Dave Duncan: Future Indefinite (1998)

Edition: Corgi, 1998
Review number: 436

The culmination of Duncan's Great Game trilogy, Future Indefinite tells how Edward Exeter does what he has been prophesied as doing, what he has vowed never to do: challenging the god of death himself. This leads his friends to believe that he has lost his mind. In the magical system of Duncan's world, the easiest way to collect power (mana) is through the sacrificial suffering of others. This is the way in which Zath has managed, as a psychopath becoming tutelary deity of death, to collect mana fast enough to become a danger even to the ancient established Pentatheon, who have been acquiring power for millennia. The only way that Exeter can hope to win is by becoming a greater monster, and after he does so, an even more significant threat to the Pentatheon. They, of course, are keen to remove Zath, but not at the expense of losing their own position.

Future Indefinite is necessarily (for the sake of suspense) told from the point of view of those who know Edward rather than by 'the Liberator' himself. They are desperately trying to work out whether or not he is sane, whether he has come up with some way around the difficulties that led him to take his vow, whether he has any chance of winning, and whether the Pentatheon can do anything about it. The reader, too, is not supposed to know these things until the end of the novel.

The trilogy as a whole is excellent, ringing the changes on one of the most venerable basic plots in the fantasy genre, the messianic hero. (Prominent examples include Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series and David Eddings' Belgariad, just to choose among the most popular works in the genre.) Like the heroes of many of these stories, the career of Edward Exeter is modelled on that of Jesus Christ. Unlike most of them, Exeter consciously follows this model, as he preaches a new ethics and a challenge to the established religious order. The closest parallel is perhaps John Barth's Giles Goat-boy, though Duncan escapes the accusations or irreverence and blasphemy that have been levelled at Barth simply by omitting the element of parody. The unpleasantness of the religion imposed on Nextdoor by those seeking to exploit the way that magic works there is an important part of the novels, and helps to raise them above the general level of fantasy. The third is also the best written and most gripping of the series, which as a whole could become one of the classics of the genre.

Dave Duncan: Present Tense (1997)

Edition: Corgi
Review number: 417

One of the reviews of the first novel from The Great Game sequence, quoted on the cover of this, the second, describes it as the most significant fantasy novel of the decade. While it is good, and attempts something rather unusual, I don't feel that it is that good. (mind you, I can't think of many fantasy novels from the nineties that I would describe as particularly significant.) Present Tense shares both the strengths and flaws of Past Imperative.

It is hardly surprising that the strengths are shared, since they are mainly in the underlying scenario shared by the whole series. In Present Tense, the two worlds of First World War England and Nexdoor in the grip of its rapacious deities are alternated, as the Nextdoor elements consist of a tale told by Edward Exeter to the few people he can get to believe in him. A new item which is good is a tribe on Nextdoor with a very unusual culture, completely unlike the European peasantry, nobility and barbarian hordes which usually inhabit fantasy novels. Instead, it is based on an African society with segregated groups of unmarried men.

A lot of what goes on in these books seems to really be about anti-colonialism. Exeter's own background - brought up in Africa yet (unusually) freely allowed to mingle with the people around rather than being kept in completely European society of sent to an English prep school - is explicitly said to help him interact with the people he meets on Nextdoor in contrast to the standard British colonial behaviour. But the whole background of Nextdoor, where the exploitative deities are normal Earth people who have gained vast powers as a result of crossing over, is a (fairly unsubtle) commentary on imperialist culture.

The major shared weakness is a poor start; with each novel, it is about fifty pages before the story grips enough for the initial "This rubbish isn't worth reading" reaction to wear off. I can't quite see what it is that Duncan fails to do, but this novel would be improved by omitting or rewriting the introductory section, which deals with the British army's reaction to Exeter's sudden appearance naked on the Western Front. Maybe changing the style so that it read more like the reader would expect from a 1917 army report - which is what it purports to be - would help. Alternatively, just beginning with the second section, in which Exeter has been incarcerated in a mental hospital in Kent, would be better than what we have (it would be easy to work out how he got there).

Dave Duncan: Past Imperative (1995)

Edition: Corgi, 1997
Review number: 357

Duncan's novel, first of a trilogy, impressed me deeply despite its rather shaky beginning. He uses two ideas which are rather unusual in the fantasy genre. The first of these is to vary the standard plot in which a normal Earth person is catapulted into a magical world of which he understands nothing by making the events in the two worlds closely connected - the First World War (the Great War) and a contest between the gods of Nextdoor (the Great Game). The events leading up to the war on Earth are encouraged (or discouraged) by agents from Nextdoor, who hope to use (or prevent the use of) magical power generated by the deaths of so many young men to influence the Great Game.

The fact that the magical system devised by Duncan works in this way leads us to his second idea. Through sacrifice and pain, magical power (which he calls mana) is generated, for the being on whose behalf the suffering is incurred. The gods require mana to continue to exert power, and so the religious system of Nextdoor is unpleasant and tyrannical. Conventional fantasy generally uses sanitised versions of the Nordic pantheon, and religion usually plays little part except possibly to differentiate good and bad (as in all David Eddings' fantasy series). Society is generally fairly secularised, probably it is easier to write about something closer to the author's own background. (One interesting minor point of Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane is the culture shock when Thomas Covenant discovers that the inhabitants of the Land are not talking conventionally or metaphorically when they speak of Earthpower.) Religion on Nextdoor is a large part of life, is distinctly arbitrary and definitely unpleasant, based mainly on ideas from some of the more repugnant rituals of Earthly religions - self-mutilation, temple prostitution, Thuggee style murder and so on.

I sometimes feel as though I write a large number of these pieces talking about the treatment of religion in fantasy novels. This is not, I hope, because I am obsessive on the subject. Religion is an extremely important force in human history, playing a vital role in people's psychological make-up. For the first time in history, we are living in a society which is to a large extent secular. Religious activity is marginalised if not actively mocked, and even the most devout usually live their lives split in two between their daily routine and religious observations. (There are cultures in which this would have seemed incredibly alien; to the ancient Israelite a distinction between spiritual and secular was hardly imaginable.) With the decline of (principally Christian) mainstream religion, a large void has opened up in the lives of many people, to be filled with all kinds of new things: an interest in the esoteric, a religious devotion to secular objects - money, the workplace, pop music for example. The popularity of fantasy is possibly an aspect of this, with magic and religion put into a context where they become permissible. To take religion seriously in fantasy, then, is frequently an indication that the writer has something to say and that they are not just trying to cash in on the popularity of the genre.

The standard of the writing of Past Imperative is not quite up to that of the ideas. The characterisation is reasonable, and includes a major character with a disability, unusual in a fantasy novel. The book begins in a lacklustre way, and the invention of names is distinctly poor and unconvincing (areas of Nextdoor are called things like Narshvale and Sussvale, not particularly evocative or interesting). The combination of the map and name pronunciation chart was almost enough to make me give up before starting the novel. Almost the only aspect of the treatment of language that I liked was the way that the hero, transferring himself from Earth, knew none of the language, and almost inevitably cast himself in the role of "holy fool" required by the plot.