Redemption’s Blade

Redemption’s Blade is a great fantasy novel that manages to smoothly transit between satire and pathos, subverting genre tropes to comic effect while developing anguished characters that find themselves lost in life.

The story begins when the great war for the fate of the world has already ended: the people have united and defeated the Dark Lord, here called the Kinslayer. It’s time to rebuild and move on, and the hero Celestaine, who delivered the final blow on the Enemy, is preparing to set on a new quest: she wants to get hold of a magical artifact capable of restoring the wings of an elven-like race broken by the Kinslayer.

After all, he may have been defeated and killed but the Kinslayer’s actions are still deeply felt in the world: for someone who is dead, his name is everywhere in the book. In each town or settlement Celestaine visits, she notes how the people are broken and mournful: despite the victory, they remain hopeless, angry, and afraid of the dark. Some turn to religion to find solace, while others turn to religion to find a way to mask revenge as righteousness. Celestaine discovers that it’s not because the war is over that peace will necessarily follow: war breeds resentment, and so people are just waiting for an excuse to get back at their former enemies.

But the rub is that, unlike Tolkien’s orcs, the Kinslayer’s minions are not one-dimensional monsters. The Yorughan may have grey skin, hulky bodies, and menacing husks, but they are not unlike any other race in terms of consciousness, intelligence, and the capacity of doing good or harm. When explaining why they worked for the Kinslayer, a Yorughan talks about community and humiliation, about how the Kinslayer managed to get hold of them by manipulating their sense of pride and self-worth, giving fascist undertones to his methods: “he made us feel worth something, for the first time in a long time. He took monsters and horrors and made-things and us, and he made us part of something. It was good.”

Celestaine’s party has two Yorughan, Ned and Heno, who helped her defeat their lord. Their presence is a political problem for Celestaine, because the people look at them and see only their past foes and tormentors. The common people, although victorious, are broken and so are quick to turn to anger as a cathartic form of relief, even though violence has the curious tendency of destroying things instead of healing them: Celestaine tries – usually to no avail – to explain to them that, in the end, they will remain broken, but now with blood in their hands.

This is the main problem that she has to face. The book has an episodic structure, with her party going from town to town in search of clues about the whereabouts of a magic crown, and, in each one of these places, she has to fight her way out of righteous people. In one town, for example, her party is hunted by templars; in another, by religious zealots who believe a cleansing is necessary to appease their gods. Here, the narrative gets very interesting, because it juxtaposes their actions with the actual will of their gods: while the latter preach love and compassion, the former is all about prejudice, hatred, and violence – and the events expose this contradiction.

Compassion is a hard message – and if some Christians are anything to go by – that gets even harder to swallow when it comes from one’s own God. Vengeance and retribution are much easier to understand and perform. Binary worldviews are so common because they make things simple, certain, and righteous, which makes “hate thy other” much more enticing than “love thy neighbor.” In Redemption’s Blade, this is made clear in a climactic scene, when a certain message from the gods gets in direct conflict with their believers’ actions – and here the narrative displays a more optimistic view on humanity than it initially appears to have.

The book’s tone is lighthearted and humorous, despite its heavy themes. Fantasy tropes and clichés are often subverted to create humor. A sword that can cut through anything, for example, is framed here as a logistical challenge, with Celestaine having trouble sheeting it, as it cuts through any scabbard. In an early scene, bandit attacks are also ridiculed to reinforce the protagonist’s power:

“[Celestaine] was tall, though: long-limbed and broad-shouldered, and there was a lot of the war left in the way she held herself or sat on a horse. On the road, a quite large band of brigands had erupted out of the undergrowth around her and her companions and then immediately thought better of it and gone peaceably about their business. One of them had even muttered an apology.”

There’s even a good deal of dark humor, with the narrative often playing with how hopeless Celestaine’s situation is. When she’s about to be burned alive, for example, there’s this particularly cruel but funny passage: “Something bright caught Celestaine’s eye; not hope, but torches, in the hands of Templars.”

The characters are also well-developed. Celestaine may travel with two Yorughan, but that doesn’t mean she’s not free of prejudice, always being careful to refer to them as “companions” instead of “friends”, even though their loyalty to her is unquestionable.

The narrative follows her point of view so closely that, when she’s angry, the terms used to refer to her “companions” change to more unfavorable ones. Here, for example, we see Heno being referred to by his former title in the Kinslayer’s army when Celestaine disapproves of his actions: “Heno tells me you want to go through the Kinslayer’s toys,” Thukrah said, and she shot the Heart Taker a sharp look, because he and the general had been talking in their own language and she didn’t know what might have been said.”

Her quest to help the winged people is also framed as the opposite of altruistic, as it gives her a much need purpose after the war ended: she’s a warrior and warriors need battles. The narrative is never overly kind to her, eventually introducing an antagonist that works as her double: a man called the Liberator, who takes the problems in her personality and cranks all up to eleven.

The story tackles how some people – and nations – thrive during a war, using it to profit. As the Liberator explains, when you villainize an enemy – even if some of them really act like villains – you get the chance to take and abuse their – and sometimes even your own – people without consequence: “I was the Liberator. And when you’re fighting on the side of right against the ultimate darkness, you can take… everything, doctors. It was a golden age, when the war was on.”

The side characters are also a memorable bunch, sometimes because of their tragic traits – there’s a bard condemned by the Kinslayer to an immortal life of perpetual suffering –, sometimes because of their eccentric voices – there’s a collector with a predisposition to utilize unnecessarily stretched sentences just to confound his interlocutors –, and sometimes because they embody the book’s main themes of resentment and redemption.

The main fault in the narrative lies in how it deals with exposition, which is frequent and quite repetitive. It doesn’t take long, for example, for the reader to find out that the gods of that world were suddenly gone one day because of something that the Kinslayerd did, and this information is repeated ad nauseum, even though the mystery doesn’t play any part in the events of the story, functioning only as a tease for the sequel. However, even by the end of the book, we are still getting passages like, “And the gods had gone silent. The Kinslayer had done some great wrong that even Heno couldn’t start to guess at, and the voices of the gods had ceased to sound.”

In the end, Redemption’s Blade is a great fantasy novel that manages to discuss heavy themes and develop interesting characters without losing control of its lighthearted tone.

December 23, 2020.