Third, and maybe final, trip to Krondor

Finished the third, and possibly the last, of Feist’s Riftwar Legacy books or as I refer to them as the Krondor books. This one, Tear of the Gods, is supposed to be the mid book of the series with two more to follow. According to his website however there are unresolved issues with the producers of the video games linked with these books and so they are on hold until if/when they are resolved. He does state that there may be a non-traditional project to the series but since it ain’t books it is no good to me. Speaking of unresolved issues, though Feist gives satisfaction in bringing the arc of the book itself to a conclusion there are still issues of the overriding arc concerning the series, or sagas as he calls them, that are left hanging. In fact the proposed 4th book was to be titled Krondor: The Crawler, The Crawler being a mysterious character that is mentioned in the first two books but never actually takes the stage, yet is a major player in all the chaos that is going on.

With Krondor III Feist has again written a good fantasy novel that both stands on its own well and yet ties in to a much larger story. A number of familiar characters are back and a new one, at least to this saga, introduced. She comes to take her place in the Prince’s Court as his advisor on things magical, except in religion. Her name had been bandied about in the previous books as the Prince, Arutha, debated on whether he needed such an advisor and later, who would take the post but she finally makes an appearance here. She is an interesting introduction because of a number of factors. She is a woman and until recently women were not supposed to be trained as magicians. She is from a neighboring kingdom, Greater Kesh, one which isn’t always eye to eye with the Kingdom of the Isles. Both of which make many suspicious of her. Even better she is related to the royal family of said kingdom and her great uncle is the ambassador to the Royal Court and who just happens to be the head of Kesh’s intelligence service. Throw in the fact that she’s the former lover of the son of the Duke of Stardock, the magician’s city, and top magician around, and that said son is a member of Arutha’s household guards, and his family by adoption, makes for fertile ground for plot threads both current and future.

Again while titled Krondor a lot of the action takes place in the hinterlands though the first part of the action does take place in the city. The main plot revolves around a missing magical artifact, the Tear of the Gods of the title. Seems that this artifact, which is renewed every ten years, is the object of a bit of piracy at the start of the book. The piracy goes awry and the object sinks into the sea and the race is on to recover it. It seems if the Tear isn’t where it belongs before the old one’s lifespan is over the consequences range from disaster at best to destruction if the bad guys get their hands on it. Can you say demon fodder? The consequences are not only to the Kingdom either; it seems the whole world is in danger even though most of the world doesn’t even know about it. Seems the power of this thing is a closely kept secret among some of the religious orders, a few of the royals and nobles and now the people sent to recover it including the new court magician and our old friend Jimmy the Hand. Also a new character is brought on stage whether just a minor one to further this story or to play a major role in the overriding arc. We also find out about the differences in magic in Feist’s world. It’s not really explained but it seems there are two branches of magic among magicians themselves, Greater and Lesser Paths as they are called. Then it seems that priests of the various temples, of which there are a damn lot, also practice forms of magic that don’t seem to be within the purview of the magicians. Then there are the women involved with magic. If they mix up a few potions and they are generally considered benign then they are village wise women. If they actually show signs of power it seems there is a prejudice against them, the power must come from making a deal with some dark power and so are witches. Why men can practice magic but women can’t is never really explained. Pug, the most powerful magician in the land is doing his part to combat the prejudice, witness the Prince’s new advisor, but the notion isn’t making a lot of headway among the masses.

In addition to the main plot the saga arc is also advanced in this book. The piracy of the Tear is part of the plot to advance the fortunes of the bad guys though this book makes it a bit more apparent that the bad guys aren’t really all n the same page. There is a lot of jealousy among the ones working for the main goal and a number of others who have joined with them in a marriage of convenience to further their own ends and still others in this marriage we still don’t know exactly what their purpose is. Suffice to say it’s all enough to be a giant pain in the arse to Arutha and his principality.

Speaking of pains in the arse the biggest one is the fact that this series may not be completed. Sure the books are good stand alone stories and the plot of the saga itself is there but not so overbearing so as to be what your mind keeps dwelling on but it is still there and there are still unresolved issues you really want to know about, at least I do. Who is the Crawler and how does he benefit from all the chaos he’s unleashing in Krondor? Is he in league with the some of the other villains because he’s a believer in their cause or is it for personal reasons, like taking over the city? Who is the dark magician who seems to be behind most of the mischief going on and what is the power he serves? Is this new power that is introduced just a plot device for this book or is it to play a larger part in the overall story as seems likely? I just hate loose ends. It’s been a decade since this book was written; you would think they could have settled their differences by now.

Ok, we’ll give you a rest from mr Feist’s books for awhile though I’m now reading the original saga in the series. Library books I am afraid as I can’t afford them just now for my collection. Thanks for the listen.

Not quite another trip to Krondor

Title of this post is because, while the name of the book is Krondor: The Betrayal very little of it takes place in the city of Krondor. Most of it is situated in the outlands of the Western Kingdom. Betrayal is the first book of the Legacy sub series of Riftwar. The second book I talked about in the previous post and I enjoyed it so I figured to get the other books in the set. While Squire James is also one of the main characters in this book he shares more of the spotlight in this one with a much larger cast of characters. There is his friend, and fellow squire, Locklear, A Dark Elf chieftain Gorath, Owyn, a younger son of lesser nobility studying to be a magician, Pug, the pre-eminent magician of his time and the character who seems to have started the whole over arcing cycle and Patrus, a highly entertaining old coot and lesser magician.

The book starts with the coming of Gorath, a moredhel or dark elf, to a town on the Northern Borders of the Western Kingdom from the icy lands north of the mountains where most of his race has been forced due to the coming of humans. Needless to say the moredhel aren’t really fond of humans and due to a war or two between them, or at least where they were on opposite sides, most humans aren’t exactly willing to clasp them to their bosoms. That being said Gorath has decided to make common cause with the humans to save his people from what he considers a bigger danger and so comes out of the North bearing a warning for the Prince of Krondor. He comes across Squire Locklear of the Royal Court, who has been banished to the godforsaken locality to serve the local noble because of some dalliance with the wrong woman. Locklear decides that getting Gorath to the prince is worth risking his wrath at leaving the exile decreed for him. And off we go on another adventure in the Kingdom of the Isles. BTW, although there is a Kingdom of the Isles with a king and other nobles to go with it, it seems, at least in these books, that most of the fighting is done by the Western half of the kingdom and its ruling prince. The Eastern half seems to sit on its ass a lot. The book covers the various travels and travails of the squires, magicians and Gorath in one set of groups or another as they combat the danger that the moredhel saw threatening his folk and the humans. As in Assassins the adventure, and story, are fairly straightforward though Feist throws in a few twists and turns you might not see coming.

One wonders if Betrayal originally started out to be the beginning of a new sub series. It stands on its own even more than Assassins does as there is no previous story to refer back to the way Assassins sometimes does other than general references to the cycle as a whole and there is no lead in to future stories as there is at the end of Assassins. It makes a good start if one would like to start any of Feist’s books as it has a satisfactory conclusion and one wouldn’t know it was part of a series if one didn’t know any better.

All in all another good book by Feist and enough to have me looking for other books in the Riftwar Cycle as I have already ordered the third book of this subset, Krondor: Tear of the Gods. Right now I have my eye on the Serpent War saga, a set of 4 books set in Riftwar universe. Really would like to read the original Riftwar saga but still searching for a fairly good copy of the first novel, Magician. Seems that either there aren’t a whole lot of them around or people don’t wish to part with them.

Beginning to think that the stroke was a bigger problem than I thought it would be. Having not done much reading for over a year just because of the sheer difficulty of it with an arm that wouldn’t grip a book properly and having a lot of time on my hands owing to being without gainful employment because of it, I am back to reading with a vengeance. I always was a big reader but my forays to the bookstore occurred a couple times a year at which times I would load up on a hundred or so dollars worth of books, mainly paperbacks with the occasional hardback. When I started collecting I usually saved my money for purchasing early books, hardcover, of those authors I enjoyed and was collecting, some of which were not cheap, and spending my time doing a lot of rereading of books I had. Now, with time on my hands and the discovery of a few new authors I enjoy, my book collection is again expanding rapidly. For example Mr. Feist has published approximately 30 novels in the Riftwar cycle. I have 2 at present which means another 28 books, give or take, will be heading for my shelves depending on various factors. Not to mention there are still some books by those authors I am already collecting that I still do not have. Some, such as Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and Dragonquest I may never own due to scarcity and cost, though I do have a signed copy of White Dragon. Others though are within my means, or were not too long ago, if I can just find the right copy. Be that as it may I seem to be buying books at a far greater pace than ever before and if I’m not careful I may soon be buried in them.

Hokay, enough for now. I hope my humble opinion was of some use to someone somewhere. I try not to go too far about the plot or scenes in the book as so not to spoil anything for the potential reader. If I should ever go too far just slap me. Thanks for the listen.

A trip to Krondor

Finished another book the other day, Krondor: The Assassins, a fantasy novel by Raymond Feist. Actually I finished 3 books but the other two were rereads. I picked up this book years ago on the bargain shelf when I couldn’t find anything else worth reading and it looked like something I might be interested in. However it took a number of false starts before I finally got into it. The dust jacket isn’t exactly designed to catch your eye as it is just a field of red with the title on it. Actually there is a background of two crossed swords but they don’t exactly jump out at you. Could have been one reason it subconsciously prejudiced me, dull looking dj, dull book. Finally decided to give it another go and I found I enjoyed it.

Assassins is the second book of Feist’s Riftwar Legacy series, itself a sub series of his Riftwar novels. Actually Riftwar is a series of three books but it was the beginning of the whole shebang which amounts to about 20 or so novels in a bunch of sub series all taking place with the same background. In addition the Riftwar Legacy books are based on a computer game which in turn was based on the original series. I hate starting a series in the middle but considering the problems I had starting this book I wasn’t rushing out to buy the first one so I guess I had to live with it. Wasn’t too bad as the story can stand on its own. There is some back story to it in the first book, indeed in all the previous books dealing with Riftwar, but except for references here and there in the story and a bit of a lead in to the rest of the series at the end you can read this on its own though you probably won’t. This is actually a good thing because, while three books have been published, five books seem to have been planned but due to some kind of dispute between Mr. Feist and the game company the last two might never be published. I hate when I get left hanging.


As I mentioned in my earlier review of Parker here is another author whose strong suit is characters and he has a raft of them. Only time I’ve seen such a large list of characters sharing the stage has been in shared universe type books where different authors set their own characters amid those of other authors. Here one man is responsible for them all. The main protagonist of Assassins is Squire James, aka Jimmy the Hand, a thief who has risen to Court rank somewhere in previous books. It is set mainly in the city of Krondor, the capital city of the Western half of the Kingdom of the Isles, which in turn is set on the world of Midkemia. Being a fantasy there are magicians, royalty, mercenaries, elves, trolls, thieves, assassins and so on and so forth all over the place. Assassins, as the name says, deals mainly with the fact that someone, or something, is wiping out a good portion of certain classes of citizens in the city of Krondor. The prince of the city, having a number of other problems on his hands, needs to find out who is responsible and why and puts the problem in the capable hands of Squire James, who once roamed the disreputable highways of the city’s underworld as the young thief Jimmy the Hand. This is a mixed blessing for while James knows his way around and still has the abilities and contacts from his former way of life; he also has a death mark upon him from the Thief’s Guild for breaking faith with them when he joined the royal Court. Of course the Guild has some problems of its own as they are one of the groups the killers are picking off. Complicating matters on the other side of the scale, the prince, in addition to the problems in his city, has some visiting nobility from another kingdom who seem bent on pursuing dangerous pastimes. So the story follows James as he winds his way through the sewers and over the rooftops of Krondor as he tries to solve the mystery of the whys and wherefores of the city’s killings and the adventures of his friend William who has just become a member of the Prince’s guard and is given the mission of protecting the visiting nobility, no small task.

Feist writes a straightforward, easy to read story. While his world may have as many different races and religions as Tolkein’s he doesn’t carry the development of the mythos to the extremes Tolkein did. You don’t need all the appendices and concordances to get all the nuances in his stories. While reading his books in some kind of order would probably give a bit more understanding he does explain enough in the stories themselves to get you by with what you need to know without going into excessive back story. I found myself reading the novel in about 2 days which might translate to 3-5 days for the average Joe given that I am a fairly fast reader who doesn’t need to worry about getting up for work in the morning. I mention that because Feist knows how to keep your attention so that you really don’t wish to put the book down even at the end of a chapter and so I went a bit later in to the night than I really wished to. So if you are in to fantasy novels I can recommend Raymond Feist’s Krondor The Assassins though you might want to start with Krondor The Betrayal, the first book in the sub series. As I enjoyed Assassins I went and found me copies of the other two books in the series and am in the middle of the first one now. The third one I ordered but it seems the store had sold their copy so had to do some searching for another one. These are first editions of the hardcovers as I am a bit of a collector of authors I enjoy. Paperback copies are readily available online.

If my opinion of the book helps I’m glad to have been of service. Thanks for the listen.

PS

While I didn't get my threefer at last night's BL game I did get 5th which put a few more points on the scoreboard.