The White-Luck Warrior - R. Scott Bakker

The sun glares. The air chills. The Mop tosses on and on, an endless ocean of swaying crowns. Whatever relief they hope to find in wind and sunlight is snuffed when they look to one another. Squinting. Eyes glittering from blackened faces. Ragged like beggars. In the gloom below, they seemed as true to their surroundings as the moss or the humus. Here on the heights, there is no overlooking either their straits or their desperation.

This book, and the series of which it is a part, falls easily into the category of world-building fantasy novels that pit evil forces against mankind, rife with battles, sex and court intrigue, sorcerers and gods and superhumans and non-human creatures both vile and sublime, and might easily be written off as one of the many Tor paperbacks that line the shelves of your local bookstore, the author's name stamped on a line of similarly designed covers. But what sets this series apart from other fantasy is the author's ambition. Embedded within the story is a philosophical core that is often absent in other books in the genre, one that guides not only many of the character's actions, but one that also seems to define the way that the world seems to move, the way that the story seems to unfold.


To summarize the plot would be tedious, but suffice it to say it is complicated, and has a novel structure in that narrative arcs are broken up into trilogies (so far). And despite Bakker's attempts to inject more seriousness into the genre, at times it seems the books take themselves too seriously, with the characters' conversations sometimes crossing the line into pedantry. The prose, which is far from terrible, at times becomes ponderous, as in the quotation above.

But the plot alone is worth plodding through the more tortuous sentence constructions, and the vision and the discipline evident in the execution of that vision are remarkable. It seems that Bakker has the whole story laid out in his mind, given the excellent pacing of the narratives in every story, as if each part is simply waiting for the book's bindings before it can be put on the shelf. For all its flaws, the story ranks high in the fantasy writing pantheon, even if it seems to fall short of the author's goals.