In my review
of the first volume, The Dragon's Path, I said that it
"ended before its most interesting elements could come to the fore." Does
that still hold? Well, yes and no. Like A
Song of Ice and Fire, The Dagger and
the Coin has a series of political plots and struggles against a far larger
mythic background. Like (the
first three novels of) A Song of Ice and
Fire¸ that political plot charges forward, twisting and turning about, while
the larger arc contents itself with hints and crawls. The spread of the Spider
Goddess' priests is certainly an important event of the book, mind you. Their
growing presence inspires a fair bit of foreboding in forward thinking
characters and readers alike and the actions they inspire from others are certainly
dramatic. But that last part's the key. The priests are important so far
primarily in how other characters react to them, whether that reaction's
gullible (inevitable?) following or violent (doomed?) resistance. The priests
themselves, however, have yet to become central; the earthshaking threat that
they pose is still nothing more than vague whispering on the horizon.
That slowness
of pace might have, after two volumes, grown obnoxious if not for the gripping
nature and fast pace of the political plotline. Abraham uses short chapters and a
multiplicity of viewpoints to progress quickly through momentous events without short changing them. He is adept at showing less to imply far, far
more; by giving us the key scenes in a war, and making discussion of it play
into the chapters and lives of the characters not directly involved, Abraham is
able to get across the scale, importance, and impact of a massive conflict
without trudging through its every escalade. By using each point of view to
reinforce the others, Abraham is able to create a far wider tapestry than he
would be able to otherwise and to make every stroke far more convincing.
Furthermore,
Daniel Abraham is a master of making his characters likable. Now, mind you,
likable is very, very different from blandly good. This is not a cast without
depth or variation. But Abraham removes moral ease by a seemingly infinite
ability to show us what is most dear to the characters and feel it alongside
them. We may be horrified by what they do, but we understand why. When we are
in their heads, we know their joys and their terrors. Their most despicable
acts seem wholly justified, until we free ourselves from their perspective and
realize the horrors we have watched unleashed. The main example of this is no
doubt Geder, the noble propelled through the ranks by his allegiance with the
priests and surfeit of blind luck. Geder is prickly skin personified, but his small
wishes, his love of reading, and his desire to avoid humiliation humanize him.
His nigh limitless power then makes him terrifying. Always, Geder's perspective
dances on the razor's edge between endearing and sickening. No matter how much
the reader tries to disconnect from him and focus on his crimes, it tips back.
As in the
first book, Dawson is an unyielding conservative, a man who believes change is
always wrong and that order and etiquette are all that hold us back from the
abyss. He is the kind of man who will die before surrendering what he believes.
He comes to view the priests as an abomination polluting his beloved Antea, and
he will die to expunge them. He is an elitist, a man who
believes that: we [nobles] have been born
better (p. 274) and who says: When a
low man crosses me, I execute him. (ibid) Abraham's said that he based the character on the
German author of Diary of a Man in Despair, who hated the Nazi's lower class
origins. The idea of evil pitted against a greater evil is certainly a strong one,
and one that's been made to work innumerable times in the past, and Abraham imbues
Dawson with an incredible force of character and personality.
But while
Dawson faces incredible worldly challenges, he faces no real ideological ones. In
my review of The Dragon's Path, I
said that "Abraham seems to have left out the part where his reprehensible
character has equally reprehensible foes." Here, the problem is rather the
opposite. Outside of a very few utterances like the one I quoted above, Dawson's
prejudices are never put to the test or even brought to the fore. He never
interacts with characters of a lower class, never has to either disregard the
merit of an inferior man or overcome his beliefs. His idea of natural
superiority is, here, a background part of his character. Outside of a few such
observances, he could simply play the part of the purely loyal white knight;
he's a Ned Stark burdened with blemishes, but whose blemishes never come into
play.
Cithrin and
Marcus both begin the story struggling to keep control of the bank branch that
Cithrin established in The Dragon's Path.
By the book's end, both have wandered rather far afield, called from that local
struggle to larger things. For Cithrin, the change happens quickly. In order to
defeat the notary that's strangling her local bank, she goes to the headquarters
of the Medean bank, which leads to some of the novel's wittiest lines, such as
when she tells Komme Medea that his notary has the soul of a field mouse and the tact of a landslide. (p. 193) From
there, Cithrin finds herself involved in great happenings around the map,
including the turmoil in Antea.
The biting
dialogue is not the only successful part of her plotline. As in the seminal Long Price quartet, Abraham weaves
economics into a larger narrative to the great benefit of it all. Money, as
well as swords, presents a route to power in Abraham's world. Cithrin says of
her childhood dreams that: The dragon
turned out to be money. […] Coin and contract and lending at interest were what
let me fly. (p. 362) Of course, as Marcus' stint as a bank enforcer goes,
coin and blade are not wholly divorced; the former, in fact, might be as hollow
without the latter as the latter would be insignificant without the former.
Despite its
excellent use of money and the bank's structure, however, Cithrin's story
suffers from being divorced from the bank she worked so hard for in the prior
volume. Here, she ventures damn far afield, and it can be difficult at times to
relate each step on the way to her larger purpose. Immersed in the politics of
Camnipol in particular, the unique aspects of Cithrin's story are endangered by
the weight of the more intricately tied together narratives around it. The
threatening feeling of aimlessness is certainly not aided by her justification
of a major decision as a whim, a moment's
madness. (p. 285) Abraham is too gifted a writer of character to allow
things to totally devolve, but one coincidence in her storyline in particular
does verge on making the whole affair feel less like a plot than an
artificially guided wander.
Though he
stays put for most of it, Marcus Wester's plotline suffers worse than Cithrin's
for their splitting up. When she departs, his role as her protector is made
rather difficult, and he's more than aware of the problem. The solution seems
to be Master Kit, a character from the first novel and an apostate member of
the priesthood. Kit tries to enlist Marcus in a grand quest to defeat the
Goddess, and, though Marcus refuses at first, it's clear that he'll eventually
acquiesce. That certainty, and his continuing fixation with a plotline that
Cithrin has already moved past, serve to make most of his scenes until near the
end feel like treading water, no matter how enjoyable the small parts of each
of them might be. As for Master Kit, it does make the reader wonder than his
urgent quest, established in the prologue, had ample time to wait about in one
place until Marcus finally got around to changing his mind.
Much of the
criticism, my own no exception, of The
Dragon's Path seemed to center on its worldbuilding. The King's Blood does add a great deal to what we know, it does not
fill in every detail of its world in the way that some other fantasy novels (The Wheel of Time, The Way of Kings, etc) do. That being said, the nature of the
world, and of its impact, becomes far clearer here. Every character is driven
by the recent past, by the shape of the nations on the map and by the history
formed character of the men that inhabit them. As one character says, the nature of history defines us. (p.
204) But what is
known about history is not the entirety of it. The Dagger and the Coin is as driven by the limits of historical knowledge (p. 43) as it is by the history that
is known. Almost everyone knows that: Anything
could be buried below Camnipol, and no one would ever find it. It was a city of
lost things. (p. 337) This is the story of those lost things coming to the
surface, the causes and events buried beneath the causes and events that seem
to shape the characters and present world, and this deeper history threatens to
throw everything that built up after off its back as it rises.
As for the
magic system, we may not have gotten to understand all of its origins or
consequences yet, but what we do see of it is fascinating and filled with
unsettling promise. The priests' power lies on the barrier between the truth
and the lie. They can always tell when you are lying. And they can always make
you believe that they are telling the truth. The priests say that words are the armor and swords of souls, (p. 210) and their claim
seems true; with their power, they can remake any man they meet. This ties into
the line between being and being thought of, the difference between truth and
certainty, and the difference between pretending to be something and being it,
all of which are chief themes in much of Abraham's work (such as in the story
The Curandero and the Swede from Leviathan Wept).
As one character says, We are the stories
people tell about us. (p. 441)
Having
reached the end of its second volume, I can say that The Dagger and the Coin has so far still not awed me to the same
extent that The Long Price quartet
did. That being said, it is intriguing, fresh, fast, and fun, and its every
ominous motion is on a canvas that threatens to be torn through in the next few
pages. The Dagger and the Coin is so
far one of the most entertaining fantasies I've read in a while, and its next
volumes promise to be far better still.
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