Dan Abnett - The Founding

"Men of Tanith! Do you want to live forever?" (p. 33)

In the war ravaged 41^st millennium, the Imperial Guard hold the line against the fearsome Xenos and Heretics in their endless billions. The Sabbat Worlds, infested by Chaos, are the target of a great Imperial crusade. One of the many regiments of Guardsmen involved is the Tanith 1^st, the Tanith First and Only, the Ghosts. The Gaunt's Ghosts series is where Dan Abnett first came into the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and it is still his most famous work. This omnibus, The Founding, collects the first three novels of the series: First and Only, Ghostmaker, and Necropolis.

Unlike Abnett's later Ravenor trilogy, Gaunt's Ghosts is purebred Military Science Fiction. The Ghosts, of course, are not any old regiment. They hail from a destroyed world, for Chaos fell upon their home even as they were brought aboard their troopships. It was Colonel-Commissar Gaunt who saved the troops who had already boarded, taking them away from their homeworld before they could die failing to defend it. For that, his men hate him. For his brilliance, and for the way that he knows and cares for each of them, they love him.

First and Only faces the burden of introducing the horde of Ghosts, but it doesn't let itself get bogged down in that task. After opening with a well executed battle, the storyline broadens to include intrigue and treachery from the Imperium's high command. The novel's middle sections, in which the character's gradually learn more about the plots afoot serves to deepen the action, and, when we return to war with the book's climax, Abnett is able to manage both the intrigue and the battle without sacrificing either, even if he does indulge (throughout the volume) in the occasional unnecessary, unfounded, and silly plot twist, like the revelation that a villain who already had perfectly good motivations is really just angry because Gaunt killed his father. Groan. Still, these failed plotting flourishes are saved by their very superfluousness, and their clunking does nothing to hamper the main storyline's successful execution.

But while the intrigue is initially successful, it doesn't always work as well. We are told early on that: The command echelon generally believed in the theory of attrition when it came to the Imperial Guard. Any foe could be ground into pulp if you threw enough at them, and the Guard was, to them, a limitless supply of cannon fodder for just such a purpose. (p. 22) Okay, fair enough, and we do see that attitude, along with Gaunt's desire to get his men through nonetheless.

And yet the command echelon's failings go beyond a cavalier dismissal of the cost. No, just about every commander in the Guard soon turns out to be evil on the level of moustache twirlers. As I said, it works in First and Only. One power hungry traitor is more than believable. But the trope comes up again and again in each of the omnibus' three books, and it wears thinner with each. By the third or fourth time we hear theoretically sane commanders speak of ridding him [the high commander] of Gaunt and his damn Ghosts, (p. 269) one has to start wondering how an army that does nothing but snipe at its own elite has managed to not implode in an hour, let alone managed to wage a successful crusade.

Nonetheless, Abnett is an excellent battle writer, able to, through the deft shifting of perspectives and viewpoints, give us both the jagged edge of the frontlines and the grander picture. The Ghosts are just one unit among many. Their surviving and falling is vital to them, and the reader feels the adrenaline besides them. But while they might even be the decisive unit, they are just one part of a larger whole, and Abnett is adept at showing his powerful heroes subservient to and occasionally thrown aside by events beyond their control.

In the Chaos-tinged setting of Warhammer 40,000, this means that he can indulge in some inventive and striking tricks and traps, generating a lasgun-armed equivalent of Lovecraft's fear of the unknown. One advancing soldier, cut off from anyone besides the men immediately around him, is just aware of the inexplicable syncopated and irregular thudding of the drum machines that that Shriven had left here. There was no pattern to their beat. Worse still, Corbec was more afraid there was a pattern, and he was too sane to understand it. (p. 52)

In addition to the battles and intrigues shown, First and Only focuses on establishing the character of Gaunt and his heroism, which it does through showing him in battle, through showing us our first glimpses of how his troops view him, and through flash backs at the end of each chapter. These flashbacks are a surprisingly successful tactic. Their very regularity prevents them from becoming a simple distraction to the action; the reader comes to anticipate them, and they become as much a part of the story as Gaunt's present whereabouts. More importantly, Abnett makes each flashback into a miniature story of its own, filling them with drama rather than leaving them as narrative-shaped infodumps.

With Ghostmaker, Abnett widens the focus from just Gaunt to the entirety of the regiment. Both of the first two novels were woven together from short stories originally published in Inferno! (as can be seen here). But while First and Only told a complete story despite its slightly episodic nature, Ghostmaker is more of a mosaic novel. As a major engagement on the planet Monthax nears, Gaunt walks through his lines and, as he encounters his men, we hear stories of their past.

The stories are excellent. In just a few pages, Abnett manages to establish setting and conflict (each takes place in a different battle) and then to delve deep into the focal character while still bringing the tale to a satisfyingly martial close. The greatest are those that take characters on the Ghost's periphery, those that hold specialized jobs, and immerse the reader in their minds and in their brutal work. In "The Angel of Bucephalon," the regiment's best sniper debates his hallucinations as he waits for the kill shot. "Sound and Fury" pits the scout Mkoll against a monolithic dreadnought that will slaughter him if it can find him in the forest; it is so successful at drawing the reader into the terrified need for absolute silence that, while reading, I found myself afraid to breathe too loudly. By the end of all these stories, I felt like I'd known the key Ghosts for years. Each of them was fleshed out, and knowing the men in the ranks gives the reader a stake in every gunfight to come.

The problem with Ghostmaker's structure comes at the end. Throughout, the frame story was nothing more than a prompt for reminisces. In the climax, the battle on Monthax fails to take on much more significance than any of the random flashback conflicts did. This isn't a crippling blow, and there are still interesting sequences. However, at the end, when Gaunt allies his forces with the Eldar against the crushing might of Chaos, it's hard to feel the necessity for such a potentially heretical act when this near ultimate Chaos threat has only come into being a few dozen pages before.

The final novel of this first Gaunt's Ghosts trilogy, Necropolis, has by far the strongest individual story. It is a brutal Science Fiction siege that resembles Stalingrad more than a little, albeit with the technology and the scale blown to delicious excess. The Ghosts don't enter for the first section of the novel, allowing us to get to known the people of Vervunhive as the attack nears and begins, devastating much of the city's defenses. As the Ghosts and other Guardsmen arrive, and as the war begins in earnest, we continue to follow those initial characters, who not only play into the overall military narrative but who also give us an understanding of the destruction's implications. Along the way, it should be noticed, Abnett delves into the well of untrustworthy leadership again and, this time, nails it, creating in Commissar Kowle a leader crippled by his personal ambition but still fervently loyal to his cause.

Though it is certainly a very fun story, Necropolis often borrows the tone of a history, constructing key events from a multiplicity of viewpoints and meticulously marking the siege's progress by counting the days. By its end, Abnett acknowledges this, saying that the future rivalry of two local characters is "not pertinent to this history" (p. 737). The themes of history don't stop there. Embroiled in a conflict almost certain to end in death, the Ghosts are each aware of remembrance. The true loss that occurs when the las-bolt hits home is not simple death but rather erasure, the way that a soldier's name, and bearing and manner and being, was utterly extinguished from the Imperial Record (p. 210). The First and Only, more than any other regiment, are aware of the significance of this. They are, after all, ghosts already. When asked where their home is, they do not say that it is a place that is now destroyed. No, Tanith has been erased […] from the galactic records (p. 67). The ghosts are from "nowhere" (p. 539).

The Founding ends with a short story, "In Remembrance," a look back on the carnage of Necropolis and war. Bitter, one of the Ghosts says: Behold and marvel, this is what winning looks like (p. 751). It's a bleak phrase and a brief picture, and "In Remembrance" embraces it. The story's central character, an artist, is tasked with remembering and immortalizing the battle for Vervunhive. To learn its heart, he follows the Ghosts through the city's ruined and abandoned streets and sees the dead and the wounded. One of the people that the artist speaks to says I just don't think there's very much nobility to be found in this misery. What little there is belongs to the Tanith Ghosts, and I doubt very much you could capture that (p. 753). But Abnett does capture the Ghosts' nobility. This volume is filled with bloodshed and horror, but it also has humanity at its heart, and Abnett is equally adept at showing the men and the guns. Despite its occasional lapses in plotting or structure, The Founding is a very successful example of Military Science Fiction at its best.

Dan Abnett - Ravenor: The Omnibus

The Ravenor trilogy, collected in this Omnibus, takes place in the bleak setting of Warhammer 40,000, where there is only war. Oddly enough for a 40k story, however, Ravenor has no war in it (though that's not to say no action). This is not a frontline tale of the Space Marines holding back the Tyrannid swarm but rather a story set in the heart of the Imperium most of the setting's novels are working so hard to protect. We follow the crippled but psychic Inquisitor Ravenor and his band of heroes and killers as they work to investigate, expose, and destroy heresies and foes. As a result, Ravenor shows us a great deal of the Imperium's fascinating internal workings, and it also reveals the consequences – both small and galactic – of the setting's reality-altering (and smashing) events and players. But for all its successes, Ravenor is badly crippled by plot.

When reading at the pulpier end of the Science Fiction spectrum, it's generally fair to expect mediocre prose glossed over by a rip-roaring plot. Abnett thwarts both expectations. The prose, I'll come back to. Right now, though, let's look at the series' chief failing: Dan Abnett cannot plot. The plots of all three books are simply a string of setpieces. Each one exists solely to get us to the next setpiece. As soon as that next setpiece is reached, the previous one becomes irrelevant, its purpose served. Though its cast might be considered detectives of a sort, these are totally linear narratives, moving ahead (albeit in an oblique fashion) and never looking back.

Sometimes, it gets to the point where it feels like all the reaction shots were simply edited out. A character is grievously injured at the end of the first novel, Ravenor, and on the point of death. Come the start of the second (Ravenor Returned), he's just fine. A recovery is understandable, but it would have been nice to have at least a single line mentioning it, and it's not the only case. A character's death in Ravenor Returned is felt until that novel's climax, but, by the third novel (Ravenor Rogue), he might as well never have been. After part of the crew is sent an unimaginable distance in Ravenor Rogue and somehow manages to return, we get a single instance of a reunion scene, and then everyone moves on as if the rules of space and even time had not just been proved worthless. The sense that the characters not only do not feel the wonder of their situation but seem clinically deprived of any sort of emotional response at all serves to dampen those responses in the audience as well.

These narratives of disjoined pieces are tied together by the goals of Ravenor's investigation, with each novel, at least in theory, broadening the scope and investigation and further testing Ravenor's resolve and integrity. This works well at first. Ravenor, my favorite of the trilogy by far, focuses on the investigation of flects, a deadly drug that looks just like a shard of glass. Since the reader is as in the dark as the investigators, the piece by piece nature of the storytelling doesn't jar much, and there is a sense of progress as we learn more of the flects' nature and origins. The story's scale is here one of its greatest parts. The Imperium is vast, and, while the flects are dangerous, they are a localized problem. The climax is gritty, brutal, and restrained. It's devastating for a few and irrelevant to most.

The overall goal, however, is not nearly so successful at tying together the parts of the later two novels. In large part, this is because the scale is expanded massively. Things are, in those two, properly and regrettably apocalyptic. Ravenor Returned features a dastardly plot to seize ultimate power through a secret language that can make and unmake reality, and it ends with all the hooded ritual and bombast that one might expect. Here we get viewpoints from the evil characters as well as the good and, while that does broaden the story, it also removes its mystery. The protagonist's ignorance, then, just feels like killing time.

At the novel's end, we discover that Molotch, a villain who died in the prologue, is behind everything. Oh. Uh, that's nice. The conflict with Molotch is also the heart of the final volume. Molotch, you see, is Ravenor's nemesis (p. 656). The two are twined in destiny (ibid). Now, here I'm going to have to plead ignorance a bit. Dan Abnett wrote a prior trilogy about Inquisitors, Eisenhorn, which I have not read, and many of the characters overlap. Maybe Molotch is established and developed there. I hope so, because he isn't here. There are constant references to his brilliance and cruelty and skills and all that, but he's offstage for the entirety of the second book and cooped up for most of the third, save for a single scene where he does get to shine a bit. The rest of the time, however, we simply have to take everyone's word that he's so great and, worse still, take everybody's word that he and Ravenor have some kind of special relationship. All we've seen them do, after all, is shoot at one another a bit.

Ravenor Rogue's problems don't, alas, end with its vague but extreme villain. The first book was driven by the protagonist's investigation, the second by the villain's plan. But, in the third, both sides are reeling, and neither is doing a great deal of great planning. Save for a clever trap or two, everyone basically stumbles around until the climax, at which point what might be supposed to be the trilogy's central arc comes to a climax. Throughout, the characters see and hear ominous hints of the demon Slyte 's birth, which is prophesied to involve both Ravenor and Molotch. The reader, however, need not rely on such hints. We are shown the demon's rather undramatic birth in Ravenor and then get to sit through hundreds of pages of characters poorly ruminating as to who it might be. The pre-revealed reveal, when it comes, does not have, needless to say, the power of a twist.

Abnett's piecemeal and disconnected plotting also serves to hamper Ravenor's themes. One of the main ones surrounding Slyte's birth is how we do not notice evil when it is close to us, how we are blind to darkness amidst our friends and home. Aspects of this succeed, particularly a scene where the infected manipulates a companion to near the point of suicide and wreaks havoc on the streets while speaking to Ravenor, and the good inquisitor remains blind. This also does explain why Ravenor's suspicions never settle on the demon's true identity. Then again, those suspicions are never shown to do much. It would be powerful if he launched a detailed search for the infected and missed it because of his relationship with the guilty party, but having him never think much about the question leaves it just as much at the door of lazy investigation as at the feet of closeness. Finally, what should be the theme's knockout blow falls flat due to passing in between books. One crewmember discovers the demon's identity but, unable to injure her close friend, can't bring herself to reveal it. This should have been a powerful moment, but we don't see a second of her struggle, just vaguely hear about it from a distance.

The novel's other key theme is how far one may go to combat evil. Though weakened by Molotch's flaws, Ravenor's growing obsession with his nemesis' arrest is powerful, as he moves farther and farther from the bounds of procedure and maybe even right with the passing volumes. When, in Ravenor Rogue, he declares: I am no longer an Inquisitor. Perhaps I'll be damned, but I'll surely be damned if I don't know (p. 725), the reader feels his pain and his boundless determination. His counterpoint, the crewmember infected with the demon, is not nearly as effective. Despite its heretical presence within them, they remain loyal, but they don't reveal the demon. They seek to master it, to bind its powers to the Imperium's cause. Needless to say, this doesn't end so well, but that's not where the arc's weakness comes from. No, it's weakness comes from the fact that we never see it at all. There is no witnessed struggle to stay in control, no growing realization of failure. We just hear him mention it in conversation, calm and removed from the battle of will that is raging inside of him. Not exactly a visceral living of theme, that.

Despite these myriad flaws, I read the three books of Ravenor straight through over just four days. Ravenor has three main successes. First, its characters. None of the cast here is spectacularly deep, but they are all well defined, and their interactions with one another are believable and often a joy to watch, a mixture of killing edge and care. There are a great number of players here, but Abnett quickly differentiates each with central characteristics before, as they act and proceed, delving deeper into their psyche and actions. Little quirks give them life and the book warmth. The teenaged Zael refers to the crippled Ravenor, who lives encased in support systems and mechanisms, as "the chair." When Ravenor goes gunning for one of his foes, Zael says: "I think someone's about to have a really bad chair day," (p. 205, Ravenor) a line that got both a groan and a genuine laugh from me. While on the subject of characters, I should point out that Abnett seems to have developed something of a crush for the acrobat-cum-killer Kara Swole. Since I started counting just after the first volume's end, he describes her as "voluptuous" no less than five times (pp. 278/322/357/578/649).

Second, there is the matter of the trilogy's setpieces. I know, earlier I criticized the plot for being nothing but. I stand by that criticism. But that's not to say that the setpieces themselves are not amazing. Whatever his faults over the course of the novel, Abnett is downright excellent at plotting out a thrilling scene. As he does with the carnival Carnivora setting, Abnett can evoke the vibrancy and character of a setting in just a few pages. In just as few, he can then set a dozen pieces in motion. And then he can tear through the stage he's just created, a cascade of well written action, clever planning, unanticipated consequences, and an absurd amount of fun. The aforementioned Carnivora, the mechanical and soul-crushing Administratum in Ravenor Returned, the quickly coming and passing displacements of time and place in the final volume, and a dozen others are all simply awesome.

Finally, we come to Abnett's prose and diction and, coming forth from those, the atmosphere he can create. Abnett writes relatively short scenes with frequent changes in perspective, which serves to not only speed up the pace but provide frequent and well done contrast. The most striking of these perspectives by far is Ravenor's own. In stark contrast to the traditional (past, limited 3^rd) point of view of everyone else, his part of the story is told in present tense and first person. His tone is educated and powerful, longing from the restraint his ruined body forces upon him, menacing, and powerful. His every utterance feels memorable; he is a monolithic figure in his own world portrayed well enough for the reader to feel that he, without question, deserves his status there as not only a strong man but a wise one as well.

40k novels have by now developed a fair amount of jargon to cement the setting's feel, and I, a relative newcomer to the setting, can't say how much is common ground here, but setting-specific phrases like "dehyd," "cogitator," "kitbag," and "tintglass" combine with expertly odd uses of general language like "decruited" to give everything an inescapable, strange, blunt, and oppressive feel. Moving above the level of individual words, Abnett has a gift for powerful phrases, such as when Ravenor says a madman is illuminated beyond the remit of sanity (p. 103) or that Hindsight is a worthless toy (p. 577).

The story arcs and themes of Ravenor meander about and fall apart over its length. Nonetheless, the individual scenes and prose are fantastic. Though not perfect, Ravenor sheds light on a seldom seen part of the Imperium, does so with style and strength, and is well worth reading for any fan of the setting. The first novel, in particular, is a great example of dark and gothic Science Fiction.