The Steel Remains, or does it?
Posted by Q on March 11, 2009
Richard K. Morgan, that mouthful of hard-boiled gritty sci-fi ventures into fantasy with his take on the swords & sorcery shebang with The Steel Remains. Unfortunately, while the prose is just as testy and the characters suffused with just the same amount of rage & cynicism, the overall story remains spent & flaccid. Much like the end result of the protagonist’s pleasures.
While in no way influencing this review ipso facto, Morgan’s views on LOTR (On suvudu) where he decries the lack of insight into the other side; that rigid barrier between utter good & utter evil as the common failing of fantasy (most notably LOTR) drives much of the book. Taken in context, it seems as if Morgan is determined to show the other face of every upturned cheek, where evil has a human face and the ‘heroes’ have evil intent. That determination leads to a largely circumstitious prose which disappointingly ends with the evil vs good hinge anyway.
But first, a bit of background about the story.
The three primary characters are all veterans of a war in the recent past. Broadly there’s a swordsmaster – Gil Eskiath (with a legendary weapon made by a race long gone & techniques long forgotten), a barbarian – Egar the dragonbane (with a blessed lance) and an advisor to the King/half-breed human lady – Archeth. Unlike the usual fantasy fare, the King is not an outright evil despotic; he’s what D&D players might call Unlawful neutral. He does have his kick the dog moment and also has his (unpopular) protect his subordinates stand. Morally ambigious yet. The setting is that Gil is asked by his mother to search for a missing cousin who has been sold to slavery. Egar the barbarian has trouble with his clan-mates because of his agnostic behavior & frequent changing of bedmates. Archeth is out doing what she thinks the emperor should do to protect his empire. All are fashionably embittered with war, & fighting the good fight. The search for that cousin is the quest.
And, as a plot device it succeeds, brilliantly. At no point of time are we led to believe that this is the quest and to be honest, it is not. But having it as the central theme allows Morgan tremendous freedom to let his characters do what he makes them do best; Edgy,Violent & non-flinching action. Also the back-story is revealed in little bits & pieces which motor the plot along quite nicely. I’d say it again, the story is good, a little bit of fantasy staple, but interesting nevertheless.
Where Morgan triumphs in writing, is often about war-weary tough dark brooding heroes (remember Takeshi Kovacs). A sure-fire formula to make any story interesting. And Gil is exactly that. Talented, dangerous & doesn’t care whether he is lying in silks or in a boardhouse. And, oh by the way, he’s gay. That’s right. And we get the full treatment of his antics. Just the way we usually get for fair-haired maidens & blue-eyed boys tumbling around. Remember this point, because I’ll come back to it.
Shock & awe. That’s what Morgan’s books usually are. Whether they’re about an augmented soldier in the future conflicts of man, or a genetically new breed of superhuman fighters or these sword & lance swingers. When you pick up a book by him, what you see is basically his assault on the established tropes of the genre. And he has done that fantastically well till now.
And that genre-bending is quite clearly his unmaking here. Reading through the book, one gets the feeling that Morgan tried to be too different, too raw-edged with his characters. In trying to make every character a Gorbag in Minas Morgul, he blurs all characterizations that basically confuses the reader. Suddenly the so-called evil go legit and the heroes look like trespassers. His dwenda (basically the bad guys, I am assuming) were on earth before everybody else. They just want to rid everybody else (who they feel are trespassers) from here. And our heroes oppose them, fight them, kill them. Here’s the problem, Morgan gives these guys legitimacy and then takes it away. WTF!! And on our hero; If I replace every gorgeous guy in his bedroom with an equally gorgeous girl, what difference will I get? Will I have mutilated the story beyond repair? Will it all stop making sense?
I’ll tell you – It’ll make exactly zilch difference in the story. His homesexuality is completely incidental. Replace every blue-eyed boy with a brown-eyed girl and there’s no change. I am sure this is what Morgan intended to showcase; that we should also accept the fact that not all heroes get swayed by the hay, sunshine & bees. That somebody has the balls to write who and what one is, without pulling a Dumbledore on us.
The problem is that it all backfires miserably. And not just that one thing, it’s across the complete story. In that incessant drive towards upturning all tropes of fantasy in one genre-bender, the tale suffers. Sure the violence is visceral, the characters edgy and all the grit in the world is right there on the roads that they travel; but eventually the storyline is still that of a reluctant hero (Or if I may predict, a reluctant villain). That’s it all becomes Shannara on steroids.
Richard Morgan is a hell of a writer, that fact remains. This book is a 5/10. Sadly, that remains too.
