The barbed coil

I hadn’t read anything by J.V. Jones previously but there have been a number of positive comments on the mailing list so when I saw this book in the bookshop I decided to buy it. The plot as summarised on the back of the book is fairly traditional. Villainous King bent on conquering the world. Three disparate individuals brought together to stop him.

But of course it's not the bare outline of a story that makes the book, it's the details. The villain is a strangely caring man warped by fate and supernatural forces. At points you are left feeling quite sorry for him.

Likewise the three heroes are somewhat flawed individuals who approach the situation and others with preconceptions which colour their judgement.

The author writes extremely vivid prose without bogging the book down in long descriptive passages. At times she seems to almost revel in the squalor and unpleasantness of this fantasy world.

This is very much new style fantasy writing. Where as the old school didn’t worry about the unpleasant details of life in a low tech environment, more recent fantasy writers have tended to emphasise it. Thus we have:

“The smell didn’t bear thinking about. Neither did the soft and bulging floaters that kept bobbing past her face.”

Wounds, illness and death are described with equal relish.

Despite the war looming in the background, the focus of the book remains squarely on the central characters and a number of very memorable secondary characters. Resolution is achieved through painting not through battle.

Indeed if the descriptions of blood and death are vivid then so too are the descriptions of the scribing. A considerable amount of reasearch and attention to detail shows through in these sections and they are made every bit as interesting as the “action” scenes.

The book is self contained, a pleasant change for the Fantasy genre these days, but there is (as always) room left for a sequel.