Poor old Kharl, he's about as boring as one of the barrels he used to make. He plods methodically through this whole novel, never seeming to think about how his actions will effect the people around him. I guess there are people out there who don't consider how others will react, but I can't imagine being one of them. At the beginning of the book, he sets up a building on his new estate as a cooperage and starts building barrels again. Before I could gouge out my eyes from frustration, he is sent off to be Lord Ghrant's envoy to troublesome Brysta, Kharl's old stomping grounds, to stop a takeover by the empire of Hamor.
There, Kharl gets an education in making the most of the lesser of evils. Lord Ghrant had encouraged him to study the law, where he learned what those who work in the system know: law is not justice. Judges can only work within the strictures of the law and cannot decide punishments that aren't established penalties. Then he learns about dealing with a whole ruling family of shitweasels. But all of this is pretty standard fare for these books by Modesitt. He follows this pattern in every book.
Kharl gets to revisit his past and, being the ultra honest sort, he is determined to make right any of the past wrongs than he can. In several cases he is a day late and a dollar short, but he does manage to help a few former neighbours. And he does it while using such stilted terms, like eight-day as opposed to week, glass instead of hour, kay not kilometre, etc. Modesitt still insists on calling horses ‘mounts’ and spouses are consorts, all awkward, klunky terms that serve no obvious purpose but to bore the reader half to death.
Always even-handed, the next volume will apparently take place in Hamor, which was the evil empire in this novel. Modesitt has been very assiduous in giving us both the Black and White mage viewpoints in this series, letting his readers know that everything is relative.
Book number 472 of my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project
No comments:
Post a Comment