Ink Mage

Well this was a hot mess. Which caught me by surprise because the author, Victor Gischler is a published writer with award nomi­na­tions to his name. I haven't read his prose previ­ously but had read some of his comic book work. It wasn't amazing, but it was funda­men­tally compe­tent. So what went wrong here?

I have a few theo­ries about that, but first some infor­ma­tion about the book. The Ink Mage is in essence a fairly tradi­tional fantasy adven­ture story about a young girl (who also happens to be a duchess) who comes into power and has to rescue her city. I went into it expecting what I term adoles­cent fantasy.

Adoles­cent Fantasy

I use that phrase not to deni­grate the stories but to describe the type of plot where the focus is a youthful hero growing up and coming into their own. These stories gener­ally have a pretty roman­ti­cized view of the world and a posi­tive outlook. I find them quite refreshing to read when they are done well. It makes a change from the grimdark.

Unfor­tu­nately The Ink Mage doesn't actu­ally seem to know what it wants to be. Because while it has all the elements in place for an adoles­cent fantasy story, it keeps drifting into grim­dark terri­tory. The result is extremely uneven and attempted rape scenes or sex scenes that just feel wildly out of place with the rest of the story.

You see The Ink Mage exists in what is defi­nitely a simpli­fied and roman­ti­cized fantasy world so these sudden plunges into realism only serve to high­light the arti­fi­cial nature of the story construct.

Really, you've got to pick a style and go with it.

Lurching From Scene To Scene

There's another struc­tural problem with The Ink Mage and I suspect it is a result of the story's origin as a Kindle Serial. The book is split into several episodes each of which was released as a Kindle Single. But there's a skill to writing a serial and both keeping each part inter­esting while also keeping the story as a whole cohesive.

There are points in The Ink Mage where stuff happens just to create a dramatic intro­duc­tory moment or a cliffhanger scene. These moments don't actu­ally have any signif­i­cance to the ongoing narra­tive, so as a reader I'm left wondering why this happened and why I'm supposed to care about it.

These moments may have worked better in serial form but reading this as a novel they make the story feel unfin­ished, like the author never got round to cleaning up after his first draft.

Moving The Pieces Around The Board

If those were the only prob­lems with this book it would be bad enough. But they're not. The char­acter work here is minimal at best. Our view­point char­ac­ters do get a little explo­ration but everyone else rather obvi­ously exists just to serve the plot.

There isn't even a pretense at giving them any sort of back­ground or anything beyond the most basic person­ality. And in some cases what minimal person­ality they do have is casu­ally discarded in order to have them do what the story needs them to do.

I have said in other reviews that a char­acter can be made to do just about anything if you set the scenes up right. And I think that's true. But it's some­thing you have to earn. You have to build up to the appar­ently out of char­acter behavior. You don't just have it happen and assume the reader will be fine with it.

You also shouldn't have char­ac­ters do things that won't make sense to the reader without finding a way to explain it. Why are all these mages and priests so happy to provide Rina Veraiin with magical tattoos? Not once are we given a reason for this. It happens because it needs to happen.

Perhaps the worst char­acter offense the author commits is to sacri­fice one of the char­ac­ters in the goal of a tragic moment near the end, only to make me as a reader realise that I know so little about the char­acter I really don't care that she's dead.

A Mish­mash Of Magic

But wait, there's more! I've seen comments else­where about how inter­esting the magic system is in this book. But it's really not a system. It's a mish­mash of elements, none of which are explained at all.

We have Dungeons and Dragons style magic users, Ink Mages who get their power from magical tattoos, wizards who ink tattoos (but we aren't told where their power comes from), oh and priests who presum­ably get their power from the gods, except those gods aren't even mentioned until about three quar­ters of the way into the book.

That is not a Magic System, it's one kind of cool idea surrounded by a bunch of clichés.

There's another problem with this ink based magic too. It's basi­cally just super­powers in a fantasy setting. Several books have taken this approach (including Brandon Sanderson in Mist­born) and it's one of my least favorite ways to use magic. But it can be made to work if you make the effort.

Here though Rina just rides around the coun­try­side (not both­ering to warn her King that his country has been invaded) collecting tattoos so she can be strong and fast and heal. There's nothing clever or orig­inal going on here at all.

Respect Your World

Next problem! Gischler's writing style clashes with the world he's presenting in this book. We're given a world that is a tradi­tional fantasy setting. Middle Ages, minimal science. But the char­ac­ters all speak and act in a modern way.

The most obvious example of that is that we're supposed to believe the peas­ants of Klaar would feel patri­otic towards their country and care who was ruling them.

No. They wouldn't. They're peas­ants. Their life sucks either way. They are just not going to form a rebel­lion unless you actu­ally show the invaders being notice­ably more unpleasant to them than their former ruler was. The notions of national pride and patri­o­tism are compar­a­tively modern constructs. If you're going to use them in your fantasy world, you'd better build in the elements that make them make sense.

And if you're going to set up a Kingdom that's being invaded, don't try to tell me that the King will play poli­tics and refuse to remove the invaders from his country just so he can try to get a Duchess to marry his son. For a start, he's the King. If he wants the Duchess to marry his son… she marries his son. Secondly he can't simply ignore an invading army. That's both tacti­cally and strate­gi­cally idiotic.

Do You Have Anything Good To Say?

Well it has a nice cover…