking eight years to write, Williams chose to work on a much smaller project next, essentially a companion to The Tempest examining the fate of the 'monster' Caliban. Despite some critical acclaim, the book also failed to shift many copies, to the author's distress and suspicion that some of his fans only wanted huge blockbuster fantasies from him, which he wasn't always prepared to do (a similar problem for many in the genre).

Despite his not-always-pleasant experiences on the trilogy, Williams did come up with an idea for another huge story, this time a science fiction epic called North on the Data Stream which would mix in elements of SF and fantasy with a river-based narrative similar to Heart of Darkness or Huckleberry Finn, or indeed Dan Simmons' Hyperion which was published around the same time he came up with the idea. Eventually coining the catchier title Otherland, Williams set to work after finishing Caliban's Hour, using many of the lessons learned whilst writing the trilogy and generally having a better time.


Otherland was, perhaps more sensibly, planned as four big books in the first place, published between 1996 and 2001, and marked an interesting departure and contrast to the earlier fantasy epic. On the one hand, it is similar: another huge story with hundreds of named characters, dozens of major ones and vast numbers of plots and subplots. Yet the differences are notable: some of the action takes place in the recognisable real world of forty years hence, in South Africa, the USA, South America and elsewhere, whilst the majority takes place in the many virtual worlds of the Otherland computer network.

Like the fantasy trilogy, Otherland has been accused of being too long-winded, but it's a different style of verbosity. Otherland's extra length is mainly due to, as admitted by the author, his treatment of the story as an episodic kitchen-sink novel with tons of ideas thrown into the mix. Some of the episodes in the books are almost self-contained, more like short stories that exist within the novel with their own beginnings, middles and ends before the main narrative resumes. Reading Otherland is an experience akin to watching a TV series with an ongoing storyline which sometimes takes a break for the odd self-contained episode along the way. Some readers hate this, others love it, and accordingly Otherland is Williams' most divisive work. For my money, it is the best thing Williams has written, with interesting, strong characters and the worlds within the Otherland network are well-realised. There is a surprising emotional punch to the finale as well, partially continued by a subsequent novella, The Happiest Dead Boy in the World, that answered a few dangling questions. Otherland was a reasonable success worldwide, but proved to be unexpectedly and particularly big in Germany, where it won some mainstream success and became a national bestseller, with a German software company now working on a particularly ambitious Otherland MMORPG.


Williams' post-Otherland work has proven less popular. The War of the Flowers, published in 2003, was a solid single-volume fantasy tale but a bit of a come-down after the epic SF series. More problematic has been his new work, the Shadowmarch Trilogy. Williams had been suggesting that his next project post-Flowers would be a return to Osten Ard for a series of short stories (presumably following the success of The Burning Man, a novella published in the 1998 collection Legends), but instead he chose to write a new fantasy book that would be released in stages online. The experiment was interesting, but whilst writing the book Williams was inspired to turn it into a full trilogy. Due to the break from his normal writing scheme, this meant writing the outline for the series between Books 1 and 2 rather than before the first one, and the result was a trilogy which simply didn't feel as polished as his former multi-book series. In particular, Shadowplay, the second book, garnered some of the worst reviews Williams has received in his career. The final volume, Shadowrise, is due in about a year's time. He is now embarking on a five-volume children's book series, Ordinary Farm, which he is writing with his wife, Deborah Beale, whilst his next adult project will be a series of 'noir' fantasy thrillers.


Looking at Williams' body of work, the conclusion one reaches is that he is an author with a variety of interests in different genres who has been sucked into the world of the giant fat fantasy epic. It's hard to ignore the impact the two big series have had or that they are both immensely popular, but at the same time Tailchaser's Song, Child of an Ancient City, Caliban's Hour and his often excellent short fiction (The Lamentably Comical Tragedy of Lixal Laqavee is one of the highlights of Songs of the Dying Earth) suggests an author who in his heart of hearts is perhaps more Neil Gaiman than Robert Jordan, and his concentration on huge series has perhaps deprived us of many interesting short stories, comics and single novels that he could have written in the meantime. Yet Otherland is a singularly impressive work and Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, if it failed at the final hurdle, is a nevertheless valiant attempt to analyse the problems within commercial epic fantasy, even if it ironically fell prey to many of them in the process. Still, with the huge epics apparently out of the way, for now, I look forward to Williams' future work with renewed interest.


Bibliography

Stand-alone Books
Tailchaser's Song (1985)
Child of an Ancient City (1992, with Nina Kiriki Hoffman)
Caliban's Hour (1994)
The War of the Flowers (2003)
Rite: Short Work (2006, collection)

Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
The Dragonbone Chair (1988)
Stone of Farewell (1990)
To Green Angel Tower (1993)

Otherland
City of Golden Shadow (1996)
River of Blue Fire (1998)
Mountain of Black Glass (1999)
Sea of Silver Light (2001)

Shadowmarch
Shadowmarch (2004)
Shadowplay (2007)
Shadowrise (forthcoming in 2010)

Ordinary Farm The Dragons of Ordinary Farm (2009, with Deborah Beale)
A Witch at Ordinary Farm (forthcoming in 2010, with Deborah Beale)

The Bobby D Mysteries
Sleeping Late of Judgement Day (forthcoming)
The Bobby Dollar Books (forthcoming)
My So-Called Afterlife (forthcoming)