People with Tusks

[mtvessel]

May 2020
The Unspoken Name - A.K. Larkwood – Tor, 2020
* * *
The map for this book is like no other fantasy cartography that I have seen. It consists of a set of scraps of paper with murder investigation-style pins and threads linking the very sparse names and icons. On the one hand, it is a strikingly original presentation that is particularly appropriate for the many-worlds-joined-by-gates setting. On the other, it is somewhat rough-hewn and lacking in detail, elegance and craft. It is a good metaphor for the book as a whole.

Csorwe, our protagonist, starts off in a similar vein to Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan. Like her, she is a child priestess of an Old Power (called the Unspoken One) in a place called the House of Silence in the land of Oshaar. One slight difference is that she is the Chosen Bride and is due to be sacrificed on her fourteenth birthday. That this does not happen is due to Belthandros Sethennai, a wizard who offers her an alternative path - come and help him return to his home city of Tlaanthothe, from which he has been exiled by the machinations of his rival, Olthaaros Charossa. Risking the wrath of her god, Csorwe takes him up on his offer and trains as his assistant, learning languages and swordcraft. Skills that will prove useful as she becomes increasingly involved in Sethennai's plans to regain his position.

The plot barrels along, aided by rapid changes of scenery (almost every chapter takes place in a different location). Travel is mediated by the Maze of Echoes, a place of fractured geometries that acts as a hub for gates that can be used by maze ships to pass between the worlds. This a nicely visual setting, if not exactly original (the Neitherlands in Lev Grossman's Magicians novels comes to mind).

Unfortunately, the constantly changing settings and the speed of the plot are the biggest issues with the book. It moves so fast that nothing gets a chance to land. Many of the settings are isolated locations in worlds with no discernible cultures or histories. In places where these do exist, there is only time for the lightest of sketches. As a result, the word that comes to mind when describing the world-building is "bland". Similarly, the plot never keeps still long enough for the stakes to build. Goals are set and resolved within a few chapters, making the whole thing feel more like a picaresque than a sustained novel.

The same is true of the characters. The stream of new locations necessitates a large cast, most of whom are little more than ciphers. One exception is the delightfully slimy Talasseres, an annoying colleague for Csorwe with a propensity for ill-advised plotting, whom, fortunately, the author evidently likes as much as I did. He provides some much needed grit and humour in Csorwe's otherwise rather conventional story of personal maturation.

There was one other thing that bothered me. Early on Csorwe's people are described as having tusks, which gave me visualisation problems because the author neglects to mention if they are in the lower jaw pointing up or in the top jaw pointing down. Similarly, the people of Tlaanthothe are described as having pointy ears that express emotions through twitching, which I thought was a rather cheap borrowing from another author. It wasn't until after I finished the book that I realised that they were intended to be orcs and elves respectively.

This is of particular interest to me as a role-player because I am currently adapting a system (Thirteenth Age) for my regular group and have been thinking about how to present the different cultural types (humans, elves, halflings etc) that player characters can be. Like most D&D-derived systems, Thirteenth Age uses the loaded term "race" for this aspect of a character and offers bonuses to core attributes such as strength, dexterity, constitution etc. which depend on the "race" that you pick. Wizards of the Coast, the owners of D&D, are quite rightly re-evaluating this aspect of the game, arguing that it promotes a bio-essentialist view that is often used by racists to justify their agendas. But a counter-argument is that obnoxious though they may be, racial bonuses mean that a player's choice of whether to play a human, dwarf or elf has meaning and consequence within the mechanics of the game. And if you replace the word "race" with "species", then the bonuses sort of make sense - you wouldn't expect the spread of attributes like strength or dexterity to be the same for humans and lions, for example, so why should they be the same for humans and dwarves? I honestly don't know what the right answer to this is, and I am aware that my privileged upbringing has almost certainly made me insensitive to the sensibilities of people who have been on the receiving end of racism. Which, getting back to the book, is why I can't decide whether to decry it for the blandness of its settings and for presenting orcs as no more than "people with tusks" and elves as "people with pointy ears", or to celebrate it as a shining example of what a truly inclusive narrative should look like.