The March North

There are three different things going on with this book, and it's been hard for me to figure out which one is most important.

First of all, you have the actual plot. A hyper-competent military commander in fantasy Republican France is assigned to the quiet and backwards province of fantasy Scotland, seemingly as a way to help him recover from a difficult command in his recent past. All is well, until the three strongest units in the whole army randomly show up and tell him that they're now under his command. From there, his battalion manages a series of brave and death defying exploits against a bizarre threat from the fantasy Neo-Assyrian Empire. When the survivors make it home, they find that everything has changed forever in their absence.

This isn't the most original premise, but it's engaging enough. Most of the page-to-page action has to do with the work of running a military unit, which was surprisingly interesting because it ranged from making sure everyone has a nice tasty breakfast to using magic to communicate with the land-as-a-living-organism as a way of traveling faster. However, the issue for me here was the incredibly sparse characterization. I like to get to know the people in my books, and I think this style didn't really work for me. There's only really two individuals who I felt had an interesting arc from the start to the end of the book. We spend very little time actually hearing from the characters and seeing how they interact. In fact, after reading the entire book I know the gender of maybe three characters, the personal backstory of a single character, and the birth name of literally nobody.

In any other book, that lack of detail wouldn't make sense, but in The March North it's a result of the writing style. The book takes the principles of "show, don't tell" and "information dumps are boring" to their extreme conclusions, and has almost no background or extra detail about literally anything. For instance, there are no gendered pronouns anywhere, which is linguistically possible because everything is a kind of stream of consciousness narration by the protagonist, who likes to refer to people by their nicknames. The only things that regularly get adjectives are ones which the narrator is personally fascinated by, like the sorcerers and their various weird horses. I appreciate the attempt to do something different, but also it's annoying sometimes. Major plot twists are delivered in a single terse sentence, which you have to read three times because it's worded in a bizarre way.

Ironically, the setting is actually really cool. The premise is that a world where some people can do lots of powerful magic and most people can't would be hellish, because at least some of the magicians would spend their time taking over and fighting each other for power. Even though most can't do magic, the effects of the magic are still present throughout society in a logical way. One of my favorite details was that the hardest part of farming in this world is dealing with a weed made of magical eels, which I think was originally created as a biological weapon in a war between dark lords. Also, the origins of the republic and its military are epic, though you don't really learn about this until the very end.

This book was unique and fun to read. It's one of those things where I feel a slightly different approach would have created a masterpiece: keep the same terse world building but tell us a little more about the characters. How do they, like, feel about things? Anyway, the people of Goodreads seem to think that the Commonweal series gets better with every book, so I'm looking forward to the rest.