The Warded Man

The Warded Man, the first volume of Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle fantasy series, is a well-structured book that presents a frightening universe inhabited by tormented characters. Its last two acts, however, throw away both character development and common sense, demolishing much of what had been built so far.

The story of The Warded Man takes place in an even more bleak and inhospitable feudal world than usual: in addition to terrible living conditions, unrelenting prejudice, and strong inequality and social injustice, demons also leave the earth whenever the sun goes down. The people – whose weapons barely scratch the corelings, as they are called – try to survive every night by drawing magical protections around their homes. In this terrifying scenario, we are introduced to three main characters: Arlen, the protagonist, is a boy who witnesses his mother being mortally wounded by demons one night; Leesha is a girl who finds herself having to face, beyond the danger of the corelings, the sexism of her society; and little Rojer is a three-year-old who is saved by a minstrel when his house is burned down by monsters.

Arlen is the most active of the three characters and the one that most influences the main events of the story. The boy is characterized by his combative spirit: he wants more than anything to fight against the corelings and save humanity. His complexity comes from the fact that his dream is not altruistic but rooted in his anger at his father, Jeph. The day his mother was attacked, Arlen ran out of the protective wards to try to save her, but Jeph remained paralyzed on the porch. Traumatized by the event and infuriated by his father’s justifications, the boy runs away from home in search of a life that gives him the satisfaction of rebellion. He wants to prove that it is not only possible to fight the demons but also to defeat them.

His father may cower, but Arlen wants to fight. When the narrative enters the character’s mind in his greatest moments of victory, however, it shows how his euphoria is quickly replaced by sudden loneliness. After all, Arlen is not satisfied with defeating the demons; what he truly wants is visibility and attention: he always believed that his father is wrong and so everyone needs to realize that he’s right and applaud him for the bravery of rebelling.

The author efficiently prepares the tension of the first night the boy spends alone. Right from the start, Arlen was already different from other boys: even at the age of seven, he excelled at designing wards and dreamed of becoming a messenger, being responsible for traveling the land delivering letters and supplies to the people. We quickly realize that the bucolic life was not made for Arlen and that his house, while comfortable, will not take long to become a prison. In this context, his first night after running away works as a small climax, tying all these elements together.

Arlen is alone, feeling finally free. But the moment the demons leave the earth and he must face them, the same fear that paralyzed his father takes hold of him as well. As skilled as Arlen is, he’s still a child, lacking the maturity to withstand the horror of the creatures. So, if he begins the scene by playing with the corelings, cursing them inside the protection of his wards, soon their terrible fury begins to get under his skin. He becomes terrified and recoils involuntarily. The events that follow are sudden and terrible, showing to Arlen that his father’s actions were maybe prudent instead of coward.

The corelings are described as horrifying creatures. Their killing instinct is so relentless that they even mutilate their own colleagues when the opportunity arises. Their attacks are brutal, tearing apart and burning the flesh of their victims. They are also needless cruel: they hunt and eat humans, but they also dance and laugh as they do so. They are not only fearsome predators but also sadistic.

Leesha’s problems, however, don’t come only at night. When her boyfriend, Gared, spreads some questionable news about her sex life to her village, she learns that the same action can have different repercussions depending purely on one’s gender. While Gared earns respect from her father and classmates, Leesha is labeled a slut. Rejected by the local population, the girl only finds solace in her work with the herbalist Bruna, the village’s elderly doctor.

Leesha’s initial characterization is of a strong, independent woman who often has to struggle to deconstruct the sexist culture of her society. At one point, for example, she refuses to be treated as a trophy and interferes when two men decide to fight for her love.

It is in the girl’s chapters that her society is the most criticized. Take’s Gared’s story about her sex life, for instance. If he’s lying or not is irrelevant to prevent the news from crystallizing in the minds of the general population, which uses ludicrous arguments like “If she is so adamant in denying, then it must be true,” or“Of course it happened, after all, is what always happens” to negatively label the girl. When Leesha questions Bruna about how the messages in their holy book corroborate the male worldview, the herbalist’s explanation is blunt: “It’s a book written by men.”

If Arlen’s main antagonism is with his father, Leesha’s is with his mother, Elona. Since Elona never managed to give birth to a son and had to marry a man for money while loving another, she despises her own life and wants to ensure that her daughter has another destiny – whether Leesha wants it or not. Her plans for her daughter is to make her the housewife of the type of man Elona herself wished she had married.

Leesha, therefore, frequently confronts her mother and exposes what her plans really mean (“I’m not a brood mare, Mother”). Leesha wants to have children one day; her problem is with the necessity of the act: the idea that a woman becomes somehow inferior if she doesn’t become a mother bothers her immensely. However, as with Arlen, her attitude against her parents ends up negatively impacting her personality due to the extremes to which she leads the struggle: Leesha ends up depriving herself of romantic relationships and often risks her own life just to not let her mother “win”.

Rojer, on the other hand, has no problems with his father or mother, as both are dead. The boy grows up with Minstrel Arrick, learning tricks, juggling and singing. He is the least developed character in the book, and if Arlen and Leesha have their conflicts presented in the very first act, Rojer’s will only finish being formed at the end of the book: he believes that all that protect him end up dead. Of the three characters, he’s the most superfluous.

After presenting their personal problems, the narrative focuses on their training, regarding their respective jobs: messenger, herbalist, and fiddler. The second act of the novel may be less impactful than the first but it’s still efficient in developing the struggles of each character. Arlen, for example, realizes that the lonely life he so desires means the absence of friends and love, having to decide whether to continue his mission to upset his father or to be close to those that are dear to him. Leesha, meanwhile, has to undertake a tense trip to a big city, where she understands that sexism is not an exclusive evil of her small village, and Rojer… loses more loved ones.

The final half of The Warded Man, however, is so problematic that it feels like it was written by another author altogether. The consistency of the characters and their conflicts, the social criticism behind their plights, and the buildup of suspense and tension all go away in exchange for cringy one-liners, epic battles, and morally questionable events. The book becomes pretty much the opposite of what it was.

Arlen, for instance, becomes another character altogether. Gone is his vulnerability, he’s now superman, capable of fighting demons with his bare hands, tattooing wards on his own body, and using Wolverine’s regenerative power. He becomes a dark being, able to defeat anything that gets in his way. In the second act, he’s a child who is always immersed in books, having to be forced to play in the street by his master. Near the end, he’s fighting Kung Fu with demons.

However, the worst change regards Leesha’s personality (spoilers up to the end of the paragraph). If she was an aggressive bastion against misogyny until this point, now she decides it’s a good idea to have sex with the same messenger who tried to rape her several times on the same trip. Adding insult to injury is the event near the climax in which she is indeed raped by countless thieves for no good narrative reason whatsoever (or to put some “realism” into the story, according to the author) and two days later she also decides to have sex with a strange man that scares the living daylights out of her.

Rojer is the only one who remains consistent, as he now fears that his new friends are going to die, too.

The beginning of The Warded Man has the makings of an excellent and memorable fantasy novel, but in its final half, the narrative derails, presenting less interesting – when not completely contradictory – versions of the main characters. In the end, there seem to be two distinct books in The Warded Man: the first one enchants, but the second can leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

October 23, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 29, 2016.