The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett

In the city of Krasia a young boy grows to manhood and becomes a skilled warrior and charismatic warleader. His name is Jardir, and he feels destined to become the new Deliverer, a warrior who will lead humanity to victory over the murderous demons who rise from the Core every night. A man comes from the green lands to the north, Arlen, who impresses Jardir with his fighting skills. When Arlen finds a cache of weapons belonging to the first Deliverer, Jardir feels he has to betray Arlen, steal his weapons and leave him to die in the desert.


Several years later, the army of Krasia boils out of the desert and begins conquering the green cities. But Jardir heads rumours that the northerners have their own Deliverer, a mighty warrior known as the Painted Man who can fend off demons with wards etched into his skin. As Jardir continues his conquests, the Painted Man is forced to confront the sins of his own past as well as a new breed of demons, smarter and more cunning than any who have previously appeared.

The Desert Spear is the second volume of the five-volume Demon Cycle, following up 2008's The Painted Man (aka The Warded Man in the USA), one of the stronger fantasy debuts of recent years (although the amusing fact the novel was almost entirely written on a Blackberry on the author's morning commute seemed to attract more attention). This sequence is interesting because Brett has created a 'points of light' fantasy setting, where areas of civilisation are few and far between and the lands in between are infested with monsters and dangers. Few fantasy novels have codified the concept as well as Brett has done in these two books, where simply walking down a road at night is suicide. The result is an atmosphere of oppression and paranoia that worked well in the first novel and is being eroded in the second, as humanity gets better at fighting the demons and finding ways to survive.

Of course, the story of humanity simply gaining the upper hand and winning would be dull, so Brett ramps up the threat level convincingly in this second novel, with the Krasian invasion giving the northlanders a new enemy to worry about at the same time much more intelligent and canny demons, their princes and generals, start appearing. The escalating threat and stakes is well-handled by the author, who also laces some additional clues about the nature of the demons and life in the Core into the story.

Characterisation is well-handled, particularly of Jardir, Abban and the Painted Man, but Leesha remains a befuddling protagonist whose motivations and decisions seem hard to follow, whilst Rojer isn't given very much to do. Structurally, the novel also works well. Like Steven Erikson's House of Chains, the book opens by concentrating on a single minor character from a previous volume and exploring their backstory in-depth up to the point that it rejoins the main narrative, from where it presses forward. Jardir's story, which makes up roughly the first third of the novel, is gripping stuff, although the Krasians do occasionally veer too close to being Klingons (albeit with institutionalised male rape) for comfort, with much talk of honour and hideous abuse of the apostrophe being perpetuated. Still, it's a tightly-focused narrative that works well.

After this, the story returns to the northlands and continues the tale of The Painted Man. This section is more mixed, with the Painted Man being forced to return to several of his previous homes to confront the aftermath of situations he abandoned and walked away from in the first novel. This section is fairly well-written, but reminds the reader The Painted Man that moved very fast, with the sections in the Painted Man's homeland and later in Fort Miln being set up, developed and resolved with pace and energy. In contrast, these sections in The Desert Spear tend to plot a little, with the Painted Man falling prey to the enemy of good pacing, angst, as he agonises about his decisions and motivations at length.

Nevertheless, these sections remain readable, even though we are clearly in set-up mode for the third book (The Daylight War, which certainly sounds more dynamic) and little is resolved in this novel. One issue that does arise here is Brett's use of rape in the novel (of both men and women), which he employs as a blunt instrument of character development to push characters down a new path. Whilst war is ugly and Brett's world is certainly cold and harsh and it would unrealistic to suggest that rape would not happen in such an environment, it is also the case that he employs it a little too readily, and it doesn't entirely fit in with his prosaic and straightforward prose style. In contrast, Bakker uses it as an actual, horrifying weapon of war by the Consult whilst Martin and Jordan keep it (mostly) firmly off-screen and more effective for being so.

Another major issue is the lack of resolution. The book has something of a finale (two relatively small skirmishes with the new, more powerful demons) but it ends almost randomly, with the final page being rather less dynamic than the ending of may previous chapters. The book simply stops rather than climaxes, which is, as with all things, rather disappointing.

The Desert Spear (***½) is a readable and slightly different epic fantasy novel set in a well-realised world with some great ideas and solid use of action. Unfortunately, the excellent pacing of the first novel has been mostly lost and the author's over-use of rape as a narrative engine is dubious, whilst the book's lack of an ending is problematic. For this reason, it is a less satisfying novel than its forebear. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett

The Painted Man (aka The Warded Man in the USA) is the first book of The Demon Trilogy and is this year's big debut fantasy series from HarperCollins Voyager. I hadn't heard of it prior to receiving the review copy, which is a shame as it's an excellent debut novel that can stand alongside a number of other recent high-profile debuts quite comfortably. I enjoyed it more than Ruckley's Winterbirth, and at about the same quality of enjoyment as Abercrombie's The Blade Itself, for example.

The Painted Man is set in a world where people live in terror of the night. When the sun goes down, demons - or 'corelings' - from below the ground emerge on the surface to kill and feast on human flesh until morning comes. Humanity has discovered powerful defensive magic in the form of wards which can protect their homes, or even patches of ground, but this magic is not always perfect and the different varieties of demons have different ways to overcome the wards.

Eleven-year-old Arlen lives on his parent's farmstead, but a coreling attack leaves his family decimated and many friends and neighbours dead. Despising his father's cowardice for getting his mother killed, Arlen runs away from home, surviving by carving wards into the dirt every night. Eventually he reaches safety in a big city and finds a new, loving family...but memories of his childhood continue to haunt him and he becomes obsessed with the idea of leading humanity to an ultimate victory over the demons, to stop cowering in fear behind walls and wards and go on the offensive.

Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Leesha is set up for a prosperous life, ready to inherit her father's business and marry one of the most popular boys in her village. However, her mother's bitterness and her betrothed's error in judgement instead leads her on a very different path as she learns the arts of herblore and healing from the town's wise woman.

An entire town is obliterated by a coreling attack, leaving only a single survivor: a three-year-old boy named Rojer. A visiting Jongleur decides to take Rojer her his wing as his apprentice, setting them both on an dangerous path.

The Painted Man is a page-turning book. Whilst at heart it doesn't necessarily journey too far from established tropes (it even starts in a village), it mixes them up nicely. The land of Thesa owes as much to Westerns in its scenery than to traditional epic fantasy, whilst the ward magic is notably different to the wizards 'n' warlocks found in other works. The notions of paranoia and fear, and the price of overcoming that, are also explored in-depth. The characters are likable and interesting. To some extent they follow the traditional 'callow youths come good' model, but the central character of Arlen takes a rather different course and there are hints that his dark and dangerous journey have left him a scarred and bitter character, for all that he finds some happiness at the end of the book. Brett's worldbuilding is pretty good, best exemplified when in a sequence lasting just a few chapters he takes Arlen into a burning desert kingdom and is able to paint it in as much detail and bring it to life as well as does the Free Cities and surrounding villages where the bulk of the narrative takes place. The plotting is also nicely done, with a huge amount of incident and character-building set up in the book, along with a reasonable amount of exposition. The book also comes to a definitive climax rather than a cliffhanger, meaning that whilst there is clearly plenty more to come you're not left hanging in mid-air for a year for the next instalment.

The Painted Man (****) is a most enjoyable novel with an interesting premise that is well-developed and explored. I look forward to reading the sequels. The novel is available now from Voyager in the UK, and will be published (as The Warded Man) in the USA by Del Rey in March 2009. The author has a website here.